VOLUME 23 - NUMBER 04 JULY-AUGUST 1987

Salem LIGHTS 101~

•• published bimonthly by the Film Society SlSSU• e of Lincoln Center Volume 23, Number 4 July-August 1987 Mailer-Mot ................. 11 Exile on Mainstreet .. ...... 31 Eeny Meeny Miney Mailer-Mot, Coming up for air from the cultural Catch a Tough Guy by His Toe. For underground, self-exiled searchers Tough Guys Don't Dance. Karen re-invent themselves for ambivalent Jaehne watched Mailer's launch on encounters with Eighties cinema. the Cape and his lynching in Cannes. Taking on a system that would eat A comedy!, he claims. them without thinking twice, four subversives might just cut through to Cannes at 40 ................ 60 the mainstream to launch their cri- tiques. Marlaine Glicksman lis- It's more than a festival, it's a theme tens to Robert Frank's thoughts along park, and it just tumed 40. The the backroads of art and film (page French threw themselves a bash, sur- 32). Mike Golden ponders the lone- vived Princess Di, gave themselves liness of the long-distance screen- the top prize, and exited to more boos writer with Rudy Wurlitzeron the oc- (and booze) than banners. Who fights casion of Frank's Candy Mountain like this over movies? Mary Corliss (page 40). Graham FuUer meets scopes out the best 15 or 20 minute up with punk rocker Joe Strummer, segments from three score films, and who doubts the Career Opportunities Harlan Jacobson hears it from jury in Nicaragua and Alex Cox's Walker president Yves Montand: \"We want- (page 45). And Chris Hodenfeld ed to give the Palme d'Or to ... \" opens a bottle (or two) with novelist- Hint: First you drink, then you Pialat poet Charles Bukowski, who consid- ers Barfly and his \"I drink therefore I (page 61). am\" philosophy (page 53). Also in this issue: Rat-a-tat Italiano ............ 22 Movie Music ............... 66 Ever since Edward G. Robinson did Lit- Journals .................... 2 tle Caesar, the only Italian-American Which came first-movies or movie mu- Unaccustomed As We Are to the inside characters on screen have packed ma- sic? Michael Walsh keeps score. ofthe hoosegow, Dan Kimmel sent him- chine guns, molls, cigars, and offers self to the joint to report on a Laurel & ... you know the rest. George De Ste- Pensees: 'River' Brats ........ 70 Hardy tent that went el foldo. Well, Par- fano says \"Ciao, baby\" to that. Gavin Smith dopes out why it ain't kids don Us. Bev Walker trekked into the who are hand-wringing over Tim Hunt- Mojave to watch German director Percy Ay-ay-ay, Gouge Out My Eye .. 27 er's River's Edge. Nada pretty picture. Adlon at work on Brenda's Palace, and Eh amigo, don't ju know anything? Elliott Stein went to Miami and saw La Mexican wrestling films came and went TV: Jogging in Time ......... 72 Gran Fiesta. while ju were en siesta. Well, hombre, Armond White runs into a Nike ad set to Andrew Coe knows bueno from malo. the Beatles \"Revolution.\" And Marc Faces ..................... 18 Mancini views vintage Woody Allen Ace cinematographer Nestor Almendros Movie Music ............... 66 playing L.A. looks through his lens and doesn't see an immortal. He sees the moonscapes of fa- Which came first-movies or movie mu- Books .................... 78 mous faces-Streep , Gere, Deneuve, sic? That's the question Michael Walsh Storming the Magic Kingdom spans the Nicholson, Basinger-and here writes ponders, on his retum from Radio City not-so-wonderful world of Disney, post- about what he did for light. Music Hall, where four classic silents Walt. Richard Natale reviews. played to live orchestral accompani- ment. Score one for movie music. Back Page: Quiz #26 ........ 80 Cover photo: courtesy Cannon Films Co-Editors: Harlan Jacobson, Richard Corliss. Assistant Editor: Marlaine G licksman. Art Director and Cover Design: Elliot Sch ulman . Advertising and Ci rcu la- tion Manager: Tony Impavido. Business Manager: Sayre Maxfield. Production: Deborah Dichter Edmonds. West Coast Editor: Anne Thompson. E uropean Editor: Harlan Kennedy. Research Consu ltant: Mary Corliss. C irculation Assistant: Deborah Freedman. Controller: Domingo Homilla, Jr. Editoriallntem: Gavin Smith. Executive Director, Film Society of Lincoln Center: Joanne Koch. Copyright © 1987 by the Film Society of Lincoln Center. All rights reselVed. The opinions expressed in FILM COMMENT do not represent Film Society of Lincoln Center policy. Publication is made possible in part by support from the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. This publication is fully protected by domestic and intemational copyright. Subscription rates in the United States: $14.95 for6 numbers, $26.95 for 12 numbers. Elsewhere, $37 for6 numbers, $70 for 12 numbers , payable in U.S. fund s o nly. New subscribers shou ld include their occupations and zip codes. Distributed by Eastem News Distributors, Sandusky OH 44870. FILM COMMENT(lSSN ooI5-119X) is published bimonthly by the Film Society of Lincoln Cente r, 140 W. 65th St., New York NY 10023. Second-<:Iass postage paid at New York NY and add itional mailing offices. Postmaster: send add ress changes to FILM COMME T, 140 W. 65th St., New York NY 10023.

Life Imprisonment Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy in Pardon Us (1931). The Somers tent of the Sons, founded Barron's was selected Stanton became in- in 1971 , provided a temporary escape for terested in this Laurel and Hardy fan be- LAUREL AND HARDY the inmates. Life membership cost only a hind bars. IN THE BIG HOUSE dollar, and many of the inmates planned on getting their money's worth. Each He arranged with Tom Healey, a T hings are tough all over. Some rep- chapter took its name from a Laurel and teacher at the prison, for a screening for ertory moviehouses have been Hardy film . The Somers tent, appropri- Barron and the other inmates. \"I went forced to change their booking ately, was known as Pardon Us, after Stan down and made some introductory com- policies, and others are finding it harder to and Ollie's first feature. ments. Then the lamp blew in the projec- get good prints. On television and in the tor,\" Stanton recalled. \"There were bulbs halls ofCongress, arguments rage over the The tent was pitched when an inmate, in an office and Tom asked, 'Anyone here colorization of classic black and white Mike Barron, began watching a weekly know how to pick a lock?,' and about three films. And at Connecticut's maximum se- Laurel and Hardy show on a Springfield, or four hands went up. They went out but curity prison in Somers, the world's largest Massachusetts TV station. The host was couldn't crack the lock. Tom tumed to chapter of the \"Sons of the Desert\"-the Hal Stanton, an active memberofthe local them and asked, 'How the hell did you get intemational Laurel and Hardy fratemal Night Owls tent. Stanton gave a prize or in here without knowing how to pick a organization-has folded its tent. two for the \"letter of the week,\" and when lock?' \" 2

eeeeeeeeeeeeeee ee e e e e e e ee .eeeeeeeeeeeeee \"So the lunatics have taken charge of the asylum .\" Metro Pictures president Richard Rowland spoke these words when he heard about the formation of United Artists . Mary Pickford , Doug Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin , William S . Hart and D. W Griffith saw it differently. So UA was born. And , 68 years later, is still turning out major films . A treasure house if facts and photos - Though UA has never enjoyed the public recognition of Metro or Warner or Paramount, the industry knows it as everythingyw expectjrom aCrown studio history the studio that turned out the three most successful series in film history. A few of the great pictures that bear the UA -1 ,581 mms: EVERY full-length feature - Paramount productions distributed by logo: released by United Artists in the U.S. UA by special arrangemen~ 1942-44: from 1919 thru 1985 brief plot, major cas~ director, pr(}- * * *High Noon Some Like It Hot Things to Come ducer (except for Harry Sherman action * *Wuthering Heights The Apartment Pollyanna -Over 1,100 photos specials) * *(1920) Witness for the Prosecution A Hard Day's * * * *Night Red River Algiers I Want to Live! The - Major entries for most films: plo~ - Hopalong Cassidy and Cisco Kid * *Barefoot Contessa Around the World in 80 Days major cast and credits, independent serials, Hal Roach Streamliners, Comet * * *Dodsworth The Outlaw Elmer Gantry Annie Hall production company Streamliners distributed by UA: stars, * * * *Scarface (1932) D.O.A. Limelight The Alamo producer, director (for Roach and * The African Queen - Minor entries for the remaining mms: Comet) brief plo~ major cast and credits, in- Here is UA , from 1919 until today. The WHOLE story. dependent production company - ALL UA Academy Award winners The COMPLETE record . AND nominees - including special and -Convenient year-by-year listing honorary awards - Studio history, by decade -I ndex of mms - British mms distributed here by UA: -I ndex of personnel - over 9,500 brief plo~ major cast and credits, pr(}- duction company names! - Documentaries: brief description, direc- - Printed thruout on fme g!c;>ssy stock tor, production company - HUGE - 352 giant 9 x 12Vz pages r-------------------------------------------- _________ _ How the Oub Works • •Yl~/~.'~.'AI• •~.' •••11 Ct•• Every 4 weeks (13 times a year) you get a free copy of the Oub bulletin, PREVIEWS, 15 Oakland Avenue. Harrison, N.Y. 10528 which offers the Featured Selection plus a nice choice of Alternates: books on films, TV, Please accept my membership in the Movie/ Entertainment *music, occasionally records and videocassettes. If you want the Featured Selection, do Book Gub and send me, FREE and postpaid, the lavish $35 *nothing. It will come automatically. If you don 't want the Featured Selection or you do volume, The United Artists Story by Ronald Bergan . I agree to buy 4 additional books, records or videocassettes at want an Alternate, indicate your wishes on the handy card enclosed and return it by the regular Gub prices over the next 2 years . I also agTee to the' *deadline date. The majority of Oub books are offered at 2(}.30l7Jo discounts, plus a *charge for shippingand handling. As soon as you buy and pay for 4books, records or videocassettes at regular Oub prices, your membership may be ended at any time, either by *you or by the Oub. If you ever receive a Featured Selection without having had 10 days *to decide if you want it, you may return it at Oub expense for full credit. For every book, record or videocassette you buy at regular Oub price, you receive one or more Bonus Book Certificates. These entitle you to buy many Oub books at deep discounts, Gub rules spelled out in this coupon . Fe - 42 *usually @.80l7Jo off. These Bonus Books do not count toward fuUilling your Oub obliga- Name __________________________________ tion but do enable you to buy line books at giveaway prices. PREVIEWS also includes news about members and their hobbies. You are welcome to send in similar items. The Address City__________________State ______Zip _____ *Club will publish any such item it deems suitable, FREE. This is a real CLUB! Good *service. No computers! Only one membership per household. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Fortunately, Stanton kept a spare pro- the demographic trend affecting their tar- his association he had said, \"The first jector in his car, which was several steel get audience. \"The mix has completely time I come and there are only three or doors and a parking lot away. When Stan- changed,\" says Smith. \"There isn't any- four people, I'll pack my bags.\" His ton announced that he was going out for one here who doesn't know who Voltron last visit occurred on the first day that the projector, several audience members is,\" says Wood. the outside recreation area was open volunteered to help him fetch it. after winter, and only a few of the T hey miss the tent meetings, which of- steadily declining membership attend- I n the tent's glory days, 100 or more pris- fered not only Laurel and Hardy but ed. Stanton decided to call it quits. oners would tum up for the screenings W. e. Fields, Abbott and Costello, and The prison could continue to show held every two to four weeks. The organi- the Marx Brothers. \"The mental atmo- Laurel and Hardy films without out- zation's bylaws provided for replacements sphere of a prison is very unhealthy. It's side help, but Wood thinks that's un- for leadership positions in the event of paranoia. Obviously it doesn't compare to likely. their pardon or their otherwise taking a parole, but it's an escape for a couple of leave of the institution. (Somers also hours.\" So Smith and Wood watch the films houses Connecticut's electric chair, al- that are offered, although they check though it hasn't been used in many years.) The similarity to Joel McCrea's revela- out the occasional rerun of The Honey- The club's treasury had over $500, and it tion in Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels, mooners featuring Stan and Ollie surro- received visits from Laurel and Hardy bi- in which he sees a Mickey Mouse cartoon gates Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton. ographer John McCabe and the late Lu- while serving time on a chain gang, is not \"What we see is fairly representative of cille Hardy Price, Oliver's widow. Real lost on Smith, who saw the film in its origi- theaters in the free world,\" says Wood. People came to tape a segment at Somers, nal release. \"It makes everyone laugh,\" \"Given a choice between a hamburger but the program was canceled and it never he says. and a nutritious meal, these guys'll aired. take the hamburger.\" A few months ago Stanton came to Barron was paroled around 1975, with Somers for the last time. When he started -DANIEL KIMMEL Stanton putting in a good word at the pa- role hearing. Stanton and Healey lost Director PercyAd/on with Jack Pa/ance. two overworked housewives, one a Ger- touch with him (though they believe him man with a cleaning fetish, played by to be a current guest of Georgia'S penal MIDNACHT AT THE Marianne Sagebrecht (who was Sugar- system), and according to Stanton, they OASIS baby), and the other a black American heard that he \"tried to open up an account with several children, e.e.H. Pounder. in a bank that was closed at the time.\" \"I'm more interested in women than in men. I don't know why, Adlon's previous films-assured, fresh, Steve Wood, 47, who isdoinga life sen- maybe my chromosomes\" says funny-were received by critics \"Better tence on a murder charge, was active in German filmmaker Percy Adlon, com- in the U.S. than in Germany,\" he says, the Pardon Us tent for the last few years. pleting Brenda's Palace, A Comedy Fa- and both Sugarbahy (a hit at the 1985 According to Wood, Stanton was the mov- ble, his first American feature. Adlon and New York Film Festival) and Celeste ing force behind the organization but, be- his small, mostly German crew have been did well at the boxoffice. His The Guard- ing legally blind, was no longer up to regu- working for five weeks at a Mojave Desert ian and his Poet (1978), Five Last Days lar trips to the prison. When the tent was truck stop which they've dubbed \"Bagh- (1982) and The Swing (1983) primed the founded, Somers' only enterrainment was dad,\" though its California namesake is festival circuit for Sugarbahy. provided by TV sets in the recreation area 200 miles away. and the Sons film programs. Prisoners now Bom in Munich in 1935, Adlon is soft are allowed their own sets in their cells, Like his two best-known films, Celeste spoken and gentle. He studied literature, which are hooked up to a c1osed-circuit (1981) and Sugarbahy (1985), it focuses on theatre, and art history at Munich Univer- prison system offering such features as women, suggesting almost revolutionary sity and began his career as a stage actor Duel in the Sun; The Texas Chainsaw possibilities inherent in their relationships before narrating and editing radio pro- Massacre Part II; THX 1138; and Reform with each other. The old adage \"Woman's grams. In 1970, he began to make short School Girls. \"They show very few com- work is never done\" suits his picaresque films for regional television networks- edies,\" says Wood, adding that the main tale ofa late-blooming friendship between documentary portraits of literary and attraction last Christmas was Brian De Pal- ma's remake of Scaiface. Frank Smith, 62, who spent mostofthe past 30 years at Somers on a murder rap, prefers the old comedies. He points out that, in spite of \"Prison Box Office,\" com- munal film screenings are still necessary, and that \"You've got to get out and move around.\" There are still films shown in the prison gym, but they tend to be action films, which most of the inmates prefer. Smith and Wood are older than many in Somers' 1300 to 1500 inmate population, and while they might like seeing a vintage comedy, they're as pragmatic as any ex- hibitor with a suburban sixplex in spotting 4

Klaus Maria Brandauer in COLONEL REDL , F\" ~ lsnu Sw. [~ Pa1t1\\tsu.®

musical figures, shot cinema-verite and elephants, too.\" kicks in.\" shoestring. In 1978, he made The Guard- In its way, Brenda's Palace blueprints a ian and his Poet. That moment-Jasmin's confession revision in the way we live. \"I'm against \"F ilm should be something impossible the concept of a nuclear family,\" says about being childless-is the story's to do any other way, just as with mu- Marianne. \"My idea for the future, which sic you cannot have a substitute. Film I am patient about, is to have a place like hinge. Mter it, they become friends, and should be something on which every tradi- this.... \" i.e. people living communally, tional form of explanation gets wrecked,\" similar to a film crew on location. their friendship is their 'oasis.' Jasmin he says. T he story posits a German couple on va- helps Brenda spiff up the place, and they The Adlons-his wife, Eleonore, is his cation in the American West who co-writer and producer-spent half of quarrel and split up. The woman walks collaborate on a magic show which turns 1986 in the San Femando Valley, writing a down the highway defiantly, suitcase in screenplay about one of his uncles who hand, stopping at the first sign of human Baghdad into the most popular spot in the migrated to the United States in the habitation-Baghdad. A dilapidated cafe, Twenties, and ran with Hearst's San Sim- gas station and motel, Baghdad is run by desert-My Beautiful Laundrette meets eon circle. Like Percy, the uncle was de- Brenda (Pounder), who is chasing her hus- scended from the Adlon Hotel family. (In band off the premises just as Jasmin (Sage- Paris, Texas. BEVERLY WALKER pre-war days, Berlin's famed Adlon served brecht) arrives, leaving the two women in as the model for Vicki Baum's Grand Ho- parallel situations. MIAMI NICE \"I tel.) Jack Palance plays a retired Hollywood The most rewarding transportation I \"My uncle had a playboy face and a scenic designer who lives in a trailer be- for cinephiles in North America I broken heart,\" says Adlon. When his par- hind the motel and who falls in love with must be the bus that shuttles be- I ents divorced, they sent their children the rotund Jasmin. Christine Kaufman tween the two principal venues of the Mi- I away forever. He came first to New York, plays a why-talk tattoo artist with a great ami Film Festival: the Coconut Grove I where he tried transforming himself into a exit line: \"Too much harmony.\" At the Playhouse and the Gusman Center, matinee idol via plastic surgery. He met very end of Brenda's Palace, Palance downtown's twinkling and intact Andalu- Pola Negri and took up where Rudolph humbly approaches the Rubens-like Jas- sian atmospheric 1926 fantasy movie pal- Valentino left off, staying with her for six min, asking her hand in marriage. Her re- ace. There were films from all over at the years. Subsequently, he married Marian sponse-\"I'II have to talk it over with fourth festival , but as usual the emphasis Davies' sister, becoming a kind of stepson Brenda\"-invokes a new order of things. was on Spanish language pictures-from to Hearst. \"In a desert, people really need each other Peru, Argentina, Spain-and, a first this to survive,\" says Marianne. year, Puerto Rico. \"This script about my uncle is a big piece, the most important I've ever writ- \"Both these women are lonely,\" says Most of Marcos Zurinaga's La Gran Fi- ten,\" he says, adding that its budget will Adlon. ''They discover very late in the sto- esta takes place at the Casino of Puerto be his highest. To leam about America be- ry that they need each other. It's really the Rico during its last big formal ball in 1942, fore tackling this quasi-epic, the Adlons chemistry between people that interests when this social club, then off-limits for wrote a smaller movie about a desert phe- me more than gender. The main thing is native Puerto Ricans (membership was re- nomenon they had witnessed the year be- to get the right feeling, the right aesthetic, served for aristocrats of pure Spanish fore, while on vacation. Near Barstow, the truth.\" Adlon was apprehensive about blood), was about to be taken over by the Califomia, they spotted two large star- his English, though he is very fluent and U.S. Navy. The political tensions that bursts which seemed to linger in the air. speaks with the merest trace of an accent. were to mark the island during the next Later they leamed that the luminous rays \"When you go a bit deeper, you discover few years--conflicts between supporters emanated from the nearby Solar Energy how inadequate your vocabulary is,\" he of the Allies and those of Franco and the Center by reflecting solar mirrors and air says. \"I worned about being able to get Axis--come to a head as the band plays on moisture. The Adlons use them to lead into their feelings and their culture, espe- and on in this handsome first feature. the stranded hausfrau to the truckstop. cially black culture. Brenda came to me from heaven!\" The public's favorite this year, Eliseo Famous in West Germany since Sugar- Subiela's Man Facing Southeast, an inspi- baby, Marianne Sagebrecht recalls \"I met c.c.H. Pounder, who played Brenda, rational science fiction film from Argenti- Percy in 1979, at a play in which I had na, was accorded a standing ovation. I was three different roles. He liked the delicacy felt she could do the role from her first far more impressed by the other Argentine of my interpretation, especially since I am reading. Bom in South America and raised selection, La pelicula del rey (A King and round,\" and with the trusting blue eyes of in British Guyana and England, she has His Movie), the directorial debut of cine- a baby. Adlon wrote Sugarbaby for Mari- worked in regional theatre and had small matographer Carlos Sorin. It concerns a anne, \"to show that ifyour attitude is posi- parts in films, including playing Mae young director who is obsessed with the tive, then you can always succeed.\" Rose's maid in Prizzi's Honor. She also idea of making a film about Antoine de That's Marianne: \"I went against a centu- plays a judge in L.A. Law on NBC. \"When Tounnens, an obscure and probably de- ry of stereotypes when I played Sugar- he cast me, Percy knew what he wanted,\" mented French lawyer who proclaimed baby, and I think I brought about a greater she says. \"His motif is the desert, barren- himself king of Patagonia in 1860. The di- acceptance of morticians,\" she deadpans. ness. Brenda is unable to 'drink up' the rector scrapes together a motley crew in \"Morticians are very alienated. Round water around her-the love of her hus- Buenos Aires; they train down to a remote people have achieved more acceptance- band and children-because she is simply patch of Patagonia and are promptly and why not? In the Garden of Eden is ev- worn out with too much work. Jasmin is stranded when their backer disappears. ery kind ofcreature-ants and snakes and barren, without children. When Brenda For want of extras, battle scenes are shot learns this, some kind of common ground with mannequins tied on horses. Produc- tion continues in surreal spurts, with in- creasing parallels to the making of the movie and the madness of Tounnens' own story. I've a hunch that this film was 6

