•SI•SSUe published bimonthly by the Film Society ofLincoln Center Volume 24, Number 4 July-August 1988 '~()()Il ~iIIl(! •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• 11 Midsection: '68/'88 ..........................31 First you read the book ... Ifyou were there in the Sixties, well, no, you didn't; you wait- it was the wildest party society ed till the 'toon came out and gave since Caligula. So 20 years went to that, instead. David later, the Sixties are so far out Chute toons into Who Framed they' re in. To wit: Sydney Lu- Roger Rabbit, but th-that's not met and Naomi Foner put the all, folks. Charles Solomon Sixties on the lam in Running sketches Richard Williams in on Empty, and tell Gavin 'Toontown (4). Smith and Anne Thompson why (page 32). Paul Kerr Hoo! Fatal Attraction did dopes out the Sixties effect on harum-scarum on feminists, Brit-cinema (46), Andreas and scripter James Dearden Kilb sacks German film (47), shrugs \"Who me?\" So, Har- PhilippeJ. Maarek routs the lan Kennedy chats him up French (49) and Peter Wol- about his directorial debut on len checks out Film Theory Pascali's Island, the latest in country (50). Marcia Pally the pawn's-eye view of the roasts the American rewrite of Empire Goes Blooey genre. the era but sees signs of life in some quarters (52). Marlaine 'Patty' Cake ..................................24 Glicksman finds the perfect Sixties Woman: Sylvia Miles Hold the presses! This heiress (!) (55). And for the benefit of is hot. You remember Patty. As Mr. Kite, with 20/20 hindsight in Citizen Hearst? Tania? As a score of film seers-Peter in Cinque (you velqum)? You Boyle, John Cassavetes, forgot our Patty? Yeeks. She's Constantin Costa-Gavras, back with the real poop in A Bruce Oem, Peter Fonda, Tale That Wouldn't Die (but Dennis Hopper, Bob Rafel- lived on in a coma) till our son, Andrew Sarris, Has- Karen Jaehne kidnapped kell Wexler, etc. (the usual Paul Schrader in Cannes. suspects)-ponder all. Also in this issue: selling real estate in Santa Fe-but now Books: The Landis Scandal ..... 71 Dean Stockwell is the odds on oddball of Directors fight for cash, credit, and final Journals .......................................2 his day. Pat McGilligan gets an earful. cut-unless you're John Landis on trial To be young, British, and black-why for manslaughter on the set. Gregg Kil- there oughtta be a panel. There was, at Norman, the Don .....................62 day reviews Outrageous Conduct: Art, the Collective for Living 'Cinema in It started as Oxford don Norman Stone's Ego, and 'The Twilight Zone.' N.Y, and Armond White listened in. carp at the decline of Western Civiliza- Mary Corliss reportS on Lean times in tion , meaning movies show rotten TV: sixtiessomething ................75 Cannes, and Gavin Smith sat rapt as things. But, as Graham Fuller reportS, Tom Carson tunes in, turns off, and Sydney Lumet, Marty Scorsese, Arthur Stone's attack was emblemmatic ofdeep drops the bomb on two Sixties shows, Penn and Chen Kaige rapped on mov- resentment in the press and Parliament. China Beach and The Wonder Years. ies, uh film, uh art. Israel at 40 .................................69 Back Page ................................80 Dean, the Don ...........................27 Israeli filmmakers struggle with the ef- He was an MGM kid, cast in the classy fects of the battle to survive, or is that su- Cover photo: Walt Disney Productions. roles. He was down, he was up, he was pervise? Dan Yakir took in a rondelay of gone and long forgotten-gad, he was Israeli fare and reportS. Co-Editors: Harlan Jacobson, Richard Corliss. Associate Editor: Marlaine GI·icksman. Art Director and Cover Design: Elliot Schulman . Advertising and C ircu lation Manager: Tony Impavido. Business Manager: Doris Fellerman. Production: Deborah Dichter Edmonds. West Coast Editor: Anne Thompson. European Editor. Harlan Kennedy. Research Consultant: Mary Corliss. Circulation Assistant: Deborah Freedman. Controller: Domingo Homilla, Jr. Editorial Assistant: Gavin Smith. Executive Direct~r, Film Society of Lincoln Center: Joanne Koch. Copyright © 1987 by the Film Society of Lincoln Center. All rights reserved. The opinions expressed in FILM COMMENT do not represent Film Society of Lincoln Center policy. Publication is made possible in part by support from the New York State Council on theAns and the National Endowment for the Arts. This publication is fully protected by domestic and international copyright. Subscription rates in the United States: $14.95 for 6 numbers, $26.95 for 12 numbers. Elsewhere, $37 for 6-numbers, $70 for 12 numbers, payable in U.S. funds only. New subscribers should include their occupations and zip codes. Distributed by Eastern News Distributors, Sandusky OH 44870. 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oumals Young Guns and Old Masters RACING AHEAD , ,young , British and Isaac Julien. by black university-trained cineastes. Black,\" the touring se- (And by government subsidies includ- ries of independent films filmmakers want to folIow the standard ing assists from Channel 4, which en- form but with a different, ethnic em- sures a minimal amount of exhibition.) by the Sankofa and Black Audio Film phasis. For members of Sankofa and The result is that the five films pre- collectives, both of Great Britain, Black Audio Film ColIective, who are sented in the \"Young, British and shows a different kind of filmmaking mostly of first generation West Indian Black\" tour have a pedagogical rather movement from the black independ- heritage, commercial filmmaking tra- than entertaining content. ents in the United States . The differ- ditions have been passed over in favor ence is virtualIy the same that divides of academic ones. The style of these films would be other European filmmakers from their anathema to the American independ- American counterparts-an art versus This is partly because the British ents who are desperate to win the sup- entertainment approach to film . film industry has been mostly non- port and approval of a large, pampered, Brought to New York by Coco Fusco existent for the past two decades. Eng- conservative audience. One of the typ- and Ada Griffiths through Third World lish film activity was limited to ical stylizations in Territories by Isaac Newsreel, this was a tour of ideological television production and , more signif- Julien shows two black gay men danc- cousins, if not brothers and sisters. A icantly, to the intelIectual study of film ing, the image superimposed over the fascinating family squabble ensued. aesthetics-both Marxist and psy- British flag burning. Julien's This Is Not choanalytic film theory. These collec- During the tour's first panel discus- tives were started in the early Eighties sion at downtown New York's Collec- tive for Living Cinema, the visiting Brits Eddie George, John Akomfrah , Martine Attille , and Isaac Julien made it clear that \" the power and control of enunciation and discourse on race\" was their greatest concern. But when the Q&A locked into a debate over appro- priate film style, the dialectics of nar- ra ti v e/ non-narra ti ve, avan t-gardel classical , formal/vernacular revealed an amusing confusion within the racialIy mixed, liberal audience. The high-art sophistos and the race- conscious politicos couldn't agree on what constitutes a true advance for black filmmakers. Should it be formal- ist art, like Sankofa' s and Black Au- dio's, that suggests elitist detachment from the experience of racial oppres- sion? Or should it be readily accessible fictions like Sammy & Rosie Get Laid, She' s Gatta Have It, or My Beautiful Laundrette , in line with common ground engagement? Hollywood's influence has made The Story the primary style of films in the U.S., and though black people have long been betrayed by Holly- wood , that's the model most of our filmmakers follow . (Innocuousness as a national tradition.) Black American 2
T ! ....................................... ... ........................ .. Publisher's price $39.95 yours FREE The Hollywood Reporter called the old edition More mves for the old edition \"indispensable .\" This new update is even more so , \"Rarely does (a bookl appear that is pl~~;urable *because you get . .. and significant. Such a happy anomaly IS Alvin EVERY television movie and miniseries released H Marill's stupefyinglywell-researched tome .. . a~ invaluable record.\"-FILMS IN REVIEW * thru 1986 - 2,069 in all! EVERYTHING you need to know: complete \"First book to provide a base for seriou.s study casts and characters . .. credits . . . plots . . . of the teleftlm .. , the accuracy of Its half premiere date . . . network .. . production com- million or so credits is highly reliable.\" -FILM pany . .. running time .. . awards ... rich COMMENT * background data Coverage : not only network TV, but even cable * *and independents Photos Handy alphabetical order * Priceless 91 -page index of players - over 5 ,500 * Index of directors * MASSIVE 81/2 x 111/4 - 576 pages! Mail postage-f.ree$3o9rd.9e5r card to get thIS giant fREE How the Oub Works • •YI~/~.'~.'AI• •~.' Every 4 weeks (13 times a year) you gel a free copy of the Club bulletin, PREVIEWS, ....ae..... which offers Ihe Featured Selection plus a nice choice of Allernales: books on films , TV, 15 Oakland Avenue· Harrison, N.Y.10528 *music, occasionally records and videocassettes. If you wanl the Featured Selection, Please accept my membership in the Movie/ Entertain- *do nothing. II will come ~ulomatically. If you don'l want the Featured Selection or ment Book Club and send me, FREE and postpaid , the you do wanl an Alternale, indicale your wishes on the handycard enclosed and return il new $39.95 3rd Edition of Mo vies Made/or Television *by the deadline date.' The majority of Club books are offered al 20-30\"1, discounts, by Alvin H . Marill . I agree to buy 4 additional books, *plus a charge for shipping and handling. As soon as you buy and pay for 4 books, *records or videocassettes al regular Club prices, your membership may be ended al any records or videocassettes at regular Club prices over the time, either by you or by the Club. If you ever receive a Featured Selection withoul next 2 years . I also agree to the Club rules spelled out in *having had 10 days 10 decide if you wanl iI, you may return il al Club expense for fuU this coupon . Fe - 48 credi\\. For every book, record or videocassette you buy al regular Club price, you Name _________________ receive one or more Bonus Book Certificates. These entiOe you 10 buy many Club books Address al deep discounts, usually 6().ll()% off. These Bonus Books do nOI counl loward fuIJiJJ- City _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ State ____ Zip_ *ing your Club obligation bUI do enable you 10 buy fine books al rjveaway prices. PREVIEWS also includes news aboul members and their hobbies. You are welcome to * *send in similar items. The Club will publish anysuch itemil deems suitable, FREE. This ~ a real CLUB!' Good service. No computers! Only one membership per household. ,-------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------~ 3
anAlDS Advertisement, a music video on The Passion of Remembrance. existence, and we thus ponder the gay interracial desire , preceded the reasons individuals create a personal panel discussion , focusing attention on characters with things in it to which mythology of \"home.\" Although At- how elite film practices permit contro- anyone could relate. That's not always tille's politicized nostalgia is not the versial ideas. the way in which people reviewed it in most original approach, she goes the England. Often it got written about furthest of any of the filmmakers rep- What seems radical in thi s black Brit- along the lines of, you know , black resented in the tour toward making ef- ish approach is a matter of addressing people and their problems...which we fectively emotional cinema. an enlightened , already sympathetic neither really wanted nor intended. audience. John Akomfrah asserted the But, at the same time, that's not to Handsworth Songs by John Akom- Collective' s right to address other than deny that side of it is there. Passion was frah explores displacement, too, but a mainstream audience but also an in- an unapologetically political film.\" more resonantly by reconstructing var- tellectual film audience , which he ied newsreel footage to his own lyrical noted has racial biases of its own . Passion follows two storylines about purpose. Centered on the 1985 upris- Maggie and her gay friend Gary (Carl- ings in Handsworth, Birmingham, Black British filmmakers propose ton Chance), plus three levels of nar- Akomfrah's film conveys black British the intercessions of race, class , politics , ration: 1) the obvious story of young alienation through poetically sugges- and sex as major issues and assay it ag- artists-activists; 2) the separate, capti- tive imagery-a black security guard gressively. Gay rights and women's vating discourse of Maggie's documen- protecting a big wheel generator in a rights are part of the collectives' fun- tary footage; and 3) the ideological museum in Birmingham; the polite ar- damental race-based challenge to or- disputes of male and female spirits rival of West Indian immigrants in pas- thodoxy . The panoply of images in seen first in studio-set limbo, as in Go- tel European dress; even a 1965 visit to Territories has male and female narra- dard ' s Le Gai Savoir, then in a desert- England by Malcolm X and his obser- tors echoing each other, saying , set infinity. This effort to do \"every- vatloh, \"If this is the center of impe- \" We ' re struggling to sell a story of thing\" makes Spike Lee' s School Daze rialism, then we have a common black people. A history, a herstory, of look ,like a comic strip. This is really struggle.\" cultural forms specific to black peo- radical filmmaking, which may mean ple.\" This is stated and repeated as po- these collectives are a folk art move- The practice of intellectual dis- etry, but to American ears it may recall ment educated beyond the sophisti- course makes these black British film- the politicking of the Sixties Black Arts cation of the average audience. But it makers seem remote from black Movement and so trigger impatience. also means the filmmakers intend to struggle. But Attille spoke one phrase, We feel we have progressed beyond raise the intelligence and conscious- with beguiling British precision, that the need for agit-prop. ness of their audience. struck a unifying note of good sense: \"Dominant culture.\" That concept If the black British independent Dreaming Rivers by Martine Attille, spears the British collectives' move scene seems to be at a young stage of about a St. Lucia immigrant's final into higher, artier realms. As blacks, political/aesthetic development, it is , thoughts about her Caribbean home, and as intellectuals, they work against actually, a stage our own filmmakers shows a regal woman in a dance of status quo filmmaking and any other have skipped over. They (we) let net- death, a lament of oppression . This restrictive agenda. work T V contain and report our expe- probably strikes deeper in England rience of the civil rights years , while than here, where relocation and dislo- -ARMOND WHITE black British filmmakers are obsessed cation are the givens of black American with investigating recent events ofcivil , ,TCANNES: LEAN TIMES rights protests, questioning the official he camera is such a pow- forms of British documentary repre- erful instrument, don't sentation (and na\"tionallracial identity). you think? So demand- ing.\" David Lean, betraying just a bit T he most complex film in the of imperial discomfort at finding him- \"Young, British and Black\" tour, self on the wrong side of the camera, The Passion of Remembrance (directed was speaking to Helmut Newton, who by Isaac Julien and Maureen Black- usually photographs strong women in wood), features a woman , Maggie Bap- boots and bondage. But here they tiste (Antonia Thomas), in the midst of were-the raja of the romantic epic and composing a video montage about riots the king of kink-twinned for a mo- and civil disobedience in England. She ment on the Hedonist B yacht moored sorts through documentary footage, next to Cannes' Palais des Festivals. searching for a correlative to the con- Sir David had just spent an hour and a fused motives and ineffective actions half bantering over lunch with eight of her \"committed\" friend s and Old lucky reporters, discussing plans for his World family . Maggie Baptiste-the new film, Nostromo , and his fine-tun- name is a pun-symbolizes the per- ing on the restored version ofLawrence plexed situation ofthe black independ- of Arabia. Throughout the conversa- ent filmmaker in Britain . \" When we tion , Lean's brilliant blue eyes were set about making Passion it was delib- fixed on the future , noton the past, and erately meant as a film that dealt with black people and their lives, \" Julien once remarked. \"A film with black 4
Acompelling, emotional drama from one of the finest directors of our time ... Woody Allen. In the tradition of \"HANNAH AND HER SISTERS\" and \"RADIO DAYS;' Woody Allen con- tinues to explore the age-old themes of family relationships. friendship. love and betrayal in \"SEPTEMBER:' Set in Vermont during the last days of summer. \"SEPTEMBER\" exposes the intense. emotional lives of six characters who have gathered to spend a quiet weekend together. But old resentments and new passions soon overflow. unleashing a torrent of powerful-and sometimes destructive-emotions. Prepare yourself for the kind of beautifully acted. meticulously crafted film you've come to expect from Woody Allen. Farrow Elaine Stritch ON VIDEOCASSETTE JULY 28th. qClosed Captioned. In VHS and BETA. AJack Rolins andCharles H. Joffe Production \"Septemberll Costume Designer-JeffreyKurland Editor-Susan E.Morse A.CE. Production Designer-Santo Loquasto O;C;ON® DirectorofPhotography-Carlo DiPalma A.IL Executive Producers-Jack Rolinsand Charles H.Joffe HOME VIDEO Produced byRobert Greenhut Written and Directedby WoodyAllen i(j 1988 Orion Home Video. All Rights Reserved. Q Closed Captioned by NCI. Used wit h Permission. An ORiON·Pinures ..... PG PARENTAL GUIDANCE SUGGESTED\"\"\" i(j 1987 Orion Pictures Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Phot ography by Brian Hamill IIOMIE \"A' EI'IIAL MAY NOT liE SUITABLE FOR C t'll~OAE N ~
