VOLUME 24 - NUMBER 04 JULY-AUGUST 1988

-- Herzog seems now to have exhausted '68/'88: his talent. Liberte! T he key character in the tragedy of Fraternite! German cinema is clearly Fassbin- Amnesie! der. Unlike Herzog and Wenders, both mired in the romance of the lonely in- by Philippe J. Maarek Also scrapped was the \" free cinema\" dividual fighting his way back to Uto- project, one of four ideas adopted by pia through the torments of time, F or French cinema, as for the rest the Etats Generaux that Marin Karmitz Fassbinder uncovered almost every as- of society, the events of May '68 and Claude Chabrol, among others, pect of contemporary human exis- seemed to mark a watershed. wanted-along with the notion that tence. From his early social critique in Nothing, or almost nothing, seemed to everyone in France should pick up a Katzelmacher or Angst essen SeeIe auf be the same as before. camera and make hi s own film , as they (Fear Eats the Soul-Ali) and the pas- had hoped. sage through German postwar history In 1967, the minister in charge of in Die Ehe der Maria Braun (The Mar- cinema had banned Jacques Rivette's After all, a director like Jean-Luc riage of Maria Braun), Lola, and Die adaptation of Diderot' s The Nun (La Re- Godard had, with Fran<;ois Truffaut, Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss (Veronika ligieuse), a novel that one could find in grabbed the stage curtains at Cannes to Voss) to the stupendous mannerism of every library in France for the past two prevent the screening of Carlos Saura's Querelle, Fassbinder passed through centuries. After 1968, while censorship Peppermint Frappe and created with each stage of the German film's renais- did not completely disappear, the ban- Jean-Pierre Gorin the militant cinema sance-the naive, the classic, and the ning of films occurs so rarely today it called Brechtian-Vertovian. mannerist. has nearly been forgotten. Today, Godard agrees to appear at As a workaholic, Fassbinder got Remembering the '68 Cannes film the Cesars and doesn't hesitate to sign along with the odds of German movie Festival, which opened May 10 that a contract with Menahem Golan and business better than anyone else . ye ar, it is necessary to recall that Yoram Globus (on a napkin over lunch) Whenever one of his films came out, he Cannes had practically remained un- for Cannon. Marin Karmitz, who had was already shooting the next one and changed since its inception. It would directed Blow for Blow (Coup pour raising funds for a third. It was the seem strange to our eyes now if Cannes Coup) with factory workers whom he shortest way to fame-and death. only had the one sidebar it had then- filmed and then lent his camera, was When Fassbinder died in 1982, at 37, Critics Week. In the following yea r, the most successful producer-distrib- the best of German cinema was gone. the creation of the Directors Group utorof 1987. With his integrated com- The rest is farce. brought about the Directors Fortnight pany MK2, he has become , all by series, the success of which forced the himself, a competitor to the three Fassbinder could have founded a festival to redefine and open itself be- French \"majors\": Pathe, UGC, and lasting tradition of German film. Wen- yo nd simply the triangle of France , Gaumont. The transition has been ders can't. Wenders is style, not story; Italy, and the United States. The Di- made, obviously, from a cinema of myth, not meaning. In most of his mov- rectors Group also strongly helped se- public service to a complete cinema ies he is the hidden star himself. When cure recognition of directors' rights servIce. Der Himmel uber Berlin came out in over their films : in France directors Germany last autumn, filmicritics bent now have the author's statute, which In retrospect, 1968 seems to have their knees in reverence. Yet, pinning had been demanded since the New plunged French cinema back into real- the revitalization of German cinema Wave. ity. In a certain way it sounded the upon Wenders is the only hope of death knell of the New Wave, whose empty men. Though 1968 became a hinge in the directors delivered their swan songs evolution of French cinema, it was not and became the new classics-after \"As I rapidly made the mesmeric the beginning of a real revolution the having successfully pushed the old passes, amid ejaculations of 'Dead! way we thought then . Of the 1300 guard aside before their time (the best Dead!' absolutely bursting from the professional cinema people who had example of this was Truffaut). tongue and not from the lips of the suf- joined at the e'nd of May to form the ferer, his whole frame at once-within General State of the Cinema (Les Etats But in so drawing to a close this bat- the space of a single minute, or even Generaux du Cinema), no more than tle between the old guard and the mod- less, shrunk-crumbled-absolutely 150 remained that September. And the erns, 1968 allowed French auteurist rotted away beneath my hands.\" nearly SO miles of cine-tracts shot in cinema to escape its cultural May and June were forgotten the next ghetto. .. and little by little to become Well, there could still be another end day. banal to the point where it is no longer to the story. In the last scene of Wen- distinguishable from anything else. ders' The State of Things, Patrick Bau- History, here as everywhere, levels its chau, the German director shanghaied in Hollywood, raises his camera to challengers. ® shoot his murderers. IfGerman cinema wants to survive, it should be German. Spurn TV and the Hollywood prophets who are already preparing for the Day After. That's how I read that scene. Though this is not what Wenders meant at all. ~ 49

'68/'88: • In by Peter Wollen was concerned, was that it was not truly a theoretical foundation. Looking an auteur theory. It was not really the- back, I can see this as a gesture against I wrote my book of film theory , oretical. both elitism (writing about Hollywood, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, about popular cinema) and populism during May 1968, the month of the The second breakthrough, for me, (writing about it in an exotic way, in- uprising in Paris that has come to stand was the discovery of French theory. In sisting on the rigors of theory). I was in- as emblematic of its period. When I a way, this was an extension from a terested in deploying complex formal wrote it, I saw it very definitely as a cinephile interest in Cahiers to a more notations and graphs to make sense of contribution toward an uprising in film general interest in French cultural Donovan's Reef, or The Thing -not studies. It is hard now to remember theory, which led me to the work of only Ford and Hawks but marginal how hopeless and moribund film stud- Claude Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Ford and Hawks (or Nyby, if you like). ies were in the Sixties. Put crudely, the and Christian Metz. These writers had Perhaps it was perverse, but I think it field was divided between \"literary\" developed a theoretical approach to was necessary. The aim was to get rid studies of the work of a select few myth, to popular culture, to the cin- of condescending attitudes to HQlly- \"great\" artist-directors (usually Euro- ema, based on the transposition and wood and to make high theory relevant pean) and \"mass-media\" approaches, adaption of ideas taken from linguis- in every nook and cranny. numbingly empirical and effects-ori- tics. Unlike standard linguistics, they ented, witless compounds of the worst dealt with images and narrative and un- Provoked by Godard, I also tried to of experimental and statistical sociol- conscious meaning. They developed a think what an alternative to Hollywood ogy with a crass and simple-minded semiotic to encompass the whole range might be like. This involved work on psychology. I don' t know which was ofsign systems from myth to cooking to the semiotics of mainstream film as a worse . fashion to cinema. It became known as priority, because, it seemed to me, al- structuralism. ternatives could only be defined in For me, there were three moments counter-position to an understanding of hope, which I took as my starting Thirdly, also in France, there were of the practice of the mainstream. In points. First, there was auteurism. The astonishing developments in cinema fact, my work on semiotics at that time importance of Cahiers du Cinema was itself. I was one of those who went to took me away from the French model, that its critics, through the politique des see Godard's Breathless every day for a derived from the linguistics of Saus- auteurs, had found a way of mapping week when it first came out. During sure, to a different model, based on the Hollywood cinema in depth and taking the Sixties his films began to change, work of C. S. Peirce, along lines that it seriously aesthetically. They could becoming both more political and more were also being explored by Umberto talk about the aesthetics of Budd Boet- theoretical. The project ofa theoretical Eco in Italy. And, at the same time, I ticher or Samuel Fuller, rather than cinema was one that had inspired Ei- went back to Eisenstein, to try and limiting aesthetics to Rossellini or senstein, but until the Sixties it had forge a link between his pioneering Bergman (though they certainly did fallen by the wayside. Now Godard work, as semiotician and filmmaker, not dismiss European directors), or was making films that made sense only and the work going on in the Sixties. seeing Hollywood simply as an undif- in the context of semiotic and cultural Lurking there, of course, was the old ferentiated morass of \"mass culture.\" theory. At the same time, Pasolini in dream of the unity of theory and prac- The politique was brought to America Italy was talking and writing about the tice. by Eugene Archer and Andrew Sarris, semiotics and poetics offilm , and other popularized in Britain by Movie maga- filmmakers , simply by transgressing M ay 1968 was a time ofexhilarating zine. The problem with it, as far as I the standard codes of cinema, were dreams, when it seemed possi- forcing us to ask again exactly how ble, for a moment, to overturn if not the films signified. world, at least its stereotypes, its shib- boleths, its rigidities and relics, and set In my book, I tried to put together off in startling new directions. Now, of auteurism with structuralism , to give it 50

course, those moved by that time often rebel impulse in film theory than they THE LIBRARY SERIES look back with nostalgia or in disillu- have in other fields , where politics and sion. So what did happen? I think that theory have drifted apart, producing a Dancing on the Edge of Success with in the field offilm theory there have in- non-political theory or a non-theoreti- dancer/choreographer Margaret Jenkins deed been massive transformations. I cal politics. This is important because Women by Women at San Francisco 's famed do not mean to say that film studies the tendency in film studies has been Galeria de la Raza , Latino women speak conferences or cinema departments are toward an increasingly academic self- about thei r art now peopled by throngs of semioti- definition, the gradual institutionali- • How to Market a Body of Art-guidelines cians, structuralist or post-structuralist. zation of what was once an extremely from the studio to the market place But semiotics provided the necessary heterodox activity. In part, of course, • Interviews with Artist Program I-Survival explosion to get rid of the logjam and this simply registers the new strength Research Laboratories mechanical per- make all kinds of other new develop- and solidity of the discipline, in wel- formances, Lucy Lippard discussing cultural ments possible. The work of Christian come contrast to its former feebleness responsibility plus 5 more Metz and Raymond Bellour, of Um- and fragility. But it also means that the Interviews with Artists Program /I-three berto Eco, of the Screen group, among political legacy of '68 is all the more minority artists reveal their genesis and others, was substantial, serious, and needed. motivations controversial enough to change the • Interviews with Artists Program III-from agenda. Especially, of course, academic in- performance art to doll making to the Church stitutionalization threatens ' to cut film of the Subgenius Auteurism, of course, has now be- theory off from film practice. I now Enlightening· Entertaining· Economical come part of the general wisdom. Pau- think that theory can never be simply line Kael might cross swords with \"united\" with practice, but I still be- VHS • Beta· Video 8 Andrew Sarris, but that really was be- lieve that there should be bridges and I.v. Studios 985 Regal Rd . Berkeley, CA 94708 side the point. The reevaluation of interaction between the two and that Hollywood, which began with auteur- this must benefit both. The gulf has Call or write for catalog (415) 841-4466 ism, was unstoppable. Of course, as begun to grow much too wide-much this reevaluation gathered strength it wider than in the other arts . It is be- From Painting by John King naturally went beyond auteurism in the coming increasingly difficult to sustain strict sense. The mapping and study of a \" third cinema\" (neither Hollywood the role ofdirectors now runs parallel to nor art film), and while this is due work on genre, on srudios and the in- partly, of course, to changes in funding stitutions of Hollywood cinema, on structures, reflecting large-scale polit- technology, and so on . But all this work ical shifts , I think it is also due to the has been shaped by the initial debates loss of a common cultural front be- over auteurism; it assumes the need to tween film scholars and filmmakers, or go beyond the literary or the sociolog- reciprocal reinforcement between ical and to recognize the specificity of theory and practice. the cinema as a field of study, with its own concepts, methodologies, and Perhaps this reflects a depressing paradigms-in short, with its own the- irony of history. We can now see that oretical climate. the transformations in film theory and film studies that I have described took Semiotics, the vanguard in the Six- place at a time when the cinema itself ties, has moved more into the back- was also changing. To be brutal about ground. In the Seventies, its course it, film is about to become an art form was changed by two extraneous forces, of the past as we enter deep into the which drew it into new areas of debate, electronic age. Video (High Definition sometimes distracting, mostly enrich- TV, computer-linked) will replace film ing. First, there was the shift in French in the near future . New visual tech- theory from structuralism to post-struc- nologies are still to be developed. Film turalism, the impact of a new wave of studies will be absorbed into the study thinkers, no longer interested in the of the range of media using moving im- exhaustive explanation of a system but ages. This does not mean simply look- in the destabilizing of that system at its ing at soap operas instead of MGM margins, at its blind spots, at its mo- musicals. It means going back to the ments of excess. Second, there was the basics of semiotics where we began. impact of feminism, which demanded We need to think through the nature of a rewriting of semiotics to incorporate these new systems of signs and mean- sexual difference, its disjunctures and ing, and the new aesthetic and political its oppressions. Journals like Camera questions they.provoke. We need to re- Obscura and books by feminist writers capture the determination and willing- have enlarged and redefined semiotics. ness to defy common sense and set out on a new theoretical project. After all, B oth post-structuralism and femin- from the 21st century, it is the Eighties ism, whether separately or in alli- and Nineties that we shall be looking ance, have retained, I think, more of a back on. ® 51

'68/'88: Return of the EaSYRiders Sixties relics? Dennis Hopper (I.) and Michael Pollard (r.) in Riders on the Stonn. soothing. People generally feel restive levity of the Lindy (that unbearably by Marcia Pally about rainbows never followed-we American lightness of being), a Sixties I n one of Noel Coward's funniest regret and feel guilty, fear age and im- rewrite couldn't be far off. Freedom ditties, a bunch of Brits chew the fat about their days in \"Inja,\" with potence . But a splashy past adds summer and political assassinations, each silly memory about some ridicu- lous character ending, \"I wonder what unease. Baby boomers--on the Right race and police riots, war and campus happened to him?\" Since rehashing the good 01' days is not only an occu- and Left, from Stallone to Oli ver strikes, women's and gay lib, and the pation of the present but its best but- tress , for these pipe-puffers the past is Stone-are like a generation of child overt rebelliousness of folk, rock, and merely raw material: Each time they recall it they rewrite a bit in their cur- prodigies grown up ordinary and stuck heavy metal were suddenly all doing rent interests. with photo albums from a past they the Limbo and Mashed Potatoes. Even Ever since The Big Chill, Americans have been up to the same thing. We do claim but can't live with. Conserva- Dirty Dancing or Hairspray, which lift to the Sixties what the British did to all those places the sun never set: move in tives haven't done much better realiz- their skirts a bit on politics, fluff them and set them up as boutiques for our egos and delusions. Those of us who ing their vision than liberals have. into a pre-teen's idea of sexy panties- are old enough look back 20 years and fondle bits of that decade as though Women, gays, and people of color all more earnest than effective. Whatever they were overpriced madeleines; quaint, but too impractical to use. In- feel their revolutions fell short. So we hopeful ideas about class or race the stead , we turn what used to be politics , idealism, skepticism , or rude spunk colonize our youth and rewrite its his- young heroes of these movies had, they into nostalgia, and we assure ourselves that in the intervening years we did the tory for our benefit. The Sixties were are certainly too simplistic to employ, right thing. grand , sincere, passionate, naive , so now, 25 years later, we don't have to It's our 1988 minds that need this meaningful, fun , overzealous-but, worry about employing them. And we mostly, over the top and inapplicable applaud ourselves for having been such to today's condo mortgages, school tu- good kids to boot. itions, or career contingencies. They Wcertainly don't apply to politics. Those hen the Sixties aren't Twist-ed into harmless pop they're recast were the days, The Big Chill clucked, but Kevin Kline didn't pay for his col- as vet veneration. Apocalypse Now. The onnaded house on a salary from Che. Deer Hunter. Platoon, Full Metal You could see The Big Chill coming Jacket, and Bill Couturie's new docu- as soon as all those Fifties flicks started mentary Dear America: Letters Home rolling in a decade ago. Once American from Vietnam, all turn this screw: We Graffiti and Grease et al. turned the were beastly to our boys. Had we been Cold War, H UAC, tranq-popping, the better, we would've won, or they double standard, and the simmering wouldn't have died, or at least the rebelliousness of rock 'n' roll into the boxes they came home in would've 52