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inspired by accounts ofOrson Welles' mad produced a four-hour film in two parts (Noi In 1942 Brazzi and Valli were at the be- adventures filming Othello in Morocco Vivi and Addio, Kira) based on Ayn ginning of their careers; they make a dev- after his backers had backed out. In any Rand's first novel , We the Living. Al- astatingly glamorous young couple. The case, A King and His Movie is not just an- though her name appeared on the credits film's acting honors, however, belong to other film on the making of a film. It is a (\"dal romanzo di Ayn Rand\"), the film Giachetti, who, at 38, was a veteran of witty and sympathetic chanson de geste was made without the writer's authoriza- many films, in most of which he person- about the transformation of reality by a tion or knowledge. ified the exemplar of the Fascist hero, a doggedly personal vision-and the best moral and serious \"man's man.\" Here he new picture on view at Miami. Rand, who had left her native Russia for is extraordinary as the Bolshevik function- the United States in 1926, wrote We the ary, too lucid for his job, unlucky in love The one film to arouse real controversy Living in the early Thirties, while she was and in politics. After his purge trial, he was Law of Desire, directed by Pedro working in the wardrobe department at shoots himself and is declared a Red hero. Almodovar, Spanish cinema's current en- RKO. The novel, set in the Soviet Union, fant terrible. It was loved or vilified by was partly autobiographical and fiercely The film is adequately directed by Gof- shocked or admiring vociferous factions. I anticollectivist. According to its current fredo Alessandrini, who, although he be- found myself in a small comer with the distributor, the movie played to huge gan his career as an assistant to Alessandro merely disappointed. Almodovar's What crowds for several months, apparently un- Blasetti in 1929, was no Blasetti. He di- Have I Done to Deserve This?, released til the Mussolini government-realizing rected a number of commercial romantic here in 1985, was a brilliantly amoral com- that its anti-Communist sentiments were melodramas and Fascist propaganda ic melodrama of survival. His new film, a also anti-state and implicitly anti-Fas- films, and managed to stay married to black comedy of sex, is all style and sur- cist-banned it. Rand learned of its exis- Anna Magnani for five years. There are a face, nearly two hours of studied outra- tence after the war. In 1968 her attorneys few wondrously atmospheric scenes in We geousness. located the original nitrate negative in the Living; what was clearly lacking was an Rome and bought the film. Rand is said to epic budget commensurate with the epic At its center is Pablo Quintero (Eusebio have preferred Noi Vivi to the only other screenplay. If not a masterpiece, it is a fas- Poncela), a cult film director, the crown movie adaptation ofone of her novels, The cinating and precious chunk of film histo- prince ofa simply mad-mad little hedonis- Fountainhead, though she had worked ry. I could not be more grateful to every- tic world of post-Franco swinging Madrid, on the screenplay of King Vidor's film. one who had a hand in its restoration. where drugs and sex (gay and straight) are She collaborated with her attorneys and where it's at, man. Youths tumble over producer Duncan Scott in the preparation T here was much more at Miami than each other for Pablo. One of them (played of a shortened version of the Italian film, can be recounted here in detail, but I by Antonio Banderas, Spain's most ap- subtitled in English. Rand died in 1982; can't close without a nod to the inspired pealing young leading man) is a stuffy psy- work on the film was completed with the screening of Walther Ruttmann's classic chopath who comes out of the closet dur- cooperation of her estate. It was this 170- lyric 1927 documentary Berlin: Symphony ing a brief roll in the hay with the director minute version that was shown at Miami. ofa Great City, accompanied live onstage and then sets about murdering Pablo's at Gusman by Pegasus, an inventive jazz lovers. (At times this film seems a rework- We the Living is a marvelously enjoy- group from Barcelona. Of equal interest ing ofPlay Misty for Me , with Banderas in able, old-fashioned Hollywood style was a \"Salute to the Fleischer Studio.\" the Jessica Walter role.) The glitch is that weepie, surprisingly faithful to the novel, The Max Fleischer Studio, Disney's chief Poncela is a graceless and uncharismatic which takes place largely in Petrograd in competitor, moved to Miami in 1939 and actor; the story makes little sense with this the early 1920s. Kira (Alida Valli), an intel- during its three-year stay there created two guy in the role of an irresistible swinger. ligent, passionate, independent young animated features and a slew of shorts. The film's pressbook states categorically: bourgeoise, is studying engineering at the This program included the beautifully de- \"In France, England, and especially in university. Like The Fountainhead's signed and rarely shown feature Mr. Bug the United States, Almodovar has been Howard Roarke, she dreams of building Goes to Town (1942) and a powerhouse hailed as a new version of Buiiuel, Billy bridges and skyscrapers. Kira falls in love short, Superman and the Mechanical Wilder, John Waters, and Woody Allen.\" with Leo (Rossano Brazzi), a penniless Monsters. Several animators who had How terrible must a 38-year-old enfant be former aristocrat. For both of them, their worked with Max and his brother Dave to live up to that! country has become \"an immense prison were on hand. Animation buffs were also covered with snow and stained with given a chance to meet a few ancient \"in- Although virtually an unknown quanti- blood.\" Leo is tubercular. When Kira dis- betweeners\"-cartoonists who drew in- ty elsewhere in this country, the Italian di- covers that Andrei (Fosco Giachetti), a se- terim action after the principal animators rector Pupi Avati is a hot item in Miami. cret police officer, has fallen in love with had filled in the broad strokes. His latest film is regularly shown every her, she becomes his mistress to finance year; a complete Avati retrospective has Leo's stay in a sanitorium. Leo, cured, As usual, the best of all the festival been announced for next year. Regalo di turns out to be an ungrateful wastrel. Kira bashes was the Valentine gala at Vizcaya, Natale (Christmas Present) is an intense decides to attempt an escape from Russia the formidable Italian palazzo on Biscayne and claustrophobic tale of a group of bud- across the border, alone on foot. The film, Bay built for James Deering. Dress code dies who meet in a borrowed villa near Bo- at least the version seen at Miami, ends was black tie or bla'Ck leather, which made logna to fleece a wealthy man in a poker here. The novel's ending is stronger: Kira for some interesting juxtapositions in the game on Christmas Eve. This sad little descends from a train near the Latvian moonlit formal gardens. The party's film about the erosion of friendship is a tri- border and puts on her mother's wedding theme was: \"Carnevale Veneziano . .. In- umph of ensemble acting. dress to camouflage herself in the snow. cluding a Salute to Polish Films.\" Shot by a border guard, she bleeds to T he highlight of the 1987 Miami Festi- death in the drifts. -ELLIOTT STEIN val was another Italian film--one made 45 years ago. In 1942, Scalera Films 8

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\"Tough Guys' \" Two Left Feel t•nuet iler's 11 by Karen Jaehne , ilm is a phenomenon,\" ob- served the Nonnan Mailer ofMaidstone days, \"whose 'F resemblance to death has been ignored for too long.\" Mter the pre- mier of his Tough Guys Don't Dance at Cannes, that old Mailer-mot was on every- body's lips. The literary giant was de- clared a cinematic dwarf, but undaunt- ed-would we expect anything else?- Mailer opened his anns and mouth to scribblers looki'ng for good copy. By the end ofendless interviews that took him far beyond his call of duty as a jury member Uury president Yves Montand refused to disrupt his busy screening schedule to grant interviews), the critics proved more forgiving than the medium. Despite Nor- man's unfortunate prophecy finding its fulfillment in the turkey-trot of Tough Guys, the literary gangster coped with the hubba-hubba of his celebrity at Cannes like just another auteur in a bad year. The Nonnan invasion made the logorrhea of cine-babbler Jean-Luc Godard look like a native defending his terrain with voodoo. Godard could not have foreseen the competition Mailer would create for Croi- sette cajolery when, at the 1985 Cannes festival, he insisted on Nonnan Mailer as his writer, before signing a Cannon napkin deal to direct a contemporary King Lear. He signed. Producer Tom Luddy was summoned to the Cannon Coun. \"On the very napkin,\" says Luddy, \"was written that 'Mailer writes the screenplay for Godard's King Lear,' so while the word was going around Cannes, someone told Menahem that I knew Mail- er and that I had worked with Godard and that he had a three-picture deal with Zoe- trope. So they made a deal with me whereby my first job would be to get Nor- man Mailer to agree to write this film. So I met with Nonnan, who then met with Godard in fall of 1985. \"Nonnan became interested but, uh, 'leary' if you will, of writing a modem ver- sion for Godard. He pointed out that he would lose twice, once to Shakespeare and then to Godard, because Godard would make mincemeat out of anything he wrote. Not that he would say 'no,' be-

cause at the same time, he began to tell plot drowned out the hum of the Mailer fied pose of the anecdotal hero who in- me that he wanted .to make Tough Guys. vision of America run amok. Destined to spired the title. And not that he thought anyone was going become a camp classic (move over, Mom- to back him to make it, but I said, 'since mie Dearest), Tough Guys could be de- To understand the point of the film, of I'm talking to Cannon about the Lear scribed as the cheap struggle to get an ex- the book, and probably of the writer, the thing, why don't I talk about this, too?' So pensive piece of Cape Cod real estate, pivotal story explaining why hero Tim I gave Tough Guys to Yoram Globus in complete with Ryan O'Neal heaving the Madden's father was the key to losing a London. Jeremy Thomas was in the room hefty Isabella Rosselini over the threshold big fight, goes like this: at the time and, when he saw the book, he of their at-Iong-Iast-home. Mter some six said, 'What a great book. Nicolas Roeg has corpses had been put behind them. Six Midway through the first-person narra- been dying to do this as a movie,' so I bad guys, of course. tive, Tim recounts \"My mistake was that I could see this bell going off in Globus' didn't dance.... head and, ultimately, I was able to pack- Failure? The buoyant Mailer, like the age a kind of two-picture deal with Can- unsinkable stiffs in his movie, was more \"My father's face was without expres- non for Norman. \" concerned with folks not \"getting\" the sion. 'Do you remember Frank Costello?' comedy. Suddenly, we had a comedy, if he asked. Luddy came on as the producer for not a comic, on our hands. Norman was Zoetrope and began collecting a cast and ready to shift categories. Like Mussolini 'Top of the mob,' I said with admira- crew of tough guys, who would be in- from the balcony of one of the wedding- tion. clined to \"work on it more for love than for cake hotels lining the Croisette, he found money,\" as Luddy says, offering his defi- surer footing on the gutsy grounds of his 'One night Frank Costello was sitting in nition of \"tough guys.\" Meanwhile, Mail- proclamation of \"a kind of self-parody, a night club with his blonde, a nice broad, er and Golan and Globus became great perhaps.\" Y'alliistenin' down there? Nor- and at the table he's got Rocky Marciano, friends, \"because they have enormous re- man's only joking. Tony Canzoneri, and Two-Ton Tony spect for Norman as a writer and have Galente. It's a guinea parry,' my father demonstrated it primarily by \"taking no Or maybe Tough Guys bears witness to said. 'The orchestra is playing. So Frank. fee as producers of this picture,\" per his infinite flexibility. His directorial am- says to Galente, 'Hey, Two-Ton, I want Luddy. \"Norman likes them as no-bull- bitions during the shoot in Provincetown you to dance with Gloria.' That makes shit decision-makers.\" included the elimination of narration from Galente nervous. Who wants to dance cinema, although he later bowed to neces- with the big man's girl? What if she likes King Lear was begun in fits and starts sity as it became clear that the disjointed him? 'Hey, Mr. Costello,' says Two-Ton with Rod Steiger, stage director Peter Sel- reveries, dreams, and apparitions of the Tony, 'you know I'm no dancer.' 'Put lars, and Godard all acting out Mailer's film would not cut together. Mter three down your beer,' says Frank, 'and get our script in which Godard in pajamas drags minor attempts (Wild 90, Beyond the Law, there and move. You'll be very good.' around \"Punk, \" Peter Sellars, trying to and Maidstone) , Mailer was still wrestling get him to make a film about King Lear. with the movie muse, who had sat so light- \"So Two-Ton Tony gets up and trots Sting was originally going to play Hamlet lyon his shoulder during the shoot, six Gloria around the floor at arm's length, as an interloper into the film within the months earlier, when he appeared to be and when he comes back, Costello tells film. Norman's script was called Don marching theory and practice, past and the same thing to Canzoneri, and he has to Learo in which Lear was modernized into present, genius and general all in lock-step take Gloria out. Then it's Rocky's tum. a modem Mafia famiJy, giving Steiger a toward his new career. Flashback of Nor- Marciano believes he's big enough in his chance to stretch across centuries. man in finer fettle! own right to call Costello by his first name, so he says, 'M r. Frank, we heavyweights Playing author to Godard's auteur on H Ow many scribblers dream of retiring are not much on a ballroom floor.' King Lear for Cannon was \"like putting a from the Manhattan hustle to the message in a bottle and throwing it in the lambent charms of Provincetown, laying \" 'Go do some footwork,' says Costello. sea,\" Mailer told Le Monde. \"We were down pen for lens, retiring from publish- \"While Rocky is out there, Gloria takes strange animals that ended up being put in ing to ordering the word made flesh? Oth- the occasion to whisper in his ear, the same place. We were certainly civil to er men's fantasies become Mailer's reali- 'Champ, do me a favor. See if you can get each other for the most pan, but we really ty, as he headed up the invasion of his Uncle Frank to do a step with me. ' Well, didn' t know how to pass a bowl of soup Cape Cod home surrounded by the mer- when the number is over, Rocky leads her back and fonh. cenaries of the movies: producer Tom back. He's feeling better and the others Luddy, \"visual consultant\" John Bailey, got their nerve up too. They stan to rib the ''The trouble is that I write only prose Cannon's Yoram Globus and Manahem big man, very careful, you understand, and Godard thinks only in images. Godard Golan, Francis Coppola, and costume de- just a little tasteful chaffing. 'Hey, Mr. is a poet-and my track as a poet is not so signer Michael Kaplan (BladeRunner, Costello,' they say, 'Mr. C., come on, why fabulous. We were just different beasts, Flashda.nce) and editor Debra McDer- don't you give your lady a dance?' different animals. We paned amicably.\" \"'Will you,' Gloria asks, 'please!' mott (FIX, Amadeus, even Howard the \"'It's your tum, Mr. Frank,' they say. For Lear, Godard fended off Mailer's Duck). Mailer surrounded himself with \"CostelJo,\" my father told me, \"shakes anti-Shakespearean prose better than his head. 'Tough guys,' he says, 'don't Mailer did in Tough Guys, an utterly pro- pros. (\"Cons\" weren't mentioned on the dance.'\" saic reduction of Mailer's obsessions with set, while Ryan O'Neal battled a $3 mil- mayhem and marriage, corrupt law and il- lion suit in Manhattan civil coun, and his Adopting a tougher-than-thou pose, licit liaisons. Tough Guys was like the sub- son faced trial for manslaughter of Coppo- Mailer wrenched the first person nar- urban sloth of John Updike masturbated la's son.) On location with Tough Guys ration of Tough Guys into some approxi- by the soapy hands of Douglas Sirko Te- Don't Dance, Mailer-that old choreo- mation of the cinematic objectivity re- pid acting deprived the intended thriller of grapher of machismo-stuck the digni- quired by a $5 million film. Still intrigued its jrisson, and the grinding gears of the by the more experimental possibilities of the form, however, the Mailer of Maid- stone imposed a fragile complexity of 12

\"I'll tell you I am tired offighting. Every punk on the block thinks, 'Boy, I'll be the guy to beat him.' Nobody has any idea ofwhat and to whom I've lost. And I'll be the last guy to tell.\" flashbacks and surreal fantasy on his tough . tale of cops and writers, wife-swapping and head-hacking. Not to forget the oblig- With Ryan O'Neal. atory curtsy to humility-writer's self- doubt-Mailer ponders the likelihood of be a movie that drives critics insane be- offscreen narration in a movie. I made the his own amnesia, after secreting the heads cause it doesn't straddle two forms. It decision in the beginning of this film that I of two victims in his marijuana stash. straddles about four or five.\" Which was not going to have an offscreen narra- makes it something of an impaired octo- tion, notwithstanding all the virtues of In person, Mailer is charmingly inse- pus. Sunset Boulevard. I hate offscreen narra- tion, don't you?\" He would later reach out cure. He doesn't want to be asked about Mailer sinks back into the pillow that for the lifeline of narration, but for now he lenses or technical stuff for film maga- offers the one note of comfort in this was the Kracauer of Cannon. zines. In the narrow confines of his dress- cell. His sudden relaxation seems to ex- ing room, bull and picador literally dance pand the walls beyond their four-foot \"Narration is inimical to film. A pro- belly-to-belly, reversing positions for berth. He's the kind of big man who found trap. I knew once I started it, I Mailer's quick getaway, ifhe's summoned makes things around him seem just as big, couldn't get out of it. So many marvelous back to the set. Mailer's agility, despite his not small in comparison. sentences in the book had to be sacrificed, now-round form, recalls his past in the but I didn't want this narrator saying ring, where he supposedly sparred a cou- \"I think finally the whole grand guignol things that look marvelous on paper but ple of times with Ryan O'Neal, the man vein of Tough Guys is a kind of comedy of would bog actors down acting them out he has chosen to play the Writer Protago- manners. Or tragicomedy without man- and dictate to audiences what to make of nist of Provincetown. ners.\" He grins, aware that he's just deliv- the images. Getting rid of the inner voice ered a Mailer-mot. Can we take it? In immediately alters the values of the work, What is the movie about? print? Famed for his expositions on the na- which is why it took me six months to re- \"I haven't even thought about that,\" he ture of writing, Mailer is eager to d'iscuss create a novel that only took two months says, because the critics didn't like what the difference between novel and script, to write. the novel \"was about.\" \"When people especially for a readership he presumes to start asking what something's about, the care. \"The novel was about a man's immer- critics come along and start saying, 'It's a sion in his own vices, miseries, obsessions, tough guy murder mystery with elements \"I took it for granted that the film was and sometimes feeble attempts to get out of horror, or it's a surrealistic novel that de- going to be different from the novel. A of them. There happened to be a murder rives,'\" he now expands with a waving screenplay is really the antitheses of a nov- mystery circulating around that. But the arm, \"'from the roman noir of the el,\" he explains as a strange Southem center of the book was Madden and his re- French,' so forth and so on. ... drawl seeps out from his increasingly casu- lation to his wives, his father. It was essen- \"That's all very nice, but you try to al slouch. \"The merits of the novel de- tially a novel about a man who only lived write something that defies-no, not de- pend upon a long, continuing inner voice through his obsessions. fies-that straddles categories. Categories of the narrative, and there should be no are just critics' attempts to bring order to a \"The movie, on the other hand, is more complex aesthetic universe. I've always resisted that because I feel it's up to the working artist or craftsman to create their own order. If they pay too much attention to categories, that can really get in the way. You see that happening to young movie makers all the time. They confuse their own opportunity to create order with an order created generations before and sacrifice creation for homage. \"I've written a lot of books that really fall out of category. Armies of the Night was called history as novel and the novel as history. A lot of people would have said, 'No, the first part's the novel, the second part's the history. The Executioner's Song I called a novel. The second book I did about Marilyn Monroe came out as an imaginary memoir. These are all forms to be explored, not obeyed. \"Tough Guys Don't Dance is going to 13