the man's easy ebullience belied his 80 comedy-for most of his feminist function as secret arias for their feel- years. When someone asked him if he planned an autobiography, the movies' farce, Women on the Verge ofa Nervous ings. Distant Voices, Still Lives is a greatest living director replied, \"Yes, when I get old.\" Lean didn't wink, and Breakdown. The film begins well, with haunting work of austere mise en scene nobody laughed. a Lothario rehearsing his tired endear- and convulsive, repressed emotions. Four decades ago, Sir David made his name directing children in grown- ments to a parade of imaginary con- Anyone whose heart is not broken by up films, Great Expectations and Oliver Twist. This spring, at the 41st Cannes quests; it ends with a spectacularly this film may not have one to break. Film Festival, life and art imitated Dickens and Lean. To gauge the chat inept car chase. In between is a whole British cinema also latched onto the along the Croisette, you'd have thought that Fagin's urchins had been lot of shallow characterization and pre- family motif that snaked through the sent south to filch valuables from visi- tors to this fortnightly campsite on the dictable plot reversal that suggests Neil festival. In Nicolas Roeg's weirdly be- Cote d'Azur. Enough passports, wal- lets, and photo equipment were sto- Simon with a Latin accent. To many guiling Track 29, it is one strange fam- len-and enough gypsies and alien felons blamed for the plague of pilfer- critics, however, the Almodovar ily: a daydreamy woman (Theresa ing-almost to turn liberal Americans into supporters of Jean-Marie Le Pen, proved much more popular than an- Russell), her model-train enthusiast the xenophobic leader of France's Na- tional Front. And on those occasions other Iberian comedy, Manuel de Oliv- husband (Christopher Lloyd), and a bi- when festivalgoers were able to get into screenings without getting their pock- eira's The Cannibals. Bored or annoyed zarre young man (Gary Oldman) who ets picked, they discovered Lean- esque films about children nudged by the film's static rendering of an in- may be Russell's son and who behaves toward the wrong arm of the law. In movies from China (King of the Chil- different opera about the Portuguese like every European's nightmare of a dren) or Cameroon (Chocolate), the spotlight landed on kids who have aristocracy, most of the press bolted spoiled American brat. In Peter Green- great expectations or learn to live with poignant disappointments. the screening within the first half hour. away's cryptic Drowning By Numbers, A few filmmakers dared to buck the What they missed! Flesh-eating bears, the family is a trio of murderesses (Joan Children's Crusade and-infidels- they paid for it. In Patty Hearst, Paul a magistrate pig, and a singing torso in Plowright, Juliet Stevenson, Joely Schrader transformed the abducted heiress into one of his Bressonian iso- the fireplace! And at the end everyone Richardson). Their deathly deeds are lates (Travis Bickle, Yukio Mishima) who endures and provokes horrendous dances a mazurka to Paganini's 24th abetted by the town coroner, in love ordeals before exploding into cathartic release-though in Patty's case it is the Caprice. It's as if Bufiuel and Mozart with all three women, and his 13-year- defiant use of a four-letter word. Schrader substitutes a nightmarish had concocted their own Night of the old son, who, to win the admiration of monotone for any psychological in- sight; he figures that's the viewer's job. Living Dead-a feast for insatiable cin- one elfin beauty, performs a circumci- Aided by Natasha Richardson's brave performance in the title role, Schrader ema gourmets. sion on himself. The film is an elabo- has made his best film since Blue Col- lar, but one that leaves more questions rate joke on, among other subjects, the hanging than answered. Hearst was in Cannes, gamely supplying some of T he British cinema, which in this games men will play to impress women those answers; and so was Clint East- Age of Thatcher has harrumphed and the mortal consequences of this wood, who brought with him a sunny itself into something of a renaissance, courtly showing-off. disposition and a dark movie. In Bird, his biography of the pioneering saxo- found its own ways of confronting the phonist Charlie Parker, Eastwood pho- tographed (mostly) black actors in Idark side of human nature. Sometimes n several films from the far-flung (mostly) the dark. The result was be- reaches of the old British Empire, yond film noir; it was radio. the tone was one of slapstick surreal- ism, as in Ken Russell's Salome's Last children fight to learn from life without The highly touted Spanish director Pedro Almodovar imitated another an- Dance and Giles Foster's Consuming being devoured by it. A New Zealand cient art form-the one-set Broadway Passions, which painted political, in- movie, The Navigator: A Medieval Od- dustrial, and erotic perfidy in bold car- yssey, sends a nine-year-old boy on a toon strokes. At other times the Brits trek through time (from the 14th cen- ran intriguing variations on the Mas- tury to the 20th) and from the Black terpiece Theatre tendency, as in Death to the Age of AIDS-all in search Charles Sturridge's respectful adapta- of the magical, unattainable cathedral tion of A Handful of Dust and James city of his dreams. Vincent Ward's film Dearden's version of Pascali's Island. scales mountains of metaphor but finds Dearden, screenwriter of Fatal Attrac- its goal as elusive as the boy's. A more tion, proves that he has more up his down-to-earth drama, Chris Menges' A sleeves than kitchen knives and World Apart, viewed the struggle for steamy mirrors. This leisurely essay in black equity in Sixties South Africa duplicity offers landscapes as ravishing through the eyes of a 13-year-old girl as the Mediterranean's, a few narrative whose parents were too busy fighting surprises, and, playing the film's ingra- for human rights to pay much attention tiating spy, Ben Kingsley in a fine, rich to her. Joclhi May is excellent as the performance. perplexed child, determined to hold In two films set in mid-century Liv- onto her small domestic fiefdom while erpool, Jim O'Brien's The Dressmaker trying to understand the larger issues and Terence Davies' Distant Voices, that consume her mother's time and Still Lives, the mood was more dour and energy. A World Apart takes a few mis- realistic. Like The Cannibals, the Dav- steps, except on the side of safety and ies film takes a while to get started, sanctity. It is as noble, and as hard to then rewards patience with astonish- embrace, as the girl's elusive mom. ment. Through brief sketches, the film Not so Mira Nair's Salaam Bombay!, tells the story of a working-class family which teems with exotic varieties ofln- dominated by a quietly brutal father. dian slum life pressing down on, and The children's only outlet is singing trying to crush, a ten-year-old lost boy. popular songs of the period, which Krishna is a resourceful, compassion- 6
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ate lad whose dream is to find his way STANDARD cllt \"l\"n~ dllt.t\"d li~c up to Michaelangelo and said, 'How's home, far away from Bombay's red- P U L L Q UOTE! :~ ~'~~Y'~1~::~Y,:.~(~rv l cw the art form of the 15th century?' . .. \" light district. Locked into Krishna's perspective, the viewer must find hu- r----------------------------------, To be fair, the panelists-the others mor and triumph in the petty felonies were Chen Kaige from the People's ,'/t was just one of Republic of China, and Arthur Penn- were as comfortable with the terms of of the boy and his friends. SalaamBom- the discussion as the audience. Basi- cally, they might iust as well have those serendipitousbay! deserved its Camera d'Or prize for been there because of, say, the writer's strike as for a desire to genu- best first feature. Like any true film moments that worked inely unite their practice with the au- document, it carries hints and echoes . remarkably well.\"L __________________________________ ~ dience's theory. The audience failed of other cultures, other wrenching case to catch on to this , and kept hammer- histories , from Hong Kong to the South ing away, not really grasping the na- ture of the filmmaker's miserable lot. Bronx. The whole 90 minutes of mutual in- And even to rural Denmark. Pelle the wasn't far behind. Film , better still , comprehension could have been avoided if two other promised panel- Conqueror sounds like a soccer hero's Cinema, has to pay its dues and de- ists , Jean-Luc Godard and Bernardo Bertolucci, hadn' t been party poopers world tour, but the title of Bille Au- velop a Cultural Consciousness. and cancelled. That left us with three ofAmerica's greatest living filmmakers gust's film is partly ironic. This Pelle is Sigh, another symposium where the and one of China' s. Not bad to go out to dinner with, but less than ideal nine years old, and for now his horizon ideological project is to reaffirm the chemistry for this symposium. Scors- ese was his usual speed freak self, and stretches no farther than the borders of privileged status of art, not film , which was received by the NYU crowd as a homecoming hero. Chen Kaige's voice Stone Farm, where he and his aging becomes art's fall guy. As a member tended to get lost by contrast, due to the language barrier. Penn and Lumet papa work as stablehands. Old Dad is of the audience put it: \"From this art exuded the wisdom of long experi- ence , and long may they reign. not the stuff of giants ; he is stooped , of movement [film], there was a prom- For Scorsese making a film is still a tired , too timid to entertain his son's ise that some new art form would be thrill: \"It's the excitement of when you got one picture and splice it to the dreams of escape into the seductive un- created . What happened to film is that next; if you ever stop getting excited when you see that, then it's gone.\" certainties of the world beyond. Per- it became an industry and became a Lumet, however, was worried: \"As the screen is shrinking, the ideas are haps Pelle is ashamed of him, or at least recording device for other arts. On shrinking with it. I don't remember ever laughing watching a TV show with disappointed, when his father backs very rare occasions it created its own the release and feeling I do when I see Mel Brooks in the theater.\" He went out of fights with doltish bosses. Per- art form. \" on to lament that his Fifties TV pro- duction of The Iceman Cometh \" never haps only we can see the love in Papa's The audience actually applauded would reach that tragic level the play deserves.\" But Scorsese had seen it as eyes as he watches Pelle open a birth- this, but the distinguished panelists, a kid and insisted , \"It did give me something-it really did.\" So there day gift, or the roguish glint the old by now minus Scorsese, who as usual you go. man flashes as he briefly finds comfort left early (wish David Mamet had Arthur Penn was having none of it: \"We can't leave you a legacy of this in the widow's bed . been there-he' d have shown ' em) , shrinking medium. Somehow it's going to survive. It's a fierce, pene- David Lean could tell you : It is of were not impressed. One of them re- trating, outrageously truth-telling me- dium , and somehow it's going to such moments-acutely observed by plied \" Bullshit.\" I cringed and I think survive being shrunk and commer- cialized and beaten down . ..The August, beautifully realized by Max the panelist regretted it, but this ex- form offilm is so huge and intoxicating that it seems to have overwhelmed this von Sydow and young, radiant Pelle change was symptomatic of the sym- discussion. The topic [of the sympos- ium] doesn't resonate in me as part of Hvenegaard-that successful epics are posium ' s mismatch of pseudo- my experience in making movies.\" made. Pelle finds small epiphanies for questions and wary answers. -GAVIN SMITH Walmost every character in its large cast, hat's fascinating about these sort of events is seeing the expec- and creates a coherent dramatic uni- verse out of a couple dozen would-be tation gap between an audience of stereotypes . The camera is a demand- preening film intellectuals (collective ing instrument, as Sir David said and need: for filmmakers to justify their Bille August knows. But if you can ideas about film), and the defensive master its demands, you can locate its disingenousness of a panel of worker- power in the faces of a world-weary artist-filmmakers (take your pick) (col- man and a child with worlds to con- lective need: to get on with the busi- quer. -MARY CORLISS ness of serious filmmaking) . Ies a lot of fun to time how long it takes a panel to throw out the intel- PROMISES, PROMISES lectual basis of the discussion and rev- ert to a by-the-numbers reflection on the problems of being a filmmaker. T he project of the First New York About ten seconds in this case, surely International Festi val of the a record. Moderator Sidney Lumet: \"I Arts Film Symposium (a don't know who made that [Art] prom- mouthful, huh?) was dauntingly por- ise in the first place ... all the people tentous-to answer a simple question: who got involved in the beginning Has Cinema Fulfilled its Promise as were out to make a quick buck.\" the Art of the 20th Century? Despite Knockout in round one--<>r own goal? panelist Martin Scorsese's postulate Scorsese later: \"To be the the torch that film is \"an art of the people,\" ie. , bearer of the art of the 20th century entertainment, once film got put in the would be as incapacitating as any mal- Museum of Modern Art, payback time ediction I know.. .I mean, [who] went 8
FILM STUDIES FROM PRINCEIDN UNIVERSITY PRESS Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema David Bordwell Over the last two decades, Yasujiro Ozu has won international recognition as a major filmmaker. This book is the first comprehen- sive study of Ozu. Several general chapters surveying his career are followed by in-depth analyses of every surviving film and information on the lost films and uncompleted projects. The book includes over 500 stills from the films, most of them reproduced here for the first time. Paper: $25.00 ISBN 0-691-00822-1 Cloth: $70.00 ISBN 0-691-05516-5 French Film Theory and Criticism A History/Anthology, 1907-1939 Volume 1: 1907-1929 Volume 2: 1929-1939 Richard Abel These two volumes are the result of a long overdue examination of a sig- nificant but neglected moment in French cultural history: the emergence of French film theory and criticism before the essays of Andre Bazin. Richard Abel has devised an organizational scheme of six nearly symmetrical periods that serve to \"bite into\" the discursive flow of early French writing on the cinema. For each of these periods, a complementary anthology of selected texts in translation is provided. Amounting to 9. precise, portable archive, these anthologies make available a rich selection of nearly one hundred and fifty important texts, most of them never before published in English. Volume I Cloth: $49.50 ISBN 0-691-05517-3 Volume n Cloth: $35.00 ISBN 0-691-05518-1 Breaking the Glass Arm()r Neoformalist Film Analysis Kristin Thompson Here Kristin Thompson' 'defamiliarizes\" the reader with eleven different films. She argues that critics often use cut-and-dried methods and choose films that easily fit those methods. Neoformalism, on the other hand, encourages the critic to deal with each film differently and to modify his or her analytical assumptions continually. Thompson's analyses are thus refreshingly varied and revealing, ranging from an ordinary Hollywood film, Terror by Night, to such masterpieces as Late Spring and Lancelot du Lac. She proposes a formal historical way of dealing with realism, using Bicycle Thieves and The Rules of the Game as examples. The book's .overall purpose, however, goes beyond making these particular films more accessible to propose new ways of looking at cinema as a whole. Paper: $19.95 ISBN 0-691-01453-1 . Cloth: $65.00 ISBN 0-691-06724-4 Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory Noel Carroll This book is an analytical inquiry into classical film theory (that is, film theory before the advent of the semiotics and poststructuralism that began to dominate academic film literature in the 1970s). The author brings his training and experience as both an analytical philosopher and a film scholar to bear on its chief tenets. His closely reasoned work charac- terizes the structure of classical film theory, attempts to diagnose its shortcomings, and suggests avenues of inquiry for postclassical film theory. In addition, it includes many illu- minating discussions of particular films and cinematic techniques. Cloth: $29.50 ISBN 0-691-07321-X Princeton University Press 41 WILLIAM ST. • PRINCETON . NJ 08540 • 609· 452·4900 ORDERS: 800 · PRS·ISBN 1777-4726) 9
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• ho work mostly in comic strips. The of the best stuff in Robert Zemeckis' strips are photographed rather than version, Who Framed Roger Rabbit. But drawn, and the 'Toons talk by produc- it's basically a pastiche for comics ing solid word balloons that hover freaks and private-eye buffs. Wolf above their heads. When human hard- spent all his ingenuity spinning out boiled dick Eddie Valiant stumbles droll twists on his ingenious premise- by David Chute over the perforated corpse of his 'Toon like the word Toonshine, for their fa- I n Gary Wolfs 1981 novel Who Cen- client, strip star Roger Rabbit, he also vorite beverage. The flourishes are just soredRoger Rabbit?, the human in- habitants of today's Los Angeles finds a deflated noise balloon aban- . winking in-jokes, gimmicks without share the city with an underclass of ink- and-paint creatures called \" 'Toons,\" doned nearby: \"I shook the folds out so resonance. The bad guys in the book, that 1 could read it. It contained one the DeGreasey Brothers, are a pair of word. Bang.\" ruthless comic strip syndication mo- The novel is a clever concoction and guls, and the McGuffin is a teapot with provides the jumping-off point for a lot a genie in it. 11
Like the water scandal that incensed Chinatown's writer Robert Towne, the red car scam was a white-collar crime ofgreed that helped transform Los Angelesfrom a pokey backwater into a world-class megalopolis. The movie's a lot more interesting. Bob Hoskins as former clown turned 'tee. caust works quite nicely, thank you. By now, you know how much fun The movie's undertow of nostalgic (most of) it is. What's surprising is that into the proceedings. Tough private it's also a real movie: It's actually about eyes always look faintly anachronistic emotion doesn't trivialize either of something. When you consider the when shoehorned into modern dress. those plot lines-not even \"the real enormous technical hurdles that had to one.\" The legendary conspiracy of a be clambered over to get this stuff on T he tone and even the theme of cartel of auto manufacturers and real- film at all, it seems miraculous that the Roger Rabbit have, with a few estate developers, which led to the dis- movie isn't just a bag of dazzling tricks. strokes , been re-angled to bring out a assembly of the city's extensive trolley Director Zemeckis and company single feeling: nostalgia. The period system, has been a popular post-Chin- clearly had some real feeling for the setting, after all , also gives rise to the atown premise for period detective material, and they managed to hold Chinatown/'Toontown device: Eddie scripts: Timothy Harris and Herschel onto it-to keep things in perspective, Valiant's back story as a circus clown Weingrod (Trading Places) wrote a so that the technology is always func- (that is, as a human who embraced the good one, as yet unproduced, called tional-through two solid years of ex- make-'em-laugh 'Toon code) and then Heat Wave. Like the water scandal that acting detail work. as a private dick specializing in 'Toon- incensed Chinatown's Robert Towne rights cases-until his partner and only (an L.A. native in mourning for the But this pleasing sense of propor- brother was squished flat by a 'Toon verdant city of his youth), the red car tion, too, was a product of detail work: piano. Eddie eventually bootstraps his scam was a white-collar crime of greed finicky readjustments of the shapely own morale by literally \"slaying\" a that helped transform Los Angeles screenplay. I had trouble with Ze- group of thug weasels with laughter, from a pokey backwater into a world- meckis' script (with Bob Gale) for Back pre'sumably with a piece of his old cir- class megalopolis. A lot of people, if to the Future, because it felt over-struc- cus act. His sense of humor, the spice pressed, would probably admit that the tured, as if there was nothing to it but of his life, has been born again. shift to cars and freeways was unavoid- an intricate dovetailed network of set- able, the price of progress, as inevita- ups and payoffs. Future is the ultimate It's delightful to see how smoothly, ble as the passage of time itself. But \"screenplays are all structure\" film; it how organically, all these familiar, what is nostalgia except an ache of re- takes the maxim literally and gives us friendly old elements fit together. Ze- gret that time ever has to pass? As man- almost nothing else. The characters meckis never has to arrest his jack-rab- ifestations of a simpler, cozier way of hurtled through the glittering mecha- bit pace to squeeze in a thematic aside. life, now deceased, animated cartoons nism at top speed, panic-stricken, like But it's all there, the sum total of doz- make more sense than a lot of things. featureless steel balls rattling through a ens of asides and passing references. pinball machine. (\"Not at any time, only when it was Who Framed Roger Rabbit is a cine- funny.\") Even the connection, loosely matic manifestation of a trend that's In Roger Rabbit, however, Ze- drawn, between the threat to L.A. 's been gathering speed recently in other meckis' neatnik narrative sense helps fabled \"red cars\" (\"the best public pop-fantasy mediums. Both Alan Mo- him lend shape and even significance transportation system in America\") ore's epic \"graphic novel,\" Watchmen to a gag-laden project that could easily and Judge Doom's turpentine holo- (Warner Books), and George R. R. go hopping off in all directions. A less Martin's \"shared world,\" science-fic- authoritarian storyteller (like cartoon tion anthology series, Wild Cards (Ban- freak Joe Dante) might have lost con~ tam Spectra), introduce comic book- trol of this mad ball movie. The script, style superheroes into a seedy, violent, by Jeffrey Price and Peter Seaman, re- post-modern urban landscape, and organizes the raw material of Wolfs then explore the possibilities. Moore's novel in ways that allow the premise version, especially, is an eerie, tough- room to grow; they help it effloresce. minded, alternate-world fantasy, The alterations all make sense, and beautifully planned and structured, their implications are complementary. with surprisingly harsh satiric under- tones. The producers of the an- The switch from comic strips to an- nounced but apparently stalled imated cartoons, and from newspaper Watchmen movie adaptation should syndicates to cartoon studios , is an ob- give Zemeckis a call: on a less apoca- vious book-to-movie adaptation. Shift- lyptic scale, Roger Rabbit, too, is a per- ing the period to the Golden Age of the fectly serious \"What if?\" movie. The theatrical cartoon, in the early Forties, implications of the concrete existence is a natural offshoot of the animation of cartoon characters are respectfully motif, an easy way to get more juice out mulled over. The film's happy assump- of the premise. And it has the added tion is that characters this popular must benefit of fitting Bob Hoskins' hard- mean something, and that a good story boiled Eddie Valiant more comfortably 12