been stamped \"hero.\" In short, we protesters cost America the respect and tuft it deserves. We should've kept our mouths shut and left government by the people to the experts. No movie says it more clearly than Sidney Lumet's new Running on Empty. As the energetic title suggests, it's a depressed, exhausted take on left-wing activism. Judd Hirsch and Christine Lahti play ex-antiwar activ- ists on the lam for 17 years for having bombed an M.l.T. napalm lab. Driving into towns with made-up l.D.' S, they take low profile jobs like receptionist and short-order cook-till the FBI gets too close. Then they split to another state and a new set of names. As if this mouse case weren' t vitiating enough, their son snares a scholarship to Juil- Riders on the Stonn: unrepentent acid-yahoo crusaders. liard , which brings on more loss. If he keeps running with them , they trun- command. The rest are childlike ge- ica is ready for a 1968 film that kicks cate his education and prevent him niuses demented by war: For 20 years ass. from living his life. But if he stops for these casualties of LSD and LBJ have Perhaps we're not, and won't be till his stipend , they risk never seeing him been perusing us from above , zooming we' re more satisfied with ourselves . As agaIn. down to save us when the Right gets long as we shrug that we were truer to Though Lahti and Hirsch play mom out of hand. Like Supermen decorated our beliefs then than now, we can't and dad as warm-hearted, funn y peo- with Purple Prostheses , they dress like look the past in the eye. We refurbish ple and terrific parents, their former Led Zeppelin and think like a mix of it and pick out pieces for the mantle, idealism now wavers between disinter- the Lone Ranger and Yossarian. and wonder why we don' t have peace est and despair. It's not just the l\\1.l.T. When the Republicans decide to run of mind. For that, we'd have to square bombing that seems misguided but the Willa Westinghouse for president-a accounts with ourselves and have a go entire decade. To them , the Sixties are battle-ax who could chop down all of at whatever is worth going for wherever less of a quaint antique than an old Margaret's thatches-Hopper and on the political spectrum-cut the wound-a foolish bit of showing off crew go into action. With their rene- Pentagon's budget, or increase it, fund that has hobbled them ever since. To gade TV satellite that sports SCTV hu- the Contras or fine them , no drugs , top it off, the only person in the film mor, they interrupt network news and more AIDS research or more church. who's still \"politically committed\" is a destroy her with an expose that uncov- Otherwise our antiques sit in glass ne'er-do-well knocking over banks. In- ers in all senses of the word. cases and glare at us-which is our best fantile and self-absorbed, he still Written by Scott Roberts , Riders of feature. Kids from the Sixties are prone thinks getting laid is a political act. In the Storm is a little heavy on the boy- to give-a-damn guilt. sum, reasonable adults know the Six- humor and tit jokes, butitzingsaround It's Eighties kids who worry me. ties were silly--only jackasses would with the irreverent zip that gave the Without room for idealism , they can' t try to live by its axioms. And Sidney Sixties a sense of possibility-for both fret about not putting out, and an inert Lumet's viewers are not jackasses. the Right and the Left. Hopper and public is fit only for puppeteers. Here' s Unlike its predecessors, Running on crew are shrewder and more sophisti- where Sixties guilt may come in handy; Empty doesn' t so much make a bou- cated than we were then, but they are it may be our best bequest to them. We tique of the Sixties as bury it. That's unrepentent acid- yahoo crusaders can pass our uneasy nostalgia along. why Riders of the Storm came as such a nonetheless. Our rewrite of the Sixties may say itwas surprise. Here's a film with the savvy of a childish and unpractical time, but Dr. Strangelove and the sass of Catch- kids know when we protest too much. R22 , and instead of setting the Sixties iders' distributor, Miramax Films , When the campus ruckus about scheduled the film for a Fall 1987 South African divestment began, I under glass, it runs the era right into this year's politics. release, then held it for seven months thought, for the first time in 15 years , biting their nails (perhaps they thought that yes, as the Beatles put it, it' s going Directed by Maurice Phillips , Riders they'd wait to see who got elected in to be all right. Young people will see is about a crew of Vietnam vets November). When they finally let it films like Riders , A World Apart, A who've been flying over our friendly out of the can, they changed its title. Winter Tan, and Salaam Bombay! and skies since the war in a bomber they The original, The American Way , had know they cannot go blithel y from keep updating with the latest video- the disadvantage of drawing attention campus to condo. Perhaps they'll feel satellite-techno-razzmatazz and which to the film 's political bent. Riders ofthe obligated by the lure of our pasts. Was they won't bring down . Dennis Hop- Storm sounds like a Star Trek rerun and it naive or important, wasteful or per plays their brain-fried captain , Mi- a better boxoffice bet. Miramax is un- worthwhile? They will not see the Six- chael J. Pollard his second-in- derstandably not sure that 1988 Amer- ties simply as a jewel in their crown . ® 53

Jerome Hellman My films focus on love. Everything else is secondary. A lotof peo- ple love or hate my work based on that. My wife walked out on me in the Sixties. When I started out my needs were creative and egotistical. What the Sixties changed in me was to want to try to communicate It was a time when one didn't to other people that it is okay to be who you are. What was impor- have to be ashamed about incor- porating social responsibility and tant about the Sixties was love and political attitudes in one's work. sharing, which may sound corny I'm still very much the same per- and New Age now, but it came son I was in the Sixties. It was a from a deep place of frustration healthy and appropriate way to and loneliness, from what came function, very different from the before. The Sixties was a reaction .f( Eighties. Obviously, the climate to the rigid Fifties, when people is no longer overtly responsive to , I didn't have that understanding. that kind of filmmaking philos- ophy. Now you're supposed to be steadfast and professional, I haven't been seducible by whatever that means. Hollywood because I grew up in Coming HOI11e was a direct spin-off of some work I began in the the Sixties. I've tried to put the Sixties. In 1970 I developed a film about a retuming veteran which truth on film rather than make I didn' t get to do until much later. films for money. Politically, the The Sixties did have some carry-over value. I've seen signs that point wasn't to sell popcorn. The the pendulum is getting ready to swing in the other direction. Al- Sixties put a lot of us into different though it has been very difficult, and I'm never optimistic, there is places: drugs, despair, and alienation. For those of us who func- suddenly a spate of films about the Civil Rights movement. tion, the reason for functioning is closely questioned. It's not for Those films have been around for the last 15 years and there were economic gain, or to produce something for a mass market or taste. no takers. My films are about humanizing people. And the greatest feedback As Hollywood becomes increasingly conglomerate and bottom I get is from people. Someone to Love is about loneliness. Always is line-oriented, films like that have to slip through the net. All it about divorce. Eating , the film I just finished shooting, is about takes is for some to make money. IfMississippi Buming, for exam- women's eating habits. It's just trying to share. As naive as it pie, is a breakout film , that's going tn wedge the door open. Oliver sounds, it's really the truth. Stone is doing Ron Kovic's book Born on the Fourth ofJuly, which has been lying dormant a long time, at least since Coming HOI11e. Chen Kaige George Roy Hill I think there is a big conflict be- tween my feelings and the reality When I began working in films of the late Sixties [in the People's in the Sixties, there was a real op- Republic of China]. I'm wonder- portunity to do a variety of work. ing what the reason was for the So I did spectacle and intimate Cultural Revolution. The Chi- drama and farce and a musical. It nese people were not satisfied was an invaluable asset to all the with the reality of Chinese society work I've done since. It seems to at that moment. We were crazy me that that opportunity simply about Chairman Mao. We be- doesn't exist today. Directors get lieved whatever he said to us. But cast to type, so to speak, very good intentions are not enough to quickly, and the possibility of ex- create something. So we did some panding a range of working expe- ike the destruction of Chinese traditional culture. riences has diminished. Actually we were all, including Mao himself, influenced by the On the other hand , I think the movies being made are, on the old fashioned mode of thinking. whole, better and richer. There was an almost exclusive emphasis We were all supposed to go to the countryside. I didn't want to on \"entertainment movies\" when I was starting that is less obvi- go, but I really learned something from the poor people living ous today. You can do serious films and it's not considered lunatic there. That's very important for us. The Sixties was a time of ide- or a fringe activity. For myself, the major factor in what I do today alism. But we started to doubt some things. Were the rights of the is simply not to repeat myself, and that certainly comes in large individual more or less important than the rights of society as a part from the fact that I was expected not to in the Sixties. whole? I can't imagine how, without the Cultural Revolution, China could be an open society. Henry Jaglom I really want to make a film about the Cultural Revolution. In most films about it, the Red Guard are just devils, which is not Without the Sixties I wouldn' t be doing what I'm doing today. true. I knew a lot of people who were Red Guards. Some of them The Sixties was the greatest thing to happen to any generation in are in the United States [now]. I found that they were dreamers at history. It was the best time to be young. If you bought the mes- the time. Maybe the title of the film will be just Red Guards. Right sage and didn't become cynical, it fed you for the rest of your life. now in China, people just want to make money, especially young people. They don' t care about society or culture. Money is the I am the quintessential expression ofthat era. I am a filmmaker most important thing for them. There are Chinese yuppies in who could not have existed without the Sixties, just as the writer New York. Some of the Red Guards work in Henry Kissinger's F. Scott Fitzgerald could not have existed without the Twenties. office in New York at the Rockefeller Foundation. 54

,'J'm not bigger than life as an actor, J'm bigger than life as a human being. ' , Sylvia Miles interviewed by Marlaine Glicksman T hink Sylvia Miles and think Six- Sylvia Miles in Crossing Delancey. ties. A streetwisened Bardot with balls, a white Tina Turner, Her apartment is laden with memora- I remember when I did Parrish, we Miles embodies the taboo. The quin- bilia from past parts and halcyon days shot in Hartford, Connecticut, and it tessential older woman, she's the one with Hopper, et al. Somehow, nothing was like the last of the kind of Holly- who, in John Schlesinger' s Midnight looks out of date. We began talking wood big studio films with Troy Don- Cowboy (1969), picks up a stranger (in about the Sixties. Turns out Sylvia's ahue and Claudette Colbert and Dean dude outfit, no less), brings him home got a lot more to say. Jagger. Lots of famous people in it, to her high-rise haven, heavy pets shot in the tobacco fields. It was di- while making an evening date with her Tell me about making your film debut rected by Delmer Daves , who was one boyfriend , does it, and then cries for in the Sixties. of the last of the big Warner Bros. di- cabfare. In Paul Morrissey's Heat I made my d~but in films in the Six- rectors. In a crazy way, my first film was (1972), she's the faded actress who ties as a young struggling off-Broadway comparable to an off-Broadway play. sleeps-without guilt-with a much actress. I got a lot of off-Broadway younger man. Able to parade naked awards. Most of all, the movies then I thought that it was a big Hollywood with less than a model's figure , she's a were what kept me working, supported film , so I borrowed a mink stole and all celeb who doesn't worry about cellu- me. Parrish, for Warner Bros. , is tech- kinds of baggage-I mean, to go up to lite. Now, in Joan Micklin Silver's nically my first film. Hartford-and I couldn' t even get it Crossing Delancey, she's the match- into the train. And I was out in the to- maker who eats with abandon (and both hands at the same time), a bubbe who doesn't blink at bulimia. Onscreen and off, Miles manages to be both ahead of and behind her time simultaneously. The epitome of a broad (and knows it), this is a woman who accepts herself. She is what we could be when we're not acting how we should. Even her career carries connotations somewhat forbidden, underground. With two Academy Award nominations (for Cowboy and Dick Richards' Fare- well, My Lovely, 1975), Miles is able to take a seemingly stereotypical role and make it unpredictable, drawing you into a scene and sticking it to your Vel- cro brain well after you leave the thea- ter. Still beautiful (if not even more so), and still an anachronism, Miles sports a peace sign button or two on her lapel, a suede fringe bracelet on her wrist. 55

,'1' m my philosophy. To see ajive-minute piece ofmy work is to know what I am and who I am and where I'm coming from. ' , bacco fields in the rain and with these Gettingphysical: Miles with Jon Voight in Midnight Cowboy. poison plants, which the story was about. So it was hardly an auspicious on fencing, dancing, acting, and mulaic. I mean, if you look at what Hollywood debut. speech-all of that stuff, including eleven years of analysis because that Schlesinger did with Midnight Cowboy It was a time of great foment in the was all part of that Zeitgeist, the spirit in the Sixties, the sort of shots that he Village. Circle in the Square was in the of those times coming from the Fifties used were much more experimental. Or Village, and Richie Havens was a folk into the Sixties-I'd be a millionaire the way Morrissey shot Heat. singer playing next door, and Bob Dy- today. lan was Bobby Zimmerman on I remember, I was this dedicated, MacDougal Street playing at the Gas- But I think the drug culture brought off-Broadway actress, wondering why light. .He hadn't even changed his a kind of immediacy; everybody ex- Robert Frank and Jonas Mekas, etc. name at that point. And it was a very pected to become famous overnight, didn't use me. They always thought I exciting time, both for film and thea- without ever having to put in the time was establishment. But off-Broadway, ter. By the time the public catches up, or to pay the dues, so to speak. I've to the Broadway people in the Sixties, or the media even catches up on what's paid the dues, literally and figura- was like what we look at now as off-off- happening, it's already in. In other tively-I just got the union cards; I'm Broadway. By today's standards, that words, in the Sixties we were, in a still paying them. You pay your dues to was like real establishment-but it was sense, into the Seventies. We were those unions every month of your life important, artistically important. Like ahead of our times. I don't know how whether you work or you don't work. The Balcony, the Jean Genet play, and better to say that, but most people in the plays I did at Circle in the Square- the arts and in the theater and in films What was it like to work with Paul two years in The Iceman Cometh. These are always the avant-garde or the van- Morrissey or Andy Warhol? plays weren't formless like a lot of the guard of what's going on. The Warhol crowd was part of the things today: Somebody sits down and party scene, which I wasn't. I was not in 25 minutes starts playing, and it's a Everything is so cyclical. People a Warholian. They were around but I play. who are into their art and concentrating didn't shoot with them. I met Paul in on what they're doing and part of what '68, when I did Midnight. I went to Was there a different attitude about is happening-and I don't mean that in work for him in the Seventies, after I acting then? the trendy sense of the word, I mean had already been nominated for Cow- that in the sense of applying their craft boy. I just did a film for Paul Morrissey, Traditionally, not that many stage at the time that they're doing it- a new one, Throwback, which is going actors do well in film, or can make the they're not conscious of being part of a to be released as Spike of Bensonhurst, transition. I was always amazed that I trend or vanguard, or being ahead of in which I playa crooked, Jewish con- was able to make it, but I think basi- their time or having great foresight, cally I was what they call a \"real\" ac- they're just trying to make a buck at gresswoman [chucklel. tress: act, sing, dance, fence, accents, their art in a hard, tough world. And it everything. Every penny I ever made turns out in· reflection that it's always, But, I think, for some reason, the went into study and work and devel- \"Oh, those were great times,\" and Eighties are more like the Sixties than oping. I went to all the plays not only stuff like that. the Seventies, even though there to see other actors but to be part of the seems to be a great desire to go back to theater, to train myself. And in movies, I do recall from those days in the Vil- the conformity and the more conserv- the same. lage, off-Broadway, and Circle in the ative Fifties, artistically. So many dif- Square, that it was really the beginning ferent things are happening. Putting all ofyourselfinto a part came of the drug culture in the Sixties. It be- from you then, as opposed to coming came much more accelerated in the It seems thatfilm has become morefor- Seventies and part of the establish- from the time. ment, and the lingo, and the jargon of No, the time too. I'm part of the comedians, literature, television, and so forth. But you could see the begin- nings of it then, and the ghastly effect that it had, in terms of a lifestyle in New York. Even artistically. A break- ing down of a kind of stronger sense of commitment to your work regimen and discipline. When I started, it never occurred to me that I wouldn't study all my life or that I wouldn't try to improve or de- velop my craft in every conceivable way. I mean, if I ever could get a hold of the money that I spent in a lifetime 56