about a man in a bewildering set of situa- nancing. But it ought to accommodate the Didion and John Dunne have done a tions. He doesn't .know which woman specialness of the cast and give each of screenplay. Sidney Lumet is supposed to he's in love with. He finds all sorts of griz- them room to stretch, as we say in the the- direct. Everything is there, I think, but zly, gruesome things happening in the ater. I guess you say that in the movies, the money. I don't know when it will be murky timelessness of Provincetown. He but you don't hear it much. Odd, huh? made, if ever.\" Think it'll be a movie? \"I has some sense that this huge cocaine deal won't get into that. Really. Not a good is going on, which did not happen in \"I gotta tell you, if somebody else had idea.\" the novel, that is engulfing him. Finally, adapted my novel I would have been what I'm depending on is that the average irked at the liberties they took. With my Hollywood, or course, didn't want to person in the audience will feel that no own novel, I felt I had a right to do things touch Tough Guys. \"Mter options but no matter how dramatic or devoid of drama that drive me crazy in other people.\" real action, I looked at it and realized how their own life is, they will recognize the difficult it would be to adapt. The more I way things are always impinging on them. HOw does Mailer feel about adaptation looked at it, the more problems I could see Odd events are coming in from nowhere. from his previous work? \"Ie's not in it. But I knew that I was the only one People they thought they could trust they worth discussing,\" he snorts, the bones who could do it. So I set to it, and then I now discover they cannot trust, unless broken by others' adaptations still on the thought, 'Hell, I don't want to write just perhaps in another way that turns out to mend. \"The Naked and the Dead was a ca- another screenplay. I've written quite a be more useful but doesn't belie the sense tastrophe. American Dream was so bad few. I want to direct this one.' of betrayal. that friends advised me not to see it. Thev said, 'You'll be violent if you see it.'\" \"Various possibilities presented them- \"That's why I caIl it a comedy of man- selves. Three and a half million dollars ap- ners. It's about the style of people's rela- So, was this the source of his vaunted peared at one point, but the money was tionships, not about the guts of relation- violence? The root of his tough guy repu- questionable. I decided I didn't want to be ships. But other people are going to call it a tation? \"I didn't see it,\" he blurts out part of a laundering operation. Then, 10 horror movie. And those are the ones who deadly serious. \"I have friends I trust.\" and behold\"-surely, not the first time will be speaking calmly. Some will slam it The effect is staccato. this has been uttered by-astounded au- as absurd , because it doesn' t add up to teurs-\"Cannon came along. And Tom anything at all. It's not this or that. I don't \"The novel took place in New Luddy, who really gets things done. He's want it to. I want to make a film that's out- York,\"-ah, another bone-\"and they an ideal producer-protective, creative, of-category.\" filmed in Los Angeles. It was a novel and likeable. about New York, its nature, its essential The film is so far out that Mailer may impact on human life. \" Marriage, it will \"When it's all done, I'm not going to say soon find himself in as precarious a posi- be recalled, is something Mailer is quite 'This is my film.' What I like about film is tion as a film director as he now finds him- practiced in. its collective effort. No single person can self as a writer, emitting sounds like, take the credit or the blame, especially in \"Anything's easier than writing.\" Or The mention of marriage puts him on this type of situation. There are some SO again, the scribe soignee: \"Writing is not guard and he leaps to the defense of his very talented craftsmen out there who are manic. It's methodical, like learning im- current wife, Norris Church. \"You should doing it with me.\" Yet only Luddy stood peccable tailoring and the measure of read some of her work. She has some very by Mailer at Cannes. taste. My script, as opposed to the novel, interesting screenplays. As a woman, was like a suit retailored to fit a different you'll bring a lot of appreciation to it,\" ad- \"Finally, a director has to be an execu- kind of body intending to do different vised the writer famous for telling women, tive first. The creative part is only about 20 kinds of things in it.\" \"You look like one of my ex-wives.\" A percent ofa film . The many practical deci- more avuncular figure than expected, sions prohibit the kind of consciousness \"I'll tell you something very interesting Mailer has a disarming ability to treat that I, at least, associate with true creativ- about scriptwriting,\" says Mailer unwill- women as honorable aliens. ity. A director has to be good at decisions. ing to stop worrying the bone, and laugh- You have to make mistakes of judgment ing at his insistence on people understand- \"I like women,\" he says, waving his and not brood on them.\" Especially not on ing the art of the screenplay. (He insists hand generically. \"But they' re different, the French Riviera, where brooding is like there are no reliable books about it.) \"The and what makes them operate intrigues a bikini-unnecessary. screenplay you want to read is never really me, but I often lose patience with the pro- the final screenplay. The second or third cess. And you've got to admit that women \"I think if! were starting out as a young draft is the one everybody will decide to go have changed individually, socially, in ev- man, I might do it differently, but coming ahead with, but you owe yourself one ery way imaginable, and all so fast that it's at it at my age, I think I'll always be seen, if more after that. And then, once the film is been like examining the permutations of I keep at it, as a benign director.\" He cast you rewrite to fit the exigencies of the the chameleon. Something basically femi- stretches the word out, \"bee-nine,\" and budget and the need ofactors who all have nine stays-not just the female form, but the idea jolts, as alarming as the vision of a to fit together visually to lend some obvi- the female psyche. Talking about women beached whale. ous sex appeal to the action. You do it for is dangerous, especially to a woman.\" the actors because you chose them, or in- Mailer concludes his statement with a flir- \"The managerial aspect of directing herited them, or whatever, but they' re tatious gleam in the eye that illuminates a this operation is much like the military,\" your actors and you owe them something good deal of the reputation he built in the Mailer throws out, aware that many men tailor-made and not ready-to-wear. Sixties and Seventies. have used the comparison. ''Think of it as NATO exercises,\" he advises, \"because \"The final screenplay is just a record of But now Mailer is preparing for the role not much destruction can come of it.\" how that suit was altered to fit the body ofthe serious director, and part of that per- and usually seems lessfitting than the ones sona requires that one not bash other di- Mailer's previous films were off-the- people like to read for production and fi- rectors, so he reins in his previous ire over cuff, experimental efforts of a renais- adaptations of Mailer novels. \"Elliott sance renegade. Kastner now owns Deer Park, and Joan \"Those three movies I directed then,\" 14

\"] think Norman hates women,\" Francis blurts out, eager to share her discovery. \"Not because ofanything personal. He's gawd-awful nice to me, but look at what]'m doing in this movie: ] go down on two guys, getfucked on a jeep, and get my head chopped off. Norman Mailer hates women. People ought to know,\" she says. Noted. cautions Mailer, \"were not just finger-ex- A comedy ofmanners. woman brunette the writer has truly loved ercises. They were like mad raids. The and exploited in his past before he fell into last one, Maidstone, was done in seven with the line \"Any woman who is a blonde the clutches of the blondes. According to days and shot in 45 hours. We had five is a blonde.\" It's a choice not a chemical. Luddy, Isabella read the script in Israel, camera crews. It threatened to become a The other blonde in Tough Guys is F ran- where she was doing another Cannon film kind of Ben Hur of the underground. cis Fisher, who is a shade feistier than and was initially intrigued because she Look at the crowd scenes, the party stuff. Sundland, although the two blondes was, apparently, confused about the It's huge, a wildass movie. I spent three would appear to come from the same \"crazy richness of the dialogue. She didn't years cutting it, because it was so undisci- bottle. know what the words meant but she loved plined and shot in such a bizarre fashion.\" how they sounded. I had a very funny \"I think Norman hates women,\" Fran- time explaining words she'd never heard Mailer claims he arrived at his original cis blurts out, eager to share her discovery. of.\" conception ofa director as \"a hostess,\" be- \"Not because of anything personal. He's cause \"that's what a director seemed to gawd-awful nice to me, but look at what \"What is a dolt?\" Isabella asked Luddy. have to do to make it cheap. It's like I'm doing in this movie: I go down on two She had a chance to ask Norman himself, you're giving a party and you invite people guys, get fucked on a jeep, and get my and he, too, was stymied. Rossellini had to the party, in effect, then you savage the head chopped off. Norman Mailer hates lost a fur coat by going to a party at Mailer's ingredients. I figured I had to act in my women. People ought to know,\" she says. house one time, so they had met before, own films, too, in order to control it. I've Noted. but who knew where or when-as the used this image before, but not that often, time came 'round for actress and director so here goes. Mailer is not particularly loved by his ac- to discuss character. tors in Provincetown, which doesn't seem \"Let's say a hostess decides to give a to bother him but keeps Ryan O'Neal Mailer admits that his explanation to party in black-and-white. She says, 'Ev- busy mediating between the disgruntled Rossellini of why Tough Guys is a comedy erybody come in black orwhite.' And they performers and the reportedly demanding of manners was roughly \"Manners? If you do. Along about midnight, in walks a director. He is prone to holler, \"Stop that\" got 'em, you survive. If you don't, you woman in red. She's good enough that the mid-speech rather than shape and hone don' t.\" Rossellini's manners were most hostess doesn't say, Throw her out of my between takes, and yet everybody is clear- evident in her assiduously polite refusal to party,' but still, the theme of the party has ly eager to work on Tough Guys, as if it talk to anyone but Mailer and the film's been altered, and if the hostess is smart, represents the Big Break. Everybody, that publicist during the shoot. Rossellini's iso- she'll keep walking around trying to con- is, but O'Neal and Isabella Rossellini. lation may have to do with the general tain the woman in red to keep her from grumbling about Mailer, with whom she totally distorting the party. Rossellini's presence is very mysteri- clearly has no quarrel. ous, sheltered from inquiring minds \"In those films, I had a sort of ongoing who want to know, while playing the plot. And I'd try to get people back to it, but there were people there who had come to hurt the movie. And some to help. What we did get was an enormous release of energy. Because people didn't have lines they had to remember, they were able to act. Anybody can act when they don't have to remember the lines. They're just talking, and there's this con- stant feeling of discovering actors just be- cause they're not pretending and recit- ing. \" Mailer is directing a \"discovery\" in Tough Guys, Debra Sundland, about whom he says, \"She listens carefully.\" Known on set as \"Obedient Debra,\" the tough, pert little blonde was recommend- ed to Mailer by producer Fred Roos. \"I loved her. We all loved her,\" raves Mailer, whose penchant for blondes began with Marilyn and is summed up in Tough Guys 15

\"Norman has become something of a uals that produce the epiphanies of the sil- Studio last year in Strawhead.\" lightning rod for a lot of loose energy,\" ver screen. They nodded sagely. They Mailer's pride in this daughter glows claims Wings Hauser, who plays the local approved of the sullen silence of Tough marijuana-smoking lawman. \"Actors are Guys. through his leathery exterior. \"If I have confused by his methods. He knows what any talent as a director,\" he chuckles, \"it's he wants but doesn't know how to get it. \" In the late afternoon on the edge of the small gift of discovering very talented Wellfleet, the white-clapboard homes ap- 23 and 24 year-old girls. First Kate, now \"Most actors are very .. . uhm, practi- peared unimpressed by movie stars or the Debra. cal,\" explains Mailer tip-toeing through magnificent sunset dipped in bronze. The his words, \"about the moment. I don't azure sky seemed equally indifferent to \"Then there's Steve, who's a good ac- ever talk to them about what a movie is the threat of sundown. It glistened like tor, and I have another son who'd like to about. To give them a large theme is going something out of South Pacific. The ele- become a movie producer. And my step- to get in the way of most actors. Not be- gaic benevolence of English landscape son's hero is Tom Savini, because he cause they're not intelligent enough to un- painters relegated the problem to some wants to get into special effects. John-Buf- derstand a large theme, but the last thing county museum. The film crew, scudding falo says, 'I'm going to be a film director,' you want them to do is playa theme at a up and down the road from their massive so we may have the makings of a studio. given moment. The theme is just the trailer trucks full of fakery to the spot with Michael is the one to run the studio-a average of all the things that went into it, the splendid backdrop of the Cape in au- real prick. No, hahahaha.\" all the manias and all the depressions. But tumn, jerked it all back into the clutter of you don't want to see 'manic-depressive' the present-as-we-know-it. What a place Family life, such as this is, definitely on screen. I'm responsible for the movie, to retire-even for an unretiring guy like appeals to the new Norman Mailer, who not the actors. Norman Mailer. has rediscovered what he calls \"my practi- cal side, which has been totally ignored. It \"Nothing gets actors more upset than And here he came again bundled up atrophies when you're writing, because for a director to rein in their brilliance, and bouncing like the Michelin man, his you wait so long for practical decisions if even if it detours the movie. But you have white hair covered by a thick fisherman's you're involved in your writing. And that's to say, 'Rein in your instinct. ' I have to be cap. He appeared to be in charge, moving a policeman, along with everyone else.\" among the technicians, checking on de- a big if. So people go around calling you tails casually rather than obsessively, mak- Earlier in the evening, Mailer did exact- ing it look easy but busy, while they got impractical and a mad-genius but totally 1y that from the backseat of a police cruis- beyond the \" magic hour\" ofsunset notori- incompetent. I do have a practical nature, er, directing the murder of one of the ously difficult to film. and this is my opportunity.\" Norman, the blondes. Watching the half-hour of re- closet pragmatist; does anyone buy it? hearsal through the rolled-up windows of \"W hat I like about movie direction,\" the car is like the fish fathoming the scene says Mailer, \"is that it's so different \"It's much too late to be a great movie outside the fishbowl. Apparently noth- from novel writing. One's living free in the director,\" admits Mailer, \"I could never ing's going on, but the bipeds are vigor- world in a funny way. It's like being in ously flapping their fins. combat. Things happen every day as you be as good as I am at writing. But I think inch forward from place to place. It's mar- I'll be an average-to-good director, and The silence offers a chance to take a velous because it's combat without blood. what they'll say about me is 'Oh, he brings long look at P-town, revealing itself by the We'll have a rout now, then we' ll stop and the movie in on time, on budget. He's so hour, much like the striptease of the pro- eat, clean up the crumbs, and take the practical, he's so reasonable.' And the fun- duction-the all-consuming locale of the next hill. ny thing is I'll finally get a reputation as a novel, the haunted cul-de-sac of Mailer's guy you can trust with the money!\" He middle-brow desperados, folks as willing \"Novel writing is so visionary in con- gets a good laugh at this funniest of all to create ghosts by dispatching their trast, so obsessive. You love the novel, you things. neighbors as to live with them. Province- hate it. The novel nags at you, accuses town is making its mark in the film ver- you, reminds you what you haven't done Maybe the basic requirements of a Hol- sion, having triumphed over mangey im- for its life. Terribly personal, like a mate, I lywood director do fit the man who Vanity postors found in North Carolina, where repeat, a wife. It's total and sometimes has the unions are softer than the Massachu- nothing to do with anything else in reality Fair saluted as having \"never missed a setts boys who shut down Tough Guys for but it has to claim you. It's confining in the four days until Cannon could strike a deal same way marriage is confining. AIl the party, never lost a fight.\" \"Possibly,\" an- over Thanksgiving. sides of yourself that don't fit the other swers Mailer skeptically, \"but that rep is person can't be used. I know. I've been untrue on both counts.\" Who beat him? \"I You can almost hear the teamsters tak- doing it for 40 years.\" can't begin to name all the people I've lost ing tea over the non-union shoot: \"They fights to, but I'll tell you I am tired offight- fuckin' want to see tough guys ... ?\" A Mailer thinks of his production team in ing. Every punk on the block thinks, flash of teeth, a slash of tire. similarly domestic terms, \"like a hell of a 'Boy, I'll be the guy to beat him.' Nobody good family. I'm used to being around has any idea ofwhat and to whom I've lost. But in mid-November, half-way families. I've nine children, you know, so And I'll be the last guy to tell.\" through the shoot, the roads around the I'm used to a great many people figuring Cape were lonely, the sand giving way out how to get it all together. My oldest, T he work betrays what Mailer won't. only to wind and water. A tight little movie she's in Chile and 37. She's a psychiatrist, And the guys he's lost to appear to be crew buzzed from location to location with then there's one 28 and they go all the way gals, at least on location in his Province- a studious concentration and mysterious down to eight. You may have heard of town home, which has been thoroughly time-table that impressed New Eng- Kate Mailer. She's quite a good actress, gutted and redecorated to match the landers accustomed to scoffing at mean- did Marilyn Monroe for me at the Actors Southem-belle-tumed-Yankee-tart of the dering tourists. In scarves and mufflers, heroine, Patty Lareine. The voluminous the locals huddled to monitor the cult rit- vulgarity of her nouveau noxious character bubbles forth in a maddening mixture of apricot, pink, peach-a medley of intra- uterine colors, topped off as one ascends the stairs by a gigantic conch shell of vagi- 16

\"Am I the only defender ofa spiritual, political, dynamic machismo in American life? We can't backpedal into guilt and spiritual consciousness. It's right there before us andfacing it head-on is also what macho is about. \" Amoment with Isabella Rossellini. drives him crazy; he gets violent and goes ofa man. mad. \"I've got to tell you that I find the per- na dentata. Feathers, fluff, and a white baby grand on a lime-green oriental carpet \"Then there's the bisexual, Wardley, ception of me as a macho disturbing, be- downstairs, while in the upstairs bedroom, who can't live up to the crazy macho cause it's accompanied by a ha-ha-ha atti- white chintz flounces and 19th century standard. And Ryan O'Neal, who is vul- tude. People who disdain power, or laugh porcelain bath fIXtures figure in a feminist nerable and a victim of the macho myth, at it, are ignoring what is absolutely central scheme to asphyxiate reason. It's all the survives, the only one, the writer.\" This is to being an American. And it's not just a work of Armin Ganz, who is loathe to dis- a succinct version of Mailer's complex physical notion of what macho means. cuss the reputed presence of a ghost on masculine code, at the center of which is the third floor where Mailer's venerable the male victim. \"Am I the only defender of a spiritual, presence as a writer is intact in tasteful political, dynamic machismo in American paintings, heavy oak fumiture, globes and \"There are mistakes too monstrous to life? We can't backpedal into guilt and swords and guns and brown. \"Norman is admit,\" says a witch in Tough Guys. spiritual consciousness. It's right there be- about as clear in his visual imagery as a fore us and facing it head-on is also what director can possibly be,\" attests Ganz, Mailer sometimes worries that his big mis- macho is about. Not to be afraid of your admitting the war between the sexes reca- take has been to become too identified own power is what life is about,\" con- pitulated in the decor. with machismo. \"It is not my primary con- cludes Mailer in a talk after completing cem. A tough guy is not necessarily ma- principal photography on his dark, tough, According to Luddy, the sexual skir- chismo-obsessed. Macho is a quality, not kinky picture about a man not sure ifhe's mishes of the film are only the surface of a an essence. American men are dedicated guilty, or for what. Tough Guys is intellec- tale he describes as \"trial by macho. It's a to finding out how strong they are, I think, tual machismo, at best. brilliant study in machismo with the irony because the country itself is the most pow- and flavor of exaggerated characters, erful in the world. Their identity be- Mailer is the kind of guy who, ifhe had couched in a mystery-horror film. One hooves them to measure themselves in to dance, would want bullets at his feet. guy, Regency, is a pathological errant terms of power. And ever since Heming- And he got 'em at Cannes. More Mailer cowboy who relates to Ronald Reagan in, way, there seems to be only that measure than movie, Tough Guy tumed the tur- uh, Norman's mind. Then there's the key-trot of the screen into a tango on the rather wounded outcast whose machismo Croisette. ~ 17