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TOp DRAW A nimation director Richard Wil- liams recalls that as work began on the $45 million Touchstone/Amblin co-production, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, director Robert Zemeckis turned to him and said, \"Don't you re- alize what this picture's going to do for animation-you're going to have to start taking 'yes' for an answer.\" Although his animated short films , titles, and commercials have won lit- erally dozens of awards all over the world for the past 30 years , his first at- tempt at directing a feature , The Ani- mated Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy (1977), was both an aesthetic and a boxoffice failure. A more serious defeat has been his inability to find the finan- cial backing needed to complete The CobbLer and the Thief, the personal an- imated feature he's been working on for 23 years. Born in Toronto in 1933, Williams grew up in an artistic famil y and began drawing at the age of two; he decided to become an animator after seeing Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. In 1948, the 15-year-old Wil- liams spent his savings on a fi ve-week trip to L.A. , where he realized his dream of visiting the Disney studio. \"We shot the opening scenes of Roger Rabbit in Los Angeles , on South Hope Street-right around the corner from the YMCA where I stayed that summer,\" says Williams. \" It looked exactly as it had then, with the red cars I used to ride. And there I was, nearly various live-action features , including splendid commercials and focused his attention on The Thief, working on it 40 years later, directing the stuff I was What's New , Pussycat? (1966), The whenever he found a spare minute. In 23 years, he managed to complete wild about at the time.\" Charge ofthe Light Brigade (1968), and about half the film , with 15 minutes in its final color form . When Zemeckis Between those visits to Hope Street, The Return of the Pink Panther (1975). saw those 15 minutes, he decided that he would make Roger Rabbit only if Williams had built a reputation as an In 1972, he received an Oscar for his Williams would direct the animation: \"There was no second choice,\" he exceptionally talented animator. He moody adaptation of Dickens' A Christ- says. began his career at 22 , when he got the mas CaroL, which evoked the look of \"For so many years , I figured I'd just finish The Thief and quit,\" Williams idea for a film about a desert isle in- 19th century steelcut illustrations. says. \"Now I feel I'd like to get The Thief ou t of the way, so I can do some habited by allegories ofTruth, Beauty, Williams also established himself as other pictures. I haven't decided whether I'll spend the next two and a and Good. Williams worked at night on one of the top commercial animators in half years finishing it, or try to do it con- currently with something else, or just the film for three and ' a half years- the world , producing miniature films of put it on ice for two years. I'm stunned by the reaction to the Rabbit-it's just after animating TV commercials for di- extraordinary diversity and beauty. A what Zemeckis said would happen!\" rector George Dunning all day. spot for vodka became an impression- --CHARLES SOLOMON The IsLand was released in 1958 to istic journey across Imperial Russia on good reviews but no boxoffice . De- the Trans-Siberian Railway; an ad for pressed , Williams spent the next four musk oil used the mighty heroes of fan- years playing the coronet in a Dixie- tasy illustrator Frank Frazzetta. A few land band and animating Love Me, Love skillful pen strokes suggested the wil- Me , Love Me, which was released in lowy figure of a model in a diet soft 1962 and proved to be a critical and fi- drink commercial , while an ad for Shell nancial success. Oil resembled a Turner seascape in Williams then opened his own studio motion. and began creating title sequences for But Williams always disdained his 14
about them should dig into all that. exploits it expressively. T he challenge of creating a movie Consider the sad case ofBetty Boop. that takes a fundamentally far- Once a headliner, she's a cigarette fetched premise and goes all the way girl now, working the floor at her old with it is that it really has to work. It has to earn the right to its earnest ambitions stomping grounds, the Ink and Paint with faultless craftsmanship. Other- wise, it's likely to be hooted into obliv- Club. Her black and white features are ion. The 'Toons in Roger Rabbit have to be convincing Golden Age of Ani- a perfect emblem of the quaintly out- mation throwbacks, of course, butthey also need to have more depth than that; of-date, the decisively old-fashioned, they have to be as well-acted as the people. The producers threw down a and she only makes it worse by wallow- heavy gauntlet to the animators when they cast performers as firmly earth- ing in self-pity, insisting (in an unmis- bound as Bob Hoskins and joanna Cas- sidy. Such early candidates as Eddie takable chirpy voice) that \"times are Murphy and Dan Aykroyd, or even Harrison Ford, wouldn't have fur- tough since cartoons went to color- nished a very stark contrast. These ul- tra-stars are, by now, creatures of but I still got it!\" Then jessica Rabbit, celluloid more than flesh 'n' blood; they're half-'Toons already. - the newest sexy 'Toon superstar, Charles Fleischer's vocal perform- slinks on to strut her stuff, and Betty ance as Roger Rabbit is convincingly cartoonish (it's a virtuoso Mel Blanc heaves a sigh of regret for her faded homage) but with richer expressive in- flections than one expects. Fleischer femme fatale status. Whatever the uses identifiable vocal hooks, like the rabbit's weed ling eagerness to please, Boopster had, once upon a time, some- to anchor the speeches in plausibility. Fleischer doesn't swerve out of control body else has their painty paws on it for a second, roaring around harepin turns at the fast-lane speeds Zemeckis now. required. Not even Maestro Mel could top this feat, in part (in fairness) be- This fleeting poignant moment cause Blanc never had an opportunity to record his vocals live on a sound- doesn't owe much of anything to vir- stage, in real-time interactions with other performers. tuosity. The filmmakers' affection for The animated characters, drawn by the character, their empathy (which Richard Williams and his huge crew (the credit crawl goes on forever), ex- must derive partly from their own feel- pand upon what the actors have accom- plished. This is definitive animation in ings of loss as cartoon lovers), creates a more ways than one; its finesse isn't ex- clusively technological. Their compu- muted, split-second connection be- ter-generated shading gives the figures an almost eerie three-dimensionality, tween Betty Boop and such icons of and the \"full-animation\" smoothness of their movements adds a fluid sense faded stardom as Gloria Swanson's of ease to every sequence. It's a treat to feel comfortable watching animation Norma Desmond and Bette Davis' again. And the character designs, es- pecially Roger's, are prodigies of em- Roger and Eddie: bosom buddies. Baby jane. I came away from Roger pathetic imagination. The emotions, although exaggerated and accelerated, Rabbit convinced that if cartoons could feel real. (Good animators have often been compared with actors, and Ze- actors every day.\") feel for their own fate, as we do on their meckis told American Film's Mark Ho- rowitz that the post-production phase The complementary relationship behalf, they would feel just this way; on Roger Rabbit \"was like directing 30 between the vocals and the visuals the way we'd feel if we were 'Toons. reaches an uncanny new peak when If there's a Rabbit sequel, I hope it Roger, stunned by the revelation that focuses on the Roger/Eddie relation- his slinky humanoid spouse, jessica, ship and scuttles the 'Toontown pyro- has been \"playing Patty Cake\" with technics. Most of the best material in ' Marvin Acme (Stubby Kaye), pours out Part One is concentrated in the first his heartache: \"Oh, jessica, please tell two-thirds. Luckily, though, while the me it's not true.\" You'd be a hard- movie's arch-Spielbergian third act boiled egg, indeed, to shrug off the (Young Sherlock Rabbit and the Temple passion quivering in that outcry, and it of Judge Doom) drags on and on, and goes further: the shot is lit dark, for a casts a pall over the immediate exper- full trompe l' oeil effect, so that the ience, it doesn't stay with you. The deep shadows reinforce the painstak- feelings do. It's hard to figure what all ing 3-D effect of the artwork and the this emotion is finally for-whether, in conviction of the vocal, and for a mo- fact, it is anything more than a phan- ment you'd swear something perfectly tom conjured up by Zemeckis' famed solid was really sitting there-perhaps perfectionism, his meticulous sense of a Rob Bottin suit-creature left over structure, his determination to make from Twilight Zone : The Movie. Or even all the pieces fit smoothly together. the real thing. This could, I suppose, be the moral A moment like that goes further, al- of the story. Maybe if you structure a most, than is strictly necessary. Roger movie carefully enough, it must, Rabbit doesn't nave to make us forget finally, come to mean something. Per- that we are watching animated draw- haps the highest levels of craftsman- ings painstakingly married with live ship can't be scaled until you've imagery. We can accept that. It comes decided what it all adds up to. From the with the territory. If anything, the film craftsman's perspective, a story's is most effective when it embraces the meaning is just the ultimate organizing stylization inherent in cartooning, and principle. ~ 15
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Deardens \"Island' Charles Dance and director James Dearden on location for Pascali's Island. by Harlan Kennedy drawn to the -mystic nemesis of a dis- mg. tant, exotic time and setting: 1908, a For his first bona fide feature film as , , T he story is ultimately generic Turkish-ruled Greek island in about trust and betrayal, the last years of the Ottoman Empire. a writer-director (he's done shorts and and that's what leads to Based on a novel by Barry Unsworth , a TV movie [The Cold Room] as well as the tragedy. Tragedy in the real Shak- \"it takes place at a point of decline and scripting Fatal Attraction), Dearden espearean sense. Pascali is a Shake- dissolution in history; the order is can' t be accused of going for the easy spearean character: a man who could about to collapse,\" says Dearden. \"I buck. Viewing Pascali's Island, shot to have had a very different life ifhe'd had think that makes an interesting back- kill on one of those enigmatic islands in the breaks, but he's somehow con- drop to a story.\" the Med. where European art movies demned always to lose.\" Speaker, used to disport (L'Avventura, II Mare), James Dearden. Movie, Pascali' s Is- At Cannes , Pascali's Island came is about as relaxing as getting stuck in land, first seen in competition at the into the \"flawed diamond\" class of a vat of amber. Through the gorgeous Cannes Film Festival. movie-the film of a director who's haze of empire-setting light, all gold found a gem-like story but hasn't quite and rose and auburn, you can just about With its solidly built narrative-the found the right way to cut and shape it. make out the pride of English acting- kind you'd expect from the screenwri- It's heavy where it should be light, Ben Kingsley, Charles Dance, and He- ter of Fatal Attraction-the film is also smooth where it should be sharply an- len Mirren-wrestling with the adhe- gled. But there's a dormant glitter that sive yards of \"literate\" script. keeps one interested, keeps one hop- Yet also stuck in the amber there's 17
Kingsley has already become involved ~ with him: both because he's attracted ~ to this dashing, sather charismatic fig- Ben Kingsley in Pascali's Island: echoes of Gene Hackman in The Conversation. ure and because he's become a kind of voyeur on Dance's affair with Helen the germ of a brilliant notion. The douse their misery in the six o'clock Mirren, who's a Viennese painter liv- thinking man's Fatal Attraction is lurk- Scotch and/or the wife. Like a Greene ing on the island. And that leaves him ing in there: without the yahoo sexual hero too , Pascali's epistles to the deaf exposed and vulnerable . And that politics but with the idea of a hero cosmos are clearly a metaphor for leads to the denouement, which is ul- yanked out of his moral depth after prayer. In one dream--or nightmare- timately tragic.\" gently dipping his toe into the un- sequence, Pascali opens a giant door in known-and with the idea, too, of a a kind of celestial library and out tum- Sounds fine in summary. So what world at the point of change, as ner- bles an avalanche of papers , as if deri- goes wrong in the movie? vously poised for peace or war as the sively to define Man as the sum of his world today in the era of Reagachev neglected prayers and appeals. And in- Prob~em 1: Dearden hasn't quite arms talks. deed the protagonist's very name has found a way to make the \"plot\" unfold enough religious-philosophical reso- visually or cinematically. He's stuck C enter screen is Ben Kingsley . nances to fill a trunk. Pasqua: French with a work in which the narrative ad- \"He's a spy working for the Sultan for Easter. Paschal lamb: the lamb slain vances not through action but through ofTurkey,\" explains Dearden, \" as the at Passover. Paschalic: a Pasha's do- deals, duologues, and discoveries-of- Ottoman Empire is finally dissolving. main (which the island is). Pascal: character. Or through sotto voce de- He writes his reports and sends them French philosopher for whom prayer bates vibrant with metaphysical por- back to Constantinople. He's been was a wager on God's existence. tent. doing that for 20 years, and yet for 20 years he's never had a report acted on This humble loser in the battle of Problem 2: If there's no action in the or acknowledged. So he's living in a lies, Pascali, sits alone on his island and plot, there has to be \"action\" in the act- kind of existential limbo. Yet the waits for a great releasing moment of ing. Kingsley does his best: the light- money comes every month through the contact and recognition. It comes with bulb eyes and the tremors of the loony local bank, never getting-any more, but Charles Dance, charlatan archaeologist singsong voice create a perverse char- arriving every month, buying him less and stand-in for the way England did isma. But Charles Dance has, not for and less but keeping him alive after a Empire. With the entry of this char- the first time in a film, an unhappy re- fashion.\" [Interjection by Kennedy: \"I acter-and this actor-starts the prob- semblance to a fish on a slab. This char- thought that practice was exclusive to lem patches in the movie. acter should be the story's demon FILM COMMENT. Please continue.\"] Messiah: awakening emotions apos- \"Well, in part he's a metaphor for the I n theory it's like this: \"Dance has tolic and erotic, respectively (or inter- writer, really. Tragic.\" hired Ben Kingsley as an interpreter changeably), in Kingsley and Mirren. in the negotiations he's having with the But wit.h Dance everything is super- Ben Kingsley's Pascali is a compel- local Pasha, \" explains Dearden, \"to cool, British, and as charged as a dead ling bird, best identified as an Otto- take a lease on some land he wants to battery. man-era Graham Greene antihero: one excavate. And we gradually realize- of those tangy spy-depressives who for- and Pascali realizes-that Dance isn't Problem 3: Dearden has lavished so ever send bits of red tape out into the what he appears. He's actually not an much time and attention on getting unansweringvoid, and then go home to archaeologist at all, but a con man. But these three characters right-with mixed success -that the Casablanca- style swell of supporting characters is underdeveloped. They're allowed a couple of scenes each in which to me- gaphone national tics and cliches: whether George Murcell's German arms supplier (from ze Gert Frobe School of Fat Cardboard Krauts) to English actress Sheila Allen's Ameri- can matron, delivering shoot-me-down lines from the How-Awful-American- Tourists-Are repertoire. (\"I'm so fas- cinated by these quaint old religious practices,\" etc. .. ). Pascali's Island is itself a bit of a twitching body. But the fact alone that it twitches puts it in a class above other Brit films in the \"Masterpiece Theatre Goes Oriental\" genre. Unlike Jewel in the Crown or Gandhi, it is not remorselessly Anglocentric. There is a genuine attempt to make the English- man one part of a culturally multifocus story, rather than our prime object of 18
Victor Sjostrom: His Life and His International Film Guide 1988 The SC....nwrlt.r·. Guide (Second _ Work Peter Cowie, ed . The 25th Silver Jubilee Edition). Joseph Gillis. For current Bengt Forslund edition of the world 's most respected and would-be screenwriters, here is This thorough biography chronicles film annual features a special \"Dossier\" an up-tO-date guide to film and televi- the life and work of Victor Sjostrom on Scandinavian cinema . With reports sion sales with valuable tips on how whose influence on Ingmar Bergman from 60 countries , this edition contains to present, market, and protect your and the Swedish screen and stage is a poll among the Guide's senior work . With an annotated list of over unparalleled. It is a history of the actor, correspondents for the 10 best films of 2100 producers , agents, distributors, the director and the man revealed the past 25 years . and industry contacts in NY. Hol- through interviews, analyses and 512 pp. Illustrated . Paper. $14 .95 lywood , Canada, and Europe . Fea- excerpts from Sjostrom's own letters. tures a new SEl,ction listing screenwrit- 324 pp. Cloth . $24.95 . MOVIES ing software plus an interview with a prominent screenwriter. The Encyclopedia of TV Game Shows itFii 160 pp . Paper. $9 .95 . David Schwartz, Steve Ryan , Fred Wostbrock This entertaining and fact- TELEFEATURE Who's Who In Amertcan Film Now filled reference features over 550 rare [Updated Edition] photographs and covers more than 450 ~~~MINI-SERIES James Monaco , ed . Who did what , and shows . Each listing includes a brief when, in recent American cinema . This history, hosts , announcers , celebrities , 1964-1986 updated and revised edition lists the show descriptions , chronology and lots key people who make movies today . It of amusing anecdoles and trivia. ALVIN HMARJLL features thousands of cast and crew Introduction by Mark Goodson. members from the past decade in 13 600 pp . Cloth $39 .95 separate categories - each an al- phabetical list of names with the title and date of their film credits A running commentary on today 's mOVies, this guide is an invaluable resource for libraries , professionals , film historians and fans alike . Illustrated. c600 pp . Cloth . $39 .95 . Paper $19.95 Movies Made For Television: The Tele- feature and the Mini-Series, 1964-1986 [Updated EditlonlAlvin H. Marill . Up- dated to include entries from the '84- '85 and '85-'86 seasons , this giant volume lists over 2000 telefeatures and mini- series . Titles are listed 'in alphabetical and chronological order, each including cast , production credits , plot synopsis , release dates , and notes by the author. A comprehensive companion to television viewing . , Illustrated . 500 pp . Cloth $39 .95 Paper $19.95 The Laser Video Disc Companion: A ---------------- ...... ------~-----~-------- Guide to the Best (and Worst) Laser Video Discs Douglas Pratt. A special 20% discount for Film Comment readers! Features a complete listing of over 2000 American discs and a selective listing of o Please send the following books , 0 Please send me your free catalogue . 1900 Japanese discs released in the U.S. from 1979 to the present. Over Enclosed is the proper amount plus NAME _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ 1200 films, music videos, imports, and $1.50 for postage ($2 ,00 for cloth & ADDRESS _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ educational discs are reviewed for the orders of 3 or more books) . quality of the finished transfer. Also included is a guide to forthcoming Or call 1-800-CHAPLIN (in NY CD-Videos. 212-420-0590). Visa, MC, Amex 432 pp. Paper. $16.95. accepted , Louise Brooks: Portrait of an Anti-Star Roland Jaccard, ed. Please allow 4-6 weeks for delivery. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ZIP_ _ __ Translated by Gideon Y. Schein. Louise NY residents must add 8'I4'Yo sales Brooks - the legendary actress who tax . rebelled against the idolatry of Holly- wood to preserve her independence and New York Zoetrope individuality. Illustrated with over 90 838 Broadway Dept. FC photographs. New York , NY 10003 160 pp. Paper. $19.95. ,.