time. NOSTALGIC SCI-FI & And the risks you take? HORROR ON VIDEO! Itdoesn'toccurto me thad'm taking risks. And yet everything I did, when I look back on it, was a risk. Even, for example, Crossing Delancey. Look, I'm standing in front of you, I'm a pretty nice-looking broad, considering my age. I mean, I could still play viable roles. I'm not somebody's mother or grandmother, necessarily. And yet, I won't protect myself in a role like that. Our most current poster catalog , 44 pages (8'12\" x 11 \") with over 300 I go with the role, what the role re- iinistel\" £inema photos & accompanying text quires, so that it's not like me but like another human being. What I did in With over 500 shock filled titles available, (about 85 in full color, including Wall Street-talk about a risk. Little Sinister Cinema is truly the leading source for front & back covers!). Mailed part-the best thing in the film. your favorite sci fi and horror oldies on video. with outside wrapper on receipt Just send $2.00 for our eye popping catalogue, of $7.00 U.S. funds by first class It's not actor-you know, a reson- or receive it free when you order any of the mail. ating voice that suddenly comes on the following films at the reduced price of . Our new location, a gallery on screen. It's \"I'm bigger than life.\" But $14.95~~RLE 1932·F Polk St. (near corner of I'm not bigger than life as an actor, I'm Pacific Ave.), San Francisco, CA bigger than life as a human being. 1. The Phantom from 10.000 Leagues (1955) 94109 . Open Mondays I'm real-everything I do is real. A through Saturdays, 11 AM to 6 2. The Killer Shrews (1 959) PM Pacific time. lot of people saw Midnight Cowboy; be- 3. A Bucket of Blood (1959) 4. Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1936) CINEMONDE fore that people didn't think I was an 5. Hercules In The Haunted World (1961 ) 1932·F POLK STREET actor, they thought that was real, and Directed by Mario Bava all I had to do was get up there and do SAN FRANCISCO, it. The pyrotechnics don't show. 6. She Shoulda' Said No (1949) 94109 Please add $2.05 per title for pac kag ing . handl ing . and postage. Specify VHS or Beta . Californ ia res idents please add 6 'h% sales tax. Sorry. not available in PAl. Make c hecks or money orders payable to: D 'd your experience working with Sinister Cinema IMorrissey help? P.O. Box 777 . dept. FC Pacifica . CA. 94044 noWldhWieslkeerIplwayU, Iiwne~ntetoKsUeecChheel-nI ,iliQeueAstio~ns~??~? C~all ~us a~t 4~15·3~59~·32~92 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~AGICIMAGE FILMBOOKS is proud to announce sea Girls, which was the first film of Warhol's that surfaced uptown at what the second book in the Ackerman Archives Series on the is now the 57th Street Playhouse. And reconstruction of Lost Silent Films I thought, \"Gee, wouldn't that be great to work with him in that style and CRITICAL ACCLAIM with good actors?\" \"A BUN D BA RGAIN : • book about So it was in the back of my mind, al- p4Tt of the fasc inating ttnd most mysterious life .nd \",t of LON CHA N EY-. fdS' ways. It was not an accident that I did ( irutting tJeidition /0 I7Ulgica/ mcw;e lartt.\" Heat, but I didn't do it until I had al- ready become part of, in a sense, the VINCENT PRICE establishment. They were looking for \"A BUN D BARGAIN j, a I\"\"jngl, rutJnftructed yersion of the film on p4per. Since the film no longer exists iI's the next a star to play that part because it was the LON CHANEY'S best thing 10 suing it.\" LONDON AFTER part of a star, a Hollywood star, down LOST HORROR MARTIN SCORSESE MIDNIGHT and out as she was. I had already done MELODRAMA Midnight Cowboy, and had already A BLIND BARGAIN \"Aneth\" lou Ch.nry? Wondnfol! The By Philip). Riley been nominated. I saw Trash, and I Acknmcm Archives provide dn a/her trea- The legendary losr Vam- thought, aha, that's the actor that I (Goldrryn 1922) sure for postmty.\" should work with [Joe Dallesandro], pire film reconsrrucred using because his persona, stillness and By Philip J. Riley RAY BRADBURY over 300 phorographs and ri- strength, with my energy, would be a great combination. What I do claim • Forward by Robert Bloch • Complere Shooring Scripr ties published by Cornwall came out of the Sixties, but not out of • Introducrion by Parsy Rurh • Pressbook, Cur Scenes, Books is available in very li- the Warhol Factory Sixties, but out of Miller mired supply by sending my acting off-Broadway, is this: I stood Producrion nores ~35.00 plus $2.50 posrage and next to him a lot at these various parties • Losr Films of Lon Chaney by • Biographical nores on Direc· handling. that we were at as part of that scene. So ror Wallace Worsley by Wal· they came to me and said, \"Would you Jon Mirsalis lace Worsley, Jr. (New Jersey residents add 6 per- play that star?\" That was what I looked • Derailed look ar Lon cent sales tax.) like next to him, and that's what I • Over 300 phorographs- Chaney's make-up box as ir eventually played. many never published before exisrs roday Film reconsrrucrion using all To them, I was a Hollywood star, available srills and original ritIe copy. Send $29.95 plus $2.50 for shipping and handling. Order both books for $50.00 (include $5.00 for shipping and handling.) NOT SOLD IN STORE5-AVAILABLE BY DIRECT MAIL ONLY SEND ORDER TO: MAGICIMAGE FILMBOOKS, P.O. BOX 128 • BRIGANTINE, N.J. 08203 57

\"It's always difficultfor artists, because ifeverybody understood everything everybody was doing, then there wouldn't be all these people that had to be dead before anybody appreciated or understood what they were doing. ' , but I always joked to myself that in bian ballet dancer; and Rex Reed said, gether in your head. You're doing it all Hollywood they think I'm an under- \"This proves that Sylvia Miles will do together. Or you might be doing the ground, off-Broadway actress; in New anything and do it well.\" In other last scene the first day and the first York they think I'm a Hollywood star; words, I will make those things believ- scene the last day. and in Kansas City they' re probably able. wondering if she's Jewish. It's that Do you feel that the money infilm has kind of a career, which is sort of hard to H ave directors changed since the Six- caused people to get away from being nail. I don't mean that I'm not appre- ties, gotten more cautious? filmmakers? ciated, but what it has given me is a I'll say this-and Schlesinger would kind of cult status, which is odd. be a very good example-I think less of No, I don't think they've gotten a chance is taken now, because I think away from it. I think it's just very hard The cult status has given you a sort of the films are more formula even though for them to get them on. It takes twice power. the studios aren't as powerful , but in as long to get them on, because the order to get films released , they have to costs are so tremendous. I'm glad that yo u me,ntion the go through a studio, so there's a great power. There must be some sort of deal more stricture. What piques your interest in afilm? power, but yo u know , power can work A guy's courage, you know, to do his for you or against you . I have not yet You don ' t see film s as gritty or as ex- thing. Filmmakers who are in control figured out how to make that power perimental as you might have seen in of everything that they do , like Mor- work positive ly for me, because it can the Sixties and early Seventies. Take a rissey and Juzo Itami. Itami is a film- be intimidating. People can think, film like Deliverance. They don't make maker. I don't want to seem pre- \" Oh, she's too big\" or \" Let's get some- films like that. E ven though it was tentious when I say \"filmmaker,\" I body like her,\" because it tends to made in the early Seventies, it was very don't mean that everybody isn't a film- make you an archetype. Where most much a Sixties film . It is not a question maker. people can handle a prototype , they' re of less fear, I think there 's much more But there is a difference . It seems like sort of frightened of the archetype. control today from the studios. And the there were more filmmakers then . cost of the films has gone up so tre- Absolutely. But these are the times. Do you feel that the archetype in the mendously that I would imagine that Look, this is the Eighties and a time of that's a big deterrent. crisis. The arts are the first thing to go Sixties has followed you? out the window. They' re the thing that Well, yes. Farewell, My Lovely's a How about the atmosphere on the sets the people who are not artists think is in the Sixties compared to now? the least needed commodity or quan- perfect example, even though that was tity or contribution. made in '75 and I was nominated in '76 Well, I can't imagine that Heat cost for it. It's set in 1940, but I'm playing more than $100,000 to make. And I But I'm not discouraged . I don't sit a character that's behind the times. In made up all the dialogue. There was no there and reflect upon it because I'm Heat, which was made in ' 71 and came script. So it wasn't even a question of too busy ttying to keep it going and out in '72, I play an actress from the late ad-lib or improvisation . I created it as I doing it. I don' t get discouraged-I get Fifties who's unemployed and doing went along and certain things that were re-encouraged . I give myself new game shows during the Sixties and at a said became truths that other people strength when I talk about it because loss . So it's a very recognizable char- had to live by because I said them . If I then I know how I feel when I have to called my daughter \"Jessie, \" she had articulate it. Knowing that what I'm acter. to be Jessie. This last Paul Morrissey, doing is not lost. Or is appreciated or Did that character adversely affect you Spike ofBensonhurst, was produced by understood. the producer who did Kiss ofthe Spider getting work? Woman [Sam Grogg of FilmDallasl. So It's like, I'm my philosophy. To see Absolutely. Well, I don' t like to say it wasn't loose. When you have a big a five-minute piece of my wo rk is to crew and there's money, there's some- know what I am and who I am and \"adve rsely,\" because that's a sort of a body there all the time making sure where I'm coming from . And obviously negative way of putting it. I would say you don't do too much overtime and that's true because that's why you yo u pay the price by not getting some stuff like that. In the Sixties or early wanted to do the interview. But I don't of the more mainstream jobs. On the Seventies you might have been hired know that all the time because the art- other hand , I've had some extraordi- to do a certain role and for the three ist isn' t concentrating on those periph- nary jobs too: Shalimar opposite Rex months of the shooting have worked all eral things , the artist is concentrating Harrison and John Saxon and four In- during that period . Now they wo n' t do on the vision of doing the thing, or get- dian stars. In Heat I won awards in 13 that. They' ll push everything yo u're ting the thing, or making that thing countries-so I have had an extraordi- doing and shoot it all at the same time. happen. nary career. But one that gives me a So you have to , if anything, be three certain cult status. times ahead of where yo u were before You know , when the painter is because you have to keep all of that to- standing there with the palette in his As a result, I'll be hired fora part that hand and mixing the paint, he isn't say- other people can't figure out how to ing, \"Now when I finish this, it's going make work, and they know that I'll pull to show at the Pace.\" No, he 's too busy it through. To wit: The Sentinel for Mi- chael Winner, where I played a mad , dead, crazed, German, zombie, les- 58

\"In The Sentinel, I played a mad, dead, crazed, German, zombie, lesbian ballet dancer; and Rex Reed said, 'This proves that Sylvia Miles will do anything and do it well.' \" Miles and Robert Mitchum in Farewell, My lovely. give Margaret Hamilton trouble with Well, it's always better to work with The Wizard of Oz. your friends than your en-emies trying to figure how to get it on the can- [laughs]. It's always competitive. vas. And the more he is involved in If you ask me how I feel about the There's just more. That's the differ- that, the faster it'll get to the Pace. But future, I would love to always have a ence. It's always difficult for artists, be- that's not where his head is at when young audience know me and want to cause if everybody understood he's doing it. see me, because it's the energy that everything everybody was doing, then they're impressed with or that they re- there wouldn't be all these people that In the same way, when you choose a spond to. The life energy. had to be dead before anybody appre- role--or the director that you're going ciated or understood what they were to work with-you look for the simpa- And it's that energy, by the way, that doing. They would all be appreciated tico resonances ofwhere you're coming you specifically think of as the Sixties. in their own lifetimes. Traditionally, from and where they're coming from, In the Sixties, it blossomed and came that's not the way it is for artists, be- if they want the same thing. It's like out. It was a time of great hope and cause usually their vision is ahead of you always fall in love with the people great inspiration, and we had all the where most people are. It takes people that fall in love with you, and in a great writers and playwrights. I just a while to catch up. By the time they've strange way it's like that. It's a reaffir- hope that in the future there will be caught up, the artists are already off mation of your soul and your existence people interested enough to make somewhere else. as an artist when somebody wants to good movies and plays that will be use you anCl have part of what you give. movies and that the dollar doesn't be- Do you feel that the films being done You have to assume that if they want come the holy thing, the Mecca of today in the Eighties are really ahead? you, then they have that understand- everything. Some ofthem almost seem like they're ... ing, they know where you're coming from, and they must be coming from, How do you feel that energy and hope, Retards? if not the same place, the same jour- and the talent that was available then , Itfelt like the Sixties films were ahead, ney, the same fount. compare to the Eighties? moving forward. Yeah. The Graduate, Midnight Cow- W here would you like to see your All that talent is still around. And boy, or the one with Julie Christie that work go? everybody that's still alive is doing it. Schlesinger did before Midnight Cow- To the moon [laughs]. I really do And I think that most of the directors boy, [Darling]. There were a lot of mean that. You know, I can never un- around are cognizant of that and are really wonderful films in the Sixties derstand why I've never been cho- willing to use the people that are still and a lot of wonderful scripts and film sen-not as yet-to do and be a part of viable. I think they're more anxious writers. the future. I don't mean I should have to--right now, as a matter of fact-use What about the questions raised in had the part that Tina Turner played in that energy or get that energy back. I films and the questions raised by the Road Warrior. But why not? I mean, just think that it needs more of a com- characters, the issues dealt with by the why can't I be somebody from another munity. characters then? planet or from another world, or one of Very interesting question, because those larger-than-Iife characters? The community was stronger then? they were probably hotter issues, more Definitely, definitely. The world loaded issues. I think the films-not I would love to work for Jim Henson. situation was one where hope was part that they're not as good, not that When I did the Evil Fairy of Red in of the public trip. Right now, it's they're mindless-are more escapist Sleeping Beauty, for Cannon, which harder times-not like the Depression films now, more not to have to deal hasn't come out yet, I was a fabulous times, because obviously there's a tre- with those things. Oh, sure, occasion- fairy . Imaginative, and really fright- mendous amount of money around- ally they make a movie like Ironweed ening and wonderful. I mean, when but that people are frightened to ex- based on a fantastic book. Or Wall that picture comes out, I'm going to pand. Street or Platoon , which dealt with And how do you think that community strong issues. But you mean more, not affected the work? two or three. You mean a lot of films. Today the issues are dealt with, but it seemed that in the Sixties the issues were explored. I would agree with you. I wish I could have said that instead of you. I think that's it, they're dealt with and dispensed with. Whereas before they were explored and not necessarily packaged and finished off, which is a difference. Explored. ~~ 59