Photogenics lAma by Nestor Almendros A baby grabs the universe with his eyes before shaping it with his hands. For those of us who work with the camera, the moviegoer is that child, and it is our pleasure and duty to in- troduce him to the universe-to reinvent reality, through our eyes, for his. In the universe of narrative film, faces and bodies are usually the stars; so our duty is to sensi- tize the audience to the visceral, visual pleasure of line and curve, color and per- sonality, that is a movie performer. In see- ing a well photographed actor, the movie- goer is imagining a better, purer self. As the great Polish critic Karol Irzykowski has said, \"To man the most interesting mate- rial revelation is his own body.\" To a mo- viegoer the most interesting revelation is in the face and body of the star on the screen. Another Polish critic once asked me if I had experienced mystical feelings while making films. The question made me smile. For if I have experienced any feel- ings in the creative process, they have been erotic. As a young moviegoer, I felt some inexplicable but intense visual sen- sations on seeing F. W Mumau's German films, Edouard Tisse's images for Alex- ander Nevsky, or Gregg Toland's for The Grapes of Wrath and Citizen Kane. Each gave me an immense feeling of pleasure, which I would describe as erotic. Today I photograph women. A man's body may be more interesting-its bone structure is more visible, and in antiquity man was the sculptural beau ideal-but nowadays it is women whose bodies are often displayed in the nude. In none of the 45 movies I have made, with the possi- ble exception of Days of Heaven, was a man's body revealed as an aesthetic-erotic object. Yet I have photographed the nude forms of Haydee Politoff in La Collection- euse, Zouwu in Chloe in the Afternoon, and Arielle Dombasle in Pauline at the Beach, just to name three Eric Rohmer films. I prefer to photograph women. This has nothing to do with my sexual leanings. It has to do with the almost erotic satisfaction I get when I'm able to make a wOIl1an look more beautiful onscreen, more apPealing to the camera's eye and thus to the view- Marlene Dietrich 18

Camera that Richard Gere's eyes were quite small. er's. I remember a closeup of Meryl My second look told me this was no draw- Streep in Sophie's Choice-the one in back; indeed, it gave him an animal sensu- cold tones just before the flashbacks. She ality, penetrating and alive, that became threw herself completely into the chal- part of his sex appeal. lenge ofcreating the proper image. I could tell her, \"Try to get the light on your More important than the size of the cheeks, look slightly to the left, lift your eyes is their color and the contrast they head a hair,\" and she could comply with provide to the rest of the face. In the mov- these requests and still give an exception- ies, dark-haired people with light-colored al performance. Meryl, whom I have eyes have the advantage; Gene Tierney worked with on four films, has a face that and Hedy Lamarr were sensations on the might have been sculpted by Brancusi. screen. This Law of Felicitous Opposites She is the most intelligent and expressive could apply as well to Deneuve, a blonde actress I have photographed. with dark eyes. Blondes with light eyes are tough to photograph; they are studies in For many years I have been privileged visual monotony. And yet there are always to photograph some of the most beautiful exceptions. I've just finished shooting and interesting women in the world, and Robert Benton's Nadine, starring the at the best time of their lives. When she blonde-on-blonde Kim Basinger. Ba- made The Story ofAdele H., Isabelle Ad- singer's face and figure are perfect; her jani was barely out of adolescence, and her features are completely symmetrical. Her alabaster complexion had a marvelous perfection might seem excessive, inhu- transparency. When I filmed Catherine man, a mannequin's flawlessness, if it weren't for her fire and technique. Nadine Deneuve in The Last Metro, she was ap- is set in the Fifties, so the dresses are in bright, solid colors, the lipstick and nail proaching her forties and was a sensational polish a violent red-all ofwhich add color beauty; the years had improved her, like a and drama to Basinger's face. fine white wine, from the pretty but un- finished creature of her youth to a god- Most of the famous beauties had fair dess. Working with Simone Signoret at complexions. A fair face is an ideal setting the climax of her life and career, for Ma- for rosy cheeks and naturally red lips; dif- dame Rosa, meant adding the wrinkles ferent shades of the skin will show that cinematographers and makeup artists through. To the camera, a suntan makes usually spend hours trying to erase. Sig- the skin appear monochromatic. In the noret had once been gorgeous-who early days of the screen, actresses carried could forget her in Casque d' or and Dedee umbrellas as protection against the sun's d'Anvers?-but she achieved a new vulgarizing rays. Yet today, actresses and beauty playing this old, defeated woman. especially actors fall victim to the suntan craze, against all medical and dramatic log- T he camera is a fickle and demanding ic. Roy Scheider always has a tan; he be- suitor; it loves some women over oth- lieves it is becoming. When Benton and I ers. Everything begins with the bones. were filming Still of the Night, we had to The great beauties of the screen-Garbo, insist that Scheider forego his weekend Joan Crawford, Silvana Mangano-all had sunbaths, because the tan was inappropri- well-structured faces. The nose was suf- ate to his role as a New York psychiatrist. ficient and well-defined, the cheekbones Mike Nichols and I had to say the same high, the eyebrows nicely drawn, the jaw- thing to Jack Nicholson on Heartburn. line splendid. A good bone structure al- lows the light to \"hold\" on a face and cre- Another unhelpful fad is the diet craze. ate an interplay of shadows. If a person People do look slightly heavier onscreen, \"has no bones,\" if the face is flat, the light but an actress doesn't have to be thin to be has nowhere to fall. photogenic. Women of yesteryear, with their sumptuous curves, had a very special The eyes are crucial-and not just their beauty. Now emaciation is the trend-so size and shape. Large eyes are envied, but much so that any variation from skinniness some actors with big eyes project a beefy, can seem a blessing. Witness Witness. By boring, expressionless look, a form of false modem movie standards, Kelly McGillis beauty. Others, with small eyes, find ways is not thin. When she appears in the nude, to compensate. My first peek through the viewfinder on Days of Heaven told me 19 Kim Basinger

though, she looks like Venus de Milo-a cheekbones. You need only compare the Nestor Almendros. rather overweight Greek lady of some ar- spherical Dietrich face of The Blue Angel tistic durability. (1930) with the sculpted face in Shanghai Express (1932) to see what a little determi- Even the most beautiful person has nation and oral surgery can accomplish. some defects. The trick is to find these flaws and hide them from the cam- Guided by Josef von Sternberg and era. A good actress is always ready to coop- cinematographer Lee Garmes, Dietrich erate with her director ofphotography; she learned every facet of her face; she knew knows he is like a doctor, diagnosing a how to exploit every cosmetic subtlety, condition and suggesting treatment. Any every flattering camera angle. She real- professional beauty must be aware of her ized, for example, that she had something facial imperfections-like an athlete who ofa \"duck nose\" and would be better seen must attend to every murmur and com- full-face than in profile. So in a love scene plaint of his body-and be ready to con- showing the profiles of the man and the spire with the cinematographer to conceal woman as they gaze at each other, Die- them. She may, for example, have an un- trich made sure that she faced the cam- even face, or a nose that is not quite era-and that the lighting was arranged to straight. In this case, the photographer emphasize her famous (and hard-earned) places the key light on the side that the cheekbones. Because her fellow actor was facing her from the side, Dietrich had to nose leans away from; then it will appear straight. glance at him sideways, a glance that be- came the foundation for her femme fatale Long before \"Action!\" is shouted on look. Thus she turned a defect into an ef- the set, the director of photography will fect. collaborate with the production designer, costume designer, hairstylist, and make- Another strategy, well known to older up artist to create the actress' image. We performers, is to smile. A smile stretches will realize that an actress, like one I the skin into an instant face lift. Which is worked with, has a gorgeous face, marvel- why some actors smile whenever the red ous torso and arms, but her lower body is light is on, no matter what the sense of the not well shaped. So she will be dressed in scene. But grimacing is not always the an- long, dark skirts. There is no magic, no swer. One young actress I photographed mystery, in our efforts to beautify the ac- had overgrown gums, giving her a horsy tress; just common sense and hard work. look when she laughed or smiled. Before shooting, I suggested that she \"smile with The lighting tests are essential prepara- her eyes,\" Mona Lisa-style. She followed tion. In these tests we can see that, say, the advice, photographed beautifully, and the actress has a round face and thus became a star. should never have both sides of her face lighted with the same intensity; we will il- A law that may be applied in nature as luminate halfof the face and leave the oth- well as in the movies is this: no woman's er side in semi-darkness. We see a per- face can stand light from high above. In former with a longish face and know to use the tropics, many women of marriageable a frontal light. If the actor has deep-set age would go outside only in the late after- eyes, we will know to place the lights low, noon, when the sun is low and the light to keep the eyebrows from overwhelming exudes a warmer, more soothing tone. his face. This was the case with the excep- Midday light forms one shadow under the tional French actor Jean-Pierre Leaud, eyes (which clouds the face) and another with whom I have made four pictures. under the nose (which impudently draws Lighted properly, his eyes were his great- a mustache above the mouth). On movie est asset. sets or in homes, any light from above should illuminate a plant or a painting, Corrective makeup will hide some never a face. That is why track lights and flaws. One actress I worked with had a spotlights, fashionable in the Sixties, were low, narrow hairline, which cramped her a disaster-they emphasize every flaw on forehead, unbalanced her face, and exag- the skin-and why the lamp shade was gerated her jawline. I suggested lifting the one of man's greatest inventions! Blanche hairline about an inch; Rita Hayworth Du Bois knew her stuff; low-key lighting tried it 50 years ago, and the new look filtered through warm-colored lamp helped make her a star. Marlene Dietrich shades is the perfect prop to camouflage was an expert self-appraiser who knew an aging belle's secrets. Candlelight is flat- that her face, when she brought it to Hol- tering too-a fact known even to decora- lywood, had a round, German-peasant tors of second-rate nightclubs. cast. It is said that she had her dentist re- move some molars, to emphasize her Another fact of life is that, all physical evidence to the contrary, many women can make men believe they are beautiful. 20

Often the director will allow his enthusi- Richard Gere in Days of Heaven. when it reveals the nature of man. The asm for an actress to blind him to her short- comings. As cinematographer I have to ig- made an indelible impression. Her im- wheat fields in Days ofHeaven, the cotton nore what the actress wants me to believe, age-intelligent and athletic, with an at- fields in Places in the Heart, were delight- and analyze her just as she is and can be; it tractive touch of neurosis-has survived is part ofwhat I'm paid for. I must become longer than all others. Among modem ac- ful to shoot because here nature was an asexual being, seeing her as she will be tresses, Jane Fonda and Meryl Streep car- shaped and modified by man. Otherwise, seen. Away from the sound stage I can be ry this standard with great style: the I am completely bored after a few days in as human as anyone. On the job, however, strong, independent woman who is still the country. I am impressed by a river only I am a camera. sweet and feminine and vulnerable to fall- ifa bridge crosses it. I also know that there ing in love. is nothing easier to film than an outdoors H ere is a list ofactresses I wish my cam- scene. I believe I put a lot more creative era could have photographed: first of Years ago, beauty was almost manda- ingenuity into lighting the interior of a all Dietrich, then Louise Brooks, Hedy tory in an actress-the traditional, shel- Lamarr, Ava Gardner, Maria Felix, Gene tered, porcelain look. Some actresses house in Sophie's Choice or Kramer vs. Tiemey, Joan Crawford, Silvana Man- looked as if they were held together with Kramer. The most mediocre cinematog- gano, Danielle Darrieux, Alida Valli, Do- pins. Before appearing on the set, one ac- tress would spend more than three hours rapher can replicate a stunning landscape. lores del Rio. I don't think Marilyn Mon- each moming in makeup, a heavy pan- And yet whenever a film dabbles in clouds cake makeup that had to last all day. or waterfalls, it is virtually assured an Oscar roe was beautiful: her face was too wide, Those women for whom beauty was sec- for cinematography. People who should her eyes too far apart, her nostrils too visi- ondary to skill, such as Miriam Hopkins or know better exclaim: \"What beautiful ble; it took cosmetics, intelligence, and Bette Davis, were more likely to play em- photography! How perfectly painterly!\" sex appeal to put her over. But these pref- bittered spinsters, not the sort men fell in erences are only prejudices. Perhaps be- love with. Today there is no absolute They should remember that some of cause I was raised in Spain and Cuba, my ideal, and that is as it should be. There is the master painters of the past-Caravag- own preference is for the Latin beauty- beauty in all ages, all races, all sizes and gio, Rembrandt, Goya--chose another, dark, elegant, smoldering. shapes. more familiar subject as the unique theme of their work. I'm with them. My favorite And what of Katharine Hepbum? She Because of my work on Days ofHeaven landscape is the human face. In it I find had a face, as Truffaut said, that \"one had and The Blue Lagoon, I have acquired a the most fascinating mountains and val- to get used to.\" Her beauty was not re- leys, the clearest lakes, the thickest for- vealed immediately, but once revealed it reputation as a landscape artist. But the ests. This is precisely why there is nothing truth is, I don't care much for nature. more exciting to light than a face: it is the To me, nature becomes interesting only sum of all landscapes. ~ 21

Italian-Americans: \"Just what we need, a thieving wop. ... a /yin' member ofa no-good race.\" By George De Stefano beasts in Mamet's moral jungle. usual to think that maybe an Irish cop Brian De Palma thinks my reasoning is would be a little anti-Italian for precisely F or more than 50 years, ever since those reasons. \" Edward G. Robinson's Rico Ban- bullshit. \"Boy, I don't get that at all,\" says delli reigned as Little Caesar and the bearded, bearish director. \"You can't DePalma maintains that he was sensi- Paul Muni's Alphonse Capone showed his have a movie about AI Capone's mob and tive to the danger of stereotype. That's Scaiface, Italians have served as the not have them be Italians. This is hardly a why he made George Stone, the young quintessential gangsters of the movies, movie that is steeped with racist stereo- cop baited by Malone, an Italian. \"It was the rottenest hoods around. Though a types ofItalians. I mean, we could've had my idea to make Stone Italian,\" says De- genre picture (and admittedly an exciting, them cooking spaghetti and playing Palma. \"In the original script he was sup- sometimes brilliant one), The Untouch- bocce, and just filled the movie with fabu- posed to be Polish. But I didn't want to ables, the new Brian DePalma-David lous Godfather images.\" make a one-dimensional movie about the Mamet film, adds something new to the cops against the wops.\" Though he isn't a familiar stereotype. Which would have been benign, com- crook, stolid and laconic Stone is Ness' pared to what's actually in the movie. I cite Tonto, a trusty sidekick who always shows Mamet's Chicago isn't simply a town the oven anti-Italian sentiments voiced by up at the side of the Great WASP(!) Wop plagued by brutal bootleggers. It's an ethi- Malone (Sean Connery), the cynical Irish Hunterwhen he's most needed. Invented cal wildemess where corruption ensnares cop who joins up with Ness. In an early to make a point, Stone, however, is too even those who would oppose it. AI Ca- scene in which Ness and Malone are try- pallid a character even to serve DePalma's pone's malignant power is all-pervasive, ing to recruit police for the Untouchables admitted diagrammatic purposes, much consuming the press, police, politicians, team, Malone tests the reflexes of a young less to compete for our attention with De and the courts. Straight-arrow WASP(!) El- Italian-American cop by provoking him Niro's memorably evil Capone or lieuten- liot Ness (Kevin Costner) mimics Ca- with ethnic insults. \"Just what we need, a ant Frank Nitti (Billy Drago). pone's murderous ways to put the crime thieving wop .... a Iyin' member of a no- chief out of business. This Untouchables good race.\" Later, while confronting a cor- Historical accuracy, De Palma explains, could've been called \"Moral Perversity in ruptcop, Malone rages, \"You run with the demands he not fudge the ethnic facts. Chicago,\" as Kostner despairingly admits dagos .... they ruined this town!\" And his hoods, in their unmitigated bad- at the end of the film, \"I became what I ness, are more credible than say, Coppo- beheld.\" And with an ethnically homo- De Palma makes the case, \"It'd be ri- la's seductively glamorous Mafiosi. \"I geneous gang of malefactors, the Italians diculous to ponray Irish cops of that period don't like to make my criminals family end up doing metaphorical duty as the as if they weren't anti-Italian.\" Malone is a men who are only in it because their fa- bigot, but \"a lot of his bigotry is based on ther's dying,\" says DePalma. \"I love The actual events, like the fact that Capone Godfather, but it's not my image of mob- was Italian, had an Italian mob, and was sters. \" killing people in Chicago. So it's not un- 22

The Untouchobles doesn't romanticize The Godfather. name for himself investigating extortion gangsters, but it does distort the historical among the mostly Sicilian members of the record. AI Capone and his mob were only can boys (who usually hailed from Brook- city's Little Italy. Though these cases in- part of the organized crime world during lyn) proved themselves loyal and heroic volved Italians victimizing other Italian the 13 years of the Volstead Act. Most of American fighters. But after the war, the immigrants, the crimes fed the native- the Prohibition gangs were headed by goombahs with guns retumed to claim born population's xenohobia. When Irishmen and Jews. Until Capone's ascen- their place as the essential Italians, and Hennessey was killed, local bigots and the dancy, Italians didn't lead the gangs; but have pretty much held it ever since, the gutter press predictably blamed the Ital- joined them as low-ranking members. gangster genre reaching its apogee in Cop- ians, though they were never able to prove The ethnic skew of The Untouchobles pola's The Godfather (1972) and Godfa- their accusations. (Hennessey's murder has only Malone's word that \"the dagos ther 11(1974). remains unsolved nearly 100 years later.) have ruined this town.\" Fourteen Italians were indicted and im- The roots of the movie mobster lie in prisoned, and in March, 1891, a lynch While acknowledging that non-Italian the social history of the early 20th century, mob of more than 6,000 men broke into crime outfits operated in Prohibition Chi- when Italian immigration to America was the prison. They beat, hanged, and shot cago, DePalma says, \"This film isn't at its height. Most of the immigrants came to death eleven of the suspects. Though about them.\" But few crime films are ever from Naples, Calabria, and Sicily, under- many members of the mob were identi- about \"them,\" not when you've got one developed regions where poverty and fied-the leaders included some of New group that has served so handily and for so weak civil authority had fostered criminal Orlean's most prominent citizens-no long as the exemplar ofviolent criminality. activity, much of it organized. Before and one was ever held accountable for the Even films like Prizzi's Honor not only during the early years of immigration, the lynching, the largest in American history. grant what they parody, they add insult to European and American press reported injury: the Prizzis' darkly comic antics the Italian government's attempts to sup- Richard Gambino reports that although skims the Corleones' family business, but press the camorre, the 'ndrangheta, and some public officials and newspapers de- it makes Sicilians do stupidly what they do the mafie. When the immigrants arrived in nounced ~he murders, others, including best-plotting and killing. the United States, Americans were well- Theodore Roosevelt and the New York acquainted with the stories of criminal Times, approved. \"Lynch law was the Same with Woody Allen's Radio Days. bands and societies operating in the Mez- only course open to the people of New Or- Rocco the mobster (Danny Aiello) has to zogiorno (Southern Italy and Sicily). The leans to stay the issue of a new license to bump off Sally (Mia Farrow) so he takes term Mafia became the designation ap- the Mafia to continue its bloody prac- her home to Mama (Gina De Angelis), plied to all Italian-American crime be- tices,\" the Times editorialized. who feeds the intended victim roasted cause of two notorious murders. peppers while lecturing her obtuse son on Mter the Hennessey killing, newspa- how to make the hit. It's a lame bit in a I n 1890, Police Superintendent David pers increasingly published sensational, Hennessey was shot to death in New unsubstantiated stories about the purport- lame film, but what's remarkable is the Orleans. Hennessey had made a contrast between Allen's treatment ofItal- ians and Jews. There's a range of Jewish characters in Radio Days, from the narra- tor's family members to the communists next door to the neighborhood rabbi. The only Italians in Rockaway are a mother and son hit team. H Ow did the Mafia gangster come to represent Italian ethnicity in movies? The first film image of the Italian was the simple immigrant happy to be in \"dis-a beeyootiful Amerrrica\", appearing in John Ford's Iron Horse (1924). This new arrival might be a voluble barber, a pushcart ven- dor, or a good-natured waiter. But what- ever his trade, he was a stock character with no life of his own. The gangster debuted in the Thirties in Little Caesar (1930) and Scaiface (1932), but the movie mobsters of that era weren't always Italian. James Cagney played brash Irish toughs in Angels With Dirty Faces and The Roaring Twenties, but they were always somewhat likeable. \"The real creeps always spoke with heavy Mediter- ranean accents and had names ending with vowels,\" observed John Mariani in the New York Times. World War II brought a brief respite from the gangster image, as Italian-Ameri- 23