identification or hindsighted national Dance and Mi\"en gettingacquainted. I think it came out at a time when opprobrium. people were sensitized to all the issues McGuffin: \"What first drew me to the they saw in it. To AIDS and infidelity Further, the film is impressively am- story,\" says Dearden, \"was the terrible on the one hand, and to the women's bitious in the Daedalus themes and power of beauty. The implacable face movement on the other, which is at a philosophical echo chambers it tries to of the statue that we see at the point of kind of crisis point in its proselytizing. build into its structure. The three-way the cataclysm is very, very beautiful, Because there's been a backlash, a re- interaction between Islam, Christian- the apogee of classical beauty, and at action against feminism , which I don't ity, and pagan humanism (Dance's ob- the same time it's Nemesis.\" And in even particularly subscribe to. ject of desire is a Greek statue) the last scene Pascali himself is left, the suggests a point of history at which the story's man-island, little Pasha on his What , the reaction or feminism ? thin walls between societies make us lonely Pashalic, awaiting death in a The reaction . I've always consid- unsure which religious music we're world loud with the silence of God and ered myself a good, card-carrying fem- hearing at anyone time. Unsure, too, Sultan, and imminent with the brute inist. And suddenly I'm attacked as where religious dominion and tem- dominion of the new order. being ideologically unsound. But these poral power-seeking begin and end. people are overreacting and reading There are clear rhymes between the W hatever reception Pascali's Is- into a movie things that weren't even movie's strife-torn epoch and today's land gets, it's hard to see the intended. A lot of it stems from fem- \"religious\" wars in Beirut or Belfast. same clouds of controversy being inist paranoia about the \"career T.P. McKenna's Irish expate even kicked up as were created by Dear- woman\" and what people are supposed pipes up with, \"We Irish ,understand den's script for Fatal Attraction. \"Ex- to think of her and how Hollywood is the frustrations of an occupied peo- cept with Turks and Greeks,\" notes supposed to treat her. ple. \" Dearden. \"We had a lot of trouble The fact is that a lot of the movie is shooting Pascali's in Greece. The a subjective story and was written that Dearden's film also suggests the Greeks thought it was pro-Turkish and way. It's seen from the Douglas char- 20th century has been the first to usher the Turks thought it was pro-Greek. acter's viewpoint. He's never off- in the notion of the chameleon Mes- It's one of those impossible situations screen, except for a few minutes here siah. Different characters in the film where you can never be on the right and there. And part of the premise- take turns playing Christ. Kingsley has side.\" But that debate is at least local- what interested me in the movie-is a dream of being crucified; Dance is ized. Fatal Attraction spread its tremors that other people are basically unknow- \"crucified\" during his moment of of controversy across most of the West- able. The movie is a leap into the un- triumph. And we sense a point in his- ern World: knowable dark. It's always odd to tory at which the whole concept of the wonder how many disturbed people redeemer-savior has become diffused Why do you think the film raised so there are in the world. Every day you and secularized, food for human met- much dust? aphor rather than the stuff of divine doctrine. Add to this a few succulent reso- nances from the Old Testament-the goat being slaughtered on a doorstep is clearly a stand-in for the Paschal lamb, the animal sacrificed by the Israelites in Egypt to save their first-born during Passover- and we have a movie that is at least aiming at religious complexity even if it is frequently erratic in its marksmanship. Chief enemy to focus and pungency is the pace. The tempo is remorselessly languorous, but Dearden thinks differ- ently. \"The unfolding of the story has a kind of inevitability, a sense of im- pending doom, that is bound up with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. That's what I was trying to capture. The slow turnings of the wheels offate end up grinding the character, until we reach the point of final cataclysm.\" When the film does spring into tragic overdrive at the climax, with a burst of rifles at Dance's doomed quarry and Kingsley's bursting run toward a bap- tismal sea, one senses at last that Dear- den is knitting his ideas together. The Greek statue fulfills its hypnotic mis- sion in the movie as a upmarket 20
read in the papers about some maniac At Last! with a knife or a gun. But it's always amazed me, given the number of peo- ple living on this planet, that it doesn't A heartwarming, vivid and loving experience during the happen more often. And that's what formation through the Golden Years ofthe 20th Century's the film's about. This apparently to- greatest artform- THE MOTION PICTURE! gether, functioning woman is on the edge of psychosis. Have you ever: What about the famous interpretation Been saved by an Angel (?) of the movie (Glenn Close equals AIDS while swimming during a squared)? barbecue at Tom Mix's beach We deliberately left out AIDS, be- house? cause we didn't want to clutter up the Known New York's literary morality of the tale with a whole new elite while inthe company of your morality based on the emergence of a friend F. Scott Fitzgerald? fatal disease. Learned the art of acting from Yet the film has the moral seal-of-ap- the great Nazimova or Characterizations from the proval given by the Famity Values lobby. immortal Lon Chaney? which no doubt coo at the framed pho- tograph offamilial bliss. Gone on picnic's with Rudolph Valentino and known the real I saw that as an ironic image. I think \"Rudy\" and the account of his the music probably undercuts it by coming to America? being \"inspirational\" at that point. But I didn't put the image in to suggest that Traveled to far away Tahiti here was this blissful, happily married with Lila Lee? Smuggled family together again. I don't think documents past Nazi agents? anybody could think they'd be un- scathed by what had happened. Known the famous, the high They're still scraping bits of Glenn society, the film and theatre Close off the bathroom tiles. greats and traveled the globe in the romantic pre-war days? I always thought of Fatal Attraction as a Gothic fairy tale. It was a story of PATSY RUTH MILLER HAS everyday life gone hideously wrong. and she shares it with us in: The predicament is as old as time it- My Hollywood- When Both Of Us Were Young self: the wife, the husband , the other The memories of Patsy Ruth Miller woman. But I think the film tapped a Filmography by Jeffrey Carrier Introduction by William K. Everson very raw nerve in the relations between the sexes. For all time men have been doing it and getting away with it, and it's been covered over and laughed about. Then suddenly Fatal Attraction shows what really happens-and what a lot ofwomen know happens and what a lot of men are afraid of women finding out. I think that's why women take their dates, their husbands, their new boyfriends to see the film and get their reactions. Because everybody relates to that particular dilemma. It's such a sim.ple story \\about such an ancient sit- PLUS-inthis limited first edition only-the Ackerman Archives presentation uatIon . ofvolume three in its series of Lost Film Reconstruction--\"The Hunchback of F airy tales of the threatened family Notre Dame\" (Miss MiUer's most famous film), complete with a facsimile of are intriguing to find in the work of Director Wallace Worsley's hand annotated script and rare photographs depicting scenes cut from the original 1923 release print-not existing in any a filmmaker himself born into a major known print today. ~_ British movie family: one fortified by A VERY SPECIAL OFFER- success and gentlemanly values. Dear-~~~ den's father, Basil, was a filmmaker of ~~& . BOTH BOOKS IN ONE VOLUME the Old School (Gainsborough and Eal- ~~~~ ONLY $39.95 (shipping 6- handling included) ing) who also cranked out the odd ~ This is a limited press run, order today: bHreeamktahdroeutgwho sfoilcmiasl-lcaoyminmgeinnttomroavciieal. Q'RAGHAILLIGH LTD., PUBLISHERS prejudice (Pool of London, 1950; and P.O. Box 128, Brigantine, N.J. 08203 • (609) 266-6500 Sapphire, 1959) long before such views .L----~_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _---I 21
DirectorJames Dearden: \"card-carrying feminist. \" writer-director on The Cold Room. which at the slightest pressure yields Based on a thriller novel by Jeffrey up connotations of Christ and Re- were fashionable. His Victim (1962) Caine, the movie won Dearden a Spe- deemer). launched a pre-permissiveness assault cial Jury Prize for Young Director at the on homosexuality laws and had Dirk Oxford Film Festival (an award in With a three-picture deal for Para- Bogarde, then Britain's favorite which I myself had some modest hand: mount now in his pocket, Dearden is heartthrob, committing boxoffice sui- I was on the jury and carried a box of clearly upping the ante on his ambition cide by playing a gay, graying barrister. Irish dynamite into the jury room: to make personal films and to make (After this, Bogarde had to auction off \"Tread softly and carry a big stick with them his own way. But he's also aware his cowlick and bedroom eyes and start a short fuse.\") The film also won the that Hollywood isn't a place you go to acting seriously for Losey and Vis- Special Jury Prize at Avoriaz in 1985. I expecting unlimited love and kisses conti). had nothing to do with that. and blank checks. Basil Dearden died in a car crash in There should have been a chutzpah \"The major studios can recut your 1971, when James was 21. \"It was long prize for The Cold Room as well: for get- film, they can take you off a project and before I could have talked to him con- ting it made in the first place. \"I'd replace you, they can refuse to publi- structively about film. Now I'd love to bought the book, I'd written a script,\" cize or even release a movie. But then bring my problems to him, because you says Dearden, \"and I'd got a producer they're not going to give you $10 to 25 can't take them to other directors; life interested, Mark Forstater. But HBO, million for you to make the film you in the movie business doesn't work with whom we were dealing, spent want to make. So you have to waive that way.\" three months thinking about it and certain rights and expectations. then said 'It's too European. ' So off the Despite gentle encouragement from top of my head I said, 'Would it be too \"It's a balancing act. It involves di- Pop to stay out of the business-\"Get European if! could get George Segal?' plomacy, comprom.I.s/e, subtle persua- a proper job, he kept saying\"-young No, they thought, it would be less Eu- sion. And it's not a bad thing. A lot of Dearden got incurably hooked on film ropean then. Well, I had no idea if I directors are capable of excess. Stu- atage 16. \"I saw The Trial and The Cab- could get George Segal, but I knew dios, and collaboration in general, can inet ofDr. Caligari at my school film so- someone who knew him, an agent, and be a healthy influence. We all need ciety.\" He frequented foreign movies he sent Segal the script. And Segal people to be objective for us. I've just in London, a sure sign that addiction liked it and said he'd do it. So a half- come out of a long dark tunnel, 14 was taking hold. \"These films tended brained, off-the-wall idea got the film weeks spent editing Pascali's Island, to be shown in fleapits around Picca- made.\" and I couldn't tell you what the film's dilly. I kept explaining to my mum that like any more. I can't be objective. It's I wasn't seeing dirty films.\" Then, D earden's next project is also an ad- great when an intelligent person cri- after Oxford University and a year as aptation, a movie version of Jay tiques a film, and shows you something trainee in a cutting room, he made his McInerney's novel Ransom. This that's been staring you in the face for first, eight-minute short, The Contrap- choice will intrigue anyone scavenging six weeks. I'm a great admirer of the tion (Berlin Silver Bear). The shorts the Dearden oeuvre for patterns and studio system. My father grew up with grew longer, as they tend to, and cul- parallels. The story is rife with Pascali- Ealing; they were the best years of his minated in Diversion, the movie he style echoes: a loner hero grappling life. It's great to be part of a big well- adapted later into Fatal Attraction: with warring creeds and cultures on an organized system that can supply sets, island (Japan); a conspiratorial plot actors, expertise, continuous employ- Ah yes. Could I see it? crowned by a sacrificial ending; a mys- ment.\" It's suppressed. terious and elusive father figure; and It's what? religious resonances aplenty even in That king of studio system-the I'm not allowed to show it. the hero's name (Christopher Ransom, One big Happy Family-scarcely ex- What, never? ists any more. But the Hollywood com- Well, it may turn up ten years hence. munity as a whole is probably the In some retrospective or other. closest the world gets to it today. So for Dearden made his feature debut as Dearden, if the director is something short of the untrammeled, self-suffi- cient creator he's often romanticized as, what then is he? \"He's the man who fights to main- tain his vision of the film. Being a di- rector's like being a general. You have to present a de_cisive front to the troops, otherwise they won't follow you into battle. In the privacy of your tent, you can look at the map and discuss plans with your fellow officers. But once you're on the floor there can only be one boss. Because things move too fast for you to stand around arguing.\" So the director has to be a dictator? \"No. When I direct, I'm not a dic- tator. I'm not an autocrat. Just so long as we end up doing it my way.\" ~ 22
by Karen Jaehne enacted by a Rising Young Star with equally impeccable genetic creden- T he velvet folds of the curtain Patty Hearst in 1974 with SLA flag. tials? It all seemed quite simply over- cloaked the cinema Patty determined and self-aggrandizing. Hearst, wronged and angry, somewhere between guerrilla glam staring us down with her final line , and celluloid chic. Nothing fit . Perhaps Patty couldn' t win for los- \"Fuck 'em. Fuck 'em all.\" The lights ing. To be fair, one story goes that it came up and glared back down at the Perhaps that was always the problem came to her attention that certain par- life-size Patty Hearst, almost 13 years with Patty. The pieces of the story ties were determined to put her story later, sandwiched between actress Na- came from different jigsaw puzzles. onscreen and she was frog-walked into tasha Richardson , who plays a very Even now, her ladylike restraint from exploiting the exploiters. \"Very sim- convincing revolutionaty Patty, and di- interference in the film doesn't quite ply, I realized in the United States ,\" rector Paul Schrader, who directed the interlock with passive/aggressive state- she explained to the curious foreign movie, not the woman. Paul and Na- ments such as, \"Despite the massive press at Cannes, \"a film could have tasha rose , graciousl y grasping their media coverage, people still don't been made about my story with or stardom, facing the noisy crowd from know what actually happened. without my cooperation. When the stu- their seats in the Theatre Lumiere du Enough time has passed that there's dio called and wanted to use my book, Grand Palais de Cannes. now an emotional distance from the is- I thought it would be better to tell the sues that allows the story to be told.\" story my way.\" Slowly, possibly reluctantly, Patty, \"Th~ story,\" however, happens to be too, got to her feet, reminding those the version that absolves her and Based on her book Every Secret under the spell of le cinema that Natasha glosses over President Jimmy Carter's Thing, published in 1982, the script was only the daughter of Vanessa Red- pardon in 1979. limits itself to the \"media event of the grave, but here was the real Patty, Wil- decade ,\" as it was dubbed. It opens liam Randolph's granddaughter, who This apologia has an unmistakable with photos of Patty as a child and then had risen among the revolutionaries of point of view: that of a faded celebrity a student at Berkeley, where Sather the Symbianese Liberation Army for needing another charge of attention. Gate, the entryway to the campus, re- similar photo-ops-long ago and far But the waning Eighties drive toward minds us of the turmoil of the peti- away. Here and now , she had traded in bourgeois respectability, exactly the tions, the demonstrations, the radical her rebel rags for a satiny camouftage- kind of \" boo-jwah bullsheet\" de- demands that passed through that arch colored, empire-waisted gown with nounced by anybody involved in just during the decade between 1964 and puffy sleeves befitting Napoleon's Jose- about any or all movements spawned in 1974. phine. Natasha Richardson patted Patty's the Sixties and simmered in the Sev- shoulder consolingly as they beat a re- enties. And what could be more re- In the shadow of Sather Gate, it may treat. Would the real Patty please stand spectable than an Art Film about one's be remembered, nothing was ever rev- up and let us know why we were watch- Ordeal premiered on the Riviera and olutionary enough, that is until Patricia ing this movie? Campbell Hearst wowed us all by changing her name to Tania and rob- The next day , she told a hall jammed bing a bank. Okay, so it was a small with scribbling press she had come to bank, but those few hundred bucks fed Cannes not to take a bow but for \"a cur- her pals in the self-proclaimed SLA, a iosity value for all of you . If I weren't gaggle of white middle-class chicks in here I think you'd be asking, 'Is there service to a black dude who could some reason why she' s not here?' She barely pronounce the rhetoric he'd also made herself available in a minimal picked up from a Harvard Lampoon way, she claimed, to the production: \"I version of Das Kapital. was not on the set nor was I a creative consultant. It would have made me un- Anybody who lived in California at comfortable to be involved with it. I that time will remember reports of don ' t feel that it was appropriate for Patty in safe houses up and down the me.\" This Patty Hearst is no longer a ce- Coast and the feeling of \"Right on, lebrity, certainly lacking that je ne sais Patty!\" It confirmed that change was quoi that kept her in the news for the possible, and indeed, change, if not better part of 19 months, first as kid- revolution , was what \"The Move- napped rich kid, then as an urban guer- ment\" was all about. But this is the side illa. Now she seemed stranded of the Patty Hearst story missing from the movie, or rather, the script, which raises another issue. Wh y hire Schrader, one of Hollywood's most dis- tinguished scriptwriters, to direct but not write the story? 24
\"I didn't write the script, and [Ni- certainly known, as is her convent nals, Schrader argues that he did not cholas] Kazan talked to Patty only once school education-all are links in the want to parody them, even in casting on the phone, he told me. And then sundry chains of a maximum security William Forsythe, best remembered just before I was getting ready to shoot, lifestyle, whether behind the walls of for his clowning in Raising Arizona, as I called her and asked her, if she had San Simeon or Pleasanton Prison, or Bill Harris, the Indiana kid aching to be any reactions to the script, send them the protection of publicists. a black revolutionary but cursed with now rather than afterwards. So she sent white skin-as wild as that may sound me some twelve pages of remarkably We see scenes showing us what today. objective comments-'They wouldn't Patty sees in her mind's eye when she say that' or 'It didn't happen that way.' remembers her family life: Patty blind- \" He has some rough lines to read ,\" Or the Harrises would have their mar- folded among her four sisters and par- argues Schrader, \"but that styff hap- ital spats in rhetoric with accusations of ents, composed by Norman Rockwell; pened. According to Patty, the real ver- being politically incorrect instead of Patty fantasizing a grave to claim her sion involved Bill Harris pounding his bad in bed. I never met her until the life just as she is about to decide fists of the floor howling, 'I want to be movie was over. And the reason was whether to return to her family or to black.' I remember th,e era quite well , that after two years of litigation follow- join the people's army. Does Patty and it wasn't that unusual a thought. ingRaging BuLL, which I wrote for Mar- share Schrader's vision of her own rid- Try it on a campus today!\" tin Scorsese, he said, 'Never make a dled motivation? movie about a living person.' With that The era did , after all, inspire ringing in my ears, I decided to stay as \"She looks at it more that way to- \"Doonesbury,\" and Schrader remem- far away as I could from her. And I day,\" says Schrader. \"Her book is in- bers things he terms \"shockingly car- wanted an Eastern European style so formed by her defense and has a lot of toonish. Bill Harris was convinced that it'd look like an Iron Curtain film,\" special pleading in it. I think she's when he went out in blackface, people which makes us think about the poli- moved past that today. She under- thought he was black. These people tics, not the bio-pic melodrama of a stands that the issue is much more am- were seriously deluded.\" On the other rich-kid revolutionary. biguous than she presented it in the hand, Schrader's versatility--or possi- book. bly lack of passion-makes him claim , \"Did she or didn't she?\" Schrader \"I could just as well have taken the mused at poolside the day after the \"It was not a political conversion. It view of the SLA. Now that would have press had bombarded Patty with less was a political indoctrination. After all, been an interesting movie. But that direct challenges. \"The answer is yes once the conditions were removed, it was not the movie I was hired to direct. and no. I interviewed a lot of people took her about two weeks to revert and thought about it a lot. But the mo- \"You can see and hear that I am the ment you move toward the yes column, back. \" .kind of person who loves to foment dis- you realize you're wrong. If you move Revert back to what? Asked what he cussion and argue. I was raised arguing into the no column, you're wrong. So theology around the kitchen table, and you try to ride the ridge of the riddle. \" makes of Patty Hearst now, having in some way, that's what I'm still only met her after the film was fin- doing. People become very divided Schrader, in turn, riddled the story ished, Schrader hesitates... too long for about my movies, and I like that. It's with his own distinctive style and comfort, his or ours. This is not the very hypocritical ofdirectors, Bernardo surely lent it more panache than it de- pause of someone thumbing through Bertolucci being one of them, to set served. A devilish combo of sets rem- the thesaurus under \"wonderful.\" about making controversial movies and iniscent of Schrader's Mishima, Finally the ever-professional Schrader then get upset about the resulting con- virtuoso cinematography, editing for stares off into the soothing blue of the troversy.\" Does anyone recall Schrader shock effect, and the feverishness of a Mediterranean and says, \"Well, she's a muttering over the idiocy of critics who kidnapped 19-year-old's imagination survivor. \" failed to appreciate Mishima, his avant- encourages us to look at Schrader's sur- garde opus on a studio budget? face rather than the subhuman and silly In an age of bankers, not bank rob- characters or pathos of presentation in bers, what is the point of making the And the prosaic Light of Day to the Kazan's script. After all, Kazan had Patty Hearst story for audiences now contrary, Schrader says his process is taken a similarly simplistic approach to too young to recall her face on six \"to agitate other people and make the life of Frances Farmer in Frances. Newsweek covers? \"Well, it's folklore,\" them crazy. I like to put on blinders , Schrader came with a concept that says Schrader, \"you could say the same like a horse, and do the extreme thing. forced us to rethink the agony of a thing about Bonnie and Clyde, or AI I will go wherever it takes me, draw Hearst. Capone, or Billy the Kid. It's the heir- whatever conclusions demanded by ess who gets kidnapped, becomes a the material. I will not wink to the au- Schrader plunges the first halfof Pat- revolutionary, robs a bank. It's Pola- dience or indicate other feelings con- ty's life into darkness. With fiance roid folklore. No committee got to- trary to what I'm doing on the screen. Steven Weed, Patty huddles in gether and decided to make a Patty Be it the kid in Taxi Driver, be it the cramped quarters by the light of a sin- Hearst movie. workers in Blue CoLLar, I will come to a gle bulb on the eve of her kidnapping. Marxist conclusion if I need to. It isn't In the disturbingly claustrophobic \"You know, if anything, there easy, because audiences want to be film, Patty's life is played out in one wasn't much of a need for a Patty told how to think. \" form of confinement after the other. Hearst movie, which is why I made it The closet, the bare apartments where as peculiar as it is. To my mind, there He likens the process to \"buying a the SLA hid, her arrest and trial, her two was no demand for a conventional film gun. Once you've made the decision, years serving time, and the eyebrow- about this subject. It had to be a film you just get in deeper. Every time elevating April Fool's Day wedding to with a signature; otherwise, why make you're tempted to be more objective, her bodyguard, which is not shown but it?\" you refuse. \" While many may think Schrader's Schrader is objective enough to in- signature also includes a comic concep- clude himself among the exploiters of tion of the Symbionese Liberation Army as inept Keystone Cops crimi- 25