Paul Mazursky typical example of the emperor's new clothes really. I didn't like it at the time, and I don't like it now. I was accused ofswinging with Anyone who is a serious the Sixties, but actually never found the swing at all, because I filmmaker is a product of where never went out anywhere. When I did go out, I always did dress they've been. I made Next Stop very daringly, so they all automatically thought I was the Swinging Greenwich Village, a movie about Sixties, because I was wearing a miniskin well before Mary Quant the Fifties. I was pan of the Beat ever invented it. I was deep in the countryside breeding horses generation in the Fifties, which when they were all swinging away. I mean, I've never been to preceded the Sixties thing. I was Tramps in my life. The Sixties did allow a lot of us to become an actor, not a writer. I was in stars. It was a time for international stardom on that level, which all rooms with Allen Ginsberg, Jack of us became, and then of course it hasn't really happened since, Kerouac, Norman Mailer, and Jay has it? That was the only time it ever did happen really. So we Landesman, the editor of Neurot- were all very lucky to be pan of that. ica, a hip journal of the Fifties. That's where I met my wife. ThomMount There were a lot of writers thinking about the East a little bit, struggling with ideas about real change, thinking about ways to The Sixties were the most emo- aniculate the need for a real social revolution. The Sixties came tionally and creatively catalytic era along and became popular, it became permitted to drop out, in my generation's life. I think a smoke grass. By the Seventies itwas old hat; by the Eighties itwas lot of us have spent our time since yuppied out of existence. Maybe the Nineties will be a Victorian then trying to find business and era again, cosmetically disguised. AIDS will bring nervous creative enterprises that approxi- changes. mate the challenge and the tur- The Sixties was the first huge statement about change that be- moil and the commitment and the came known nationally to squares. I was already in my thinies passion that we enjoyed in that when the Sixties came along. I was a grown person with a wife and decade. Cenainly for me, every- children. I moved to California in 1960 and spent the Sixties out thing I Ieamed working on the here. New York was radically different. A lot of stuff staned here Left and organizing areas in the and then moved to New York, like flower children and long hair. Sixties contributed to whatever It seemed ludicrous in New York, and they made fun of it. Five skills I may have as a producer. years later they were all doing it. I made fun of \"Let's drop out and I've always had the belief that it was possible to change almost smoke a joint.\" It was all one big movie. any system that wasn't being as responsive as it could be to human The Sixties woke everyone up to everything that was going on needs and social conditions and quality ofendeavor. I think Holly- in their minds. It wasn't so cut and dried. Up until then: ''This is wood is in a moment ofvery interesting turmoil. There is a chang- the way it is, folks, grow up, get married, get a job.\" The Sixties ing of the guard in this town, an agonizing process for any industry, said to all kinds of people: not necessarily. Everyone was always which is fully under way. searching, aware. You wanted to be conscious-to trick yourself into being self-conscious-about it. It was healthy. I'm for it. But when it gets silly you have to make fun of it. I'm in there myself Sarah Miles Compiled by Mar/aine Glicksman, Leonard Klady, Gavin Smith, Bob Strauss, Anne The Sixties was very strange era Thompson and Beverly WaLker. altogether, I think, and we were somewhat on a false high in a way. I felt that the bubble was going to break even at the very beginning. I didn't think itwas real, anyofit. I withdrew from it because I man- age to smell phoniness quite quickly. Regarding. one's career, probably I was very lucky to be pan of the Sixties in that every- body had much better opponuni- ties than they do in the Eighties or the Seventies. My first film was Term ofTrial at the very beginning of the Sixties, and that was considered risky, risque then. Then in The Servant, of course, I was nude, and that was the first time that had been done in England, so I suppose I was a vanguard of that panicularshockingness. And I suppose it's better to be a vanguard than the last few. In that way it was rather nice, to be able to be daring. A few films of the Sixties will last, but for most of them were just fashion, and I find that any film that is fashionable imme- diately becomes unfashionable again and becomes a piece offluff. Blow-Up was purely fashion, I wasn't a fan of it at all, I think it's a 60

One change is in the direction of big business, but an equal and Bob Rafelson more fascinating component of the change has to do with the grad- ual retreat the studios are beating from the risk of making motion The only way I can think about pictures, in terms of financing and creative control. This means my Sixties experience is through that independent producers are becoming gradually more and the work which I haven't looked at more on the line both financially and creatively, which I think is a since I made it. It seems utterly bewildering, impossible, and ar- very healthy thing. duous. The only thing I learned I think politics and life are inseparable. We don't make an overt from all of it is that I survived it. Today I have dle confidence that I effort to get politics into our movies. What is more the case is that survived the six other movies. the politics ofour lives inform our choices of movies and shape the That's all. decisions we make about movies. That's the way it should be. It's a medium that requires a certain amount of collective authorship, Last night somebody asked me which can be guided down a road that is somewhat unconscious or why I make movies. I said: \"To that has some criteria, some crisp analysis, a sense of personal cri- stay off the street.\" I've been tique and politics. And that job is really up to the producer. working on this movie Mountains ofthe Moon, about Burton and Speke's exploration of the Nile in the 19th century, for seven I don't get disillusioned easily. I was dismayed by the extraordi- years. It may never get made the way I want it to be. I'm still nary retreat of the Seventies. I feel much better about our experi- scared shitless. ence in the Eighties and I look forward to the Nineties, which will be Q great decade for this business. Hollywood's always in a crisis Andre\\v Sarris ofcreativity and should be: Any mass communications form that is this dependent on this much money for its survival will always be The Sixties produced a great in a creative crisis because there's always going to be money peo- crystalization of revisionist ideas, ple in one form or another who think they have solutions. But mostly about pop culture. Film- finally what is true about this business is true about all other art makers and genres that had once forms: Art will out and everything else finally is unimportant. The been considered minor now be- cleverest deal in history, the biggest piece of stock ownership, the came major. The Sixties are rel- cleverest political maneuver within a studio, fades very quickly in evant to the Eighties only in so far the face of a good film about the human condition that touches as they register a decline in opti- people. mism and self-confidence in the general culture. One could have Arthur Penn said that there was such a thing as a film culture in the Sixties. In the The polarized society of the Eighties all is chaos, conglomera- Sixties was more dramatic, which tion, fragmentation, and dispersal, or so it seems now. Once we lent itself to social issues reach 2000, the Eighties will undoubtedly be remembered as representable in dramatic terms. some sort of golden age. I hope sincerely that since the Sixties I There's a paucity ofsocial issues in have become open to more approaches and perspectives. I still get our current era. People are search- a great deal of pleasure from moviegoing, and that is all that mat- ing for some way to root films in ters in the final analysis. something serious. Fatal Attrac- tion and Rambo are absurd, car- Haskell Wexler toonish. Even comedies have very few social issues, and if they do, My work in the Sixties, wheth- they're black-and-white social er documentaries or features such comedies, fairy tales like Trading as Medium Cool, expressed areas Places or Beverly Hills Cop. of our culture and life which were I think I didn't do very good work after the Sixties. I was search- ignored by the conventional cine- ing for something to do but couldn't find it. I think I may have it ma of the time. Since the Sixties, here in this one [Penn arul Teller Get Killed]. It's a biting and fierce the system has learned how to co- comedy-about two comedian-magicians who play practical opt the revolutionary ideas which jokes on each other-which does engage in larger issues. It's not were fomenting by perverting just a series ofjokes. It's comic with a hard edge to it, resonances. them, by allowing people to think You might be able to extrapolate larger psychological issues for a they're saying something that's generation of people who grew up with a fascination with the Six- revolutionary. The entertainment ties. People who are in their thirties from an early age practically system has taken the exploitable experienced an assassination every coupie of years-not only po- elements, to try to make certain things seem socially relevant. But litical figures, but cultural ones like John Lennon-which had a they don't really get at it. There's no bite. telling effect on them. I've continued to seek unconventional subject matter. I ap- I'd like to hope we're retuming to the vigor and excitement-of proached John Sayles on Matewan because I knew the story and the films of the Sixties and Seventies (the Sixties continued well was interested in it. And when I'm working on a film, such as into the Seventies). From there on movies went to sleep. There Matewan or Colors, I admit I try to influence the director. were some stories I wanted to tell. I had a script about Attica that I In the next few years, as the political situation changes, films wanted to do for years. Finally someone did it on TV; it was pab- will also change. I'm hopeful. lum. No studio wanted to do it. Social issue movies will come back-if they make money. 61

Battle for Britain The Empire Strikes Back by Graham Fuller abroad. Moreover, as Julian Petley commented in The Listener (January The rain pours down; skinheads beat 21), five of the six films Stone lam- people up; there are race riots; there are basted \"had funding from Channel 4, drug fixes in squalid corners; there is which has played the major role in re- much explicit sex, a surprising amount of vitalizing the British industry today, it homosexual and sadistic; greed and and whose example is now being fol- violence abound; there is grim concrete lowed both by the BBe and certain lTV and much footage of ' 'urban decay\" ; on companies.\" Television, acknowl- and off there are voiceovers by Mrs. edged Petley, brought directors like Thatcher, Hitler, etc.-Professor Nor- Jarman a bigger audience than he could man Stone. ever achieve theatrically, and gave Frears and Richardson their directorial debuts. T his gauntlet was thrown down in political invective and social criticism N ostalgic for a British code and the January 10 Sunday Times , of the six offending films in the British creed that barely existed (except the Rupert Murdoch-owned intelligentsia's alienation to the Left in in the movies) and flawed on many mouthpiece of Britain's New Right. the Thirties. He longed for the lost technicalities, Stone's article was cor- It's been kicked about the muddy bat- world of the Ealing comedies and the rect on at least two counts: the shortage tlefield of the British \"quality\" press Boulting Brothers-\"a very innocent, of money available to the makers of the ever since. Invited by the paper's edi- decent place, where regardless of po- six films, though the British cinema's tor, Andrew Neil, to play movie critic liticalleanings, there is a sense of right- resurgence has been facilitated rather for a day, Stone, professor of modern eousness\"-and extolled the than hindered by its low budgets; and history at Oxford, fired a broadside on \"traditional\" (or safe, escapist, and es- their mutual distaste for the Thatcher what he considered a \"worthless and sentially fallacious) values of the few government's monetarist, Draconian insulting... farrago\" of \"six tawdry, recent British films he admired: A Pas- policies, and those peculiarly culture- ragged , rancidly provincial films\": sage to India, A Room with a View, and less stratas of society that have thrived Derek Jarman's The Last of England, Hope and Glory. On the other hand, a on them while an unemployable un- Lezli-An Barrett's Business As Usual film like Sammy and Rosie, commented derclass has been created in the pro- Ron Peck's Empire State, Peter Rich- Stone, \"for pointless sensationalism, ardson's Eat the Rich, and Stephen sloppy attitudinizing and general dis- cess. Frears and Hanif Kureishi's My Beau- gustingness deserves some sort of Stone's hate list could presumably tiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie prize. \" Get Laid. \"They are all very depress- include-not least because some har- ing, and are no doubt meant to be,\" de- Television, Stone contended, was to ness sex as a form of social defiance- clared Stone. blame for throwing British \"cinema on such films as Frears' Prick Up Your to the defensive\" and \"turning film- Ears, Alan Clarke's Rita, Sue and Bob According to Stone, \"Plots are des- makers into an ever smaller minority, Too, David Leland's Wish You Were ultory, messy, and in one case, non-ex- addressing a smaller and smaller audi- Here , Terry Jones' Personal Services, istent. Endings are melodramas of the ence. If you are in film today, you are Neil Jordan's Mona Lisa (respectively corpses-on-the-stage type, revealing competing with what you see as capi- written and co-written by Leland), and that the makers have either run out of talism at its most revolting and cruel: Chris Bernard's Letter to Brezhnev. Ear- money or, more likely, of ideas.... the Box,\" though, in fact, British the- marked, perhaps, for future Stone-ing, atrical admissions rose in 1987 for the or general Establishment opprobrium, \"Somehow, their visual world has fourth consecutive year (up some 4 mil- might be Phillip Saville's The Fruit Ma- been dominated by a left-wing ortho- lion from 1986's 72 million , according chine (a story of gangland killings and doxy; the done thing is to run down to Variety), while British films contin- teenage Liverpool \"rent boys\" on the Mrs. Thatcher, to assume that capital- ued to find appreciative ·audiences run , from Brezhnev writer Frank ism is parasitism, that the established Clarke) or John Crome's The Naked Cell order in this country is imperialist, rac- (about a woman held and maltreated in ist, profiteering, oppressive to women police captivity after one of her lovers and other minorities.\" is found dead), and especially four films unlikely to take a gung-ho ap- \"Through a Lens Darkly , \" as proach to the Falklands War, including Stone's article was headlined, was ac- For Queen and Country (co-written by companied by a sidebar of snide cap- Trix Worrell and director Martin Stell- sule reviews entitled \"Sick Scenes man, and starring Denzel Washington) from English Life.\" Stone rooted the 62

\"The done thing is to run down Mrs. Thatcher, to assume capitalism is parasitism, that the established order in this country is imperialist, racist, profiteering, and oppressive to women and other minorities. ' '-Norman Stone. and Resurrection (written by Martin Al- biguity and humor. sionistic film (but not his most Ien, directed by Paul Greengrass). \"Like Norman Stone and The Sun- original)-whose lack of narrative par- ticularly piqued the resolutely middle- Stone's view of polemical British day Times and Mrs. Thatcher. . .we brow Professor Stone-consists of a cinema (which apparently embarrassed should all be batting for Britain ,\" Ku- series of fragmentary 8mm images some of The Sunday Times' regulali film reishi continued in ironic vein. \"Every- (cost-effectively transferred through journalists) reeked of provocation, and one should be batting for Britain or video to 3Smm): a yo uth (Spencer HanifKureishi and DerekJarman were shut up and not say that Britain is a de- Leigh) stranded interminably in an in- among those provoked. \"Whenever a pressing place for millions of people, or ner-city wasteland; the di spossessed right-wing newspaper calls one of our that black people don ' t fight back underclass held at gunpoint on a dock- films 'sick,' Stephen and I know we against violence, prejudice and dis- side by a hooded SAS soldier; a war must be doing the right thing,\" Ku- crimination that cold-hearted and bride (Tilda Swinton) screaming in an- reishi wrote in the left-liberal Guardian wretched British whites inflict on them guish under an apocalyptic sky. An ul- five days later, but much of his reply every day.\" timately terrifying poetic allegory of was couched in terms of what at first Britain's spiritual ruination , in which glance looked like near-h ys teria: Given a voice in the following Sun- Jarman proves, like Tarkovsky, that \"England seems to have become a day Times, Jarman coneentrated on his even detritus and dereliction can pos- squalid, ugly and uncomfortable place. own role as a morally responsible , 46- sess a kind of visual beauty, The Last of For some reason I am starting to feel year-old artist, resenting what he took England patently lacks the comfy nos- that it is an intolerant, racist, homo- as Stone's implication that he was \"a talgic glow of a Hope and Glory. Its phobic, narrow-minded authoritarian salacious corrupter, steeped in para- most radical-and trite-sequence de- rathole run by vicious, suburban- noia. ... My cinema has tradition and picts an SAS assassin and a naked man minded, materialistic philis- history; it is not just a trite reflection of copulating on the Union Jack, and this tines. . . . \" the political divide. The decay that is the one that Stone singled out. permeates The Last of England is there Kureishi's Sammy and Rosie, more for all of us to see; it is in all our daily Jarman's film was released in the exhilarating than \"depressing\" in its lives, in our institutions and in our apocalyptic update of the racial ten- newspapers.\" He also laid the blame of U. K. the same week as Eat the Rich sions in My Beautiful Laundrette, sacri- the ever-present economic impover- fices focus and structure for its anti- ishment of British cinema on America. (October 22, 1987). In this broad com- Thatcher rhetoric, but still hi ts many of \"You will find that most commercial edy, a half-caste waiter of indetermi- its targets. Where Stone erred in his British production companies are run nate sex (Lanah Pellay) is fired from judgment of Kureishi's vision is in the by absentees, far away in Hollywood , Bastards, an upper-crust London res- failure to recognize that Kureishi is as presenting a heavily censored view of taurant, leads a people's revolution , disenchanted with the Thatcherite their country, all Beefeaters and hol- and returns as the manager of the joint, Asian entrepreneurs in his films as with lyhocks, feeding illusions of stability in serving up its Sloane Ranger and yup- the paternalist oppressors who have an unstable world... .I will leave pie clientele on the menu. It's actually taught them; as affectionate and skep- Stone to muddle the past with the pres- one of the least incisive satires from the tical toward the smug, sexually liber- ent and take some solace that I know of Comic Strip (natural inheritors of the ated and politically correct Rosie no artist of caliber who celebrates his Monty Python TV mantle), and as a cri- (Frances Barber) as he is toward Rafi bizarre dream world.\" tique of Thatcherite Britain it should (Shashi Kapoor), the corrupt, murder- be taken with a pinch of salt. While ous liberator of Pakistan from Western There are no Beefeaters, holly- Professor Stone didn't like it, Vincent imperialism. In the interests of fair- hocks, or any such emblems of Brit- Canby did. ness, Kureishi even finds some sym- ain's glorious historical or suburban pathy for the True Blue Tory Alice heritages in Jarman's pessimistic The T he Sunday Times' campaign against (Claire Bloom). \"You could make Last of England (which takes its title the British intelligentsia had be- grim, realistic films about gay people, from a Pre-Raphaelite painting); it in- gun in an editorial on September 20, black people, unemployment and rac- cludes instead home-movie reminis- 1987, that compared its political bank- ism in Britain,\" he says, \"but the age cences of Jarman's mother, who died ruptcy with that of the American Re- is different. Whatwe need is irony, am- slowly of cancer for 18 years. Other- publican Party during the Sixties. wise, his most personal and impres- Here, too , it took its first shots against Stone's view ofpolemical British cinema reeked ofprovocation, and Banif Kureishi and Derek Jarman were among those provoked. \"Whenever a right-wing newspaper calls one ofourfilms 'sick', we know we must be doing the right thing, \" replied Kureishi. 63