Radio Days. the existence of a Palermo connection historical legacy, the \"Sicilian thing that's seemed indisputable. (The actual circum- been going on for 2000 years,\" as Mi- ed exploits of Italian crime outfits. More stances of the detective's death remain chael's WASP wife Kay puts it, with a sophisticated opinion journals wondered uncertain however, and no evidence was touch of overstatement. whether Italians were predisposed to ever found to tie the boastful don to crimi- criminality by dint of genetics, culture, or nal activities by Italians in America.) Pe- Writing in the Village Voice shortly both. Then, 20 years after the New Or- trosino's murder was a calamity for Italian- after the release of Godfather 1/, Richard leans incident, another murder quelled Americans. Protestant America, feeling Gambino claimed that Coppola's films any doubts among Anglo-Saxon \"nativ- itself threatened by an criminal conspiracy \"carried a benefit with the [Mafia] stereo- ists\" that the Southern Italian and Sicilian that somehow involved virtually every typing\" by providing \"millions of Ameri- immigrants were a lawless bunch bent on member of the group, lashed out. In the cans with an introduction to the Southern establishing their old world crime syndi- wake of the detective's death came mas- Italian's view of tragedy.\" Life in the Mez- cates on American soil. sive police raids on Italian neighborhoods zogiorno was marked by poverty and de- and villification by public figures and the spair; social justice and political freedom In March 1909, Joseph Petrosino, an press. were non-existent and seemed unattaina- Italian-born detective in the New York ble. These deprivations, says Gambino, Police Department, was shot to death in Though Italians resented the gangster gave rise to a weltanschauung that empha- Palermo. The press reported that Petro- as an obnoxious stereotype, he was ir- sized the tragic absurdity oflife. Maturity, sino's mission was to investigate the pur- resistible to Hollywood. While they were and a degree of existential freedom, came ported links between American hoodlums larger than life in their villainous allure, from accepting this absurdity while also ofItaljan origin and the Sicilian Mafia. But they rarely were more than one-dimen- \"having the will and emotion to live life Petrosino's police work in America had sional until the Corleones came along: En- and enjoy it.\" This world view contrasts convinced him that criminals among the ter Don Vito, the austere entrepreneur, sharply with \"the sense of progress and Italian immigrant communities acted and his sons, the brooding, reserved Mi- optimism\" characteristic of Protestant alone or with small groups of accom- chael, the volatile Sonny, and the dim- Northern Europe. The Mezzogiorno Ital- plices, not as members of a well-orga- witted, pathetic Fredo. They were the ians recognize that \"good is inextricably nized, foreign-based association. Despite American hope of the assorted members woven with evil, and that few motives or the newspaper stories, Petrosino had actu- of la famiglia Corleone, family in both events are of unmixed moral quality.\" ally gone to Sicily to check on the activities senses of the word. Coppola's gangster The head of a brutal crime syndicate can of hoodlums who had returned to Italy epic adhered to the genre conventions (es- be a loving father who wants better for his from America, and to examine police re- pecially in Part I), but its originality lay in son than the family business; the COllege- cords of Italian-born criminals then living the portrayal ofa family trapped by a tragic educated'and assimilated son can become in the United States. a more ruthless don than his Old World fa- ther. But when a prominent Sicilian Mafia don claimed credit for killing Petrosino, While The Godfather was an unabashed romanticization of the criminal organiza- tion as family, it used all the strengths of classical Hollywood cinema to establish an ethnic group recognition. L'ordine della famiglia, the extended family with its set of rights and obligations, is the essence of Mezzogiorno culture, and it was The God- father'S vivid and accurate depiction of this primary social institution thatcaptivat- ed Italian-Americans, while simulta- neously offering them the spectacle of a family consuming itself. What bitter irony that the best depiction of the Italian- American family we have on film is the one most tied to the irksome Mafia stereo- type. During the Seventies, the Italian male wasn't only a Mafioso; a new, if close- ly related type emerged. (The Italian woman remained what she'd always been-a subsidiary, homebound figure.) The Urban Primitive was unintellectual and crude, but vital and passionate. Some- times he exuded a dogged integrity, like AI Pacino's Serpico or Sylvester Stallone's Rocky. More often, he was the blue collar embodiment ofsex and violence. And this type-as played by De Niro, Pacino, Tra- volta, Lo Bianco, Sorvino, Stallone, and 24



Martin Scorsese directing Mean Streets. nological and bureaucratized societies. No American creative artist since James Richard Gambino sounds a similar T. Farrell has understood as well as Scor- Gere, who acted \"Italian\"--enjoyed tre- sese what neighborhood loyalties mean to mendous cachet. In the New York Daily note. \"The key to the Mafia mania,\" he ethnic groups,\" Greeley wrote in the New News, Deanne Stillman proclaimed the says, \"is that Americans yearn for the aura York Times. Italian male \"the man we have idolized of l' ordine dell£I famiglia that emerges more than any other ethnic in American from Mafia stories. Values of belonging, But Mean Streets, despite its psycho- history.\" Effusing over the Italo-Ameri- loyalty, control of one's life, canny ability logical acuity and keenly observed behav- can's \"swarthy primal qualities,\" Stillman to assess people and events, and palpable ioral detail, is mainly about the petty deal- saw in him a \"repressed electricity\" which rather than abstract human relations radi- ings and violence ofsmalltime hoods. The gives him \"an element of danger.\" Ameri- ate through the criminal sensationalism of criminality and general low-life aspect of can films, she gleefully reported, were full the tales. \" Scorsese's characters is consistent with the of \"Latin lovers who regularly sally forth to distortions of the gangster movie tradition. kill , con, caress, and hustle, and make us The conference panelists at the Media For all its brilliance, Mean Streets doesn't wish we could hire one of them to take Institute of the National Italian American challenge stereotypes but leaves them in- care of our own personal enemies list.\" Foundation came to a different conclu- tact. sion. They agreed that the Mafia stereo- Stillman's nutsy dithering reeks of type alters the self-image ofltalian-Ameri- Marxist political scientist Michael Par- quasi-racist condescension. (The Italian cans and leads others to regard them as enti points out that movies and television Urban Primitive in fact resembles the ster- untrustworthy, even sinister, and some- have either ignored or trivialized the class eotypical black: very physical, sexy, not how more likely to be involved in criminal aspect of the ethnic experience, the \"pur- too smart.) But Stillman intends praise. pursuits. There's reason to believe the suit of the American dream and the often She \"idolizes\" Italians. Perhaps, then, conferees were right. When nationally- bitter disillusionments of that pursuit.\" stereotyping of Italians elicits little protest syndicated political columnist Joseph So- Italians have a history of involvement in because the ascribed attributes are regard- bran wrote that Mario Cuomo reminded ed as positive ones. Killing, conning, and him of one of the guys from The Godfa- militant movements for economic and so- hustling might not be nice, but when ther, he wasn't paying homage to the cial justice, and last year it seemed that a they're done with such style, such primal Governor's political skill and strength of piece of that history would make it to the swarthy repressed e1ectricity-ooh! character. screen. Producer Martin Bregman an- nounced plans for a film biography of Vito Despite the sanguinary exploits of real- What might a non-cliched film about Marcantonio, a son of immigrants who be- life gangsters, the popcult image of the Italians look like? Martin Scorsese's came the only Marxist ever elected to the Mafioso is a formidable, take-charge guy Mean Streets, according to Andrew Gree- U.S. Congress. From 1934 to 1950, Marc- who commands respect. The Italian- ley, the Jesuit sociologist and novelist, is antonio represented East Harlem, a pre- American actress and playwright Julie Bo- not so much a film \"about\" Italians as it is dominantly Italian district that became vasso suggests that the Mafia dramas, with \"about loyalty and devotion in the context known as \"EI Barrio\" with the Puerto Ri- their powerful protagonists, tap a yearning of the Italian-American experience.... can influx of the Forties. for autonomy and control over life's ex- igencies among members of highly tech- Known as \"the people's congressman,\" Marcantonio was a tenacious, outspoken advocate for labor rights, civil liberties, and a non-interventionist foreign policy. His life spanned the peak years of Italian immigration, the New Deal, and the start of the Cold War and McCarthyism. It would've made a great movie, especially with Bregman's choice for the lead-AI Pacino, who was a child in East Harlem when Marcantonio was in Congress. But Vito, as the project was tentatively called, has been officially on hold now for more than a year. Paramount is, however, planning to film The Godfather, Part III. Mario Puw has signed to write the script, and Nicho- las Gage, the former New York Times cor- respondent turned novelist, will produce, according to the Times. Paramount chair- man Frank Mancuso is reportedly a big booster ofGodfather III. \"Both Frank and Mario [Puw] are Italians, and they know that world, and I'm Greek,\" said Gage. \"I'm from that same Mediterranean world and I've written about it .... We're deal- ing with a world we observed and know, and the emotions that come out of that world.\" Madonna mia. ® 26

sts by Andrew Coe or \"Iucha libre,\" to the country. The mask clean living, humility and love ofchildren. lent an air of mystery to the proceedings \"Mexico was looking for a genuine T he TV room in a Mexican home: and caused great excitement among afi- the Sanchez family stares into the cianados. More masked wrestlers, like Mexican superhero,\" said Rene Cardona, world's eye. Onscreen the Vic- \"The Masked Marvel\" and \"The Mask the director ofover 150 films, patriarch of a tims-young lovers, children, a family From Chicago,\" began to appear. It filmmaking dynasty, and friend of EI just like the Sanchezes--cower before in- wasn't until the early Forties, however, Santo. \"Santo became the one.\" exorable Evil: an army of assorted assas- when Rodolfo Guzman Huerta donned a sins, grave robbers, Martians, zombies, silver mask and became \"EI Santo,\" that Cardona and Jose G. Cruz, a photo- diabolical brains, spies, smugglers, and the cult really took off. After he won the novel writer, saw the possibilities in San- lesbian vampires led by Frankenstein, championship in 1946, Santo became a to's character and cast him in an action- Dracula, Wolfman, and the Mummy. In national idol, known for his clean fighting, advenrure comic book, El Enmascarado the nick of time a Masked Wrestling Hero de Plata (The Masked One ofSilver), that is summoned from his crime lab or arena. soon sold a million copies a week. Movie After a series of athletic slugfests, he routs inexorable Evil and restores Justice and Good to the world. The Sanchez parents hug; their children jump up and down and apply wrestling holds on one another. Cut to: interior of a movie theater owned and operated by the Mexican gov- ernment. Standing room only. Onscreen, narcotics traffickers, prostirutes, drunks, and politicians screw and shoot each other. Everybody is corrupt. In the end, only the baddest Bad Guy, the Don Mierda with the biggest cojones, is alive. The audience srumbles out, drained, and sees these movies' black vision confimled by the newspaper headlines and the traffic cops extorting bribes on the street. Eh amigo . .. que pasa to the Mexican wrestling film? This innocent, violent, and sometimes surreal genre was responsi- ble for many of the top Mexican and trans- Latin American boxoffice hits from the early Sixties into the early Seventies. It produced screen stars Blue Demon, Hura- can Ramirez, Mil Mascaras, and, particu- larly, EI Santo, whose popularity eclipsed the American cartoon empire of Super- man, Batman, and the like. Although the genre still lives in television reruns and on videotape in the United States, it hasn' t had a good year (meaning more than two films produced) since 1973, when at least 15 wrestling films were released. And since El Hijo del Santo en la Jrontera sin ley (The Son ofSanto on the Lawless Fron- tier) was made in 1983, the genre has been dead on the mat. Mexican wrestling's cult of the mask began with the appearance ofan American known only as \"EI Enmascarado\" in 1935, two years after a promoter named Salvador Lutteroth brought professional wrestling, 27

:. ..~-. not cut into Santo's lion's share. Santo be- came known as \"The Magnet of the Tick- Mil Mascaras. when Santo starred in Santo contra el cer- et Window,\" and the wrestling film genre makers, Cardona included, were also at- ebro de mal (Santo vs. the Bad Brain) and became bread-and-butter for writers and tracted to professional wrestling. In 1954, then Santo contra los hombres irifernales directors. the first four wrestling films were released. (Santo vs. the Irifernal Men). Both were They represented a variety of dramatic filmed in Havana on rock bottom budgets. \"All of the wrestling pictures were class forms-family drama, comedy, melodra- They pit Santo against a gangofhypnotiz- B films,\" says Rene Cardona. \"Some of ma-that were often repeated in future ing bandits who force him to participate in them were good, with good stories, good wrestling movies. However, it was Car- their crimes in a plot so haphazard, it sets, and beautiful women. Others were dona's movie, based on his comic book verged on negligence. No matter, said the lousy. Sometimes we ran out of money and with the same name, that defined the public, as they streamed zombie-like into during the filming, so we had to start cut- genre's format. Santo himself didn't ap- the theaters, the grapple genre has what ting and inventing with the footage we al- pear in the film-he apparently didn't we want: a masked hero, lots of fistfights , ready had. That makes a bad picture.\" think it would be a success-so the lead and a happy ending. was taken by another masked wrestler, Cardona's formula was to add a little of \"EI Medico Asesino\" (the Assassin Doc- Producers were quick to catch on. They evetything to his wrestling films. \"Making tor). opened the door for well over 100 rehash- a picture is like inventing a new cocktail,\" ings of the same plot over the next 16 he says. \"Everyone's taste is different, so Wrestling films were released sporadi- years. The pie was big enough for other you make it a little sweet, a little dry, a lit- cally for the next six years until 1958, wrestlers to star in their own movies and tle sour. In the films we put in a little com- edy, a little romance, and a little melodra- ma and hoped one of them hit the public.\" The variable was the setting. One would be set in the Old West, the next in the Bermuda Triangle, and a third in Dra- cula's castle. All of them , however, includ- ed an arena scene of the wrestling hero in action and most gave him a crime lab as well. Rene Cardona built a three-story high crime lab in a cave-a la Batman-at Estudios Americas in Mexico City, so Santo could search for a cure to crime when he wasn't on call. \"Santo was a very nice person, a gentle- man , and well-educated,\" recalls Car- dona. \"Usually those big, strong men are kind and easy to handle. Thank God, or else you'd have to shoot them. Santo was Santo, because he never showed his face. He would leave the set with his silver mask still on. When he went to the studio restaurant, he wore a mask with a bigger opening, so he could eat.\" Santo, like most of the acting wrestlers, was dubbed. \"He was not an expressive actor,\" SflYS Alfredo Crevenna, another veteran direc- tor (bom in Germany and Oxford-educat- ed, he worked at UFA before emigrating in 1938 to Mexico, where he has di- rected films, some festival material, and wrestling films). When Crevenna was di- recting Santo's last film, La furia de los karatecas, (The Fury ofthe Karatekas) in Miami, Santo had to travel on a different plane from the production crew, so they wouldn't see his face when he unmasked himself at Customs. For Crevenna, a one-time cohort of Bunuel, there are reasons other than mon- ey for making wrestling films. \"You can do things you can only see in the movies,\" he says. \"In Santo vs. the Invasion ofthe Mar- tians, Santo has a hold on the Martian leader. The leader tums a knob on his belt, and he disappears. I enjoyed making that.\" 28

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the whole story about professional wres- t1ing,\" he said. The real poop. Santo yBlue Demon contra Los Hombres Lobos. The handful of wrestling films that Mascar.as. strode up and.down his con- were produced during those years were in- dommlum and office m Mexico City I n 1974, the feedbag was taken away. dependently financed and shot abroad. and described the story, which is his own. The wrestling films boxoffice was down Now, under President Miguel de la Ma- Without his mask he looks a little like drastically. Producers concluded that the drid, there is no official policy on wrestling Wayne Newton-the same moustache public's taste had changed. They became films. Few are made, because producers and combed-back hair. He turned the sto- leery of putting up money for new produc- are not convinced that wrestling films with ry into a screenplay with the help of tion. the victim-evil-masked hero-happy end- scriptwriter Carlos Suarez, also an actor in ing plot can draw a public now jaded by almost 400 films, and manager of Santo At the same time, President Echeverria the \"bad people\" films. and now Hijo de Santo. In May, he signed named his brother Rodolfo, an actor, as di- up Rene Cardona Jr. to share executive rector of the Cinematographic Bank, For Mil Mascaras (Thousand Masks), producing duties with Suarez and Rene which controls production, distribution, star of 16 wrestling movies , the genre's Cardona III, a recent graduate of UCLA and exhibition funds for the vast majority tribulations might lead to its salvation. \"I film school, to direct his first feature film. offilms in Mexico. While many historians don't really like any of my films ,\" he says. Mascaras will act in the film and direct the believe that Rodolfo presided over a \"I think the prohibition was good, be- fight scenes. The budget is two hundred flowering of \"noteworthy\" Mexican cine- cause the stories were bad. It's time to million pesos (about $1. 75 million), ma, he did his best to quash wrestling change the story.\" which, in Mexico, is enough for \"a good films. According to Mil Mascaras, Rodol- film with a revolution,\" in the words of fo's acting career had been limited to Unlike the other wrestler-actors, Mil Cardona Sr. Mascaras hopes to shoot the \"wrestling films, cowboy films, and more Mascaras studied acting in college. He film , tentatively titled Adios, Campeon, 0 wrestling films,\" and he wanted revenge had to choose between acting and wres- La verdad de Lucha fibre (Goodbye, Cham- for his frustration. He had unlimited pow- tling, chose the latter, and starred in his pion, or the Truth About ProfessionaL er to exercise his grudge. first wrestling film in 1966. His movies in Wrestling), this summer if he can fit it in- the late Sixties made \" big, big money,\" between wrestling matches. After the Echeverrias retired abroad and he began to reinvest his profits in oth- with their billions, the new President, Lo- er films, some wrestling, some not. As first Adios, Campeon is one of those Mexi- pez-Portillo, named his sister Margarita to generation superstars like Santo (who died can generational sagas about friends who the bank. She wanted Mexican cinema to in 1984) and Blue Demon, became less ac- are torn apart only to meet again in the reflect her antediluvian ideas about moral- tive, Mil Mascaras emerged as the top end. It begins in the Fifties, when an auto- ity, and while wrestling films feature good wrestler in the country. He became cratic promoter named Don Florindo triumphing over evil, usually good ends known by honorific nicknames, like \"Don (based on Salvador Lutteroth) ruled wres- up sitting on evil's chest. Bad, according to Personality,\" \"The Julius Caesar of Mexi- tling. He pays his \"boys,\" the wrestlers, Margarita. She also claimed that they were can Wrestling,\" \"The Multifaceted measly wages, and death is the only ex- dangerous, because there had been some One,\" and \"The Conquistador of the cuse for not making a fight. This section is well publicized accidents involving chil- Five Continents.\" Today, he's the heavy- full of gym, locker room, and bar scenes dren wrestling. (She banned Rene Car- that show the backstage life of the wres- dona's film about the terrorist, Carlos, be- weight champion of Mexico, a multimil- tlers. The main characters are two pals and cause it might encourage terroristic acts.) lionaire businessman, and perhaps the clean wrestlers who fight each other for Paradoxically, it was during her tenure best known wrestler in the world. And he the first time in the finals of a big tourna- that the narco-trafficker, drunk, and pros- wants to make a wrestling movie, a very ment. Goaded to violence, one kills the titute films-the \"bad people\" genres- different wrestling movie. \"I want to tell other. came into their own. Later that night a crazed fan follows the killer wrestler into a cantina and shoots him. After a dual funeral scene, the fam- ilies of the wrestlers split up. One goes to Los Angeles and becomes wealthy; the other stays poor in Mexico City. Flash for- ward 30 years. The two wrestlers each had a son, who have become wrestlers them- selves. They both enter the big tourna- ment and meet in the finals. They are ig- norant of their history until just before the bell rings and then ... \"This won't be Rocky, full of impossi- ble fights,\" says Mil Mascaras, muscles rippling under his shirt. \"Adios, Campeon will show the blow that's true, the fight that's true. In the end the only winner, the real champion, is the promoter. He makes all the money.\" ® 30