Patty claims she does notfeel her ordeal raised her consciousness about American society in the Seventies. She used her time in jail \" to learn about another side oflife . .. Now I don't think about it. ' , the Hearst legend. He criticized the says Schrader of the womaI). Patty has with a 'passive protagonist, who is only Empire for using Patty to sell news- become. \"Either the scars are •ve'f ry well acted upon. It's like trying to sink your papers (her granddaddy would be proud) and to crunch numbers over hidden, or she's the sort of person who teeth into the hole instead of the film deals. \"What I meant by that,\" he does not ~car permanently. I wouldn't donut.\" Schrader's simile is revealing, explains later, \"was that a lot of polit- ical hay was made over what the law- venture to decide that.\" because the film does reveal more yers did call a 'sexy case.' Political careers were made, and we had a po- Does he think of her as a real person? about Schrader's struggle with his own litical show trial at the expense of a jury-rigged justice system. \"There is this real person that I went style than about the material itself. \"Just like she was a symbol to the to the screening with last night. And SLA, she was a symbol to the politi- cians, to the Left and the Right she was Athen there's this person who's in the t the core of the director is 'a film a symbol, which bothered me. She's critic; in fact, that's what he was also a symbol to the media, and we ex- movie. One of the reasons , I think, that ploit her. But I guess that's what we're she's so calm and at peace about the doing while Patty was playing with supposed to do. I don't know if the le- gal establishment is supposed to ex- movie is that she doesn't think that's guns. \"I felt it was important and ploit people for their own gain. \" And this man has been the object of how her up there. wanted to write about movies because many nwisance suits? \"When she saw the movie for the 1 had something to say about the world \"I had I u n c h wit h. a Iawy e r , \" Schrader defends his own case, \"who first time , there was only one scene she 1 lived in. Movies were an excuse, or told me lawyers still discuss this case as a classic example of how not to defend disapproved of, and I was shocked to perhaps a form of discourse.\" Ah, the someone. F. Lee Bailey was from out of town, and hired by Daddy, someone hear it-the last scene. You know it's old critic emerges with respectable crit- who San Francisco didn't like, who didn't do his homework, and finally her moment; we've been telling the ical terms. made the mistake of putting his client on the stand. The minute she got up story from a couple different points of Nor is the critic too far behind him there, she died, because it's like John DeLorean, 'I can't put him on the view for 90 minutes . Now it's her turn. even now. One of his reasons, he says, stand. The prosecution then asks, \"Is that you, Mr. DeLorean?\" \"Uh , This is her moment, so I just put her in for chailenging the critical establish- yeah.\" \"And is that a suitcase of co- caine?\" , Well, that was Patty, and that front of the camera and let her have her ment with this film is \"the enormous was a gun, and there was no denying it. It was stupid.\" say. That was my idea. All that stuff residue of class prejudice. Rightly or O ne might think that out of Patty where she's abused and put upon, that wrongly-and my feeling is Hearst's struggle against institu- tions, systems, and primarily the men was okay. 'wrongly'-with all due respect to your who tried to control her life for their purposes, a tough feminist would have \"But when she is shown standing up publication-if you want to make a film emerged. Back in 1975, she promised \"a revolutionary feminist perspec- for herself, she claimed she looked about a psychopathic murderer, the tive,\" if she got out on bail. Now, as a mother of two living in Florida; Patty cold: 'I look calculating. 1 look like a Village Voice will say, That's your claims she does not feel her ordeal raised her consciousness about Ameri- bitch. You can't have that.' But then right and we defend it. They're peo- can society in the Seventies. She used her time in jail \"to learn about another that's the only person in the movie that ple, too.' side of life.. .Now I don't think about it. \" approximates who she is now. The \"But I say 1 want to make a film \"The scars don't seem to show,\" other person she probably doesn't even about this kidnapped heiress, 'cause think is her. \" she's human, too, and critics cry, 'No, Patty's disapprovals of her own final she's not human. She's rich.' She got line after announcing that the press is burned by that attitude, but you know a tool to be used to set the (her) record it takes a lot more than one movie to straight (a Hearst is a Hearst is a Hearst) sort out this whole case. The Hearsts was widely rumored. \"It was just the F- didn't have a whole lot of clout.\" word, that's all. She approved the sen- Now the question is whether timent. She just says she would never . Schrader has enough clout to get his vi- use that word. She wouldn't now. sion of Patty legitimized without the \"But she's told us a number of things prejudice and controversy he so loves that' weren't quite true. For example, killing it. \"I made a very special film, she had seen the film before last night. and for just under $4 million it can af- She wouldn't have got on that plane ford to be a specialty film. 1told the var- without seeing it. And she said she had ious executives who asked me why never worn bell-bottom jeans until 1 there wasn't more conventional stuff in showed her some pictures of herself in the movie, 'Hey, give me another mil- ' em. Well, screw 'em, screw 'em lion and a longer shooting schedule and all. .. damn 'em , damn 'em all. .. it I'll deliver two versions and you can didn't have the effect 1 was after. So 1 make your choice.' 1 believed then and just said, 'Patty, I'm sorry.' 1 still believe this story had to be told \"As Henry Ford once said , 'Never in this way. Hell, do we all have to go complain. Never explain .' It was the to the bank every day?\" only opportunity 1 had to show the Not unless we're casing the joint character in action . In fact, 1 don't with Patty, whose withdrawals were think I'll ever again try to make a film more fun than her deposits. ~ 26
Dean Stockwell in Married to the Mob. Dean Stockwell interviewed well was 15, he had acted in some 22 But Stockwell was still unhappy by Pat McGilligan movies, including such pick-of-the-Iot with acting, with society, and with properties as Anchors Aweigh, Gentle- himself. He was married , for two years, I n his book Negative Space , critic man's Agreement, Kim and (on loan-out to actress Millie Perkins. He aban- Manny Farber writes about Holly- to RKO) Joseph Losey's allegorical The doned acting again, embraced the Six- wood sideliners, screen players Boy with Green Hair. ties, and recreated, sex- and drug-wise, whose fringe characterizations can legendarily. When he was not keeping stand out, like raisins in rice, whether Stockwell makes no bones about de- company with Beat Generation artists in good , bad, or in-between movies. testing the MGM experience, then as and intellectuals, he was hanging out in \"Standing at a tangent to the story and now . After finishing high school at the Topanga Canyon with Jack Nicholson, appraising the tide in which their fel- studio, the teenaged Stockwell quit Neil Young, Eric Clapton , and long- low actors are floating or drowning,\" acting, enrolled at Berkeley, dropped time pal Dennis Hopper, with whom Farber says, \"they serve as stabiliz- out, then, after shearing his trademark he has often worked. ers-and as a critique of the movie.\" tousled hair, roamed the United States for roughly five years. By the time Stockwell had opted for One of our best professional sideli- a second comeback, the parts, for a ners, nowadays, happens to be Dean Hardscrabbling persuaded him that middle-aged renegade child actor with Stockwell. acting was maybe not the worst way to an out-there reputation, had dried up. make a living. Back in harness, as a In the Seventies, Stockwell's moodily Born of show business troupers (his young leading man Stockwell acted in offbeat presence could be glimpsed father, the publicity notes invariably programmers, until he was cast as one more reliably in dinner theater and ep- mention , was the voice of Prince of the two killers in Compulsion on isodic television than in the obscure Charming in Walt Disney's Snow White Broadway, which led to his repeating films he made that were barely re- and the Seven Dwarfs), Stockwell has the role in the film version, and other leased. This nowhere period was had a long, intermittent, richly varied stellar performances during a flurry of capped by such projects as co-writing and at times climactic career. The first motion picture activity in the late Fif- and co-directing Neil Young's anti- stage of that career was as a popular, ties and early Sixties. For Compulsion nuke rock-and-roll comedy Human ambiguous, glittering-eyed juvenile and for his emoting in the screen ad- Highway, and by Stockwell' s bit as an performer at MGM in the late Forties aptation of Long Day' s Journey Into Anglo military advisor In the Oscar- and early Fifties. By the time Stock- Night, Stockwell received (\"shared nominated Nicaraguan feature, Alsino cast\") Best Actor honors at the Cannes and the Condor. Film Festival. 27
Again, Stockwell was discouraged. The Boy with Green Hair. so he was not a role model at all. My After meeting his wife, Joy Mar- mother [Betty Veronica Stockwell] had chenko, at Cannes, a place with a lucky Compulsion. given up her career, which was as a dan- association for him, he decided to quit cer-singer-comedienne in vaudeville films yet a third time, to move to Santa the vitality of the parts in the Eighties. and \"George White's Scandals\"-that Fe and to take up the sure thing of real In director Demme's new picture, type of thing. So her career really had estate. In 1983, the following adver- Stockwell takes a rare leap at comedy very little bearing on the type of thing tisement was placed in the trades: as the cold-blooded, loose-zippered I was doing. I was the first film actor in \"Dean Stockwell will help you with all Mafioso Tony \"The Tiger\" Russo. It my family per se. My home and my en- your real estate needs in the new center is a sly, full-bodied, captivating per- vironment was MGM. of creative energy.\" A telephone num- formance, the kind the Motion Picture ber in Santa Fe, New Mexico', was Academy remembers come statuette- I don't think working at MGM influ- listed. time. It may be misinterpreted as a enced me, as far as my acting goes, at way-out departure, whereas, like all . I think that my acting was strictly Fortunately for moviegoers, fate in- everything else he has ever done, it is intuitive, from the beginning, and has tervened , in the persons of David very Dean. always remained that way. I resisted Lynch, who cast Stockwell as the fien- any attempts by anyone to assist me. dish Dr. Yueh in the science fiction ex- When we met at a chic restaurant in Even when I first started acting, when travaganza Dune, and German director Santa Monica, Stockwell was still re- I was six or seven, I always knew, when Wim Wenders, for whom Stockwell covering from an all-nighter of filming I was doing a scene, if it was right. I played the common-sensical brother of Dennis Hopper's latest (with rockers don't know how I knew, but I knew. drifter Harry Dean Stanton in Paris, Neil Young and Bob Dylan in the cast). Texas, which won the grand prize at He ,was wearing blue jeans, cowboy How did you think about acting, as a Cannes in 1984. Needless to add, the boots, turquoise jewelry. He chain- boy, when you thought about it at all? actor never did sell any real estate. smoked during lunch. An unlit cigar dangled in his shirtpocket for after- When it's intuitive, that's a bypass- Since Paris, Texas it is clear that wards. -P.M. ing, really, of the thought process. It's Stockwell is in the midst of an improb- a source that's just prior to or more orig- able and fecund third comeback in his D id it help you as an actor that your inal than the thought process. When I career. The roles have included the parents were professionals in the did think about it, I thought about it in pansexual weirdo who lip-syncs Roy business, and presumably role models? terms of honesty or truth or self, or how Orbison's \"In Dreams\" in the den of Does your acting approach come out of I would react, how I would feel, what iniquity in David Lynch's Blue Velvet , the home at all? Or does it come out oj I would do, and what I would say. and the hardbitten career soldier of being honed at MGM? Francis Coppola's Gardens of Stone; Did MGM have acting coaches and memorable quick-fixes in To Live and Well, my father [Broadway actor classes in which you were constantly Die inL.A. and Beverly Hills Cop II; and Harry Stockwell] wasn't there. My par- worked over? upcoming (this summer) pivotal roles ents had split up by the time I was six, in Jonathan Demme's Married to the They had an in-house acting coach Mob and Francis Coppola's Tucker, in for years, named Lillian Burns,.. I used which Stockwell plays none other than to have to go into her office and I hated Howard Hughes. (\"Surprisingly, I it. I felt it was just such a waste of time. look a lot like him!\") I had to sit there while she took the script and read the role and cried and Manny Farber also writes about laughed and did all this shit, while I \"centered\" acting, which entails just sat and nodded and wanted to get \"deep projection of character,\" as op- the hell out of there. That was my only posed to an \"uncontrolled, spilling coaching. over quality.\" You talk about MGM in such measured It is this \"centeredness,\" this un- terms. What was the upside of being compromising revelation of a faceted there, for so many years, when you were self, which has made Dean complicit growing up? with audiences, and a boon to film- makers, for 40 years. In silly business Well, the only upside that I can like 1968's Psych-Out, · with Jack Ni- really tell you about pertains to where cholson fronting an acid rock band in I am now, many, many years later. I the heyday of Haight-Ashbury, Dean's have a profession that I'm more com- eerily tranquil characterization (and fortable with, that I'm proficient at, the sacrificial death of his character) and which I need to support my fam- provides the only authenticity in what ily-my two children and my beautiful was, even at the time, a garbled time- wife. I have no idea what I would have piece. In Blue Velvet, his thoroughly done-I might have been a lawyer, I oddball performance as Ben provides a might have been an artist, I might have sideliner's window onto the edged sur- been a physicist. Who knows? But at realism of the rest of the movie. the time, when I was a child, I didn't see any benefits, and in retrospect, I Stockwell's resurgent joy in acting is found in the range, the looseness and don't see any benefits now. You were unhappy at the time? A great deal of my childhood was not there for me, because I was working. I 28
was doing two, three pictures a year, the Actor's Studio in New York. Lee and in between I was going to school on Strasberg was conducting something, the lot. It was the full-bloom fruition of and I walked out after about 15 min- the motion picture industry. It repre- utes. I thought it was horrendous. I was sented the pot of gold for most people going to classes , to be perfectly frank, who were striving to achieve this big looking to get laid. payoff of fame, glamour, and money. There was a lot of pressure to succeed. You were not at all insecure about your A lot of demands were placed on me acting? that should not be placed on a child, at all, ever. No . And I didn't like the classes. I did not like that highly critical atmos- When you look back on those pictures phere which is damaging to an actor's at MGM, do they give you any gratifica- sensibility. tion at all, after all these years? Or do you experience a different kind of The loners. H ow did the Sixties affect you? twinge? In a very positive way, I think. It certainly looked , for a long time, as Some of them do give me gratifica- though the Sixties affected my career tion, in retrospect. But the ones I ap- in a devastating way. For anyone who preciate now, or have some affection was there, who remembers it, it was a for now, I also appreciated to some de- profound time that stretched clear gree at that time. Occasionally a pic- around the world: of enlightenment, of ture like The Boy with Green Hair came awareness, of a critical view of society. along. The war was all around us, con- The flower children and the love-ins, stantly, so I took that film very seri- the Beatles, were the childhood I ously, very purposefully. I felt a certain didn't have. sense of pride in that film and I still feel good about it. A lot of people involved So I quit working. I told my agent I in that film were blacklisted, including wasn't going to work for three years and the director, Joseph Losey. It was my I didn't. I just participated in that and I loved it. first radical film project [laughs J. The sexual aspects of the Sixties I Y OU stopped acting altogether after Blue Velvet. found incredibly positive. When I ar- high school and dropped out ofshow rived at puberty, sexual mores were business for roughly five years . Why? again in the film industry, and you ap- very rigid and unreasonable. It was peared in Long Day's Journey Into frustrating. When it opened up, I Well, I desperately needed to get Night and Sons and Lovers. But during found it to be very beneficial. out of the whole thing. I didn't really the early Sixties , you accepted few parts formulate it in my head that I had to and only those , it seems, which made de- Can you extrapolate what it is about find myself or see the world, I only had mands ofyou. having gone through the Sixties that has to get away from MGM. changed or deepened your approach to Yeah. I was turning a lot of things acting? I used a different name-my real down. I was making my own career de- first name, which is Robert-and I cut cisions, as I am now , and I wasn't find- Nothing has deepened my ap- all my hair off. I had to earn whatever ing things that appealed to me. I wasn't proach. The approach was always deep money I lived on. I was doing a lot of going in a specific direction. I just ana- because it was always intuitive, and in- odd jobs in California and New York. lyzed and reacted to whatever material tuition is a very deep part of the self. By the time I was 20 or 21 it became came along. Ironically, I couldn't give Very mysterious. The approach re- clear that I had no tools to go into any myself any credit. I would denigrate mains constant throughout. But the in- profession. My education was poor at my own accomplishments. strument of the self becomes more rich best because it was geared towards ac- and varied as it experiences life. The commodating the work. There were I read that you destroyed your best act- Sixties were the richest and most var- only three hours of school a day, which ing prizes from the Cannes Film Festival ied experiences that I had, so I unhes- was constantly interrupted by having to for Compulsion and Long Day's Jour- itatingly say that they had a very go in and do the shots . I had to re-teach ney. positive effect on my work now. myself to read later on. Yeah, one drunken night I threw W hen you returned to acting, in the So I thought I would try acting again, them into the fireplace. They were late Sixties and early Seventies, it and contacted my agency, MeA. I got a scrolls. At the moment it happened-I must have seemed like a time warp, with little part on a religious show in New vaguely recall it-I remember thinking all the old studio moguls dead or dying , York that paid me $150, which got me that the scrolls that Cannes provided and the studio systems changed and in di- back to L.A. I did a number of live tel- for the prix de masculin were ugly, stu- sarray. evision dramas, a couple ofstupid mov- pid-looking things. But in a deeper ies, and then in part through a friend, sense they reflected my resentment: I was very happy that all of it was dis- or a lover as it were, a wonderful actress Poor Dean! appearing. Independent filmmaking named Janice Rule, I was cast in Com- allowed more freedom of expression, pulsion for Broadway. You went to some acting classes during more diverse talents to emerge. The this period. films made today are as good or better Compulsion legitimized you all over than those made in the classic days of I went to some classes around town, and I went once with some people to 29
I hate rehearsals. I have always hated rehearsals. You have to do it out of re- spect to the director, the other actors and the material, sometimes. When it comes to, say, a piece like Long Day's Journey Into Night, which was taking a play verbatim and translating it onto the screen, you have to rehearse a lot. I have found ways to rehearse posi- tively now. But I would still rather not do it. It goes stale for you in rehearsals? No. It's just a waste of time for me. I don't like to do what I do unless the camera is rolling. Any good film actor has to be able to do ten takes of some- thing and to get very close to hitting what he is after each time, but it is al- ways going to be a little bit different. I \" ~, hate the idea of doing something, knowing it is right on, and that it is re- It !' hearsal. Dean Stockwell as Tony 'The Tiger' Russo with Michelle Pfeiffer. Hollywood. There are a lot of lousy as a director? D o you think of yourself, these days, as having a certain persona, in movies being made now, but also a hel- Number one, it's a job. The factthat terms of what you give offon screen, the luva lot more experimentation. it's Dennis' project makes it a wonder- connections you are making with the au- But you also had trouble landing ful job. Because Dennis is at the top of dience? parts. the talent side today, as a focused film- I think about that quite a bit. Be- All through the Seventies I couldn' t maker and ,!S an actor. He doesn' t work cause I think there's a certain point in get arrested half the time. I was aver- with any formula . He is knowledgeable the life of an artist when his work be- aging $10,000 a year in income. about film history. He is very respect- gins to communicate most fully. I seem Were you going in for a lot of read- ful of all the great filmmakers who have to be approaching the height of my ings? preceded him. He has learned from all communicative powers now. I find I Yeah. But I never got ajob I read for of them. But he creates a fresh film am able to do less and communicate in my life. Never. So I don ' t read any- each time. It always has Dennis' stamp more with greater ease than ever be- more. on it. fore. I feel almost a sense of power Sometimes I'd ask a producer or di- What does he do to help you as an ac- about acting, now. rector I knew if they' d check around tor? The new role , in Jonathan Demme's and find out if there's a bad rap on me, He leaves me alone . 1£ a director Married to the Mob, is a very playful or if I was on a modern-day version of leaves me alone, I do my best work. one for you-you are teasing the audi- a blacklist, or what. David Lynch? ence as well as the character-and the Did you have a reputation for being David and Dennis share a certain performance is less intense than what we difficult on the set? facet of their vision-although I'm not have seen in Blue Velvet or Gardens of No. Never. I'm a total professional. sure either one would agree with me. Stone. The only filmmaker I ever had a prob- Both of them have at least a streak of No character has ever come to me as lem with was Henry Jaglom. surrealism in their souls, and I have al- ,clearly, as easily, and as fully as Tony Nowadays you gravitate toward the ways been very partial to surrealist art, \"The Tiger.\" It was almost as though offbeat, fringe material. to surrealist thought , to surrealist I had done it before in another life. I Strangely, the gravitation works not being. I think Blue Velvet is surrealistic, don't know whether it is because I'm from me to that material, but from that and Dennis' film The Last Movie is def- half-Italian, or that I've never had the material to me. The onl y project I initely surrealistic-and a great movie , opportunity to do this type of role be- sought myself was Dune. incidentally. In Colors there is very lit- fore-a woman-chasing, amoral, top Why is that? tle surrealism, but it's there, if you dog Don. But I just lit up the minute I I knew you were going to ask that! know Dennis. read it and I didn't have to touch it. Let's talk about some of those cutting- There! Solid. Completely. Hedge directors . What about Dennis Hop- ow do you prepare for your roles? But I get the idea that, in Married to per, with whom you ' ve now worked When I first read the material , the Mob at least, acting isn't work any twice, and with whom you are now film- nine times out of ten what I am going longer, it' s fun for you . ing another picture . He has been your to do with it falls into place at the fi-rst It should be fun. It wasn't for years close friend since the Fifties . Is it a case reading. Or at least 80 percent of it and years and years. Now, in this third of him starting a sentence, and you fin- does. The remaining 20 percent falls stage of my career, all that has com- ishing it? into place by itself over a period of time pletely turned around and good luck is Sometimes it can be like that, yeah. prior to when I start shooting. still with me. Now, I am finally able to How would you characterize Dennis How do you feel about rehearsals? enjoy it. ~ 30