,'] will leave Stone to muddle the past with the present and take some solace that] know ofno artist ofcaliber who celebrates his bizarre dream world. ' ,-Derek Jarman \"the more serious output of the British heroine would be better off in the So- working class, now as in the past, re- film industry:\" viet Union than unemployed in Liv- sides in organized labor and united erpool. Most low-budget British films community. Being so far removed from \"In My Beautiful Laundrette, for ex- these days have an agitprop purpose. the mainstream of British society has ample, the plight of the white working The latest, Business As Usual, en- made our intelligentsia prone to fan- class is even more desperate than that thused Mr. Philip French, the film tasy. \" of the Asian community\"-an ironic critic of The Observer, unequivocally racist pang-\"while the implication in states that the best hope for the British Fantasy, or the attenuated \"aspira- Letter to Brezhnev is that the teenage tions of plain folk,\" is what The Sunday Times believes the intellectual elite is Samuel French's \"so out of kilter\" with. French's edi- torial seemed to be applauding the di- T HEATRE&FILM visiveness in British life in the BOOKSHOPS Eighties, a concomitant of Mrs. PLAYS and BOOKS on the Thatcher's suppression of the unions, MOTION PICTURE INDUSTRY which Business As Usual-set, like Brezhnev, on depressed Merseyside- sendfor a copy ofour seeks to redress in very human terms. FILM BOOK CATALOGUE containing A boutique's commonsensical manager Business ofFilm • Directories • Screenwriting (Glenda Jackson), fired after defend- Screenplays • Directing • Cinematography ing an employee (Cathy Tyson) who Biographies & Studies ofDirectors • Editing had been sexually harassed by the Lighting • Animation • SpecialEffects boorish, nouveau riche area manager (Eamon Boland), is reluctantly drawn Makeup • Acting • more into a union campaign, with the help of the hard-Left Militant Tendency, to Order by have her reinstated. The film is a PHONE: rough-round-the-edges docudrama, but one infused with an invigorating (800) 8-ACT NOW (US) underdog voice, which is apparently (800) 7-ACT NOW (Calif) anathema to the Thatcherite press. MAIL: The Left-baiting continued in The Sunday Times on November 29, when 7623 Sunset Blvd. columnist Brian Walden (actually cit- Hollywood, California ing Gore Vidal's conspiracy theories rather than British movies) reempha- 90046 sized the \"remorseless deterioration\" VISA • Me • AMEX between \"popular sentiment\" and \"the preoccupations of many intellec- When in Los Angeles visit our tuals in our society.\" Accordingly, \"A 2 locations large proportion of the intelligentsia has taken up permanent residence in 7623 Sunset Blvd. the cave of Adullam, from which it Hollywood,California 90046 transmits messages as dotty as they are (213) 876-0570 VICIOUS. \" Mon.- Fri. 10:00-6:00 Sat. 11 :00-5:00 Finally, once it had .Jet Professor Stone loose on the unsuspecting world 11963 Ventura Blvd of film criticism, The Sunday Times Studio City, California 91604 wasn't about to let Hanif Kureishi get away with his warnings of incipient to- (818) 762-0535 talitarianism. On January 24, it de- fended Stone's accusation that Mon. -Fri. 11:00-10:00 Britain's filmmakers were portraying Sat. 11 :00-5:00 Sun.12:00-5:00 the country \"as a cesspit of decay and intolerance,\" and suggested that \"by coming out of the political closet, Mr. Kureishi, of course, makes Professor Stone's point for him.\" By the same to- 64

\"] am not an expert in filmmaking, \" Stone admits, but it is easy to understand why he uses different rules to appreciate films he likes and doesn't like. ken, The Sunday Times was justifying The heavily armed SAS forces in The (who specialized in \"Paki bashing\"). Kureishi's words with its own snip- Last ofEngland now carry the grim res- Even real incidents of the type Df up- ing-nothing illustrated that \"intoler- onance of the SAS shooting of three un- per-class yobbishness, if not cannibal- ance\" more than Fleet Street's armed IRA terrorists in Gibraltar in ism, shown in Eat the Rich are apoplectic reaction to a handful of mov- May. My Beautiful Laundrette is chill- frequently served up for the delecta- ies (and to their defenders), or its role ingly real in Roshan Seth's recollection tion of the predominan t1y working- as self-appointed guardian of the na- of the marches in the early Eighties, of class readership of Britain's top-selling tion's moral welfare and populist head theneo-Nazi National Front skinheads newspaper, The Sun, itself a symbol of boy. A re these six films reliable mirrors The Vision of The Acoustic Mirror for England, or self-pitying, alarmist, and sensationalist misery? It's Robert Flaherty The Female Voice in significant that Stone suspends disbe- Psychoanalysis and Cinema lief while praising the blue-remem- The Artist as Myth and Filmmaker bered hills ofHope and Glory et aI., but By Kaja Silverman insists on applying a literalist critique By Richard Barsam to films essaying the unpalatable face \". . . Barsam provides a fresh and illuminating \"An original work likely to have significant im· of contemporary Britain-no matter critical assessment of this influential film· pact on all those with an interest in the vibrant that it is depicted farcically in Eat the maker.\" -Publishers Weekly Intersection of feminism, film theory, and Rich, with dark romanticism in The Last cloth $27.50 paper $10.95 psychoanalysis .. .\" -Naomi Schor ofEngland, excoriating satire in Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, skewed realism in Eric Rohmer cloth $37.50 paper $12.50 My BeautifulLaundrette and Business As Usual, or like an X-rated cartoon in Em- Realist and Moralist Heretical Empiricism pire State. \"I am not an expert in film- making,\" Stone admits, but it is easy to By C. G. Crisp By Pier Paolo Pasolini understand why he uses different rules Edited by louise K. Barnett to appreciate films he likes and doesn't Here, for the first time in English, is a compre· Translated by Ben lawton like. hensive analysis of Eric Rohmer's work. Crisp and louise K. Barnett thoroughly examines Rohmer's films, perform· None of the six is social realism, al- ing structuralist, psychoanalytical, and Pasolini, writer, filmmaker, and cultural figure, though Business As Usual has elements ideological analyses of each. remains a major force in the world of Italian of socialist realism. They are all ficti- cloth $29.95 paper $1l.50 and European letters. With the translation of tious, heightened visions of city life Empirismo Eretieo, Pasolini's enormously centering on individual struggles and Eros plus Massacre important theories become available in English pain, even the non-narrative The Last of for the first time. England. In the latter and in Sammy and An Introduction to theJapanese Rosie Get Laid, the inner-city waste- New Wave Cinema $37.50 lands haven't, however, been faked by an art director. And if some of these By David Desser Screening the Holocaust films offer only inner truths, elements The decade of the 1960s encompassed a \"New of others are based on actual events. Wave\" of films whose makers were rebels, Cinema's Images oj the Unimaginable The police killing of the black woman challenging cinematic traditions and the cui· at the start of Sammy and Rosie is based ture at large. Eros plus Massacre is the first By lIan Avisar on the real-life killing ofCherry Groce; major study devoted to the examination and the race riots in that film echo the race explanation of these New Wave films in Japan. Filmmakers have struggled with the task of riots in London, Liverpool, and Bristol cloth $40.00 . paper $12.95 depicting the atrocities of the Holocaust-the in 1982. And Lezli-An Barrett based unlma~inable Nazi brutalities and the victims' Business As Usual on the true story of incredible suffering. This study examines how Audrey White, unfairly dismissed in cinematic art meets the challenge of dealing 1983 from the Liverpool clothes fac- with the extraordinary nature of the Holocaust. tory, where she worked as an overseer, after trying to protect some of her girls cloth $35.00 paper $12.50 from sexual harassment. (Striking min- ers supported the picket lines outside At bookstores, or order from the factory, and Ms. White won her case.) INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS TENTH AND MORTON STREETS, BLOOMINGTON, IN 47405 • 812-335-6804 Major credit cards accepted 65

THE STUFF THAT DREAMS ARE MADE OF Nobody in the film or IV industry worth his or \"THE MALTESE FALCON\" ~ her salt is making films celebrating the lies of The Ultimate Conversation the past or the status qUO. Piece. This collectors sculpture is 10\" H. cast in Britain's spiritual malaise. There is, as Cinema' 88, hosted by Barry Norman, glossy lead black they say, no smoke without fire. and the right-wing Daily Telegraph hydrocal. $45.00 PPD or weighed in with an editorial on Feb- Collectors Edition Bronze Unfortunately, Hanif Kureishi ruary 28 that, by way of attacking Ku- $250.00 PPD. 2 to 4 paints a more accurate picture than reishi, got to the real nub of the issue: Wk. Del. Satisfaction Professor Stone ofa Britain where rapid \"To them [the opposition parties, Guaranteed Ck., Mo. to. economic revival has been accom- some academics, and some sections of panied by a drastic decline in moral the media], a number of recent events ~ standards, as reflected in those films have given credence to the notion that and in the most popular home-grown our freedoms are melting away before CLIFTON J . SHEELY CO. TV programs (like the soaps East End- our eyes, and that we are entering a po 2569 Mercerville , NJ 08619 ers, Coronation Street, and Brookside, new era of censorship, repression and which often tackle issues like racism centralization....Government which .uw and unemployment). The Conserva- has done so much for individual liberty tive government's fiscal policies, and socially and economically must be budget the leader's personal example, have above suspicion of wishing to curb it in- features encouraged the triumph of the individ- tellectually. \" • Shorts ual will in modern Britain to the det- riment of community: Private gain , Must it really? Far more was clearly • Documentaries materialism, racism, homophobia, and at stake than the critical fate of six Brit- sexism frequently set the tone in the ish movies, although their vilification 35mm , workplace, in the streets, in the pubs, had become symptomatic of not only 16mm/ Super 16. in front of the TV. Urban crime is surg- the right-wing press' sustained at- lighting mg. tempts to marginalize the Left (in truth, more politically than intellec- and Britain in Eighties films will be re- tually bankrupt) but also of the climate sound membered not for the City's Big Bang of censorship that has been stifling the packages financial deregulation and the rise in basic democratic freedoms of thought the standard of living, but for the Falk- and information. throughout Mrs. competitive lands War, the miners' strike, the Hun- Thatcher's current term. That the in- rates gerford massacre, cruise missiles, violable right of these filmmakers- escalating violence in Northern Ire- Britain's \"Hollywood\" Six-to express 212/925-97?J land, and appalling unemployment. their opinions was being linked, in Earlier films, such as Richard Eyre's newspaper editorials, with the Spy- The Ploughman's Lunch and David Le- catcher, Stalker, and Zircon debacles land's Made in Britain quartet for Cen- revealed that through 1987-88, the par- tral TV, had also addressed Britain's terminal state, although no manifesto anoia resided with the political Estab- for an anti-Thatcher film movement lishment rather than with the artists. has ever existed. However, as Jarman and Frears averred, nobody in the film In each of these three cases , the Brit- or TV industry worth his or her salt is ish government wielded civil law in a manner that made official secrecy the making films celebrating the lies of the jackboot of its power. Special Branch past or the status quo-not that there confiscated all tapes of left-wing jour- nalist Duncan Campbell's BBC series ===============-1 are really any urgent films to be made Secret Society, which investigated clan- about the selling ofcouncil houses (like destine government activity (including Marilyn, \"Bogey\", Gable and those housing project hellholes in Rita , an $800 million expenditure on the \"Zircon\" spy satellite). Injunctions Liz are just a small sample of Sue and Bob Too) or about the self-sat- were brought against The Guardian, The Observer, and The Sunday Times it- names from the infinite isfied suburban soul of the commuter self to prevent them from publishing a review of ex-agent Peter Wright's book supply of photographs class. Spycatcher (banned in the U.K.), dVailable to collect. We also which alleged that former MIS chief Sir Roger Hollis had been a Soviet spy and have a wide Variety of T he Sunday Times, given its due, that MIS was implicated in a plot to de- posters. Now you can own published a selection of readers' stroy Harold Wilson's Labour govern- your own piece of letters, all but one of them (and it Hollywood. Send S2.00 for wasn't Stephen Frears') at odds with our illustrated Catalogue with free poster insert to: Stone, and admitted that its mailbag Hollywood Collectibles, P.O. Box 1498, Dept. ran 10-1 against him. But by now everyone was entering the fray. Stone FCII, Rego Parte, NY 11374. reiterated his opinions on BBC-TV'S ment. This January, the decision was 66