· ection . 31

Highway61 Robert Frank interviewed Revisited by Marlaine Glicksman Robert Frank in Home Improvements. \"I'd Like to make a film which would mingle the private aspects of my Life with 32 my work, which is public by definition ... how the two poLes of this dichotomy join, interlace, are at variance, and fight each other, as much as they compLement each other . .. \"Two houses. Two countries. Two points ofview. One is outside cuLturaL Life, the other right in it. One is the other's ref- uge. Both are at the same time necessary and useless . .. .'/'d like to make that film. ' , -Robert Frank, Pantheon Photo Library 1983 I n China, it is the Year ofthe Rabbit. In film, it may be remembered as the year ofthe phoenix. Once recognized, now underground , poets of literature, photography, film, and music will rise centerstage with upcoming films. Bob Dylan will appear as an older but wiser musician in Hearts of Fire; cult poet Charles Bukowski goes public as screen- writer of Barbet Schroeder's Barfly; The Clash's Joe Strummer will appear in Alex Cox's Straight to HeLL and WaLker, which was written by Rudy Wurlitzer (screen- writer for Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid), who himself returns, along with Robert Frank, as co-director of Candy Mountain. Perhaps no artist more than Robert Frank typifies this phoenix-like rise from the ashes. At the apex of his photography ca- reer, Frank put his still camera away and converted his eye to,filmmaking, directing several personal films which were fol- lowed mostly by those already familiar with his still work. With Candy Mountain however, Frank reaches for a wider audi- ence in a four-wheeled film quest that strikes images from his own life. Robert Frank first hit the road when he emigrated from his native Switzerland to New York in 1950 as a fashion photogra- pher. In 1955, he traveled the American asphalt as a Guggenheim fellow for pho- tography, and the resulting book of stills, The Americans, published in 1958, gained him both fame and infamy. Woven throughout the black and white photos are images of American flags, graves, juke- boxes, cars, political and religious icons, and the road itself. By the critics, he was condemned for his \"joyless,\" \"disillu- sioned,\" and especially \"anti-American\" photographs that depicted America and its citizens from New York to the Deep South to the West. Yet by photographers

he was hailed, and then imitated, for his Frames from Cocksucker Blues. spontaneous and poetic style, which looked outward upon America while, at the same time revealing Frank looking in- ward upon himself Some of the photo- graphs have since become so well known-in one photo, a black nursemaid holds a privileged white baby in South Carolina, while in another, people stare blankly from a trolley car in New Or- leans-that they themselves have be- r come American icons. It would be the last project for which F rank considered himself a photographer. Film, where he found a \"kinship in the negative,\" became the next logical step for him. A diary entry at that time (Panthe- on Photo Library, 1983) states: \"1960. A decision: I put my Leica in a cupboard. Enough of lying in wait, pursuing, some- times catching the essence of the black and the white, the knowledge of where God is. I make films. Now I speak to the people who move in my viewfinder.\" The first film to earn Frank a reputation as a filmmaker was Pull My Daisy (1959), made with a traveling companion from The Americans journey, Jack Kerouac, as well as other Beat and artist friends: Allen Ginsberg, PeterOrlovsky, Gregory Corso, and Alice Neel. With a voiceover by Ker- ouac, the unscripted film continued the same spontaneous and poetic style of Frank's photographs while also utilizing many of the same themes of music, reli- gion, power, and the American flag. With Ginsberg's participation, Frank made another film, Me and My Brother (1%5-68), about Orlovsky's instirutiona- lized brother, Julius. He continued to make more films (among them Conversa- tions in Vermont, 1%9, and About Me, A Musical, 1971) and in 1972, at the invita- tion of the Rolling Stones, Frank went on the road again, as part of the Stones' American tour, which he filmed with as- sistant Danny Seymour. The documenta- ry won him notoriety again, this time with the Stones, who didn't agree with the frank and excessive sex-and-drugs-and- rock-and-roll light they were cast in. The film remains banned (by legal order) to this day. Frank then made Life Dances On (1979) after the death of his daughter, An- drea, in a plane crash in 1974 and even a video, Home ImprovemenJs (1984-85). With Candy MounJain, Frank skims the pavement again with the semi-auto- biographical narrative of a two-bit musi- cian, Julius (Kevin J. O'Connor), and his search for the legendary, but long unseen, guitar maker Elmore Silk (Harris Yulin), with whom he hopes to make the quintes- sential American deal guaranteed to bring 33

Kevin O'Connor as Julius in Candy Mountain. him fame and fortune. This road film from Robert Frank. American film.\" Candy Mountain brings New York to Canada (parallelling Frank's together previous themes of Frank's own move from his New York City base to work: power, fame, loss, American life, Nova Scotia in 1969) introduces Julius to a and inward search. cast that includes Tom Waits, Buster Poindexter (a.k.a. David Johansen), Dr. In Switzerland, Frank, along with Gia- John, Leon Redbone, Joe Strummer, and cometti, is considered one of the last two even filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, who great Swiss artists. He is, as the same time, wound up on the cutting room floor but a very American artist, whose position on whose own films, Permanent Vacation the outside ofour culture has allowed us to and Stranger Than Paradise, bear a slight look, sometimes painfully, inside Amer- resemblance to Frank's Pull My Daisy. ica, our American lives and values, and ourselves. The Swiss-French-Canadian co-pro- duction was written by Rudy Wurlitzer. It -M.G. is Frank's first scripted film. While Frank was behind the camera for most of his pre- H OW did Candy Mountain come about, vious projects, it was Swiss cinematogra- and why, after all these years, did you pher Pio Coraadi who shot this one. Frank decide to do a scriptedfilm? would arrive on the set, survey the room, and tell Coraadi exactly where to put the Rudy [Wurlitzer] and I, we've been camera but would barely look into it. - friends for quite a while. We're sort of Gerald Dearing, Frank's American- neighbors up there in Canada. We made based producer, said the film was original- two films together. And then the idea was ly intended as a co-production between that I would like to make another film, a Switzerland and Canada. However, since very simple film, which is based in part on the two countries had no production some biographical facts of my life and so agreement, but had common production on. That was about four years ago or so. So agreements with France, two French I asked Rudy to write something in that companies were asked to participate. The respect, some simple story, you know, of cast and crew was constructed from the living here and going up to Canada, that three countries as well as the States, has a connection with me. And actually, \"but,\" emphasizes Dearing, \"it's an that was used as a text for that photogra- 34

phy book [Pantheon Photo LibraryJ. And fuse to settle for it that way. meant to me, so that I could tell the actor What would you do differently? more, how I thought about it, how I felt that was the beginning of the film, really; I would try not to move in that heavy about it, having gone through the situa- that was the basic idea. tion , thinking ' back about people from machinery; I would like to limit it. It could New York who want to hold on to me, The text that said you wanted to make a have been more limited in this film. But who I'm a valuable property to, you know, film that was a journey from the center of somehow, it got bigger and bigger all the make money from. So I could explain to one culture to the margins ofanother? time, and there was no way to stop it. And an actor the feeling that I had about that- I think it was detrimental to the film. It what I felt. I felt very secure in that. So Yeah. So it had to do with living in two also came about because of the music; it when these moments come about in the places. So it came out of that, and at that made it even bigger, the fact that there film, I feel good about it. I feel there's like time I also worked on a video called Home were a lot of musicians involved, and mu- a little glimmer of the truth there, you Improvements, which also had elements sic. So the machinery became even heavi- know? of what is happening in my life. So the er, with all this sound equipment. And I idea was just to make a short, simple film. think it would not have had to be like this. Why did you portray America with the But then it developed. Rudy wrote more That's my strongest feelings toward the oiL fields and the women in housecoats, about it, it became a regular script, and film-that it was like a hype. and the television game shows? then we met some Swiss people by acci- dent-Ruth Walburger, a producer, Did that come from the business? Or The industrial landscape of New Jer- whom we met in Zurich. It was a total acci- did the script warrant it? sey? Well, I think because it's a road mov- dent. She had a friend who wanted Rudy ie and it starts out in New York, it moves to write a script, and then Rudy said, It came from raising money, you know. you out of the city, through the industrial \"Well, I'm working with Robert on You have to say there's going to be a rec- part, toward the Canadian border, where this ... ,\" and she knew about my being ord, there's going to be . .. In order to things get quiet and the landscape would Swiss, so that's how it came about. raise money, you have to say what you do, become more empty till we're in Canada, and you have to say, \"They are the musi- where it becomes very peaceful and emp- What were the other two films that you cians, and they're going to play, and we're ty, and slow. That was the idea. worked on with Rudy? going to have a lot of music and we're go- ing to do it right. We're going to have it You first became interested in America I worked with him on Keep Busy and recorded right.\" And so it gets bigger and through country music-and music is so Energy and How to Get It. bigger. And actually, most of all that big much a part ofCandy Mountain. Why? sound stuff that was used in the film, you You directed thosefilms andRudy wrote have to pay a lot of money for. In the end it Music is very interesting. Music is also them? didn't get in the film. It was cut out. very entertaining. Music is powerful in films. I don't think that's what makes Keep Busy, I probably had more to do You co-directed with Rudy. What was America interesting, though. But I think with directing that. And the other, Energy that like? Who did what? that ifyou can use it right and use it right in and How to Get It, was a cooperation be- the film, it will help the film a great deal. It tween three people, Gary Hill and myself That's very difficult. That's like mak- really makes it go, moves the film. . and Rudy, and we sort of split it up. Keep ing a baby, two people making a baby. Busy was an almost unscripted film-not You can imagine. Actually, I think that is a In The Americans, there were severaL much ofa script-but Energy and How to very good comparison. I mean, a film is a pictures of jukeboxes, and this is a film Get It had documentary footage in it. We little bit like making a baby. You know, about musicians. What role does musicfill started to make a documentary on a guy the film is made and it's lying there, and for you? who was interested in electrical storms to you say, hey, it's got red hair, or it's fat, or hamess lightning and produce electricity. whatever. But you're happy it's there. It's I don't see any connection between my It's called ball lightning. We found this alive. It talks. You know, it's got color. So photographs of jukeboxes and the music guy in Nevada somewhere and started to co-directingwas a little bit like, you know, in this film. I made another film a long make a documentary on him, and then lat- you make the baby together. And that time ago, A Musical About Me, and I used er Rudy submitted more of a script; it doesn't really work that well. a lot of music in that. could be done as a bigger film. We got money from PBS to do it. Why? You know, sometimes I get very tired of Well, I think that Rudy was very good words. Words get kind of boring. Music is How did you feel about working on a at the content ofa scene, and the lines and more uplifting. It's lighter, it's easier, it's more scriptedfilm? what's behind the scene. And there was faster. Sometimes it's wonderful to have no rehearsal. I came in front of the camera music, and then silence, and then words. I It's, like, if you work on a scripted film and decided we shoot the scene in a cer- think it's a good combination. So the idea like this, you move in heavy artillery, you tain way, you know, these three camera in this film was to use musicians more as know. To kill it. I mean, you have a target angles and that's what I want. And then I actors. You know, they act, but they're and you're not going to run around with would watch them [the actors], how they musicians. So we have Dr. John-he this little air gun. You really move in with move, and I would say, \"Do it different- doesn't appear at all as a musician. In the this heavy equipment. And you kill it. I ly.\" Sometimes I would say something final scene, we had a big number where he mean, you hit it, you know. You are going about the words, but most often it was plays music. And we didn't use it. So it to be on target. You know what you have mainly a thing about how to deliver them was interesting to see how musicians- to do with that heavy equipment. So I or how to space it, the spaces in between. like Buster Poindexter (David Johan- think the most difficult thing was to realize It was a thing of movements. sen)-how they were as actors. Or Tom that there could be very little improvisa- Why did you choose to make a film that Waits, acting. And then we had a little bit tion. I mean, you have to stick to the was autobiographicaL? of music with them in it. shooting schedule, you had so much time, Well, it's all fictional. It just has mo- you couldn't change the camera angles. ments that I knew very well, what it What did musicians as actors bring to After a while, I settled for it, and it's one of the film ? the things that I don't know .... I wouldn't do it like this again. I would re- Well , first of all, when they play music, 35

up there. And then he's up there and he 1 goes right back again. . .. I liked the Wenders film a lot, the one in Germany he made, which was, you know, a road picture, with the repairmen of the projectors, Kings ofthe Road. Well, that has a sort ofconnection to it. This is an American story. I think Rudy likes [the genre] a lot. He did Two Lane Blacktop, which is a road picture. , \"In making films I continue to look around me; but I am no longer the solitary ~ . ' O V ~ '\" observer, turning away cifter the click of the shutter. Instead I'm trying to recapture '\\(lI k t'- what I saw, what I heard. and what I feel. What I know!\" -Robert Frank, Pantheon Photo Library 1983 Film frames from Me and My Brother. Well , it's sort of a metaphor for how, in y ou wentfrom a still photographer to a America, money is very important. Like filmmaker. It seemed so easyfor you. they' re musicians, they don't have to act. I Dr. John [Elmore's son-in-law], his fury is It's easy? It's not easy at all. It's a strug- think it's more interesting than the other that he lost out [on the possibility of mak- way around, where you use an actor, and ing money on his father-in-Iaw's gui- gle. I think it's very different to be a pho- he's not a musician. So I think that was tars]-that he had nothing. I think that's tographer. Because in photography you very valuable, although that wasn't as very American. To be leftoutofa big deal. are alone. You don't need anyone else. complete as we hoped it would be. Julius' fantasy of making this big deal, Whereas in film, there are a lot of people coming back with this suitcase full of mon- around you. You have to explain what you And why Joe Strummer, a musician on ey. You know, it's that kind ofdream. The 00. The other films I did, most of them the outskirts of British culture, and Tom closer he gets to it, the less likely it is. Or were really not very well planned--often Waits, a musician on the outskirts of the more he loses and the more he sees without a script-which is the hardest way American culture? that it's really not going to happen. you can make a movie. It has its wonderful moments, but as a whole it's much more Well, we knew them. I knew Tom Why did you choose to make a road pic- difficult than to do a scripted film. Waits, and I had a connection with Joe ture? Strummer and, you know, these are peo- Did you have specific i£leas in mind be- ple who are sympathetic to the project and Well, I think that's very simple. It start- fore you started, or did you construct your who wouldn't want to do it just for big ed out from this little plan to make this lit- films in the editing? money. They liked the project. tle film which goes from New York to Canada. So how do you get there? The Well, like Me and My Brother was In the film , there is a lot of swapping first version of the script, [Julius] even cars. went to Europe, to Berlin, to look for [El- something that just went along, that more], and then back to Canada. Well, changed as I went along. I started out to do Well, because [Julius] gradually, as he the fact that you move in a moving picture a film about a poem of Ginsberg's, and it sets out on the trip, has a girlfriend, loses is very good, you know. You keep going. ended up to be a film about Peter Or- the girlfriend, loses his car, and gets an- And I think one of the good parts in the lovsky's brother, whose name was Julius. other car. He ends up getting there and film is [its editing]. It continuously moves. So it continuously changed. Then you sort find ing the guy, and has nothing in the Once he leaves New York, Julius is really of focus on this person. And by what hap- end. on the road and doesn't stop until he gets pens to him over a longer period of time, the film changes. Or in this case, he disap- The Americans in the film always want- peared, and you find something else to edto make the deal where they come out on take his place. But it's made like that. And top. The closer he got to Elmore, the more then, you see, it didn't succeed, when you Julius had to trade down. see the footage, and then you try in the editing to put something together. And I think that was a mistake. I edited for a long time on Me and My Brother. And I should have just accepted what was there and not try to make it into something else. I think that's what I learned from that film. I really tried to twist it into a shape that I felt the film needed in order to be a full- length film. And now, if I was to re-edit the film or redo it, I would let it be the way the footage came out and not try to over- edit it or force it into telling a a specific sto- ry. I mean, I would have more confidence 36

in the material than I had. other negative-immediately-and you How I don't want to make a film like this Did Julius in Me and My Brother have could see it and then you could print it anymore, but change. That's very inter- much later. Then you could change again. esting. It doesn't happen like this in pho- any connection to Julius in Candy Moun- But the most important thing was to be tography. It just doesn't come up for me. tain? able to express right away, on the film, on lt just doesn't have that challenge. the print, how you wanted it. And later on No. No connection. you went to the darkroom and sometimes Is that what keeps you going? You worked with Sam Shepard on Me it didn't work. But sometimes it worked, Absolutely. and My Brother? that spontaneity of expressing your feel- The photography at one point was much Well, Sam Shepard wrote just one little ings. more certain. You had a reputation, and scene, and then Antonioni asked him to you could have kept on going-which do 'ZLlbriskie Point. Sam Shepard left for Which ofyourfilms has been the closest most people would choose to do. You the glory of the glory. to you? chose to do something that was less cer- Why did you choose to become a tain. It's much harder to succeed in film. filmmaker when there were other media Well, I like Life Dances On in a way, Well, that also gave me the impetus. I you could have chosen? because it deals with three people I knew, want to risk things in film. I don't want to If you are a photographer for that and I like each one. And it talked about go middle of the road. I'm not interested long.... You have film, which is a nega- the friends I had, and my daughter. That in making a safe film . That's not the point tive, so you find there's a kinship there. I was the most personal to me, but it was anymore for me. I don't even want to can't paint, I don't want to write poetry, very simple. And it had a certain truth. Re- make money in films. I mean, I'd like to I'm not a writer. So you just continue mak- ality. get paid, I'd like to be able to live. But I mglmages. want to make a film that really takes risks, Your newer stills contain serial images. It was about Danny Seymour and An- that expresses some of my lifestyle and That's a direct influence, I think, from drea ... some of my experience. the movies, once I started to make mov- ies. I certainly didn't think about the sin- Yeah, it was sort of dedicated to them. HoW have your films and your ideas gle photographs anymore. Not very But also the film took three characters about film changed since Pull My much. then-my son Pablo, who lived in Ver- Daisy? And how about using words with the mont at that time, and Marty Greenbaum, photographs? who was an old friend who was struggling On each film you say, I'm never going That also comes from film. Well, it's a to be an artist and Billy, a bum I got to to edit two years on a film , I'm never going combination, but it all comes from being know on the street. And I felt that each to work without a script.... After this forced to explain something, being forced one of these three people was walking on film, I'm never going to work with the to communicate your ideas to the people the edge. And that's what made the film. heavy machinery like that. I'm not going you work with in films. So then, when I And it also had these references to my to have 2S people around me when I make went back to photographing with the Po- daughter, and I was always in it. It was al- a film. It's not necessary. You can do it laroid camera, it didn't leave me. I wanted ways me who forced these people to talk, with less. We were really very careful to to communicate something else-not who made them talk about themselves or keep the dialogue, to really stick with the necessarily to explain it, but to communi- expose themselves in a way, I didn't hide script; it was the schedule, it was like an cate something else with the photographs. that interference and that brutality that airline schedule, the plane leaves and The picture in itself didn't mean that pushes a filmmaker to get something out you've got to make the plane, make the much to me anymore. of people.... connection-I would not be so slavish Why a Polaroid as opposed to 35mm? Because a Polaroid was immediate. You Probably I didn't know then how I fit had, just like in any other photograph, a into this, how I found myself in the center negative. And then I could immediately ofthese three people with whom I had dif- put on the negative forever-I mean, ferent relations. I never said that before, scratch in, in a way, to destroy the im- but I think that's what interested me- age-writing something over it that would pure intuition, I didn't plan on this. I be spontaneous, and that would be an ex- didn't make a point of this in the film. But pression of what I felt, the moment or the it comes out sometimes stronger than at time I took these pictures. Usually I take other times. I think now if! would make a eight pictures together on a cassette. It film, I would be much too conscious of it. was always between two and eight. Never more. And very seldom one. And if it was Me and My Brother had similar ele- one, then it had words in it. ments in it, but I think it's trying too hard, Do you think Polaroids, which are so you know, to be a real film. It was also in immediate, also came out ofyour interest part because I was given money by some infilm? people who then immediately demanded No. Film is not at all instantaneous be- that I do it in color. But I liked to work cause you have to bring it to the lab, it has with Joe Chaiken. That was a very good to come back. And it's not the same as vid- experience. And I learned on each film. I eo. In video you also get it back right mean, that's a very wonderful thing, in away, but you can't do anything with it. I films, if you are really almost obsessed by mean, it's electronic. But here the beauty making a film. You know, as soon as the was that you had a negative, just like any film is finished, that it isn't made accord- ing to a scheme or to a fonnula. I can see what is wrong, or what I could have done better, or what I should have done better. 37