ection Before I'd made The Last Movie, I'd gone around to all the universities selling Easy Rider, and everyone was saying, \"We want new kinds of movies.\" So I made a new, different kind of movie. But if I'd really listened to what they were saying, really taken a moment to interpret it, I'd have realized they meant, \"We don' t want anything too extreme to jar our sensibili- ties, which are already rattled by drugs and protests and so forth.' But I didn't see that. I just took what they said at face value, and I made a movie which stopped my directing career. It won the Venice Film Festival, but the film was never seen. Spielberg obviously saw that this romantic kind of Forties film was what we grew up on and what was needed, and I think he does them very well. The other stuff that's popu- lar now, the mindless entertainment, I don' t know. Maybe I'm mindless these days, but I enjoy a lot of it. I would love to think that I'm good enough to make a flat-out But, man, do you think I really can? I've gone through a major change in my life. I've had almost five years now without drugs or alco- hol. That makes a big difference as far as my mood swings are concerned. AI I never thought of those episodes as interfering with my work, I'm sure people who saw them were terrified by my behavior. On that level, I'm much more acceptable to work with than I was before. Now, when you knock on my door, the same guy answers every time. In the old days, you nev- er knew who was going to come out. I feel like a baby. There's a lot of work and I feel hap- py. Whenever I think, \"God, I'm working so much I didn't take any time off for Christmas or Ne,; Year's,\" .I reme.mber all those . years I just sat there and wondered if I'd ever work again. So I don t complam and Just keep working. I've got a lot of catch-up to do, and I just want to keep making movies. -DENNIS HOPPER 31
, Sidney Lumet: Lion on the Left Sidney Lumet. Judd Hirsch and Christine L1!hti in Running on Empty. Sidney Lumet interviewed did not sacrifice dramatic situation and in bright, garish primary color, and so by Gavin Smith acting performance. It is for the latter on. Sidney Lumet is one of the only surviving political filmmakers in that he was initially hailed in the early Amidst the mushiness of Eighties American cinema. Lumet began his career at the height of Mc- Sixties as heir to Elia Kazan, as he him- filmmaking with its televisual vocabu- Carthyism. In the Thirties, he recalls attending a single Communist party self agrees. lary and zoom lens aesthetics, Lumet is meeting, and was asked to leave after he pointed out that Soviet society was Lumet's output, in terms of quality one of the few filmmakers who com- not classless because the artists lived better than the masses. Yet Lumet had and quantity, is phenomenal-38 films mands the medium and understands a particularly close shave with the blacklist via the informal \"Red in 30 years. He looks to be a workaholic form and style. He carries an aesthetic Papers.\" In retrospect, 12 Angry Men was a definitive rebuttal to the lynch and a perfectionist with hands-on con- torch that goes back to the height of mob hysteria of the McCarthy era, and his 1960 adaption of Tennessee Wil- trol of everything that goes into a film, Hollywood classicism in the Fifties (12 liams' Orpheus Descending added a postscript. The Fugitive Kind foreshad- from the choice of lens to the design of Angry Men) and yet is responsive to owed the turmoil of the South in the Sixties. Far from being well-meaning sets, from where the teamsters park sleek Eighties modernism (best ex- liberal-humanist melodramas, along with Fail Safe and The Pawnbroker, their trucks on location to the selection emplified in the stark minimalist nar- these films are sophisticated ideologi- cal critiques of postwar American so- of a sound effect in the mix. rative and visual formalism of Prince of ciety, shot through with an emotionally potent and socially acute leftism that Scathingly dismissive of auteurism, the City). Long dismissed as a director Lumet might nevertheless be one of its alternating between portentous play- prime American exemplars, if not con- adaptions and underreaching political sistently at a thematic level, then cer- dramas, by Andrew Sarris on the one tainly at a formal one. His specific hand, and Pauline Kael on the other, shaping of the look and style of each his critical cachet is inversely propor- film is at once very dependent on reg- tional to his filmmaking talent. Ask any ular collaborators, notably cinematog- filmmaker. raphers Andrzej Bartkowiak and Boris TKaufman, and yet rigorously concep- he key to Lumet's talent is his hav- ing been originally an actor. He tualized at a thematic level by Lumet himself in pre-production. For in- was born in 1924, his parents were in stance, the sky was never shown in theater, and he began acting for stage Prince of the City, Dog Day Afternoon and radio as a child-in fact, he was a was shot with only natural available child member of the Group Theater. light, The Morning After was saturated Continued on page 34. 32
Naomi Foner: Radical on the Write Naomi Foner interviewed Harlem's Head Start program, registered can't pay you enough money for a year or by Anne Thompson voters in South Carolina-but wasn't two of your life. I'm still trying to clean out too radical to campaign for Eugene the things I took because I was flattered I t's impossible to imagine Running on McCarthy. into it by some famous actor. After all, you Empty being written by someone who end up alone in a room with a typewriter, didn't fully experience the Sixties. After a career at PBS producing chil- and the actor isn't in there with you. It's The contemporary story spans three gen- dren's television, Foner moved to Holly- awful ifyou don't care. The bottom line is erations: two underground radicals (Chris- wood nine years ago with her second hus- you definately need some feeling. tine Lahti and Judd Hirsch), her bereft band and has painstakingly Ieamed the upper-class parents (Augusta Dabney and screenwriting ropes. She developed a Was this a story you'd wanted to tellfor Steven Hill), and their two children (River movie about the Triangle Shirtwaist Fac- a long time? Phoenix and Jonas Abry). It's a great story tory fire with Barbra Streisand and wrote that tums on the axis of authority. You an adaptation ofRandom Harvest for Dus- People say that you write over and over don't need a Sixties diploma to enjoy the tin Hoffman. Her first produced film was again about the same things. I keep writ- movie. So it's easy to see how producers Violets Are Blue, a boxoffice misfire star- ing about how you have to leam to really Amy Robinson and Griffin Dunne, who ring Sissy Spacek and Kevin Kline. Foner love people in such a way that you can let are in their thirties, were able to get it finally marshalls her considerable re- them be who they are, let them go when made. It avoids the hurdles of dealing di- sources with Running on Empty, a tour de they need to go. That's probably the un- rectlywith the period by entering the story force which portrays the pain and disillu- derlying message of this movie. Even through the children. And under Sidney sionment ofthe Sixties generation without though it's political and set in some fairly Lumet's direction, the movie is beautiful- apologizing for their hopes for a better exotic circumstances, it's universal. ly acted and unexpectedly moving. world, within the framework of a dramatic parent-child conflict.-A.T. Someone told me that the only love sto- Running on Empty's screenwriter, Na- ry that ends successfully in separation is omi Foner, possesses impeccable Sixties Are you a canny word manipulator or that of a parent and child. If anything is credentials: the child of Brooklyn sociolo- was there great emotion in you while close to me, that idea is. That's what I was gists, she was an ardent member of Stu- you were writing Running on Empty? trying really hard to write about. That was dents for a Democratic Society (SDS) while what I struggled with on botll ends of the attending graduate school at Columbia, I hope a little bit of both. This one's a story: being what you need to be yourself, married historian Eric Foner, taught at combination of old personal history and a and how much your parents let you do lot of research. I try not to take on a project mat, and then seeing yourself as a parent if I don't care about the subject. They struggling with the same things with your Continued on page 39. 33
Continuedfrom page 32. Lumet and Henry Fonda on the set of12 Angry Men. expression of a generation that time forgot, living proof that instant history (Lumet had a copy of Elia Kazan's au- Reaganite Eighties, just as Prince ofthe could be converted into instant nostal- tobiography on his desk.) During City now seems to be more about the gia-with a little help from the people World War II, he was in the signal corps movie business than law and order. Lu- who thought they were changing the in the Far East, as a film cameraman. met chuckles at the idea. system from within, but were actually On his return to New York, he formed being swallowed whole. By contrast, his own theater group and studied with Among still unrealized projects are Running on Empty's ideological project Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Malcolm X, a David Mamet script is a rehabilitation of Sixties values and Playhouse. (Meisner's very practical which Lumet believes has been diffi- objectives. and specifics-oriented technique is one cult to finance because it is \"too radi- of Lumet's formative influences.) cal,\" and a film about TV evangelism Judd Hirsch and Christine Lahti that foreshadowed the Jim Bakker/PTL play two Sixties radicals living perma- In the early Fifties, he began to work scandal by several years. nently underground since sabotaging for CBS in the heyday of live TV. It was an MIT napalm lab in 1970. Forced to a baptism of fire and taught him his F or avowedly political filmmakers, raise their two sons under a life of false craft-the ability to work very fast and the Eighties has been a tough dec- identities and enforced marginality, yet obtain high quality results. Lumet, ade-look at the stalling of Arthur they aren't waving but drowning. Franklin Schaffner (who directed the Penn, Michael Ritchie, and Robert They've transmitted their Sixties val- original 12 Angry Men for TV), John Altman. But somehow, against the ues intact to their kids but now they're Frankenheimer (Lumet's successor grain, Lumet has done some ot his best going everywhere and nowhere, in a helming the You Are There show), and work-Prince of the City and Daniel- state of continuous transition. Their Arthur Penn together constitute a Fif- in this period , and even something as paralysis is emblematic of the inade- ties New York new wave generated by flawed as Power is still bett<>r than most quacy ofSixties' values in the Eighties, TV and shaped by leftist politics and everything else surrounding it. of the political exhaustion of a gener- method acting. Lumet reflects that ation that tried to unite pleasure and perhaps he and his generation of film So why does Running on Empty sur- politics and was scared off by the eco- directors were thus seen as upstarts by face now, at the end of a decade that nomic crises of the Seventies. the old guard of classical Hollywood. has attempted to obliterate, coerce or Fitting, now that his generation looks marginalize the politics and culture of Their 17-year-old son Danny (River doubtfully at Eighties filmmakers who the late Sixties? Is it merely because Phoenix) is tired of living in limbo and have cut their teeth on the anything- the film's surface appeal (a coming of longs for stability and the opportunity goes aesthetic incoherence of music age story with River Phoenix as an to pursue a career in classical music video and commercials. Eighties teen son of Sixties radicals) is (Hirsch wishes he'd get hip and listen unthreatening and marketable? Or is it to more rock 'n' roll). He's also in love After the prestige success of the because demographics has made the with a girl (Martha Plimpton) at his early part of the decade, in the second Sixties hip again? half of the Sixties Lumet went on an in- ternational trajectory, making films in The Big Chill was the self-satisfied France, North Africa, Italy, England and Sweden. It was a period of consol- idation and transition. Lumet moved away from black and white classicism (that started to go modernist with The Pawnbroker) , to a fluid, mosaic style of gritty urban alienation and psycholog- ical detail: The Anderson Tapes, Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon. It culminated in 1976's Network, which confirmed the mature Lumet style. Ironically, Network's defeat by Rocky for the Best Film Oscar marks the end of Seventies mainstream film's period of modernism; the tide turned back toward the bankrupt, emotionally fake triumphalism and reductive soap opera sentiments that Stallone has come to embody. Lumet never looked back, and so spent some time out in the box- office cold, almost up until his and fre- quent collaborator, screenwriter Jay Presson Allen's The Morning After. A determindly commercial excursion into Jagged Edge territory (and his first film shot in L.A.), a year later it reads peversely like an ironic critiqe of the 34
\"Asfar as I can see, art has never changed anything. It's wondeiful to have around, but we're sort oflike terrific camp followers. ' , new school whose parents are the kind conflict endures. (There are also strik- justified. I'm very touched by his pol- of stuffy, Norman Rockwell types that ing parallels between this film and itics , because that is really running on seem to populate small towns in Mov- Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark. Lumet empty. Oh, boy, is that hopeless.. He's ieworld. Naturally she adores Danny's cringed when I pointed them out: \" I never going to reach anybody and he's mellow, groovy parents , while Danny have some trouble with those kinds of not reachable. And he's isolated , he's sees a mentor in her father, the music films.\") Anyway, shaky Marxist theory not the Red Brigade, he's not a terrorist teacher (complete with bow-tie , about the relation of the family to ide- in that sense. It is hopeless for him and natch). The film' s script is based on a ology aside, the film does use the Pope others like him, because this is a coun- succession of expectation-reversals of family as a vessel to contain the contra- try without a left wing. Europe has a this kind, since it's Danny's story and dictions and conflicts of the Sixties, not left wing, England has a left wing. he's used to a life based on centripedal only to rehearse them , but to vindicate Even Russia has a right wing. We motion. them through the vigor with which don't. We' ve got variations on the cen- they work themselves through to emo- ter, with some very right-wing people. Danny'S rejection of his parents' way tional resolution . And it is an emotion- of life is not a rejection of their values ally loaded film , depending, as usual Do you consider yourself left-wing ? Is however. We're never left feeling this with Lumet, the consumate actor's di- Running on Empty a left-wing film? film is an epitaph for the Sixties, or a rector, upon the performances that bash-the-hippies exercise, because it's Hirsch, Lahti, Phoenix and Plimpton I think it's a left-wing film. I'm not ultimately about the durability and rel- decidedly deliver. nearly as left-wing as it's possible to be evance of Sixties values, and the polit- -G.S. now. I don't know where that would be ical struggle they imply-at the level of in the political spectrum in America. I personal relations. Progressive politics R unning on Empty is about locating was a Jackson supporter during the pri- are situated in the characters' lived ex- the political in the personal and the manes, but will happily vote for Du- perience, which is itself an ideological personal in the political. In a number of kakis. realm. That's just another way of say- your films the politics are given emo- ing that personal relationships are po- tional fuel by the characters' relation- I t's interesting that you chose a lyrical litical. The family is the basic unit of ships. style . There's no sense ofjeopardy or the economic and political apparatus. tension. To begin to disengage the family from If you're brought up in a New York, this institutionalism, and for a new set Jewish , left-wing background, a That was a deliberate choice. I of family relations to develop, is prac- Depression baby, being brought up in wanted no false melodrama, I didn ' t tically impossible-unless the family's the Thirties, I think it's almost auto- want a sense of the pursuit, that their normal relationship to society is al- matic. It's just woven into you, warp lives are liable to be wrecked any mo- tered. Which is precisely the case in and woof. There is no separation. And ment, and they could be d ragged off in Running on Empty , albeit with a certain so, I guess, that's why it's there in so chains and so on. None of that. It's a suspension of disbelief. many pictures. very calm movie, deliberately calm. No substitution of energy to hop things If the family in Empty is trapped in a In Running on Empty, the twist is up. It's there in the score. It's very im- pattern of relations-patriarchal, based that the idea of questioning authority is portant to be honest about what's going on subordination and denial-that are turned back on the Sixties children, who on with these people. In that sense the impossible to erase, despite the trans- now \"rule\" their ownfamilies. damage has been done. formation of the surface conditions of family life, then at least the film affords I never thought of it in terms of a re- It's as if the Sixties and the Seventies the possibility of politically meaningful versal of Arthur's [Judd Hirsch] basic struggle being worked out in that con- political position , where he started as hadn' t happened and that town was text. Hirsch may be paternalistic, but one thing but became another. It al- straight out of the Fifties . his family'S central governing principle ways struck me that his tight control- is skepticism, and the lifestyle he has ling of the family was because he was Even further back. I picked a town, led them into only functions via a doc- so unsure about the life he had led that I wanted to be super-idealized , trine of questioning \"natural\" percep- them into . He thought of his control as clean, not a speck of dirt in the street. tions and searching for the symptoms a kind of discipline without which they The high school was so perfect-the of a normally hidden but definable or- were all going to collapse, but he was classes look as if there's never been a der-ie., in the first scene, Danny's holding onto himself more than any- moment of adolescent pain in them. view of an ordinary suburban street re- thing else. Well, at one point, in that Everything-from the son Dann y'S veals the undercover FBI agents sur- last scene with the girl, the kid says, point of view-is ideal as anything he' s rounding the house. \"He needs us to hold him up.\" ever gotten. Finally, of course, it is ironic, that what he sees as this perfect As such, the film is about the conflict Do you think that Gus, afellow radical little refuge is something that his girlf- between Sixties values and normative who's still fighting the revolution with riend, Lorna , finds totally stultifying. culture, and about common sense per- guns, has a point in accusing them ofbe- ceptions vs. political imperatives. That coming middle-class? There' s no political discussion within the family , and so the film never directly For my politics, I don't think he's addresses Reaganism and the Eighties . When you've had exposure over a long period, it's assumed . It was never 35
in the script, we were never tempted to [Prior to this interview, Lumet put in the history of the Left in the United it, but it springs alive when Gus [L.M. a call to the New Jersey film commis- States than the Communist party. Kit Carson, former underground film- sion in an effort to send a message to That's a fairly recent development. maker and screenwriter] comes into Congressman Peter Rodino (D., New The agrarian and labor movements at the picture. That's where the politics Jersey) regarding the upcoming the end of the 19th century were won- got so mixed up with the fucking. colorization-busting bill: \"This guy derfully moving, touching things, and Rodino is getting all the pressure from of great importance. And by cutting Gus embodies what can go wrong with a lot of Democrat backers, like Jack themselves off from the Left, they radical ideals. Valenti and the theater owners and so made themselves a one-action gener- on, who are backing Ted Turner, be- ation . The war, but after that, It's over. That's the main thing. We shot a final scene between him and Ar- cause they deal with him financially all nothing-those people grew up, a lot thur, in which Arthur gets into his truck and finds Gus wounded . And Gus says, the time. Colorization doesn't mean a of them voted for Reagan. 'You've got to shelter me, you've got to take me home with you.' Arthur says, damn thing to them. And so we'll do Did Sixties thinking liberate you as a 'No. I can't. My family comes first. I can't expose them to this.' And after the only thing we can, which is to try to filmmaker? Did you/eel, during or after they have a sort of sentimental recon- ciliation, Gus crawls off to the bushes, hit them in the pocketbook. I won't that you could take more risks? wounded. shoot in Jersey if Rodino goes against Absolutely not. In fact, I felt that the I cut the scene, because the original intention was to provide the motivating us. It's the only pressure I've got. It's societal elements were rather naive and moment for Arthur to realize that he's got to let his son go-what's he going a lot of money we're talking about. I laughable. I'm just not thrilled by a to do, open him up to a life of running? When I saw that the transition could be once sat down with the mayor's Office rock on' roll drug culture. It doesn't made without it, just between Arthur and Danny, I cut the scene. Other- for Motion Pictures and TV in New seem to be enormously contributive to wise, I thought it would sentimentalize the mood. York, and we figured out just from my a way of living. It's a great way of en- T ell me about the title , Running on pictures, I brought about $400-450 mil- joyment, but it has nothing to do with Empty. It's that state ofloss ofenergy, which lion into the New York City economy. what one does about economics, about is as critical a thing as can happen in your life, and we all have it. You just Woody Allen shot his last picture in Jer- sociology, about very important forces get worn down finally, from continual fights. It's a fight to get the picture sey. I shot Running on Empty in Jersey. in our lives. done, it's a fight to cast the picture properly, it's a fight when they'change And I could have shot it in Long Is- The Sixties \"rebels\" united with the the cut on you. For directors who don't have final cut, I'm fortunate, I do have land . . . . \"] So it' s that continual blacks and then abandoned them. As final cut, but it took me a long time to get it-I don't know how they survive. struggle, struggle, struggle that just soon as blacks got secure enough to say Then you start with the advertising and the distribution. There are very few exhausts you finally. Whenever I get fuck off, they got frightened and did people in movies who do their job well. Most distributing companies do not do tired, I kind of refuel for a little while. fuck off. Instead offighting it out on an their job well. But some people don't. And they get ideological ground and refusing to be How much influence can you exert on the way afilm o/yours is marketed? exhausted and fall by the wayside. pushed away no matter what, which is Only if you come off a big hit. You'd Like in Running on Empty? what I think the behavior should have never get any contractual control. That they simply will not give. You may Yeah. And it's not out of a loss of be- been. So as a social movement within have final cut in terms of the artistic product, but they will never give you lief. That sort of thing happens usually the United States, I think there was control of advertising. That I know. But usually what happens is that if very early, if it's going to happen, and very little contribution. There was a you've come off a big hit, they're very anxious to keep a good working rela- then it isn't really fatigue , it's corrup- tremendous international contribution tionship with you, so they listen to you and may even try to accommodate you tion. But the Sixties generation suc- in the sense of stopping the war. to some degree. But it's only a question of that kind of muscle. And you cer- ceeded at something very romantic. The only lasting influence was the tainly never have any legal rights to it. And then when it all didn't go their black liberation, which came about way, they ran out of gas. Certainly po- largely through the efforts of blacks litically they did. First came exhaus- themselves, and mostly among south- tion and then a refusal to re-engage. ern whites. You'll find that most black What was your stance towards the Six- people involved in the civil rights ties upheavals ? struggle had far more confidence in the I had ambivalent feelings. I had tre- change in white behavior in the south mendous admiration for something than they did in white behavior in the that was uniquely achieved , which was north. That was largely black- the stopping of a major war without achieved, black-led, and white-sup- overthrowing our own government in a ported at the beginning, but as soon as revolution-which is I think maybe the situation got a littl~ sticky they historically the first time it's ever hap- pulled in their horns. God knows, it's pened. Because it was a young move- as racially a divided country now.... ment, and coincided with the normal With all that happening, you were in adolescent revolt , it also revolted Europe. Did you wish you could come against its own father, which was the back and participate? old Left. And laughed at it, dismissed Absolutely. I was in Rome when it. Whatlittle it knew of it. Didn't even King was shot, and then I was in Lon- bother really to learn about it to any don when Bobby Kennedy was shot, great extent. and I had a picture to do in Sweden, but All the anti-war movement knew I had seriously been considering set- about the Old Left were some gener- tling in Europe to work, and decided alized things about the Communist then that I couldn't, that !really did be- party. But there's a hell of a lot more in long here, and came back. 36