made not to prosecute members of the with the avant-garde) as a result of AVAILABLE Royal Ulster Constabulary for six kill- \"finding it virtually impossible to pen- ON VIDEO ings in Northern Ireland in 1982. This etrate the film industry on a profes- followed retired Deputy Chief Con- sional, populist level until Channel 4 Rick Schmidt is the Marley's Ghost of modern stable Stalker's revelation that he had came along and offered us some light at been taken off the case at the crucial the end of the tunnel.\" As for Stone, movie makers. -Lowell Darling moment, and his report suppressed . she felt he simply \"didn't like the po- litical message of Business As Usual As with Rick Schmidt's earlier low·budget features (A Two more events this May stoked [ironically financed by Cannon]. But I MAN, A WOMAN, AND A KILLER, 1988-THE RE- the fire. Thames Television's docu- don't see why I have to be labeled an MAKE, EMERALD CITIES) , his fourth film , MORGAN'S mentary Death on the Rock, which the ardent Leftie because I made this CAKE, also engages the viewer by capturing real government argued was an attempt to movie. The films he cited, like the Eal- moments of human emotion , reality as it intersects with prejudice the inquest into the Gibraltar ing comedies, actually ridiculed the the illusion of moviemaking . The film begins with SAS killings , fueled speculation about Establishment whenever they could, Morgan (played by Morgan Schmidt-Feng) explaining the extent of the powers-perhaps to and even Passport to Pimlico--which that his mom named him after the famous British black preview programs and exert prior re- was an important influence on my comedy MORGAN, and muses that he wishes life was straint-likely to be granted to the new film-would cause an outrage today if, more like that movie, just \"unserious and funny.\" What government watchdog committee, the for example, Stephen Frears remade it follows is such an unending series of problems confron- Broadcasting Standards Council. with a Sammy and Rosie-type aesthetic. ting Morgan that the full impact rings of comic absurdity. Through this body, the broadcasting of His problems include a love affair, his divorced parents, imported U.S. feature films and TV se- \"But I didn't consider I was making draft registration ,car payments, economics which force ries showing sex and violence will re- a depressing film. Business As Usual him to share a small office where his father must sleep ceive particularly heavy scru tiny, doesn't herald the trade union as a new on top of a desk. While not a remake of MORGAN, though it seems as if the political con- Jerusalem-it's about an individual's MORGAN'SCAKE pays acertain homage to the earlier tent of indigenous British movies is al- fight through life, and as far as I'm con- film with its ribald humor, most notably in atour-de-force ready being unofficially vetted by the cerned it has a positive image.\" performance by Willie Boy Walker as Morgan's dad, who media pundits. (Sammy and Rosie Get describes in outrageous detail how he got out of the draft Laid was released shortly after Profes- Professor Stone couldn't attend the by acting like a crazy man . Like many kids in America, sor Stone's \"preview.\") discussion , but The Sunday Times was Morgan is basically cut adrift from any real and lasting represented , in the blue corner, by me- support system , and must quickly learn to fend for him- Meanwhile, the passing of the Local dia editor Jonathan Miller: \"If you de- self. MORGAN'S CAKE, while a film about teenagers, Government Act, with its Clause 28 construct what Norman wrote, you find is not at all like its \"Breakfast Club\" Hollywood counter- preventing local councils from inten- two basic complaints. He selected parts. This film deals with the mysteries of growing up tionally promoting homosexuality, the- these six films because he felt they il- as told by the real teenagers themselves. oretically outlawed the subsidized lustrated the inability of certain British production , distribution, or exhibition film directors to tell a story properly. MORGAN'S CAKE is now available for 16mm screen- of any films with gay content. This And I would agree with him that Amer- ings with director Rick Schmidt in person . Video copies would prevent, for example, council- ican films are much better at telling sto- may be rentedlpurchased at the following stores: backed arts organizations and colleges ries, because it has a tradition of from handling five of the six movies promoting that ability to the whole • • ••••• FRONT ROW VIDEO (Berkeley) ••••••• Norman Stone attacked, and Jarman world. •••••••• PALMER'S VIDEO (Berkeley) •••••••• and Peck's other films; Merchant-Ivo- •• • •••• • ••• VIDEOPHILE (Seattle) ••••••••••• ry'sMaurice (as well as E. M. Forster's \"Secondly, we-at what is thought books); Mona Lisa (with its lesbian sub- of as the right-wing press-are increas- ••• • ••• • •• VIDIOTS (Santa Monica) •••••••••• plot); Prick Up Your Ears (and Joe Or- ingly annoyed at the inability of the ••••••••••• CAPTAIN VIDEO (S.F.) ••••••••••• ton's plays); and Ken Russell's The British intelligentsia of the Left to Music Lovers and Salome's Last Dance come up with any arguments at all. We Or purchase your VHS/BETA cassettes (please specify) (along with Tchaikovsky's music and feel it's given up thinking, spouts for $49.95 plus $3 per copy for shippingl handling. Wilde's writings). nothing but rhetoric, and hasn't come up with any kind of response to the Please send LIGHT VIDEO T he fight for the soul of British cin- other person who's not in the room to- money order ema is, of course, a largely hypo- night-Margaret Thatcher. The kind payable to Fa Box 342 thetical one. Its freedom to make rude of rage that is manifested in films like noises about the way the country is Sammy and Rosie Get Laid is arguably PT Richmond, being run--or any kind of noise at all- not a very constructive way of count- depends on its uncertain ability to sur- ering Thatcherism-and it betrays the (415J 235-7466 CA. 94801 vive financially, although at the mo- country... by focusing on a narrow, ment the signs are good. Whenever highly political view of England that is British films are agonized over how- out of touch with reality. These films ever, the talk will turn to money before represent the whingeing of the Left, art, which is what occurred at the pub- because it has no alternatives to the lic seminar on The Norman Stone Af- government that's in power. \" fair at the Everyman Cinema in London on April 19. Bordering on the meretricious , Em- pire State , written by director Ron Peck Among the panelists, Lezli-An Bar- with Mark Ayres, is surely the least de- rett recognized her alignment with a fensible of the pilloried six, and per- counterculture cinema (like Jarman's haps illustrates their point. Set and shot in the London Docklands, its un- 67

The passing ofthe Local Government Act, with its Section 28 preventing local councils from intentionally promoting honwsexuality, theoretically outlawed the subsidized production, distribution or exhibition ofany films with gay content. remitting cynicism is as powerful an ar- out well-made films, in black and against councils defying it. gument for the re-Blitzing of that site white, which.. . launched some of the While subsidized theaters and other of capitalist redevelopment as Little participants on the road to Holly- Dorrit (also made there) is a reason for wood.\" It would be a tragedy if, at the tax-funded arts are thereby banned its continued prosperity. An..East End moment of its regeneration, the cur- from supporting gay rights, the main Nashville filtered through film noir, it rent British cinema's iconoclastic and target of the clause (an amendment goes wildly astray, since the polyglot socially alert artists were banished to proposed by three Conservative cast includes not one likable character, the United States by the slow dissolve \"backbench\" MPs to the original bill, unless you count a seedy Time Out- of civil liberties in Britain and the pop- which is mainly concerned with the in- style reporter investigating an inex- ulist carpings of academics, to become troduction of a poll tax to replace the plicable gangland racket and the tipsy another colony-in-exile, the cinematic current householders' \"rates\" system) bimbo he takes up with. Otherwise, is the outlawing of \"the teaching in the gel of cocksure \"rent boy, \" naive last of England. ® any state-maintained school of the ac- prot<~ge , sadomasochistic American ceptability of homosexuality as a pre- billionaire, and various hoods, tarts, Stephen Frears and Hanif Kureishi. tended family relationship.\" yuppies , and no-hopers in a convoluted plot is as unsavory as it is incoherent. 28 Up: SEXUAL APARTHEID The Giause has been controversial This is a cynical and sordid pastiche of since it was introduced in December modern London , but any socio-politi- IN BRITAIN 1987, the key areas of debate being the cal message is nullified by hyperbolic problem of interpreting a word as neb- nastiness and terrible acting. If a local council community center ulous as \"promoting,\" and the impli- in Britain wished to sponsor screenings cation that it condemns Britain's Perhaps this makes the Stone dis- of Lianna, An Early Frost, Parting homosexual community as an auto- course sound more reasonable than it Glances, and Kiss o/the Spider Woman, matic underclass. It is ostensibly a legal actually is. Despite his subsequent dis- theoretically it would not now be al- reaction from Mrs. Thatcher's govern- avowals that his article was politically lowed to do so. Section 28 of the Local ment to what it regards as wasteful motivated, what he objects to-like Government Act, made law on May 24, public spending, in schools and by the rest of the Right-are any artistic 1988, prohibits local authorities from counseling and support groups, on pro- expressions of anti-Thatcherism. the intentional promotion of homosex- gay propaganda-particularly by lib- These six films are proudly anti- uality, and would result in litigation eral (or \"loony left,\" as the right-wing Thatcher, and they therefore reflect tabloid press would have it) London what millions of Britons think, for Mrs. borough councils such as Haringey and Thatcher's power is based not on pop- Brent. ularity but on her unyielding leader- ship and the lack ofa united opposition Section 28, though , is full of legal party. loopholes. Tory MPs were incensed with an Environment Department cir- As for British films and TV, if not yet cular admitting that, technically, it for society at large, 1984 may finally does not affect teachers or school gov- have arrived--only four years late. In ernors, who, since the Education (No. the Sixties and early Seventies, the rig- 2) Act of 1986, are responsible for sex orous social realism of TV docudrama education in Britain-not local coun- directors like Peter Watkins and Ken cils. While the Education Act itself Loach were the focus for suppression rules against the advocating of homo- in the corridors of power. As the dis- sexual behavior as \"the norm,\" or the enfranchised British Left struggles for encouragement of \"homosexual exper- air in the late Eighties, and the Right imentation by pupils,\" it does not pre- seeks to gain the middle ground, the vent teachers frm helping pupils new terrain for government meddling overcome gay prejudice. in the entertainment media has shifted to encompass the hyper-real cinema of Britain's artistic, theatrical, and film the decade' s second film industry ren- communities have vociferously op- aissance, because it has dared to target posed Section 28, fearful not only of the social injustices of Mrs. Thatcher's the legalizing ofsuch prejudice but also sacrosanct \"permanent revolution.\" of widespread censorship. Several commentators have already compared Professor Stone's tirade harped back this climate of clampdown to the one to a time when \"British cinema turned that exists in South Africa; others have likened it to Nazi Germany. -GF. 68

Israel's Black Box Late Summer Blues. demonstrated Jewish-Arab prison co- an attempt to build a utopjan society. existence, and Renen Schorr's Late And this film was not made in order to by Dan Yakir Summer Blues depicted the draftees ex- look back nostalgically, but to examine perience circa 1970. oursel ves today, to check out our I srael is celebrating its 40th anni- dream through those revolutionaries. versary this year, but its filmmak- Normally attuned to radio and T V In a sense, it was an attempt to discover ers aren' t rejoicing. Seldom a breed news bulletins, Israelis attend to new the Black Box of our society.\" . to laud the status quo or cast a self-sat- cinema because it envisions solutions isfied glance at the human landscape that transcend the impasse regarding The film focuses on the fine line be- around them, they have become the West Bank and Gaza that reigns in tween fanaticism and idealistic com- spokesmen for social and political mod- the Knesset. In between the Labor/ mitment in its vision of a commune eration at a time of polarization and Peace Now left and the Likkud/Gush that strives to suppress individualism confrontation. Eschewing the filmed Enumin right lies the only solution to in the interest of true collectivism . essay that preaches to the converted , Israel's woes---compromise-and sev- Kell y McGillis is Anda , a Viennese they offer politicized personal stories eral new movies try to stress that. Al- doctor who denies her passion for Mar- relevant to a mass audience. though filmmakers Yehuda (\"Judd\" ) cus (John Shea), a musician , in the Ne'eman in Fellow Travellers , and Nis- name of group spirit. Like the rest of While much popular commercial sim Dayan in On a Narrow Bridge, try the group, she initially rejects the pres- cinema can only reflect the tensions in to foreground sympathetic Palestinian ence of Amnon (Arnon Zadok), a dark- Israeli society indirectly-for example, characters, Israelis rejected the films at skinned Palestine-born Jew , who as- the antiquated bourekas comedies that the boxoffice-if not the concept. sists the settlers in coping with their thrive on ethnic contradictiQns-in- hostile environment, and the neigh- creasingly films are attempting to tac- U ri Barbash's new film, Unsettled boring Arabs , who resent their pres- kle Israel's problems head-on. The Land, is about the exodus of Eu- ence though the film pre sents the fifth annual Israel Film Festival in New ropean Jews to Palestine-eretz Is- Zionists as having paid for the land. York and Los Angeles offered a cross rael-in 1919. \"It's the most exciting, The Arabic-looking Zadok is given a section of both strands of Israeli cin- romantic period in our history,\" ex- counterpart in a European-looking, ema. Large domestic audiences con- plains the 42-year-old director. \"Pal- blue-eyed moderate Arab who advo- nected with Eli Cohen's Ricochets, a estine in 1919 was our Wild West, cates coexistence with the Jews-and military training film preparing soldiers where everything was possible. It is murdered by his tribe for it-a com- for southern Lebanon. Uri · Barbash's wasn't just the conquest of the land , plicated film strategy that both reverses Beyond the Walls, nominated for an fighting against natural forces and ene- racial stereotype as it reinforces an as- Academy Award as Best Foreign Film, mies that tried to eliminate you. It was sociation between diplomacy and fair- 69

ment,)) Sharon says, \"which doesn't understand you can't be a conqueror forever. It's the war, the outcome of such policy, that I criticize.\" The filmmaker became a minor ce- lebrity via Eli Cohen's documentary about his ordeal, To Stand on Your Feet, which followed a year in the life of a paraplegic, played by Sharon, trying to rehabilitate himself. \"It conveyed the message that all was well and that life could go on,\" says Sharon. \"I felt that if everybody was leaving the theater so satisfied, something must have gone wrong, and so I decided to make my film. This is a taboo subject, but our so- ciety must recognize the destructive impact of the reality we live in.\" Unsettled Land. wounded in my spine, which paralyzed R enen Schorr was a 17 V2-year-old in both my legs, and the other two be- 1970, when the War of Attrition ness. came shell-shocked. I could have made (1969-70) raised the specter of the draft \"Many Jews around the world are a film about exactly what had hap- for his generation. Late Summer Blues is pened to me, but this would have been Schorr's reminiscence of those days- still stuck on Exodus and think of the I Don't Give a Damn,\" Shmuel Imber- a joyous, funny-sad coming of age Jew as Paul Newman,\" explains Bar- man's recent film about a similar sub- piece that hasn't lost its relevance even bash. \"But 60 percent of the people in ject. \"The more I studied my subject, though it's deeply rooted in a late Six- Israel are dark-skinned.)) Ultimately the more I realized that I was talking ties anti-draft, anti-establishment cul- the film's Ashkenazi settlers fail to co- about a phenomenon affecting all sol- ture. \"It's a sort oflsraeli Hair,\" muses exist and stumble into confrontation diers-indeed, the entire society.\" Schorr, 36, \"but it's still up-to-date, because of their ideological tunnel-vi- because it's a state under siege and sion. Barbash sees the film's moderate Shell Shock is the first film to deal people still get drafted.\" Sephardic Jews as thwarted potential with the Yom Kippur War trauma, and mediators in this conflict, and he de- so was met with ambivalence. While The picture is divided into four cries the left's tendency to equate the the Ministry of Defense actually in- chapters, corresponding to four char- Sephardics with extremism, even vested in the film , as did the IDF (Israel acters, and is in the style of a home though the Likkud does enjoy their Defense Forces), which also allowed movie as if shot by bne of them (named vote: \"They respond to nationalism, the use of its facilities, both later pres- Fellini), a diabetic aspiring filmmaker, but this isn't the fanaticism of Ariel sured the director to change his sub- whose misfit cynicism pervades the Sharon or Meir Kahane. They aren't ject. The premiere was staged by the film. The other three include a virginal die-hard nationalists and they'll Ministry of Defense, but the minister innocent, an anti-war activist, and a change when their economic condi- himself didn't show up. musician torn between his career and a tions change. \" sense of duty-a dilemma of the same Unlike Judd Ne'eman's Paratroop- order as that facing the pioneers in Un- , ' W a r is the most central thing in ers, which showed the breakdown and settled Lady. my life; I've 'fought four of suicide of a young soldier who couldn't cope with his tough task, Sharon's Schorr's loosely structured musical them,\" says Yoel Sharon, 39, whose di- movie isn't critical of the military per format, sprinkled with teen humor, rectorial debut, Shell Shock, is an in- se. Where Paratroopers lambasts mili- combines non-professional actors with tensely emotional study of two shell- tary rigidity and harshness, Shell Shock cinema verite to achieve home movie shocked soldiers. stresses the military's camaraderie. But simplicity. Embraced by both critics both films question an institution that, and audiences-with not a squeak of \"During the Yom Kippur War, I re- for years, was sacrosanct-until the in- protest from the right-the picture turned from the London Film School vasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the Ie- quickly became a cult hit, with audi- to assume command over a paratrooper cent riots. ences memorizing its dialogue and unit,\" recalls Sharon, \"and in the last day of the war, in the city of Suez, an \"The problem is in the govern- songs. Egyptian ambush eradicated the unit. It took American cinema years to Only three of us survived: I was badly start coping with the Vietnam War di- rectly, and the French didn't start mak- ing films about Algeria (with the exception of Jean-Luc Godard's Le Pe- tit Soldat) for many years. In Israel, with its small, funds-starved industry, these filmmakers have already man- aged to make a dent in the nation's col- lective subconscious. 1!9 70