Frank with cinematographer Pia Coraadi. , of. I think I meant it that way. And if you leave the country, you go to America. I about this anymore. I would risk more, to need to exist in New York. And I think it's don' t know what other country I would go throw the schedule away, to depart from not that open. People know too much to. Still, I think the U.S. is the best coun- it. now. You know, they really want to be try for me. sure to succeed somehow. You stayed away from structure for a In what respect? long time in your work. Was that to take And back in 1959 it was much freer? It's free. People let you do whatever those kinds ofrisks? It was much more open. Everything you want to do. You can live your iife any was possible, everything was new. But way you want to. Especially in New York. Yeah. And here I felt everything be- now that spirit doesn't exist. Things are I really talk about New York. I talk more came secondary to the structure of the not that new. If they make new galleries about New York than America. But it's film. No spontaneity. You preserve that on Avenue C, that's a new location. But also the bigness of America. You can structure. You absolutely don't want to de- it's a similar game. But in the late Fifties, leave. You can go to Montana. stroy it. Now I would feel, well, fuck it. I early Sixties, there was a tremendous opti- Here, nobody gives a fuck what you do. don' t have to. You try to shoot the film in mism to bring in something new, to make It's wonderful in New York in the subway. sequence, which we mostly did . We it different. People are much more careful There's solidarity in some ways. And I also wanted it, and I thought it was very good today. They go to school for many years, feel that in a way, it's more democratic. and much easier. But in a strange way, it they prepare everything very carefully. It's depressing to see how many people made you really more a slave to the struc- They know exactly what they want and are poor. And everyone seems to get more ture. If we had not shot it in sequence, it how they want it. Because it must fit into and more so. I really have become an would have been easier to say, well, we this category, and this is where they have American in that way. don't need this, we can do it differently. to fit in. Because if they don't fit in, they Why did you leave for Canada? don't make it. They're left lying down the I didn't want to die in New York. Why did you choose to shoot the film in road . And I think that's a very strong feel- Why not? sequence? ing today, also with younger people, that It's pretty horrible. It's a very depres- they have to fit. None of us had that feel- sing place to get sick. Actually, one mom- Well, because it's a road picture. It had ing. You didn't have to fit. It was okay. ing I woke up in the 10ft and I said, \"Jesus to start here; because here it's fall and up Why did you leave Switzerland and why Christ, I could die here in this 10ft, you there it was winter. did you say it was difficult to be Swiss? know.\" I always lived near the Bowery. Well , I think what I meant probably But J' m still curious why you didn't Do you see any parallels between the was, it's a small country. And to stay in want to die in New York, what was it about social scene at the time ofPull My Daisy Switzerland as a Swiss, you know, you New York? and the downtown New York scene today? really are in an orbit that you can't get out Well, you pay a high price to live in the city. It wears you out, it wears you down. No. Unfortunately, I don't see any. Be- So after living here 30 years, you get to cause in New York, it becomes more diffi- know it, it gets in your system. And you cult to operate, to be free, because of the know that there is something else. tremendous amount of money that you You can go back to Europe. But you can also go to a peaceful country that's vast, and you can go back to nature. I never liked to go in the middle of the road, and so you go to the edge of the continent. I liked the cold and the winter. I liked the people there. They have roots, and they are very simple people. And very de- cent people. And they also leave you alone. There's so much space there, and you come and they watch you. They know that you're going away, you can't stand it after a while. And so it's quite wonderful. It's so beautiful. The land- scape. It's so quiet. How are the Canadians different from the Americans? How are they different? Well, they are much less aggressive. They are calmer. They're not afraid to be run over, there's not so much pressure there. I'm talking from New York to Mabou. I'm sure there's somewhere-Duluth, for in- stance-where it's very different. But also I went to Canada not so much because I loved Canada, but because I simply could not afford to buy land near the water in 38

America. I didn't have that kind of mon- o Enclosed Is $7.95 ($5.95 + $2 shipping) cash. check 6736 Castor Avenue • Philadelphia, PA 19149 215/722·8298 ey. or money order. Send your new Video catalog. plus periodic updates. NOTE: foreign orrJers (except APO. r ve read a lot about the importance of Canada. Mexico) add $20 shipping/handling. spirituality to your work. o Enclosed Is additional $3.50 ($11.45 total. $31.45 Spiriruality? I can't answer that. You foreign). Include your Adult Video Catalog. I am over have to be religious? I don't know. I think 18 years old. in New York it is really important for you to believe in yourself, for you never to give Name ___________________________________________________ up this belief. And in New York it's son of easy to reinforce that, because artists are Address _________________________________________________ egotistical people. They really have to City _________________________ State ______Zip ___________ look out for themselves, always. They really think about their work, their imagi- Phone ( nation, their dreams. They put it down; they are able to show that. So New York is very strong; it's very powerful to reinforce that feeling and to make it even stronger. And I think, when you go to a place like Canada, where all of a sudden it's empty and there's nobody standing behind you, nobody standing in front of you, and no feedback, then you're alone. Then you begin to watch narure, to watch.... You watch something else, and you become a better human being. Well, after making films here when I go to Canada, I feel much better. I look at myself as almost a better person. I'm the same person there as I am here, it's just that this is an inhuman place. Why do you feeL an ciffinity for the odd man out? I think it was my choice not to want to belong to any group, be connected with any group. H ow do you feeL about getting older, and how has that affected your work? I'm 62. And I'm very concerned with getting old gracefully. My main concern now [laughs] . . . Now, as you get older, it's a more peaceful feeling, because you know that it's going to be over in the next ten years or so. It's okay. You just try to get your sruff in order. That will take a long time. You don't have to climb up the ladder any- more. It's an awkward feeling, but you don't have to do things anymore the way you did before. It's a more peaceful feel- mg. Any ideasfor another fiLm? No. No ideas. I don't have any ideas. But I'd like to find them, I'd like to go to a place where I can have a choice. It's not like going shopping, you know. You have a book of photographs com- ingout. I'm going to be republishing a book called The Lines of My Hand, in which I will add all the other sruff that I've done. Which is son of the only other book I want to do. I don't want to do more books. That's it. Yeah. Well, that's a lot of words here.@

e - rontlersman I Rudy Wurlitzer directs Kevin O'Connor. Rudy Wurlitzer rides the dichotomy long eschewed. I between underground cult figure The sense ofirony is inescapable. Little Rudy Wurlitzer interviewed by Mike Golden and consumate pro, epitomizing a did 22-year-old Kevin O'Connor, who plays the smoldering Dharma Bum \"He was up 14 grand. He decided to keep writer's writer. None of his four critically dreamer Michael Fitzsimmons in Francis fourfor himselfand give the rest to Walker as payment for the next installment of the acclaimed novels-Nog, Flats, Quake, Coppola's Peggy Sue Got Ma\"ied, realize script, making himself the producer. He and Slow Fade-are in print, and though would have Walker sign a paper saying all that his next role, as the kid hustler, Julius, three of them owned the script equally. his filmography reads like a who's who of This was his move. He was pulling up on in Candy Mountain, would be as close as a the fast lane and making a grab for the cinematic hip-Pat Ga\"ett and Billy the package. He would have halfa script cred- Kid for Sam Peckinpah, Glenn and Randa role can come to materializing and demys- for Jim McBride, Two Lane Blacktop for tifying a previous role's dreams. Julius, a it along with the producer's credit and if Monte Hellman, the last draft of Coming few years older than Michael and a prod- Home for Hal Ashby, Dune for Ridley uct of the Eighties, not the Sixties, carries Wesley pulled some shit they could take it Scott, Two Telegrams for Michelangelo a different message: the road obviously to a younger director more able to deal Antonioni, and now Walker for Alex ain't what it used to be, kid. Romanticism bites the dust. What Julius chases is nei- with the action. Because if there was one Cox-he has managed to stay out of the ther more nor less than the total sum of his accumulated self; so that when he finally thing A.D. felt the script needed it was limelight, to survive and keep his integrity gets to drink from his Holy Grail, he recog- action. \" nizes the emptiness he tastes as his own. intact. Ironically, it may be Candy Moun- -Rudy Wurlitzer, Slow Fade tain, the film he co-directed with Robert The darkness in Candy Mountain's sin- Frank, that may retum him to the center gle-minded north to nada search for drop- out, master guitar builder Elmore Silk is ofa system he has moved in and out ofbut lightened along the way by a slew of idio- syncratic characters cast against their type: Jim Jarmusch, brilliant but dead on the cutting room floor to speed up the action; Dr. John as Elmore's cheap-deal, whee- dling, crippled son-in-law, Henry; Leon Redbone as a half-witted Canuck, and putter in hand, Tom Waits, as Elmore's rich polyester brother, AI. Each epito- mizes the thin line a persona walks be- tween hip and gauche. At the same time, laughter offsets the bleakness with a com- forting, though patently unsentimental fa- miliarity. Affectionate and offbeat to be sure, but how else would you expect the last true links of the noble-underground- existential-outlaw-wanderer tradition to slow fade our love affair with white line fe- ver? If he were still alive today, Kerouac would probably be doing American Ex- press commercials. F or the past several years, whenever Rudy and I talked, we invariably found ourselves discussing the path of the writer and the process of writing itself. One of the points he'd always stress was that if he was starting out now, writing probably wouldn't be the path he'd choose. When he was younger, there seemed to be an almost Camelotian nobil- ity to the term writer that has all but evap- orated in this post-literate age. In fact, even the idea of the literary artist as a Dosroevskyian underground man seemed 40

\"Ifyou're going to make afilmfrom a book, you have to be an outlaw, you have to really do what works, without any consideration for what is. ' , to disappear, just as the idea of a true un- think it took three or four drafts for the film country, and the compromises were hon- derground (as opposed to old school made to evolve. The reason why we did it to- est working compromises dictated by the new but pseudo, or the passe academic gether was we shared the same geography conditions and circumstances ofthe shoot. mind jerk-offs) disappeared. of the film-we both have houses in Cape Breton and places in New York. And What about the soundtrack with Tom ''The underground\" and the notion of we've been involved with that dialogue Waits, Dr. fohn, and Leon Redbone? \"selling out\" are both phrases Rudy between Canada and New York for almost thought no longer applied in this culrure, 20 years. So there's been a lot of common The music in the film is very eccentric; as we'd been conditioned to the concepts. ground. We tried to find a story that would it doesn't have one style. It's probably not You can't sell out something that no longer fit the geography we shared, however un- the most commercial way, but it was the exists. And \"underground\" has become onhodox that seems. right way for us because the music carne synonymous with anything that isn't from inside the film. It's pan of the narra- blockbuster, lowest-common-denomina- What was the reaction to the project? tive line and not imposed from the out- tor mentality. In fact, in the Eighties, un- side. If we'd have gotten a lot of money derground has acrually become an eco- We couldn't find money in the States, from the States, that probably would've nomic term, based not on ideas or for various reasons. I don't know. Either been the first thing that we would have aesthetics but on how many units of prod- the script was too oblique or they were had to change. To have a more commer- uct you did or didn't sell-a definition worried that we wouldn't be able to do a cial soundtrack-we just didn't think that Wurlitzer might humbly feel still qualifies fearure. We'd done two little films before way, and that's a great luxury because it's him as \"an underground man,\" though so unusual. that seems on the verge of changing. Re- [Keep Busy and Energy and How to Get cently the New York Times did a long fea- It]; they were fairly extreme. The money It is. rure on the importance ofthe script ofAlex people are much more conservative here You want to be able to pay your inves- Cox's Walker, and credited the screen- than in Europe, so we ended up financing tors back. It's not that one wants to be irre- writer as Andy Wurlitzer. the film through Xanadu films in Switzer- sponsible, but at the same time you want land, and we got some French TV money to be free to make your own movie with- We met in New York, after he got back and Canadian money and a few little pre- out being romantic. You want to be able to sales like Sweden and Germany and Hoi- make the best movie you're capable of, from mixing Candy Mountain in Paris and land. It was really hard work, but we kept and at least break even. But we didn't do it creative control. for money-no one did, everyone got right before he left to go back to the set of scale. It's a good way to work. I'm com- How'd this differfrom the other two you pletely convinced one can make really Walker in Nicaragua. Written by Wur- did together? good films for under two million. Unless you're totally mercenary and your motiva- litzer and directed by Alex Cox, the film is Keep Busy was just a little 30-40 minute tions are about outrageous profit, you can about William Walker, the American who make a modest small film with really big raided the country in the mid-1800's. The exercise that we paid for ourselves and did values to it. Which appeals to me because cast was down with dysentery and the ru- for its own sake. Really just a little sponta- it's a challenge as a writer, because the lan- mors strong of CIA efforts to stop the pro- neous, improvised film. And then the guage means more, and you have to be duction by having the film's bond re- clever in how you arrange the scenes and voked. next film [Energy and How to Get It] was be conscious of how much they might cost. I like to work on that scale, and the -M.G. just a little bigger; and had Burroughs and people that I most respect and feel most Dr. John in it. We had some TV [PBS] involved with are Alex Cox, Jim Jar- You've been indecisive about directing money. It was son of a mixrure of fact and musch, Wim Wenders ....Those people for a long time. How did that finally fiction I was interested in exploring-ya seem to have an integrity that's quite hard get kicked off? know, where one leaves off and the other to arrive at within the traditional Holly- begins.... And that was a good arena for wood system, which always just has too The origins of Candy Mountain staned Roben, because his camera work is very many people in the room. active, and it discovers the subject as it's about three years ago, in a very small spon- operating. He works very close to the If I direct another film I'd like it to be taneous way, where I just wrote a few edge, in a marginal way, and that's where within a modest budget, but with as much pages for Roben[Frank] to do a small film he gets his strength and his poetry from. freedom as possible. One of the things I in his own way that I would try to raise found out from doing Candy Mountain some money for in Europe. It grew as peo- So that film was possibly the best forum was how many people in the crew have ple became more interested in it. I was in been conditioned and influenced by do- for him, in terms ofbeing the most person- ing commercials. It's a very insidious in- Europe doing Two TeLegrams for Anton- al and the most spontaneous. I mean, fluence. The mechanism is that you can buy your way out of anything-you don't ioni, and a Swiss director [A1in Klarer] Candy Mountain is son of a traditional have to think your way out, you can just buy your way out of it, and grease it along who'd read a book of mine [Slow Fade] film, in that we had a real script and had a on a certain level, and that's son of the an- traditional strucrure to film in. Though it came down to see me about it, and we be- was a small film, relatively, it was the larg- came friendly and staned talking about est film Robeneverworked on. I think we both learned a lot. And that's all you can Candy Mountain. He got very excited ever ask for: you're not totally embar- rassed, and you learned something. And it about it because Roben is Swiss-he's the feels good that the film wasn't pan of the obvious system of filmmaking in this Swiss that got away. So then it seemed possible to get more money for it. But it would have to be a fearure. All in all, I 41

,'America's about the Big Action, being on the big scene; it's about the people that are the big doers, that are ridin' the bulldozers, that are movin' the earth around, ya know; it's about the generals. It's the same infilms. \" tithesis of personal filmmaking. You stop and you're forced to communicate on dif- hole. That's son of the way it is, ya know. thinking, you know, and the aesthetic val- ues are so, well, they are what they are, ferent levels, not just through writing And maybe the heroic gesture is in recog- but they are so slick and banal and ulti- mately so trashy that it squeezes the real something, but how you said it or how you nizing that and still going on, and making personal risk out of anything. I think it's a terrible influence. It's unfortunate, upset- project it-you have to make thousands of whatever deal you have to make to sur- ting, and also a large metaphor for where this country's at. The whole thing about little choices. Not just visual choices, but vive, and still trying to have your own in- reaching the most amount of people in the most simplistic way ... psychological choices, business choices, tegrity. Whatare the major differences between music choices, all those choices that make It's not a dualistic situation. It's not writing and making films? The important thing is to know what up a signature, make up a gesture.... I black and white. It's also the romantic boundaries I can work in and feel the most comfortable in. I find filmmaking hard: find that very contemporary, so that's real- myth of the anist sacrificing his life for his it's so much the opposite of literary pro- cess, where you're really involved in your ly the fascination and the challenge of it own integrity, which is usually never really own internal investigations. It's a different kind of journey. Making a film has so and the agony of it, ya know. I enjoy writ- the case. It's always more complicated much to do with external aggravations and endless series of crises having nothing to ing novels, I enjoy writing screenplays or than that. It's such a mechanical son of tra- do with you that you have to deal with. And it's good to have that muscle where plays. For me, psychologically it's good to dition, now. Such an indulgent one. It's you can deal with that level of suffering, calmly and not taking it personally, and have that kind of range. The literary world really great-not great, but it's amusing to being detached about it and just trying to move the energy forward. I'm complicat- is such a desperate situation. It's a compul- find someone at the end of the road who ed, however, because I've been formed and fashioned in a literary way and so it's sion and a mechanism with me, and I've doesn't represent the cliche, the bigger- not as easy for me as for somebody who came up via film school like Alex Cox, never really been able to stay in anyone than-life hero. In a way it's like a young who I have tremendous respect for. I'm more convoluted and internal, which place for too long; maybe I can't. I have a man's voyage toward the father, or figure sometimes presents a handicap for me. But because ofthat it becomes an interest- lot ofdoubts about whether that's the best of wisdom. And really the only place for ing thing to do because you find out where your own limitations and values are to try way to work. I mean, sometimes I'm envi- wisdom and knowledge is within one's to get through, to get to the other side.... So I would like to do another. It's ous of people who can work one way and self. like a bad drug, filmmaking. You get son of hooked on the action of it, which is very go deeply into that and just get deeper and Julius, in a sense, invented a scam just dangerous and insidious. deeper and bigger and stronger. for the money and to feed his ambition. Even though films are the hardest and most brutal process, people are left with Movement does seem to be the theme of But if you invent something not real, at the desire to do another one. It's quite amazing why they want to. Because there your work. some point, you have to find that out. are very few highs. I mean, I find the high is surviving it. I'm a worrier and overreac- Yeah. Everything I seem to do in one There's absolutely no sentimental attach- tor and too sensitive in certain areas. But it's tremendously interesting to work in an way or another is possibly a road movie. I ment to Julius' voyage at all. Julius is arena where the canvas is so big, where you work with so many different ele- guess it's a reflection of my life that I'm thrown on himself. So the film ends with ments. I think that's the real attraction for me; you're forced to relate to other people attracted to a kind of phenomenology of Julius alone, walking down the road. And movement. Possibly that has to do with it's son of important to leave it at that. Not certain Exit Lane maneuvers, or attraction to tie it up in a little ribbon and say what it and fear of confrontations, or of strategies means. That was the strategy of the film. toward finding and losing identity at the To go against the myth. But it ain't gonna same time. Finally you try to get to that work unless it's funny or ironic enough, so point where you're neither coming nor go- it's not a big downer. ing, but you just are. You're living in that It's also about what freedom is. Like moment. I don't consciously set out to what Elmore says: \"Freedom doesn't write road movies, but it just seems to have much to do with the road one way or evolve that way. Even the thing with another.\" So it's really about the myth of Alex, Walker-it's not a road movie, but freedom, too. Pretentious thing to say, but in a way it is. It's episodic and constantly it could be. Here we are in the Eighties, moving. It would probably be good for me and a young guy is faced with this plethora to write something that takes place in a liv- ofdeals that he has to make in order to sur- ing room or something, just to see what vive and still not give up the quest toward happens.... Looking for the frontier that his own personal salvation or growth as a doesn't exist anymore, working a myth man. that no longer applies.... The question becomes what maneu- Do you think Candy Mountain closed vers does one make to get through this lab- that myth outfor you? yrinthian predicament and still arrive at It probably did. I don't think I'll do any oneselfafter all the deals are made? So this more road films. I shouldn't say that. I film is also a comment on the nature of probably will. Ya know, I think that's the capitalism: everybody wants to make a mountain. Candy Mountain pulls the rug deal or hasn't been able to make a deal or is out from underneath traditional heroes. obsessed with making a deal. It's also You spend all that time looking for some- about the changing money and Julius fi- body at the end of the road and he turns nally being left with nothing. Which is out to be just another guy, just another ass- probably the best place to be, where he 42