Lumet andJudd Hirsch on the set ofRunning on Empty. Were there projects that you felt And we even break the fourth wall- in movies and maybe that has ever needed to be made, for instance, about every once in a while Daniel stops and lived, and he liked my work. So right the civil rights movement? talks to us directly on camera. We away that was a good basis for a friend- broke it to that degree. ship . And he talked to me at great No. I never feel that. As far as I can length about it, because it would take see, art has never changed anything. When did you discover that the style of another director or possibly a camera- It's wonderful to have around, but afilm, the look ofthe film, could embody man to see the subtle levels of styliza- we're sort of like terrific camp follow- the consciousness of the film's protago- tion in that-and very extreme. They ers. Life develops and then we make nist? finally wound up very extreme, but some sort of reflection of it. I don ' t they were introduced over such a grad- think we're ever in the forefront of any- I never understood it. I never did ual period of time that you don't realize thing. [Lumet's one foray into docu- that consciously. I realized that's what how highly stylized that movie is. mentary was the 1970 King: A Film I was doing after I'd done a large num- Record. ... Montgomery to Memphis, ber of movies. Especially as I got more Apartfrom Prince of the City, Dan- co-directed with Joseph L. Mankiew- tired of realism and felt that I wanted iel, and Running on Empty, what films icz.] to get greater stylization in the work. meant the most to you? And therefore the point of view- I n Daniel, the stark, harsh visual pres- Whose picture is it?-became a much The Seagull, Long Day's Journey into entation of the Sixties is set again a more trenchant question for me. Night, Network. Dog Day Afternoon. Fu- nostalgic, warm Thirties. That seems to gitive Kind. It's hard to tell about 12 An- be against the received wisdom about the Some of your recent films seem as gry Men because it was the first one . golden era of the Sixties . though they're conventional narratives Not many have been initiated by me. but aren' t at all, because they' re so often In Daniel, the golden era was the elliptical. Like Prince of the City. T he idea of being worn down and Thirties, clearly, and the parents' gen- strayingfrom your own ideals comes eration. And that wasn't a political I don't like technique to show. I up in the difference between Al Pacino in commentary on my part, that wasn't in- think it's an interruption for an audi- Serpico and Treat Williams in Prince of tended to say I felt this way about the ence, it certainly is for me: when I see the City. Left in the Thirties and that way about the wheels working, that's when I cut the Left in the Sixties. It came about out. But that doesn't mean that I'm Right. But Danny, the Treat Wil- really because, from a creative point of against stylization. But I want it to be liams character, thought he could ma- view, the story ofDaniel-I'm not talk- done with such subtlety, that you can't nipulate. He thought, 'Okay, they ing about its meaning-is that a boy see it happening. Prince of the City think they're using me. I'm going to sets out to try to find out why his sister seems like a completely naturalistic use them.' They were very different really died. What killed her. Emotion- movie. It is highly stylized . The only men in that sense. Both in reality and ally. And, therefore, everything emo- one I ever knew who really spotted it in the movies that we did about them . tionally associated with the Sixties, I and could talk to me about it in great felt should be treated in a very distant detail was Akira Kurosawa. Serpico was a professional rebel. He way, rather than an emotional way. happened to be a cop. He was a ro- When he came over to the United mantic, essentially. Danny, in Prince States, we got along famousl y, because ofthe City , isn't that. Hardly. He's very I think he's the greatest living director 37
On the march: Lindsay Crouse and Mandy Patinkin in Daniel. York theater -I was therefore opened realistic, but when you're an SIu-Spe- greatest vindication, in fact. up to a great many experiences. I was cial Investigations Unit-detective, in a play at one point, called The Eternal you think you are on top of the world, W hat influences shaped you politi- Road in 1936 and '37, and it was a gi- that you can handle anything. cally? gantic production and many of the The Depression. As simple as that. young kids in that play were going off I am constantly amazed by the fact None of you can imagine now, butwe to Spain to fight with the Lincoln Bri- that these men can exist at all. It's the were a country then of, I think about gade. most extraordinary job in the world. 130 million. We had 12 or 13 million It's such a peculiar job: there you are, unemployed. That's one out of every Daniel's Thirties sequences seemed to living in a society that promotes free- ten people. So you can imagine what be a very personal attempt to recreate dom, and you're a cop, and the first proportion of the working force that your own childhood. thing you say is, 'Oh, no you don't.' was. Because women weren't working. You're the first line of reality. Absolutely true. In the camp se- And veterans demonstrating in quence, where the Communist Party I once did a picture in London with Washington encamped on the Potomac speaker is speaking, the clothes and so Sean Connery called The Offence. It River and the army coming in and on, the choice of that house, the way was a failure, but it's a very interesting burning their camps down. And dem- the little boy was dressed, the poultry movie, about the line between the onstrations-literally about food, not store downstairs.... most psychotic criminal possible-the to m'ention a job-and police coming child molester-and a policeman. The along with horses and riding people Do you see it as a golden era? line was not that distinct, not in terms down. It was a volatile situation. If I'm Not at all. Painful. But rich. Only of behavior. The emotional identifi- not mistaken, in 1920 Eugene Debs those of us who lived through it and cation between them, however, was so got I don't know how many million survived it came out with something enormous that they understood each votes in the presidential election. He that provided us with something very other totally. So all of those elements was a socialist. The radio station in positive over the rest of our lives. come into it. In Prince of the City, he's New York City, WEVD, is for Eugene With all that's happened since, have a tremendous egotist, the actual guy. V. Debs. you ever succumbed to leftist cynicism? No, because the nature of it is that How did he feel about the film? Were you personally a witness to po- He loved it. litical events or were you made aware of you push forward inch by inch. If you Did that surprise you? them by your parents? look at American history, you'll see Not at all. I wanted him to like it. He that about every 30 years or so there's is bright enough not to want to be Both. My father, . not my mother. an enormously progressive president, played by Robert Redford-he wanted But largely a witness, and also because and there's an enormously progressive an honest portrayal of it. That's his I was a child actor. I was in the New time in the country. But a very short time. Usually centered about a presi- dent. And then he lasts for four years or eight years or something like that, and the remaining 22 years is just trying to push it back where it came from. Thomas Jefferson in the beginning of the 19th century, then Andrew Jackson in 1832, Abraham Lincoln in 1860. In a certain sense, certainly domestically, Theodore Roosevelt in 1902. Then Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, Kennedy in 1960--and I think we're coming up on it again. That kind of cyclical optimism, though, runs against the thesis ofPower, which saw the political process as ter- minally compromised and false. Well, there's a whole new ballgame now. And I 'have no idea where it's going to go, and I don't think anybody does, and I don't know whether any- body's even judging it yet or trying to estimate its impact. That is what's hap- pened since television began, because television really has taken over our lives, from the mid-Seventies on, when we first had a generation that had never lived without television. Which is what Network's about. And that does frighten me. It doesn't dishearten me, but, boy, it scares the shit out of me. Because the nature of human experi- ence is shifting rapidly, rapidly. ~ 38
Continued from page 33. River Phoenix and Martha Plimpton in Running on Empty. children, trying not to repeat mistakes. When somebody has skillfully become a clear to me was Martha, I guess because How did you come to write Running on character and they tell me, 'This won't I'm a woman. She was always a smart-ass, come out of my mouth,' I believe them. tough-talking girl that had a total vulner- Empty? When writers do get respect, it's usually ability. People didn't like her at first. I Amy and Griffin brought me a New from the best actors and directors, who kept having to explain her: that's an act. A know it's not worth doing something un- lot of people can' t read scripts. They don't York Times article about a group of radicals less there's good work to start from. know that the words on the page are going with a houseful of machine guns in upstate to come out of the mouth ofsomeone who New York who were arrested and their Was there a crucial scene for you is going to look and be different and use children were put into childcare. Amy and in the movie? them in a certain way. All they read was Griffin said: 'This is the way in, through It was the scene between Christine and those tough words and they thought she the children.' We talked for a long time. her father, which hasn't changed since the was just impossible. The casting was as if This boy had been such a petfect Ameri- first draft. Somehow that scene came out Martha walked right out of my head: she can kid, played in the little league, great that way the first time. The movie came was that girl. grades in school, that when people found out in layers. But everybody said that out that he had been the child of these Judd's character was too mean: who is this You must have been a tough New York wild, violent radical parents, they were guy, why is he such a pain in the neck, girl like that. flabbergasted. That was the jumping off why doesn't he want his son to be happy? point, that this kid was such a great actor The second time around I went for his I was. It was smart-ass to hold people that he could fit anywhere. So the story is character. I wanted people to know that off, it was funny to cover up. But she mine but the starting point was theirs. this was a guy full of enormous charisma adored this boy. You need to feel both who got people to follow him off bridges if those things at the same time, they were How much ofyour personal history did necessary, and who really loved his family. as different as two people could be, but you bring to the story? What is also interesting about him is his they really loved each other. The last pass childishness. He doesn't really grow up was River's character. I still think of myselfas a Sixties person. until the end of the movie, because he And that moment of glory that we all went can't let that kid go. It's important that he Was it the most difficult? through-that energized eight to ten be unsympathetic, but also you need to It probably was. He was the character I years-formed me in a really significant know why Christine was married to him, saw initially as a child caught in the middle way. I wanted to talk and write about it be- why everybody didn't just pick up and who had to make himself fit into spaces. I cause I felt like I was an alien in the world leave. wrote him as a quiet observer. Like Jean- that I have been living in. And then I dis- Pierre Leaud in 400 Blows, he didn't covered that there were a lot of people The other character that was always speak very much. I would have known ex- who felt that way, but we just hadn't been actly what to do with him if I were direct- talking to each other about it: A lot of that ing the film , but people who were not in- old energy is reemerging, finding its voice, both in us and in a generation of children. It was very interesting to see River Phoenix and Martha Plimpton, who are both 17 and are children of people my age, feeling spontaneously a lot of the things we used to feel , dressing in old clothes again, and feeling comfortable with all the things of the period. The circle comes round again. Did you pick the James Taylor song they dance to in the movie? No, Sidney did, and we thought he was crazy! Nobody has ever danced to \"Fire and Rain\" before. When did Lumet come aboard the project? After the script was finished, when we were shopping around for a director, Lori- mar gave it to Sidney. He worked on the last draft with Amy, Griffin, and I. We spent ten days reading it out loud to each other, scene by scene. That was great: when you do that, you know every word that doesn't work. I went away for another month and gave it a final draft. Were you on the set? Yes. I had never been treated with such respect as a writer before. Sidney wouldn't let anybody change a word without talking about it first. It was very unusual. I am the first person to listen and change things. 39
~~~ like the elegance ofblack. Especially in Eastman film!' Producers Don Simpson and \"Moviemaking is a team enter- \"And yes, we do think people will Jerry Brnckheimer are behindan amazing prise-it's an all-star team pulling still be going to theaters to see movies string ofhit films: \"Flashdance, JJ together-but we are involved with in years to come. The theater is that \"Top Gun,JJ \"Beverly Hills Cop,JJ and every aspect of every project from commune, that darkened communal \"Beverly Hills Cop II. JJ start to finish, because that's what cave-it really harkens back to prehis- we enjoy doing. toric men sitting around their fires, in \"Part of what we try to do is com- caves, telling stories. It's what we call bine our two talents to equal five. To \"And that includes being con- 'the magic room.' When you get inside create something greater than the sum cerned about the film stock. We that magic room, you 're presented with of its parts. We come from different choose the film stock and the print the opportunity to be transported. And points of view, but we rarely disagree. stock we use. We insist on Eastman if you've come to see one of our We will approach a problem from totally film . What we like is the richness of movies, we hope you will be.\" different directions, but come to the the color and especially the depth of same conclusion. the blacks. We're both art and archi- © Eastman Kodak Company. 1988 tecture buffs, and we notice things like \"We both have 'cheeseburger hearts.' that.. We like the elegance of black. EASTMAN KODAK COMPANY We are the sum of the audience in You'll see it even in our cars, our terms of our taste. We go to the movies clothes, everything we own. MOTION PICTURE AND AUDIOVISUAL PRODUCTS DMSION every weekend because we like to get our boxes of popcorn and watch the \"The first time we used 5247'M, the ATLANTA: 404/668-0500 movies. We're also popcorn freaks. first thing we noticed was the blacks- CHICAGO: 312/218-5174 the degree to which they could push DALLAS: 214/506-9700 \"We like to create characters and that stock, and still hold the black, made HOLLYWOOD: 213/464-6131 situations where people are put up it unique. Blacks that are very rich and HONOLULU: 808/833-1661 against internal and external obstacles very black. We want blacks to give more. MONTREAL: 514/761-3481 and overcome them. So they can Other brands of film stock have blacks NEW YORK: 212/930-7500 function as representatives for the that are more milky. TORONTO: 416/766-8233 movie audience-so the people in the VANCOUVER: 604/987-8191 audience can have their moments \"Longevity is the reason we insist WASHINGTON, D.C.: 703/558-9220 of triumph. on 5384 print film. We don't just make films for today. We'd like to caslm~ put them in a time capsule and go on and on. Motion Picture Films
- about a boy who had to run away from this terrible radical family, who was very at- tracted to middle-class America. I said: 'No, you're missing the point here. That's not what this is.' Why did you write the Kit Carson clulr- acter, Gus, as a \"bad\" radical? To make these people nice? Unfortunately, this happens on all mov- ies: to me the Gus character is sympathet- ic, but there's only a little bit left of him now. You don't get the full color behind the character. I thought there was a poi- gnancy to somebody who is caught under- ground, and loses his voice, and sees no other way out but to literally tum himself into the thing he went under to fight. I heard a lot of that went on underground. I talked to lots of people, some old friends, who told me some amazing sto- ries: How the Weather Underground got Timothy Leary out of prison, ran drugs for money, did whatever they needed to do to survive, which had nothing to do with politics, to the contrary. I wanted Gus to show what happened when it went sour, as it did for some people. They got angry, they got isolated, they were only listening to themselves. School's out: River Phoenix, Christine Lahti andJonas Abry in Running on Empty. What was it like growing up in Brooklyn with leftist parents? side my head needed more clues to him. I You get the sense tlult he tapped into his I was exposed to everything from the total middle-class New York Jewish stuff had to give him a voice. In fact, he doesn't own experience. to the more radical fringe elements. When say all that much now, but he needed to He did . His family traveled in South I was a teenager we picketed Ebbinger's, say more. the famous Brooklyn bakery, because and Central America, living in com- they wouldn't hire blacks. It was an enor- People in positions of power [at Lori- mous sacrifice because the cake was so mar] kept demanding that his character munes. One part of his experience that good. We'd go downtown to Town Hall have more active control over his life, comes through is that he loves his family. and listen to John Jacob Niles, Cynthia which I thought he did anyway, even This character loves his family too. Gooding, and Bob Dylan, hang out in the though he doesn't talk about it very much. The final draft is a compromise between There are those who would side with the Village, and go to all the folk music con- clulracter of Christine's father, who felt the two. I still see him as somebody who what they did to their families was urifor- certs. survives by his listening-and ultimately You had a lot offreedom. acting. He has to reach out all his nerve givable. Not really. I had to fight for it. I was on a endings to what everybody else needs and Their course takes over their lives. wants of him at any given time. That's pretty tight rein until I was 16, when I how you survive in that kind of situation. They didn't understand the pretty heavy went to college. My mother was more un- consequences of their actions when they reasonable than my father. She would get Did you write River's climactic scene went into it. But they were people of in- panicked about me, she thought I was with Martlul in the woods in the last draft? tegrity. That's why the last line of the quite wild. At one point there was a boy in movie is so important to me: 'Go out and my class who was half-Italian and half- Yes. It came out in one go. Sometimes make a difference.' They're not apologiz- Jewish, who invited me out on a date. She things work like that. I took an acting class ing for what they did. said I couldn't go because he wasn't Jew- with Nina Foch a couple of years ago. She ish. I couldn't believe it. They'd sent me says: if you know who you are when you You worked Iulrd to make these \" radi- to all these radical summer camps like come into that room, and what you're cals\" sympathetic. Shaker V~lIage. I left the house and spent there for, and where you are when you the night on a park bench. When I went to leave it in each scene, you won't have to I went out of my way not to make these school the next day looking bedraggled, memorize your lines, they'll just come out people from the Weather Underground. I the guidance counselor asked, 'Why do of your mouth. She is absolutely right. wanted them to be more like someone you look like this?' So I told him the story. The same thing is true for a writer. I have like Daniel Berrigan, whom the general In a moment of great embarrassment, at to hear everybody, see everybody, know audience wouldn't dismiss as violent and my graduation I was given the Brother- who they are before I can begin-literally. radical fringe. I wanted them to embody hood award. My mother meant well. She the spirit ofwhat we were all trying to do in Knowing those people that well, it comes the Sixties: stop the war, work on the civil out like automatic writing. And River is rights movement, make the world a better just breathtaking. place. I got some pressure at the height of the Reagan time that maybe this was a story 42
was trying to protect me. She'd grown up be commercial, as opposed to following New with the whole McCarthy scare and all the the strong feeling that made the m all-in: c1uding the actors-respond to the script Film blacklisting. in the fi rst place. T hey start mucking Was there a struggle when you left around with the thing that they all liked for Books reasons that have very little to do with home for college? what originally got them into the room. SILENT MAGIC T he re was more a struggle with my How did you become an executive pro- Rediscovering the mothe r than my father, about letting me ducer on Running on E mpty? Silent Film Era be who I am and still love me and trust me IVAN BUTLER and nottry to cast me in the irown image. I Having been unhappy before, the only Foreword by don' t think I was clear about it until I had way for me to assure that I'd be treated in a Kevin Brownlow my own kids, whe n I realized how hard it respectful way by everyone concemed A nostalgic year- ' - - - - - - - - - 1 was to do. And not just with kids-in ev- was to get some kind of producer position, by-year guided tour through the magical ery relationship you have, not to be disap- which I'll continue to do on all projects 20s with more than 200 illustrations. pointed with what you' re getting when that are my original stories that I care $24.95 you want something e lse, leaming that ev- abo ut. eryone has a diffe rent language that says I THE DEAD THAT WALK love you. My father's was to drive for How hard is it to fulfill the Hollywood hours in the middle of the night to pick us demands of both quality and commercia- Dracula, Frankenstein, up at airports in faraway places. It took me lity ? the Mummy and Other years to leam that because I was always Favorite Movie waiting fo r the hug, I couldn't see that the I'm conscious of the m. I hedge that bet. Monsters othe r thing was equivalent. I've become a I' m working on a Gail Sheehy project, LESLIE HALLIWELL much happier person since I leamed that. Spirit of Survival, at Warne r Bros. about how she adopted a twelve-year-old Cam- The world 's foremost Were your studies in developmental bodian refugee child. I knew this movie film encyclopedist psychology useful in your screenwriting would be a piece for a star and that the sheds new light on career? main characte r had to be he r. IfI had gone those \" horror heroes\" about it my own way I might not have we hate to love but do. It helped me with having small chil- done that. I do te ll people going in how I Illustrated with 100 dren, Ieaming the language of childhood. want to approach a project. photographs . $24.95 My own childhood was a complicated one, so I was drawn to it. If I could choose Did you have trouble convincing Lori- THE FRENCH to be with adults orchildre n, very often I'd mar that Running on E mpty should be an THROUGH pick childre n. My personal experience ensemble piece? THEIR FILMS with the rapy has been very positive. Psy- chology and language are very closely re- I struggled to make it an ensemble. ROBIN BUSS lated. You name things to know they ex- Most studios are not keen on that. They ist. It's like you hear a range of notes in were pushing for cleare r roles. It was given \" A sure classic . It music that you didn' t hear before, that you to several actors early on who were not in- will be welcomed by can no longer ignore. And you can' t com- terested career-wise, because the father all Francophiles , municate te rribly well with people who isn' t the star of the movie. T he re are stars ethnologists, movie can' t hear them. It's like a statue: if you who will do ensemble parts. Some of the buffs and histor- walk all the way around , you see things actors in this movie turned down bigger ians.\" -Laurence Wylie $18 .95 you couldn't see just from the front. In parts with highe r salaries to do it. AMERICAN the rapy and writing you have to do the Is this your best screenplay? HISTORYI same thing, look at everything from all AMERICAN sides. It's what I like about living: getting I'm very proud of it. I reached a new FILM close to people, finding things out, being plateau in my work and I won' t be able to intimate in as many ways as possible. I look back and do things the same way any- Interpreting the have an insatiable curiosity on that level. more. I wrote this movie for myself It's Hollywood Image the first time I've done this. I wasn't think- Edited by What kind of experience did you have ing about how much the studio or Amy JOHN E. O'CONNOR on Violets Are Blue? and G riffin would like it. I did the best &MARTIN A. JACKSON work I could , to check if I could write at Expanded & Updated, with a Foreword It got caught in studio politics. I loved all. I wrote about people I cared about. I by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Sissy [Spacek] and [he r husband , director] discovered that Hollywood responds Jack [Fisk]. But so much got lost out of whe n you care a lot. The projects that ev- \" Exciting insights into the intersection of that movie along the way, that it ended up eryone e mbraces- from Ordinary People popular culture with social and political being fairly simplistic. I wanted it to be a to Terms of Endearment to Platoon-the values.\" -Afterimage $14.95 paperback much more complicated, darke r movie. film s that may take years to get done for Again, the producer [Mary Kay Powell] very little money and are a labor of love, At your bookstore or call t -800-638-3030 had a story about a woman going back and those Hollywood movies are coming from seeing her old boyfriend in he r home somebody who cares a great deal. Ulti- CONTINUUM town, and there was a marriage story that I mately that comes through, that's what wanted to write. So I put the two pieces audiences respond to. And ofte n the big 370 Lexington Avenue togethe r. Making a movie is a very organic packages with the pe rfect stars, and per- New York, NY 10017 process, lots of things work or don' t work. fect write rs, and perfect idea for the time, People ofte n second-guess what's going to 43 just don' t have it. ®