Landis' Final Cut by Gregg J(jlday T here's nothing that Hollywood Landis: an accident waiting to happen. enjoys more than a good back- stage scandal. If, during the community has drawn the line. When to spring to the immediate defense of course of the increasingly overbearing news of the July 23, 1983 pre-dawn hel- the movie's hot-headed young direc- Eighties, the movies themselves be- icopter crash, which took the lives of tor, John Landis-whose hyperactive came ever louder, cruder and more ob- actor Vic Morrow and two Asian-born cockiness had already marked him as vious, true drama-full of colorfully children, Renee Chen and Myca Le, an accident simply waiting to hap- idiosyncratic protagonists, compli- first spread throughout the industry, pen--condemnation was eq uall y cated, baroque plotting, and satisfy- there was a palpable shiver of guilt- muted. ingly full-blooded conflict-seemed to stricken horror. For every onlooker As scandals go, it cut too close to the flourish only off-camera and behind the who wondered aloud what those poor bone, and it just wouldn ' t go away. scenes. The 1978 David Begelman kids were doing there in the first place, Five years later, after protracted inves- check-forging imbroglio , the 1980 there was somebody else, quietly mut- tigations, hearings and a nine-month Heaven's Gate debacle, the 1982 John tering to himself, \"There but for the trial , all played out in the press in ex- Belushi overdose, all gave rise to a new grace of God ... \" If few were willing cruciating detail, Landis and four of his genre of Hollywood literature-the You-Are-There, insider-account of ex- cess-gone-awry. David McClintick's Indecent Expo- sure, Steven Bach's Final Cut, and Bob Woodward's Wired all proved juicy page-turners, their purloined galleys eagerly consumed by Hollywood insi- ders even beore they hit the best-seller lists. For all their moral tub-thumping, McClintick and Bach offered up richly entertaining comedies of errors in which their mixed-up moguls and driven directors, bouncing back from the brink of defeat like indestructible cartoon characters, ultimately pick themselves up, dust themselves off and go back about their profligate ca- reers. And even if Woodward's Wired-by far, the most vilified of the trio-----<:ould not be set down so lightly, given the tragic overtones of its anti- hero's premature demise, it neverthe- less confirmed the comedian's legend, for at least the self-destructive Belushi was spared the indignity of the slow, creative death suffered by his fellow SNL alumni in such tepid comic vehi- cles as Spies Like Us , Funny Farm, and The Great Outdoors. Hollywood's taste for scandal does have its limits, however, and in the shockingly sad case of the notorious Twilight Zone accident, the insular film 71

\"/ can count on less than one hand the number ofstudio executives who have any idea what it would take to get the shot that .~ John was trying to get that night.\" ~ crew were all acquitted of charges of in- Vic Mo\"ow in Twilight Zone: The Movie. tives, who did have initial script ap- voluntary manslaughter. But that said proval, made one suggestion that was more about the ineptly overbearing was set up as an independent produc- to put the whole fatal enterprise into prosecution than their own moral culp- tion, allowing Warners to shave off motion. Concerned that Landis' seg- ability. Having adopted a few new some of its overhead costs, while also ment, the tale of a barroom bigot, pur- safety policies in an effort to clean up ensuring that the filmmakers could go sued by SS Troops, the Klan, and its own act, Hollywood was ready to off and make their movie, relatively American G.I.s in Vietnam, lacked a consign the whole tragedy to uneasy free of meddling executive overseers. moralistically upbeat conclusion, they memory. In fact, Spielberg and Landis remained urged Landis to make his bigot more housed at their production offices at \"sympathetic.\" Serling, whose own As a result, the arrival of Outrageous Universal. Although Warner execu- liberal humanism was far too acerbic for Conduct: Art, Ego and The ''Twilight tives reviewed daily call sheets and such easy bromides, might well have Zone\" Case (Arbor House, $18.95), a countersigned checks, they were re- objected, but Landis readily agreed to thoughtfully sober reconstruction of moved from much of the daily deci- an eleventh-hour redemption and spun the accident and consequent trial, by sion-making surrounding the movie, out a final scene in which the bigot Hollywood chroniclers Stephen Farber which was handled instead by Spiel- would rescue two Vietnamese orphans and Marc Green, has not been greeted berg lieutenant, Frank Marshall, serv- amid a spectacularly exploding village. with any of the titillated excitement ing as executive producer for all four The executives never asked how ex- that usually surrounds such tell-all segments of the film, and, in Landis' actly he planned to film the scene, but, tomes. \"What more is there to say case, his own associate producer, as Mark Rosenberg, a former Warner about that case?\" is the general reac- George Folsey. By turning the produc- executive, tells Farber and Green, \"In tion I've encountered when recom- tion over to the filmmakers, Warners both accusation and defense of studio mending the book to friends who might have set itself up for the sort of executives, including myself, I can usually descend upon the latest bits of directorial excess that had infected ear- .count on less than one hand the num- Hollywood gossip with undisguised lier Spielberg/Landis efforts like 1941 ber of studio executives who have any delight. And, in fact, the book doesn't afld The Blue& Brothers, but t-He tw.o d~­ idea what it would take to get the shot offer up a smoking gun in the form of rectors, in an apparent effort to dem- that John was trying to get that night. I previously undisclosed revelations. onstrate their fiscal responsibility, accuse almost all studio executives of But what it does offer is far more tell- were determined to shoot the Twilight knowing next to nothing about how to ing-an incisive portrait of an industry in which, amid the overheated com- Zone fast and cheap. petition for jobs, credits and boxoffice Ironically, though, Warner execu- profits, individual responsibility has been cast by the wayside. It's not a pretty picture. T wilight Zone: The Movie itself op- erated in a sort of executive no- man's land. Warner Bros. owned the motion picture rights to the classic Rod Serling TV series, which ran for five years on CBS in the early Sixties, but the property had languished at the stu- dio for several years before president Terry Semel dangled it in front of an immediately responsive Steven Spiel- berg. Spielberg, at the time, was closely associated with Universal, but Semel was eager to bring him into the Warner fold. And so, when Spielberg proposed that he and Landis-friends since their first respective successes with Jaws and Animal Hou&e--ceprod- uce an anthology film under the Twi- light Zone's provocative umbrella title, the Warner executives happily gave them their blessing. Technically, the $10 million film 72

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make a film. \" Udanger.\" They go on to quote defense ltimately, one of the saddest spec- From all evidence , as later devel- tacles of the whole case was the attorney Harland Braun explaining, oped in court and further pursued here \" The key to the case is Landis' per- lengths to which all involved went to by the two authors , Landis was told from the first th at California labor sonality. Ma y be another director deny responsibility-legal or other- codes would prevent him from working w ith children late at night-to say would have said , 'Well , okay, let' s go wise. In his testimon y, at both the nothing about putting them in close proximity to potentially dangerous ex- with the midgets. Let's shoot it a little grand jury hearing and the trial itself, plosions. But Landis wouldn't hear of using midgets or dummies, nor would differently.' Not that Landis thought it Landis offered an implicit rebuttal of he resort to editing tricks to tie two real kids into the action. Despite all the cin- was dangerous , but some people would the whole auteur theory, arguing that ematic trickery at his disposal, he was determined to shoot the real thing. think , ifit's a violation of the law, let's he was reponsible only for the \"aes- And so Folsey was instructed to find a couple of kids and pay them under the do it some other way. . .. Put it this thetic or creative aspects of a film,\" table-and Marshall , who consigned the $2,000 check involved , apparently way: If being an asshole was a state that in all other areas he was dependent approved . Folsey, according to testi- mony introduced at the trial , joked, prison offense, a lot of us would be in on the experts who surrounded him. \"We'll probably all be thrown in jail for this. \" trouble.\" Asked whose was the final authority for Landis certainly knew he was sub- In its scrupulous detailing of the camera placement, actors' positions verting the child labor laws , but there's no evidence he took the subterfuge- chain of events that led to the accident, and the helicopter's path, Landis an- or anything else , for that matter-very seriously. As Farber and Green tell it, Outrageous Conduct goes a long way swered, \" Not mine.\" But, in point of there was no preproduction meeting to sketch out the complicated logistics of toward exonerating Landis , painting fact, he was the sole authority on that the final blow-out. Landis was simply winging it. Several crew members- him as sy mptomatic of an industry particular set. Warner executives had among them assistant director Ander- son House and camera operator Ste- whose whiz-kid directors were out of no active role; Marshall maintained his phen L ydecker-voiced concerns about the potentially dangerous situa- control. But that doesn't mean he gets distance; and Folsey, the actual line tion at Indian Dunes, where the ex- plodable village had been constructed, off scot-free, either. Certainly, by plac- producer, reported to Landis. but no one was willing to challenge Landis' judgment directly. When pilot ing two children in that fatal scene he In the wake of a particularly damn- Dorcey Wingo objected to the force of was guilty of gross insensitivity. When ingRolling Stone account of the case, 16 the blasts that wracked his copter while it comes to dangerous, physical scenes , major directors-among them Francis filming an establishing shot, Landis movie-makers encounter a slippery Coppola, George Lucas and Billy laughed, \"You ain't seen nothing yet.\" slope. Stunt men take such risks as a Wilder--<:ame to Landis' defense, ar- Hours later, when the copter crashed to matter ofcourse-they figure the odds , gu ing in a letter to the magazine , \" Di- the ground just feet in front of him as attempt to minimize the dangers , and , rectors design films , but they must he yelled \"Lower! Lower! Lower!\" for a fee, take their chances . Vic Mor- often depend on the technological Landis' prophecy proved darkly accu- row , who saw the role as a chance to skills and professional responsibility of rate . make a comeback, may have had his experts , regarding logistics, mechanics doubts, but like many actors eager to and safety. .. It is their job to direct P rosecutor Lea D 'Agostino , who in please, he too was willing to take the the director.\" But what if the director her Joan Crawford-like posturing inherent risks. Butwho's to take the re- doesn' t heed their warnings , or worse, was to prove more off-putting to the ju- sponsibility for putting two nonprofes- sends out signals that he doesn' t even rors than Landis himself, was never sional children, their immigrant want to be bothered by such bother- able to establish that Landis exhibited parents dazzled by the opportunity to some considerations? the \" wanton and reckless disregard for appear in a Steven Spielberg produc- human life\" necessary to convict him tion , in such a terrifying situation? One of the true virtues of Outrageous of manslaughter. For as Farber and Even if the filmmakers had somehow Conduct is that it focuses the subse- Green write, quite fairl y, \"What D'A- taken the time and care to assure there quent debate. William Friedkin, who gostino did not see was that Landis's would be no physical danger involved , refused to sign the letter, tells Farber 'common sense' might not be the same they were still putting two unsuspect- and Green, \" If you take the credit 'A as hers. Wasn't it possible that he hon- ing kids in a traumatizing setting. John Doe Film, ' you're saying to the estly believed the scene was safe-be- Would Landis so blithely have cast his world , 'I am responsible for everything cause he had almost no concept of own two children to work in such an en- you see' .. .\" Brian De Palma, Richard vironment? Brooks, Robert Wise and James L. Brooks all criticize Landis' judgment. Spielberg himself was nowhere near Observes Robert Towne, \" I'm pleased the scene that night, although the two to be in a profession where I'm consid- authors speculate that, through Mar- ered responsible for my actions.\" shall, he may well have know that chil- dren had been hired illegally. But, It doesn't make for a very sexy scan- Farber and Green report, when Landis dal. Not even Landis' enemies can af- called him the next morning to break ford to take any special satisfaction in the awful news , Spielberg's first ques- whatever discomfort this book causes tion was, \"Do you have a press agent?\" him . For the larger issues it addresses From that point on, Spielberg severed are simply too serious. Making movies relations with Landis, presumably lest may always appeal to boys who like to his own image as a latter-day Walt Dis- play with toy planes , but Outrageous ney be sullied. And Marshall, who pro- Conduct , which deserves to be read vided the link between Landis and closely by the industry, suggests that Spielberg while the movie was filming, when those toy planes become poten- went to even greater lengths to avoid tially lethal, the boys involved had bet- being subpoenaed to testify. ter learn to grow up. ~ 74

sixtiessomething by Tom Carson O ne thing that's striking about Dana Delany (top) and (I. to r.) Marg Helgenberger, Nan Woods and Chloe Webb in China Beach. television's rediscovery of the Sixties is that nostalgia has quaver. But it also seemed terribly falsely, since even though the tunes probably never been able to take itself easy; unearned, in a way. The music of belong to the era, they' re hardly what so seriously. Even those in the baby- the Sixties triggers so many poignant a twelve-year-old in the suburbs would boom audience too young to have been associations, and has been used so have been listening to. part of the decade's momentous public often to do exactly that, that by now events find it natural to see The Wonder you get the feeling that your Uncle E ven so, both shows do succeed at Years treat their childhood in talis- Fred, given a couple of vintage Mo- being evocative, somehow-and manic terms, as if its trivia were mo- town platters and a movieola, could that by itself virtually settles the case mentous by association. Meantime, in probably get you choked up , too. with Wonder Years, since being evoc- the Vietnam of China Beach, self-con- ative is the show's whole (and pretty scious melodramatics and awkward On Wonder Years , the use of Sixties near only) point. China Beach is more storytelling get excused, and quite rock is at once less tendentious-that messed up, but in some ways that often resolved, by appeals to how is, it isn't attached to such traumatic makes it more genuinely, if uninten- weighty we already know the subject images-and a lot fancier. It functions tionally, poignant. What the show ends matter is-rushes of hyperbolic the- as a kind of scrollwork around all the up evoking isn't Vietnam so much as way-we-were inflation. scenes, fading them out in mid-dia- \"Vietnam\"-the whole set of pulp logue, turning .every moment into a connotations and blocked, ambivalent For all that, neither of these series- memento. The whole series is more or emotions that have garishly come to ty- both from ABC, apparently set on mak- less Leave It to Beaver, but played as if pify the war in later popular conscious- ing thirtysomething-ish self-examina- it were Remembrance of Things Past; ness. It's a recital of obsessive cliches. tion its quality trademark-is a the music is there to give the sitcom disgrace, though perhaps most people material an extra, wistful dimension of The setting-its name borrowed with a rooting interest in the period are collective reminiscence-somewhat from an actual rest-and-recreation cen- so impressed that the shows aren't crap that they're willing to overlook all the ways in which both are still television. Trying to be more truthful , they're mostly just tonier; both depend heavily on techniques that are already hand- me-downs in movies, as well as on our built-in responses to the period atmos- phere, to elevate themselves above TV's usual. The secondhand effect that sticks out most in both series is the music. China Beach is packed end-to-end with period oldies, played on the sound- track and sung on the screen. Most spectacularly, one episode's coda was supplied by Dana Delany (who basi- cally plays the Alan AIda part in this gloomier-hued update) wearily singing Bob Dylan's \"Girl from the North Country,\" her voice cuing a montage of helicopters flying in, explosions in the night, and so on. It was powerful stuff, even surviving su.:h Hollyw'oodisms as full studio or- chestration coming in under Delaney's 75