John BOOl~an divisions in America will not be suppressed but will break out again. I'm not advocating that, I'm just speaking as an observer. It is fashionable to sneer at the But the one thing I will say is that during the time of Reagan, the frivolous, sybaritic, sex-obsessed movies that have been made have almost no political content at Sixties. Coming out of a war-tom all. I think that will be changing, and that'll be good. childhood and the bleak Fifties, I won't hear a word against that in- Because of one role I played in the Sixties, I've been offered nocent orgy of fun. It came and and even have had to do a number of parts named Joe. It's bizarre went quick enough. On film it was in a way, but I haven't been able to shake that off. It's impossible Julie Christie swinging her hips to underestimate the depth ofstereotyping. But people still talk to and shoulder bag, Dick Lester me about it, and I think some of the issues are still around. I don't jump-cutting and under-cranking regret having done Joe at all. It was a terrific break for me and all the Beatles, and the glorious ex- that. Just from an acting point of view-all of the improvisation cesses of Ken Russell. My pop shows I did in the Sixties really helped me when it came time to film, Having a Wild Weekend, was work in films, and still helps me a lot. pessimistic about youth culture, lashed out at the deceptions of advertising, demonstrated the illusionary nature of personal free- I'm still a Sixties guy, though I've revised my view of certain dom, and was sanctimonious about the shallowness of the things. I'm still against the Vietnam War. I'm against the war in young-all deeply repugnant notions to the Sixties teenagers who Central America. Hey, y'know. I'm against whatever way they understandably stayed away in their millions. The main influence want to play the same tired old tune. And I do like to see films on that picture was the socio-poetic school of documentary film- about real people, real issues. I'd love to see a swing back to natu- making at the BBe that I came out of. ralism and realism. I don't get into these little rubberized dwarves When half of Hollywood was rushing to England to make running around on other planets. I want to get real, exciting, living swinging London movies, I went in the opposite direction in 1966 character actors into these movies. and introduced the miniskirt to American films in Point Blank, re- vealing more of Angie Dickinson's legs than had hitherto been John CassaYetes seen. Breathless was the seminal movie, and many of those Lon- don movies were sub-Godard, but the chief influences on Point Back in the Sixties I'd think to Blank were Resnais, Pinter, and Antonioni. Fractured, bleak, la- myself, I don't care if I'm broke conic, dealing with betrayal and death, itwas again profoundly out the rest of my life. Now, today, I of kilter with the times, which much preferred the romantic exis- don't say that. I say, I'd like to tentialism of Bonnie and Clyde. make a comfortable living. Money Ever in the wrong place, '68 found me on a remote Pacific Is- does become increasingly impor- land. While the youth revolution swept the Western World, I was tant, but that's a fact of life. It has making a movie (Hell in the Pacific) about World War II, although nothing to do with the times-the essentially it was an allegory for the nearby conflict in Vietnam. Sixties or the Eighties or the Sev- I ca.ught the last gasp of the Sixties with a London movie-Leo enties. If you're a good director, the Last, a black comedy about the hypocritical relationship be- you relate to your times. You also tween the haves and the have-nots. My head was full of Brecht change with the times. You also and Fellini. change. My films have gotten Looking back I would say that the most powerful influences of longer. That really doesn't reflect how society has changed, it has the Sixties were Fellini and Antonioni, pulling us in opposite di- to do with me. I have more to say. In general, I'd say the era we rections, between exhibitionism and inhibitionism. As Marcello live in is less experimental, less creative than when I started to says to the critic in 8th, \"I suppose you like films where nothing direct movies. Back then I believed there were no rules-it was happens. Well, in my films, everything happens! \" up to you to create the language. I still believe that. Roger Connan Peter Boyle I made two distinct types of movies in the Sixties. First, there In the Sixties, I was studying were what I call \"studio-like\" acting, struggling, trying to get films, and they would include the ahead, dealing with poverty-all Poe adaptations. Then there were the realities of that. I was really af- the pictures of the times like Wild fected a lot by all of the social Angels and The Trip, which were changes of the era, but I think also pictures that we filmed on above all the Vietnam War. I was location. Essentially, I'm still do- in Chicago in 1968, doing improv ing that, but as a producer rather shows at Second City, and that than a director. The techniques made a deep impression on me. haven't changed dramatically, but About a year or two ago, when I now I own the studio. Probably was in the HBO special The Trial of the Chicago Eight, I was really able more than most of the people I was associated with back then, I'm to look at it again. It sort of brought a lot of things together and continuing along the same path. I haven't joined the establish- showed me how much my view has deepened and changed. ment, I still work outside the mainstream. I hope I've changed Some people thought the Eighties would be like the Sixties, with the changes in our culture. I'd say possibly the films are a but I really think that that's going to happen in the Nineties. The little less socially oriented but that's due to the interests of the directors. In the Sixties social issues were what they wanted to do. 44
Costa-Ga\\...as roles in studio movies, bigger roles in smaller movies. All that vari- ety of work was the basis for what I'm doing now, which I feel is The'68 movement started with the best work I've ever done. New Wave cinema and with the nouvelle roman-that kind of un- When I began working as an ac- derground movement. It was tor I had two goals. I wanted to deeply cultural. Most of the guys work for Kazan and I wanted to who participated in the '68 move- become a member of the Actor's ment, four or five ministers in the Studio [note: Oem accomplished Mitterand government came from both goals within six months ofliv- '68. The Prime Minister, Michel ing in New York City]. I'd say that Rocard was a friend of mine at the was a pretty common goal among time. I remember we used to go my peers. We didn't know any- out and meet the b/ousons noirs thing about \"the business\" or (street guys) and discuss with movies. As the Sixties progressed them , to see what they were thinking, why they were fighting, it became more apparent that you what they were asking society for. Rocard and other ministers cre- had to do films to survive unless ated the movement. And today they are the political leaders. you were Christopher Plummer, and even he had to do films then. I was living on the Left Bank, near the Sorbonne. All those things happened under my window. People stopped in the I loved doing movies back then and I still love doing movies. I streets, arguing. Day and night you had people making speeches. didn't come to Hollywood often enough ,because I believed in all Every kind of speech. I went from place to place, taking photos, the acting fables of suffering in cold-water flats and doing endless not really participating: they were 18 years old, I was over 30. An scene studies. Really, once I discovered it was a business, I be- active part came later when some of the groups wanted to know came a better actor. It remains the greatest canon I've learned in how to use film and later I helped create a group with Louis Malle, my career. Godard, [Marin] Karmitz, and some others. Trying to make a movie to teach other people how to make movies. Peter Fonda The idea was to use the camera like a pen [Ie camera sty/o]. So we tried to make a collective movie about repression and the po- When I made Easy Rider, it was litical situation in France, and how solutions could be found. We my eighth film, and now I'm spent nights discussing and taking notes, and finally all those dif- about to start my 38th film. What's ferent kinds of contradictions-aesthetic, political, and just per- changed, much more dramatically sonal ... We never succeeded. than my work, is the world around French society today, the Mitterand election, the rise of Le us. We are citizens of a world Pen, come from '68. Le Pen is a reaction to seeing so many where its leading powers can de- changes happen. Not very spectacular changes, but everyday stroy everything on this planet small changes. I personally think '68 was a kind of revolution, several times over. We are not probably the best kind because during two months of fighting on masters of our destiny. I live in the streets, destroying cars, beating policemen and students, Montana, which seems a much there was no death, there was just one accidental death. So it was saner place to raise children than a more a revolution of ideas. American society absorbed Sixties radi- big city and where it's easier to calism much more quickly. deal with passion. I pay taxes, so I don't really own my land, I rent it. When I lived on a boat I was master of my vessel and my word was law, and I have to admit I liked that feeling, however much of a delusion it might have been. I do continue to feel youthful and I still get excited about acting and making movies. I feel freest when I'm learning. And I'm glad it's still possible to talk about hopes and dreams. Somewhere out there and within myself there are great performances, films, and plays. Bruce Denl The key word for me was \"work.\" I didn't plan my career, I never said to myself, don't do that role, you've done it before, or only do one Gunsmoke, not six. I did two kinds of roles-small 45
'68/'88: TheEmpire'sNewClothes by Paul Kerr SCANDAL or's production company is British . In- . _ .\"-,.... .'.!.\".JOHNHURT JOANNEWHALLEY specting even those most English of L ike much else in British cultural --------....,.,,:.~.:.:.:..:.;.,:,:-::-::'::.:.:..... . English films, Chariots of Fire and life, Sixties cinema was \"swing- Room with a View, we find that the for- ing,\" from Beatlemania to ~ mer was Egyptian-financed and the lat- Bondage, while the so-called social ter had an Indian producer and an realist New Wave was either conveni- I, American director. ently relegated to the tail end of the Fifties , forgotten altogether, or taken Alexander Walker's book about the up by television by the likes of Ken Sixties is aptly entitled Hollywood En- Loach, Tony Garnett, and, later, Ro- gland, but if Britain' s film industry was land Joffe, Stephen Frears, and David colonized two decades ago , its Eighties Leland. output has become colonizer, with im- perial epics of India and Africa full of In the Fifties and Sixties, television heat and dust and signifying nothing was regularly accused of killing off cin- more than white mischief. Such films brought new locations and costumes- ema in Britain. By the early Seventies, and accents-to British screens suffo- though, a quite different verdict began ~ CHRlSllNE 1(IE1£R, LONOON, 1963 cating from Olde England, but for the to be heard: It seemed that film had ac- most part retained respectable literary tually been saved by its alleged assas- and/or historical sources, simply trans- sin, the small screen. \"British cinema forming class differences into racial is alive and well and living in televi- ones. sion\" ran the refrain . In the late 8,\",.~s,.,~.\" I Still, the choice facing filmmakers in Eighties , the critical court of appeal has ••J the Sixties and the Eighties-whether rewritten that judgment once more: to make low-budget films for the do- What passes for British cinema today :':~::'~f\"'r\"\"\" . .r\"'L.u~1' mestic market or prestige productions lives not on television so much as oJfit. for Paris and Texas (and Paris, Texas ,~~::'.~';~:~!:,J>'bd~hvn was itself funded by Channel4)-was Questions of definition have always undermined the idea of national cin- \" \" '. . ~¥ the same as it was for Korda in the Thir- ema, but never more than with British ties and Rank in the Forties. The cinema in the Eighties. With features O·\"\"\"v,:.., short-lived success of British films on like Wish You Were Here , My Beautiful S\"\"\"n \" ,ot,t,.. American screens two decades ago was Laundrette , Mona Lisa, and Room with due, among other things, to a paucity a View all funded, at least in part, by Povl ' '''rmon of U.S. product. Today such a depend- and for Channel 4, can this be called T' ... lC o,h ence is even more precarious. Korda cinema at all? And with the BBe in- and Rank , after all , ended their Amer- vesting in White Mischief and Granada \"\"d'\"\"oJv\"\"1t ican invasions disastrously, as did TV'S forthcoming The Fruit Machine J'od~'M· t Wood fall in the Sixties. The Goldcrest IIv\" , Uu .].,,,,,,,,. O. \".~.. 8\"on ll';\".. :;:';;':,~PIo\"'~It'\"pIt, r ..,\"\",. \"\"\"\"~,.•,, T,m\".. ••\" t ••• h• .\"H..\".\".\" ~ \"'\" .~~•• \" \"J\".~ \",''''v... .... \"'~ 11.,1, I.H. II......,,,, (; ~\". II. n••• ready for release, British cinema is in- debacle is only the latest in a long line of companies to sink under titanic am- creasingly indistinguishable from Brit- L _ __ bitions. ish television. - - -- -- - Nor is this simply a question of Stylistically, most British movies re- money. Just how different are most main resolutely realist, tastefully tame, such films from those made exclusively (what's known in the U.S. as the mini- both literal and literary-a cinema epit- for the small screen since the mid-Six- series), 'Jith works like Edge of Dark- omized by Room with a View. The mav- ties, when that \" living in television\" ness, The Singing Detective, Boys from erick reaction to this cinema of formula was first coined? The number the BlackstuJf, Tutti Frutti, and Life and reassurance is the cinema of shock of writers turned directors (Leland, Loves of a She-Devil. (sex, class, race, politics, and, if pos- Neil Jordan, David Hare, Stephen Po- sible, a combination), which explains Bliakoff), the often clumsy composition ut if the conftation of cinema and the tabloid element essential to British TV is one problem , deciding art cinema. The Last ofEngland, Sammy of the image (frontal framing, proscen- ium performances, et al.), and the whether a film is in fact British in the and Rosie Get Laid, and Personal Ser- well-made-play script structures all first place is another. Platoon, for in- vices are as puerile as any of Ken Rus- testify to theater/television paternity. stance, was British-financed . Top Gun, sell's camp superannuated sex Ironically, the most inspired work of Fatal Attraction, and Beverly Hills Cop farragoes. It's not that Norman Stone the last few years hasn ' t been in the 2 were all British-directed. Superman 4 (Tory historian and self-appointed feature film but in the original TV serial was made in the U.K. The Last Emper- critic of unpatriotic films) was right 46
when he lamented the negative state of '68/'88: the art in The Times this winter [see re- Rainer lated article by Graham Fuller, page Doesn't 62]; if only there was as much formal Live Here invention in such films as there is a de- Anymore sire to shock the likes of Stone with their content. That Nic Roeg's Track 29 is an American reworking of one of Dennis Potter's Sixties TV screenplays says a great deal about the \"filmmakers block\" stultifying British cinema. Nevertheless, Terence Davies' Distant Voices, Still Lives and Chris Menges' direction of Shawn Slovo's script for A World Apart, both autobiogniphical fic- tions, are both strong signals that fine filmmaking isn't entirely a lost art. Back in the Sixties the success of both Bond and Beatie films was partly based on their being already \"pre- sold\" to books and records. British cin- ema has always relied to a dispropor- tionate extent on adaptations. Even hy Andreas Kilh the much vaunted New Wave was little more than a series of screen versions of page and stage profiles of life \"up 'Mr. Valdemar, do you still sleep?' As before, some minutes elapsed be- north.\" In the Eighties, what passes for fore a reply was made; and during the in- quality cinema is equally literary in or- terval the dying man seemed to be collecting his energies to speak. At my igin-A Passage to India, The Bostoni- forth repetition of the question, he said very faintly, almost inaudibly: 'Yes; still ans, The French Lieutenant's Woman. asleep-dying.' -E. A. Poe, The Facts in the Case ofM. Valdemar Nor, of course, has the Eighties lacked rock movies and spy sagas of its own. Punk ensured, though, that in the age of the great rock \"n' roll swin- dle, the rock star was no longer a lov- able moptop; similarly, the era ofPeter I f you happen to be familiar with the heart of light-which is to say dark- E. A. Poe tale about unhappy Mr. ness. Wright and John Stalker has trans- Valdemar, you are perfectly pre- In 1987 and the first half of 1988, formed the screen spy from national hero into secret policeman. Indeed, it's pared to meet German cinema. For people went to see German films to get in prestige-free horror and thriller gen- like Valdemar, it isn't entirely dead; what they had already gotten from their res that many of the best recent British and yet it is no longer alive. German little screen at home. During the last 12 films have been made, from Angel to film seems to be mesmerized by dif- months, the boxoffice has been largely The Long Good Friday. ' ferent doctors: by government support dominated by comedy actors whose ca- Meanwhile, Another Country may be programs that keep most of the films reers were built on ARD and ZDF (the a stage play-and one with an aristo- out of boxoffice competition; by the in- two major broadcast networks): from cratic setting to boot-but it's also a spy eptitude of filmmakers unable to give the dumb Otto Waalkes, Didi Haller- story and a gay romance. Nor was the audience what they want instead of vorden, or Mike Krueger-Tv aborig- Maurice just Merchant-Ivory's follow- what they want them to want; and by ines with the grin of the living dead- up Forster to Room with a View; it's also nostalgic critics hunting for the last to the deft Gerhard Polt, a witty blue- their ever-so-tasteful addendum to the remnants of 1968 in the post-modern print of the average Bavarian proletar- gay cycle of Laundrette, Prick Up Your turmoil of the late Eighties. ian, and Loriot, his Prussian Ears, and the forthcoming Fruit Ma- So, roaming restlessly through the aristocratic antipode. Their films gave chine. Such over-covering of boxoffice movie halls of Berlin or Hof festivals, cinema aesthetes a cold stare; they options in uncovering British life- where the recent fruits are shown, you were home movies, TV shows errant in with the emphasis, as ever, on sex and don't need a telltale heart to grasp what the cinema desert, offering hideous class-may sell tickets but has yet to has become of the bright heritage of imagery spiced with silly laughs. Ifyou result in great movies. Next year, two Fassbinder, Wenders, Herzog, and get the chance to see Otto-the Movie or interesting-sounding Sixties-set mov- Kluge: shape without form, shade one of the Didi serials on an American ies-Scandal (about Christine Keeler without color, paralyzed force, gesture screen-don't go. and the Profumo affair) and The Krays without motion. As you turn from the Meanwhile, German film authors, (about the eponymous gangsters) hit retrospective to the previews in order facing (or not facing) an audience eager the screens. Mostly, though, I'll be to discover what German cinema is like for cheap tricks, failed to recover from watching TV. ~ nowadays, you're looking into the their latest malaise. Werner Herzog 47
Tony Curtis in Welcome to Ge . tenced to death by the rebellious film- makers of the Sixties. Still , producers _ rmany dlfected by Thomas Brasch. like Bernd Eichinger, lured by Amer- ican money and the smell of the big \\..eOne. market, try to put German films back t ofSie{t3 on the international stage, hiring Doris r on the se Dorrie to make Me and Him (a relation- der (Cente ) ship film-between a man and his talk- UWeSChra ing penis)--and Wolfgang Petersen, as if German cinema were a rose that is yet went right down with Cobra Verde , a Cafe), with an incredible attendance of to unfold. drowsy rip-off of his own Aguirre; Jean- 300,000--a low-budget movie with a Marie Straub made a small footnote in low-budget morale. I t has become hip among in-groupers art movie history with the Hoelderlin- to shout for the abolition of subsi- based The Death ofEmpedokles, a myth At the end of the Eighties, German dies. It is indeed disgusting to imagine lesson held in the good old Brechtian directors evoke the disquieting image stiff-eyed bureaucrats, clerks, and cler- way; bad boy Uwe Schrader' s Sierra of a headless, self-devouring horde, gymen rubbing their sweaty palms on Leone (note the titles; aren't they really howling for state support and critics' film treatments , or to see conservative German?) predictably flopped; and Jan praises for their films. While atten- lobbyists making a rentability forecast Schuette's promising debut with dance distinctly surpasses expectation, for ingenious misfits like Herbert Ach- Dragon's Food, a sentimental journey and while subsidies (including regional ternbusch. The path through consorts into the life of illegal aliens in West support programs and the high- and commissions may exhaust young Germany, didn't pay its producers a budgeted National Film Awards) ex- talents, and it always has. But since au- pfennig back, despite rave reviews . ceed $50 million, German cinema still thor-directors like Alexander Kluge , Only Wim Wenders proved indefati- goes through spasms of agony. Film- Volker Schlondorff, and Edgar Reitz gable with the (relatively small) suc- verlag der Autoren and its ilk are stag- came up with a new vision of cinema in cess of Der Himmel i.i.ber Berlin (Wings gering at the brink ofcollapse. Thomas the Sixties, state support has kept ofDesire), and old kitschmeister Percy Brasch's labyrinthine Nazi tale Wel- them going. German cinema has been Adlon made the surprise hit of the sea- come to Germany doesn' t get its audi- raised with subsidies, so it will not die son with Out of Rosenheim (Bagdad ence. And German television paroles of them. Its recent crisis is more likely the cinema of the patriarchs-sen- a matter of talent-and time. First of all, the real thing did not start in the early Sixties, when 26 directors proclaimed the Oberhausener Manifest to get rid of their parents' fuzzy com- edy plotlines. Most of the avant-garde of 1962 proved to be craftsmen rather than authors, or neither. There was a concept, a commotion, but its reality did not show until the early Seventies, when Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders , and Werner Herzog con- verted vision into visual imagination. They were the New German Cinema because they moved away from the de- funct aesthetic of the Sixties to the ex- amples of the distant past. They created a new aesthetic synthesis through rediscovery: Herzog rediscov- ered Murnau and Lang; Wenders went back to Fuller, Ray, Hawks , and Ford; and Fassbinder rediscovered Douglas Sirk, Max Ophuls, and Erich Von Stroheim. Their idea of inheritance made them international German film- makers, bringing cinema back from the provinces to the metro poles. This is the recurring pattern in the reception of their works: First, the film flops in German theaters, then it wins international prizes, and finally it re- turns to Germany and has a good run. This is why each dreamed of a Holly- wood career. Wenders tried and failed. Fassbinder might have succeeded. 48
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