ter in the real Vietnam-is in the series War II with M-16s, like Tour ofDuty- also a rear-echelon hospital and graves- registration facility, operating some- it often looks like it's going farther out time during the period when the war seemed to have just settled down to on a limb than it actually does. It takes being permanent. The variety of traffic going in and out mitigates, but can't you a while to notice that same old bal- conceal, the artificiality of so many il- lustrative incidents of the war just hap- ancing-the-scales TV morality at work, pening to take place here week after week; the show's pretended slice-of- neutralizing any real controversy. A life naturalism is too baldly at odds with the old-fashioned TV dramaturgy going HOL' deserter whom Woods befriends can on inside it. talk vividly about walking away from an obscene war, but then he's got to be At times, how much China Beach de- rives from earlier pop pyrotechnics shown to be manipulating her, and also about Vietnam, instead of inventing its own hallucinations, can be directly em- get conveniently killed before he can barrassing. One subplot had the naive Red Cross volunteer played by Nan either escape (which would offend Woods searching for her older brother, who'd disappeared-rather too much some people) or be punished (which like Chris Walken's character in The Deer Hunter-into the war's opium- would offend others). The only black den underworld. The battle-scarred tough guy Woods enlisted to track him soldiers allowed to express radical, sep- down showed up in full Tom Berenger drag from Platoon, right down to the ol- aratist attitudes are also heroin smug- ive-drab kerchief knotted around his head. Even the series' occasional ar- glers; one gets revealed as a hypocrite resting images-a drug-dealing soldier holding court in a graveyard of spent who drops his political spiel when shell casings, a room filled with body bags-feel familiarly theatrical, rather money calls, the other gets conveni- than freshly discovered. ently killed. The protagonists can be China Beach is much better when it sticks to its people as people. Interest- scarred by the corruption around them ingly, though, I've never seen a TV se- ries whose white male characters were but can't ever become corrupted them- so disposable; all the sensibility has gone into the portraits of the women selves. What the series ends up with is and the black soldiers on the base, as if the show's makers instinctively recog- a curiously sentimental version of trag- nized that those are the people for whom the real stories of the era, if not edy-sentimental because even those necessarily the war, occurred most. who wanted to bomb Hanoi back to the Delany and Woods are both good enough to keep you reacting to their Stone Age can now agree that the war characters as individuals, even when the scripts tty to turn them into state- was a tragedy; the question is what ments. So is Chloe Webb as Laurette, kind, and why. who also has the advantage, rare on this show, of not seeming to be intended as China Beach falls short at all sorts of a representative of anything in partic- ular. Neither Laurette nor the audi- levels. What you can't get around is ence can know for sure what she's doing here, which of course ends up that the series is still affecting. No mat- making her the most truly representa- tive type of them all. ter how many gaucheries surround So far, the actor who's made the them, the people are still convincingly most impact is Michael Boatman, as the enlisted man running the graves- stranded in a place that makes no sense registration unit; he's christened Sam- uel Beckett, in one of the little hip-sur- to them, in the coils of a machine that's long lost sight of whatever purpose it was supposed to have-far more haunt- ingly so than in MASH, which always looked like a fairly balmy spot, period- ically enlivened by somebody grousing that war was hell. One could wish that the series found something else to ad- mire in its characters besides the grit that lets them go on serving an absurd- ity. But the cliches have their own power; this fumbling show holds you, Nancy Sinatra's China Beach guest appearance. because its inability to come to grips with the war it's supposed to be about real touches with which the series mirrors, in so many ways, the mass au- periodically tries to decorate what is at dience's own. heart its absolutely foursquare, clunky Tearnestness. Beckett's given stagy po- he Wonder Years is as smoothly made as China Beach is lumpy. etic guff to spout, but what counts is the way Boatman's performance keeps There are few other TV series involving catching you up short: You're contin- kids that have so convincingly stayed ually being reminded that this psycho- inside the kid's point of view. The logically ravaged man, mustering all show's tone-and this is one show the adult authority he can to deal with where tone is front and center-is adult horrors, is only a few months really admirably sustained. Fred Sav- away from being a sweet, scared kid. age, whose facial expressions have a Because the series at least acknowl- wonderfully shrewd naivete, plays edges some of the war's most emotion- Kevin Arnold, in the wading pool of ad- ally loaded issues-it's not just World olescence in the suburbs, circa 1968; 76

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Daniel Stern, as the adult Kevin, pro- And yet, in terms of sensibility, The Kevin's father, well-played by Dan Wonder Years is basically the world's Lauria, is at first seen, with what seems vides offscreen narration a la Stand By longest AT&T commercial. It's all like startling verisimilitude, through \"those precious moments\"; the stories Kevin's eyes as the Other-a mysteri- Me. Stern has so much droll charm that don ' t function as stories, only as yet an- ous stranger who comes home from you can almost forget that this lively other snapshot to be pressed into a work and yells at him-then Kevin will boy will probably grow up to be thir- scrapbook, embellished by an endless , be brought to appreciate the man's tysomething-to which The Wonder enraptured rhetoric of memory. You pain, and we'll be brought back to the Years is almost an unofficial preq uel. In wonder what kind of precious mo- sitcom-staple Wonderful Dad by an- a much more minor way it's a bit like ments they're going to be dredging up other route. This series keeps on being watching The 400 Blows when yo u al- to commemorate by their second sea- about mushy reconciliations with one's ready know what a dork Antoine 00- son; since the series makes such a point past before we've had a chance to see inel is going to turn into. of being accurate to the most minute rejection of it. experiences ofa twelve-year-old in '68, The period atmosphere occasionally you also wonder how quickly they'll For all the dwelling on the special hits a false note, but generally it's very beat a retreat once Kevin is old enough magic of the baby-boom era, the pu- good. The cleverest idea the series' to' partake of the rather less innocuous bescent rituals Kevin goes through- creators, Neal Martens and Carol pastimes available to, say, a 1S-year- gawky first encounters with girls, the Black, had was to set their Sixties series old in 1971. There's something atro- byzantine social codes of junior high- among people who were in the decade ciously complacent in how entranced are at least as old as Booth Tarkington's without being particl,llarly of it. The Martens and Black are with their past, Penrod stories. Up to a point, that's fine parents are still trying to hang on to and how benignly they use it. with me, since I like Penrod, and The their idea of the suburbs as utopia; Wonder Years does handle this stuff even the kids , in their efforts to emu- Ironically, in the guise of reworking with a fidelity that's funny and engag- late the countercultural trends around the family sitcoms they grew up on ing. When the series does touch on the them, end up with the rinky-dink , mall (this is the first sitcom that feels gen- social turmoil outside the Arnolds' sub- versions. I laughed out loud when Josh uinely autobiographical, made by urbia, it's still well done, but it's also a Saviano, as Kevin's awkward best members of the TV generation who ac- cop-out. In one episode, Kevin's sister friend Paul, showed up at a seventh- tually lived in those squeaky-clean Karen (Olivia D'Abo) brought her hip- grade dance in a pair of bell bottoms suburban settings) the producers end pie boyfriend to the house, and a din- whose cuffs ballooned out a good two up reaffirming those shows' stalest bro- ner-table argument erupted over inches above his sensible shoes. The mides as passionately held beliefs. If Vietnam. It's a scene that's just about series dotes on that sort of fond detail ; de rigueur in any treatment of the Six- it's lavish with them. ties, but I thought the show handled it about as well as I've ever seen it done. Lauria conveyed just the right mixture of bewilderment and red-faced out- rage; Jack Corbett, as the boyfriend, nicely captured the character's obli- viousness to just how grating all that easygoing hippie frankness could get. But then the morality cropped up again, awarding the prize to middle- class values by default: fleetingly, we were shown Karen rejecting the boy- friend , who suddenly (and inexplica- bly) appeared as a cold-eyed user. What The Wonder Years ends up say- ing is that from the vantage point of the Eighties, the best parts of the Sixties were the ones that stayed most like the Fifties, while at the same time making a fetish of the generation lucky enough to live through them. If you're at the right age, it's hard not to respond at some level to such infatuated re-crea- tion of the trappings of your childhood. And yet there's something mawkishly regressive in cherishing it quite this much. Twenty years ago, the media age seemed like a break with the past; today, the people reared on it are still sitting in the same living rooms, utterly and incongruously mesmerized by their own childish things. ~ 78

III Everything you always wanted to know about the American movie business but didn't know where to look T his huge, comprehensive volume-more than 300 pages in a large 9%\" x 121/2\" format- features a detailed text and nearly 600 photo- graphs and illustrations, 330 of them in full color, chronicling the mak- ing and selling of Hollywood movies. Here, on screen and behind the scenes, are the stars, the directors and the moguls; the men and women who created the sets, the costumes, the music, the dances; the camera men, the money men-everyone involved in making films, and, of course, the films themselves. T he book first examines the history of film , from the silent era through the innovations of sound, color and widescreen to the decline of the star-oriented studio system and the rise of today's producer/director-controlled system. It then devotes a lengthy chapter to each of the eight major Hollywood studios, and the men and women who made the reel magic at MGM, Warner's, Paramount, Fox and other production centers. Hundreds ofcharts and diagrams illustrate career histories, finances, releases and much more at a glance . If you have a question on Hollywood films and filming , the the answer is most likely here. It's all part ofThe Hollywood Story. $ 3 5 .00 . now at your bookstore, or se nd c hec k or m oney order to Crow n Publishers. In c .. Dept. 754 .34 Engelha rd Ave .. Aven el. NJ 07001. VISA. AmEx . Mas te rCard holde rs . call toll·free 1·800·526·4246. Dept. 620

Contributors Quiz #32: Midterm 12. Birthplace of the Manchurian can- Tom Carson is TV'critic for the L.A. Weekly. David Chute holds the Asian newsdesk at the For QUIZ #32 you are to answer as didate's stepson. L.A. Weekly. Mary Corliss is an assistant cu- rator for the Depanment of Film at the Muse- many of the following questions as possi- 13. He married a nun. um of Modem An. Graham Fuller is a free- ble. Answers are in alphabetical order. lance film journalist based in New York. The sources include Georges Sadoul's 14. In Germany and Eastern Europe, Karen Jaehne is a New York-based freelance Dictionary of Films (edited and updated writer. Paul Kerr is a producer on The Media by Peter Morris), Clive Hirschhom' s The ice creams were named after him. Show on Channel 4 TV in the U. K. , and a free- Hollywood Musical, and Ephraim Katz' lance film and TV critic. Andreas Kilb is a The Film Encyclopedia. The respondent 15. Played Kate in The Taming of the film critic for Die Zeit in Hamburg. Gregg Kil· with the highest number of correct an- day is an L.A.-based writer. Leonard Klady swers wins a free year of this magazine. Shrew, Stratford-upon-Avon, 1922. is a freelance writer based in L.A. Philippe J. Send your list by August 30 to FILM Maarek is vice president of the French critics COMMENT, Quiz #32 , 140 West 65th 16. Mono-monickered auteur. union, full time professor of political science at Street, New York, N.Y 10023. Paris University, writer forthe French trade pa- 17. Bell & Howell bought the footage per le Technicien de Film and the author of 1. Superman I. three books on cinema. Pat McGilligan's bi- from Upton Sinclairand produced six edu- ography of Roben Altman will be published in 2. Potage ala tortue , blini demidoff au winter 1988 by St. Manin's Press. Marcia cational films from it. Pally lives in New York and writes on the ans. caviar russe, caille en sarcophage avec Bob Strauss is the Hollywood correspondent sauce perigourdine, salad , cheeses, baba 18. Co-starred in a Judy Holliday com- for the Chicago Sun Times and writer for a au rhum et fruits confits, fresh fruit, and number of other publications. Beverly Walk- coffee. edy and a porn movie. er is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles. Armond White writes for New York's City 3. Brothers directed him in consecutive 19. Director of No. 1 box-office movies Sun and Paper. Peter Wollen's latest film is starring roles in 1986 films. Friendship's Death. Dan Yakir is a freelance in consecutive years. writer based in New York. 4. Glenn IVlilstead. 5. \" I would never have believed it pos- 20. Her monogram: ETHWTFBBW. Photocredits sible to assemble mechanical noises to cre- ate such beauty,\" Charles Chaplin wrote 21. Nkla Tales of the Pale and Silvery ABC: p. 75, 76, 78. Avco Embassy: p. 59. Ave- of this film. nue Enrenaiment: p. 17, 18, 20,22. Cannon: 6. Four times a movie, two times a Moon After the Rain. p. 44 (3). Cheung Ching-Ming: p. 54 (4). lady. Columbia: p. 31,44 (1), 45 (3), 60 (2). Roger 7.42 reels to 24 to 18 to ten. 22. Appeared in Fellini Roma; did not Corman: p. 44 (4). DEG: p. 29 (2). Nancy Elli- son: p. 54 (1). The Film Society of Lincoln 8. Last winner of consecutive gold write Caligula. Ce nter: p. 70. Israeli Film Festival: p. 69, 70. Henry Jaglom: p. 54 (3) Sylvia Miles: p. 56. medals in women's Olympic figure skat- 23. Lyricist of \" Let's Dream in the Miramax: p. 52 (1,2), 53. The Mount Compa- ing before Katarina Witt. ny: p. 60 (3). Movie Star News: p. 29 (1). Mu- Moonlight\" for the Dorothy Lamour seum of Modem An: p. 28 (1,2), 34. Orion: p. 9. Howard Gaye played Jesus. 27, 30, 61 (3). Paramount: p. 38. 71. Andrew 10. Vanessa Redgrave and Meryl musical St. Louis Blues. Sarris: p. 61 (3). Third World Newsreel: p.2, 4. Streep were in it. Tri Star: p. 44 (2). 20th Century Fox: p. 61 (2). 11. Directed Rocky. 24. Original title: Zee and Company. United Anists: p. 45 (1). Universal: p. 45 (2), 60 (I). Walt Disney: p. 11, 12, 14, 15. Warner 25. Twelve songs, here, all soliloquies Bros.: p. 32,33,37, 39,42, 54 (2),55,61 (1), 72. Woridwide/AP: 24. by the same performer. 26. Banned by the French censors until 1946. Another free year for winning QUIZ #29. This time we wanted clips from movies that had been shown in other mov- ies. And this time Leskowsky provided a list of 108 films within films. If contribu- tors to this quiz care to menace Les- kowsky with their lists of films within films , they may send them to him at 602 E. High Street, Urbana, III. 61801. He asked for it. And he's getting it: two years of FILM COMMENT. -R.c. MOVIE Pin·Ups • Ponraits • Posters • PhysIque ORIGINAL AUTOGRAPHED Poses • Pressbooks • Western • Horror • CELEBRITY PHOTOS STAR Science Fiction • Musicals • Color Photos • 80 Years of Scenes From Motion Pictures Hollywood legends, superstars. PHOTOS Quality collection, authenticity guaranteed. Ru sh $1. 00 FOR OUR ILLUSTRATED BROCH URE Brochure: L&M Gross One of the world's largest collections of film personality photographs, with emphasis on 134 WEST 18th STREET, DEPT. Fe 2675 Hewlett Ave Dept F rare candids and European material. Send a NEW YORK, N.Y. 10011 Merrick, New York 11566 S.A.S.E. with want-list ro: (212) 620-8160-61 Milton T . Moore, Jr. STAR PHOTOS· MOVIE POSTERS· MAGAZINES Dept. Fe -----1 FREE CATALOG P.O . Box 140280 Dallas, Texas 75214-0280 M~..il.t \\ll'Ii .IENIl'· flHI.I .\\ '''EH·... • . Inwli!'l .\\IO\\' lIl ,\\1 ,\\Ttill 1.\\1. STOllt:. In.'. l\\~ \\ HIW 242 W. t 41h Slreel • New York, N.Y. 10011 \\ (212) 989-0869 oP'. IV... 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The cast of characters who have helped make Miller Lite famous has brought America a lot of laughs. But the beer that stands behind them happens to be one of the most serious creations in the history of brewing. After all, the very idea of Lite was once considered an impossibility: a truly full-flavored beer that was significantly lower in calories than regular beer. AMERICA'S FAVORITE LIGHT BEER Today Miller Lite is far and away the largest-selling light beer in America and the nation's second largest-selling beer of any kind. This remarkable perfor- mance took a lot more than a good sense of humor. The brewing process that gives Lite its superior taste uses no fewer than 128 quality checks along the way to the bottle. MORE HOPS, MORE FLAVOR Lite's flavor is achieved by using two kinds of hops instead of just one for more hop flavor than most other light beers. Then the flavor is meticulously balanced to a perfectly mellow, well- rounded pilsner beer containing no additives or preservatives. The only way to achieve this much character in any beer is quality brewing every step of the way. To achieve it consistently in a beer with only 96 calories is a long way from funny. It's unprecedented. THERE'S ONLY ONE LITE BEER. MILLER LITE. © 1985 Miller Brewing Co .• Milwaukee, WI