can really start. So at the end of the film, he first full study of Roberto it's really the beginning. Rossellini's film career HOW hard was it going from Candy \"A labor of love and lucidity!\" Mountain to Walker? Well I was just the writer on Walker, as -Andrew Sarris opposed to Candy Mountain, where I ex- perienced every phase of the film. Walker Precursor of filmmakers such as Michelangelo Antonioni and is just great. Alex is the best director I've Jean-Luc Godard, Rossellini, whose ever worked with. His mind is reallyexcit- works include Paisan and Stromboli, is ing. The thing that's great about him is he often called \"the father of neo-realism .\" has a great sense of equality and is not into This first full-length study of the direc- hierarchies. He's a tough guy, but he's in- tor's films, published to commemorate spiring because he's so generous with his the 10th anniversary of his death, energy. He understands in some innate proceeds chronologically, from the so- way what the mechanism of power is. called \"fascist films\" to the lengthy He's not a tyrant, but he has great author- epic series, offering an appreciative ity. Emotionally, he's very mature-he's critical study of \"perhaps the greatest quite young, but I would work anytime, unknown director who ever lived.\" anyplace with him. Maybe I shouldn't say that-he'll call me and want me to. \"This is the first serious American book about my father...and a How did Walker originate? missing piece in the history of film for American film-lovers:' We met at the Rotterdam film festival , -Isabella Rossellini where he was showing Repo Man. And he At better bookstores or directly from: 384 pp .; 40 halftones $9 .95 knew of my work, and I certainly knew of his, and we got along well and wanted to OXFORD PAPERBACKS work together. A year later he called and Oxford University Press said, \"Let's do it.\" He was very much into 200 Madison Avenue the story of Walker and the subject of New York, NY 10016 Nicaragua. And I knew about it, but I wasn't anywhere near as involved as he CELEBRATE was. The quality of his energy was so ex- citing to me that there was no way I could THE NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL:S tum it down. And we did it on specula- tion, which is another thing I admire- 25th ilNNll'EBSflRY that he could get me to do that. He has great integrity and he didn't want to com- Join the party with one of our new, special edition T-shirts. 100lfo grey promise it, so he didn't want to get totally cotton with our anniversary image in white and metallic silver. Sizes S, M, sunk into a studio situation. When some- L, X-L. $12.00 each, includes postage and handling. body's that strong and that determined, it's just a great privilege to work with him. Mail with check or money order to: The Film Society of Uncoln Center, 140 West 65th Street, New York, New York 10023. Not only that, his politics were really correct. Alex is strong enough to digest the Name poison of the system and make something out of it. And that's thrilling to me. I'm Address much more wary of it than he is because I've been scarred up by Hollywood, but City State Zip he's a real warrior. I find that he's a very important filmmaker, for a lot of reasons. Daytime phone number o o Not just because of his films, which I like a lot, but the way he goes ·about it, the way oo L X-L he thinks about it, the way he's outside of a class structure, and the way he chooses to sM live. There's a reason young people are real excited by him. He's living here in the middle of the Eighties, a totally profane materialistic poisonous time, in a country that's at best immoral. And he's able to make good work and to say what he has to say with a strong point of view. As well as a lot of humor. The only way you can survive and have the courage to go on is to try to work in that way. I think the system really eats you,

uses you as cannon fodder. And just to be a when it comes to being able to be orga- nized or standing up for what's right. They part of feeding ''The Beast\"-just that I can't. It's almost in their nature that they can't. All you have to do is go to a Writers think that way makes it impossible. I Guild meeting: it's the most pathetic thing; it'll make you never want to be a mean, that might be a complete illusion, writer. It's terrifying. Even the writers who write about films, they never give the but that's where I'm coming from. Every screenplay any credit. They're all kneel- ing before the altar ofthe director. The au- one involved's caught in it. And you have teur thing. Andrew Sarris. It's all about that. And they've created it! to be real strong and a real warrior to deal I s there anything to be done about it? with it. That's one of the interesting [Laughs] The only thing I feel bad about is that I didn't decide before this in a things about making films, why it's so bru- stronger way to do my own thing. I made a choice about three or four years ago not to tally hard and so interesting. James Taylor in Two-lane Blacktop. live in L.A., not to answer too many calls from Area Code 213. So I started to work It's a big leap going from Antonioni on sity to change something from one medi- with people who were more independent, who came from a more individualistic Two Telegrams to Cox on Walker isn't it? um to another and make it work. You've place, who just interested me. It was the only way I could survive, really, and be a Yeah, it's true. Antonioni comes from a got to be able to be disrespectful and break screenwriter. There's no way I could sur- vive just being part of a large agency in totally different tradition. Very autocratic, taboos and to be crude and to maneuver L.A. that feeds writers into the system, where you're one of three or four writers like a European prince who is totally in- something into a medium that's more sim- on a script. And it's only about money, and it's utterly depressing. I just need enough volved in a sense of himself as an auteur plistic than the original, because nothing to live on-I'm not really venal that way. and separates himself from everyone and can have more resonance or reverberation But if everything is decided, whether it's good or bad, by how much you get is very hierarchical. He has a wonderful than a great book. A film could never from the script, something's really wrong. I mean, even if you're a good writer and mind, and I really learned a lot working match that. It's not as profound a medium you go out there, the process damages you. It's guaranteed. Guaranteed! It's al- with him. in that way. most impossible to grow as a writer. May- be people get better in a craftsmanlike Did you work closely with him? Yet not every good novelist can make way, but even then the bumout is so ex- treme-it's such a mediocre shot. There's Yeah. Very close for three months or so, the change from prose writer to screen- a lot of despair. And I like to write screen- plays; I think it's a wonderful form. But on a little story of his. It was completely . writer. the writer, once you sign away your rights, you're working on Maggie's farm. And fascinating to become involved with his Well, in fact, very few novelists can there's nothing you can do about it. It's the studio, the producers, and the director- aesthetic and see how his mind worked. write screenplays, because it's a different they all control your fate. And most of them are numb and uninterested in what And to see how my mind worked in rela- muscle. It's a different relationship to lan- you do. It's a brutal fact: the writer has no power. tion to his, and to see what I could bring to guage. It's a totally different thing. It's as The act of pleasing people whom you his aesthetic. Because it's a film that's in different from novels to plays as it is from don't respect is psychologically very dam- aging. So it would be impossible for me to English, and it's about America, and it's novels to screenplays. It's strange to be write scripts unless I also wrote books. That's why now, I suppose, I want to di- about sex and eroticism, betrayal, and all able to do both. I guess it's a kind ofschizy rect, because there's just not much more for me to leam as a screenwriter. There are. those great things. thing. Now this might sound like that a few people I'd work with, but it's not quite enough. I'm very slow. A lot of peo- Why didn't Dune work out? tired old writers' lament, ya know. I'm ple come to this at a much earlier age, but finally I've realized the only way is to go I did the script for Ridley Scott. I tired of it, embarrassed by it, but yet I still through the whole process and be respon- sible for as much as you can. ~ thought the book was impossible, in terms sing the blues. It's like every director, of making a film out ofit. So I eliminated a agent, and producer always dismisses: oh lot of the language and the exposition and yeah, another writer outside on the street, the immense SOrt of overload of verbal in- under the lamppost, singing the blues. It's vention, which works okay for a book but a terrible thing, but it doesn't make it any for a film just sinks the image. And also in less true. And it's all because we don't some perverse way I introduced an Oedi- have any power. pal situation and threw in a lot of my own It's also because people don't really perverse esoteric interests in the thing, think that the screenplay is that important, and Frank Herbert, I think, flipped out no matter what they say. They really don't when he read the screenplay, because it think it's that important. Or they think it was a film from his book, but it wasn't a can be fixed by anyone, or it's just typing, literal translation. And so they tumed it ya know. They don't really respect it. down. And finally they did make the film, There are a few people that do, but even which was a literal translation of the book, the ones that do, as soon as it's done, that's and itwas terrible. And I think that's why. it! Ya know, it's like what America's I'm not saying my screenplay was the about. It's about the Big Action, being on answer, but the reason it didn't work was the big scene; it's about the people that are because there was too much respect for the big doers, that are rid in' the bulldoz- the book. I mean, if you're going to make ers, that are movin' the earth around, ya a film from a book, you have to be an out- know; it's about the generals. That's just law, you have to really do what works, what this country's about. Action. without any consideration for what is. So it's the people who control the action That's why it's better to work from a book who sort of control the whole game in that's not so good. Always with books that terms offilm . And the closer you get to the are great classics you've got two and a half controlling-there's always jockeying for strikes against you. Like Under the Volca- position, however unconscious, between no. There was just no way that could ever the producer and the director and the stu- work. It's just realJy difficult because dios and the star. But the writer's never in- you're so impressed and awed by these cluded in that. And the writers have all works. It takes a certain amount of perver- given it away, too. I mean, they're lame 44

•• om Joe Strummer interviewed by Graham Fuller ''They're burning the town tonight, aren't they, Joe?\" \"I hope so, rruuL. 1 like to see things bum. 1 must admit, I've enjoyed these burning nights. I've never worked on a picture with hundreds of extras, muskets, and battle scenes before.\" Joe Strummer, ex-leader of The Joe Strummer on the set of Walker. On a rest day on Walker, some of the cast Clash, most incendiary and politically and crew repair to an idyllic beach at San right-on of British punk bands, and ger. \"On Straight to Hell, I was pretty ner- Juan del Sur, anointing their bodies with burgeoning but reluctant movie star, is vous, but I found just to concentrate sunblock against the ferocious heat. But propped against a pile oflogs in the palace would get me by. Simms was written for Joe muddies his body in damp sand and square in Granada, Nicaragua, nipping me-like he never changes his clothes. tells me to do the same. I guess they didn' t rum, keeping his own peace, and watch- All the time I was working on Sid and Nan- have sunblock in 1855. ing Alex Cox orchestrate a charge of the cy and seeing Alex every day, he noticed campesinos for Walker. He's smoking, after a few weeks that I never, ever, I f The Clash, initially a cadre of urban too, but I wouldn't have been surprised if changed, because at that time I wasn' t cer- guerrillas raging against Britain's social he'd offered me a chaw or slit open a rabbit tain ofanything and decided to stick to the or two. The thing about Joe is that as Fau- same clothes while I was thinking hard.\" cet, the scurvy dishwasher in William Walker's ragged army of \"Immortals\" who bring a cartoon rogues' gallery to Cox's irreverent historical 1850s epic about U.S. intervention in Central America, he is to- tally unrecognizable. Deadbeat, grime- laden, unkempt shoulder-length hair, mountainman's beard, a fantastically dis- reputable army tunic swarming with med- al ribbons, a gun not a guitar across his gringo knees-whatever happened to Strummer's rebel waltz and the spirit of '76-77? Is this Method acting? Or acting- by-numbers? 'The reason Joe's a good person to have in the film,\" enthuses Cox, \"is because he gets incredibly into it and never wants to give up his costume. He gets very upset if he has to give up his guns at the end of the day, but he goes around in the rest of the outfit-the sombrero and the jacket, which he embroidered himself. He doesn't really change his personality at all.\" Strummer also lived his debut starring part, as the unsmiling Teddy Boy gang- ster-gunslinger Simms, in Cox's delicious- ly awful cheapskate punk spaghetti west- ern, Straight to Hell. He wrangled flies with sugar water applied to the face and practiced not flinching, slept on the set, and twirled his pistol for three weeks until, apparently, he had to bandage his forefin- 45

Joe Strummer (I.), Sy Richardson and Dick Rude (r.) in Straight to Hell. malaise, later developed their iconogra- Clash lyric. And him now a film star, too. The Clash, promulgating \"White Riot,\" phy into that ofa more internationally alert As Granada burned that night on camera, was firmly established by then as the mili- agitprop army, they always worked hard at filling the air with bats and a weird, un- tant wing of punk. His was already a face enabling their audiences to identify with earthly fragrance from the damp wood, it to conjure with. (It could snarl in less the- them. One of my favorite latter-day Clash would have been hardly any less surpris- atrical moments, too: I once watched Joe images, before Mick Jones' departure sig- ing to me ifMarlee Matlin had chosen that hurl a mike stand across the stage at naled the band's decline, is a simple moment to tum up on the set, Vivien Brighton's Top Rank after a searing Clash enough group portrait of Strummer, hand Leigh-style. Four days later she did, but set in which he had been constantly spat over one eye, Jones, Paul Simonon, and by then Joe was filming in the jungle. and flobbed on from the front row.) But Topper Headon squatting on a railroad where was its romantic side, awaiting the track on the sleeve of 1982's Combat Rock Was Joe Strummer always going to liberating influence of a movie camera? In album-with its rap, new American jazz make it in movies? Will he anyway? Born among The Clash's powerful indictments and Eastern influences on songs about John Mellors in Turkey on August 21, of American multinationals, heroin, con- Vietnam, Latin America, and U.S. exploi- 1952, he lived in Egypt, Mexico, and Ger- sumerism, 9-t0-5 drudgery, Cold War tation, a powerful musical flourish from many before arriving at boarding school in propaganda, and U.S. imperialism in the the last real punks in town. Railroad England. As with Orton, John would be- ensuing years of musical maturity, begin- tracks, though, serve as a reminder that come Joe; but first, Woody. By the mid- ning with the London Calling LP, it was rock stars, like their celluloid equivalents, Seventies he was leading an obsessively always Mick Jones' songs that provided live parallel lives to their fans, never hard-gigging R&B band, the tOlers, the tenderer moments, the odd hint of a touching, except by accident or on the dis- around the London pub circuit. The love affair. tant horizon. Clash was formed in 1976, headlined with the Sex Pistols at the 100 Club on Oxford But there was more time for movies: Despite, or because of, The Clash's Street in September, and signed to CBS The Clash's very own (but subsequently championing of Sandinismo on their 1980 Records in November as punk mush- disowned) Rude Boy (1980) and a fleeting album Sandinista!-probably the first roomed into a national phenomenon. bit for the whole group in Martin Scor- time many young Westerners got hip to sese's The King ofComedy (1982). There the FSLN's revolution-to see the beard- I first saw Strummer, exactly ten years was also talk of the band doing music for ed, 34-year-old Joe Strummer, sitting re- prior to the week I saw him in Nicaragua, Scorsese's abandoned would-be master- flectively in the dirt in front of the arch- at Eric's club in Liverpool. Led by Joe- piece, The Gangs of New York, an Irish bishop's palace in Nicaragua, suddenly twitching and barking in the dark, eyes immigrant story set on the Lower East seemed like a time warp: \"Can I hear the bulging with incredulity at the racial , eco- Side in 1898. echoes from the days of '79?\"-to adapt a nomic, and class-driven injustices and in- equalities in \"blank generation\" Britain- By the fall of 1985, Strummer had 46

.. INTERNATIONAL FILM GUIDE 1987. The Screenwriter's Guide (Updated Peter Cowie, ed . Now in its 24th edition . Edition). Joseph Gillis. For current the world 's most respected film annual and would-be screenwriters, here is now includes a special \"Dossier\" on an up-to-date guide to film and televi- Canada, tributes to the Locarno and sion sales with valuable tips on how San Francisco Festivals, plus the usual to present, market, and protect your medley of reports from 59 countries . work. With an annotated list of over 'The best ongoing inventory of the 2100 producers, agents, distributors, world's film industry .\" L.A. Times . and industry contacts in NY, Hol- 504 pp . Illustrated. Paper $14 .95. lywood , Canada, and Europe . Fea- tures a new section listing screenwrit- ing software plus an inteNiew with a prominent screenwriter. 160 pp. Paper. $9 .95 . Who's Who in Amertcan Film Now [Updated Edition] . James Monaco, ed . Who did what, and when , in recent American cinema . This SALT OF THE EARTH: updated and revised edition lists the THE STORY OF A FILM. Herbert Biberman . This classic chron- key people who make movies today. It icles the twelve year struggle to bring Salt of the Earth-winner of France's features thousands of cast and crew Int'I Grand Prize for best film of 1955-to the screen . Written by Herbert Biberman , members from the past decade in 13 one of the \"Hollywood Ten\" jailed in 1947 and blacklisted by the movie industry, it separate categories - each an al- is a graphic record of the ravages of McCarthyism , but ultimately, it is a story phabetical list of names with the title of courage . Includes screenplay. Illustrated . 373pp. Cloth $5 .95 . and date of their film credits . A running LOUISE BROOKS: PORTRAIT OF AN commentary on today's movies , this ANTI-STAR. Roland Jaccard , ed . Translated by Gideon Y Schein . Louise guide is an invaluable resource for Brooks - the legendary actress who rebelled against the idolatry of Holly- libraries, professionals , film historians wood to preseNe her independence and individuality. Illustrated with over INTERNATIONAL TV & VIDEO GUIDE and fans alike . 90 photographs , this is a tribute to a 1987. Richard Paterson , ed . The fifth woman , Louise Brooks; a film , Lulu ; a updated edition features reports , data Illustrated. c600 pp . Cloth . $39 .95 . director, G.w. Pabst; and to an era of and statistics from 49 nations for any- German Expressionism . Brooks' own one interested in television or the com- lucid reflections give new insight to the munication arts . Provides a special woman behind the myth . focus on the successful Doctor Who Illustrated . Paper, 160 pp . $19 .95 . series, current sections on TV and video schools , books , magazines, festivals and fairs . 256 pp. Illustrated. Paper $13.95 . WIM WENDERS. Jan Dawson . A re- vealing inteNiew with a director who has become a major force on the inter- national film scene . Includes a selection of Wender 's own writings on topics from film criticism to Rock 'n' Roll. Filmography . Illustrated . Paper $5.00 . ... _-------------------- - ...... _----,.-------- Hello Zoetrope: o Also please send me your free o Send 'me the following books . I've catalogue . enclosed the proper amount plus NAME ____________________ $1 .50 for postage and handling ($2 .00 for cloth & orders of 5 or ADDRESS __________________ more books .) Or call 1-800-CHAP- LIN (in NY 212-420-0590) . Visa & Mastercard accepted. Thanks . Please allow 4-6 weeks for delivery. _______________ ZIP_____ NY residents must add 8'/.% sales tax . New York Zoetrope 838 Broadway Dept. MX New York, NY 10003

Joe Strummer (I.) with Kevin O'Connor and Arto lindsey (r.) in Candy Mountain. hooked up with Alex Cox, the maker of written by Cox and Rude in three days. ain and said, 'In all honesty, I can't play Repo Man, on Sid and Nancy, the punk It was fueled on energy, alcohol, and a this part because there is a better actor tragedy documenting an era of which motivating theme of sexual tension. than I.' And he went to Stephen Frears the singer/guitarist was a leader and and said, 'Mr. Frears, you must hire central icon. Plans to follow that film Strummer might just be the best Tim Roth.' \" And Roth played the with a video ofa concert tour ofNicara- thing in Straight to Hell, which in itself part. gua by Strummer, Elvis Costello, and isn't much of an achievement, al- the Anglo/Irish punk-folk outfit The though he personally emerged from In Straight to Hell, meanwhile, Pogues, came to nothing when Cox's the shoot a \"natural\" actor. His sweat- Simms, sensing a sexual conquest, financing fell through. Instead, ob- ing, deadpan Simms is less a western goes into the local hardware store os- serving Strummer, young writer/actor villain than a drunken British tourist of tensibly to buy some nails and is practi- Dick Rude, and cinematographer T{)m the 1980s-toppling down a saloon cally raped by the lubricious wife (Jen- Richmond out of place and out of order hatch, eyeing the local talent, and nifer Balgobin) of the proprietor in Cannes the following May, Cox lit combing his hair with a knife dipped in (Miguel Sandoval) when the latter is upon the idea of three hapless killers gasoline-but there is an edginess checking his stock. Later, Simms (Strummer, Rude, and Sy Richardson) there, a psychotic trigger-happiness, strikes sparks off the beautiful, red- turning up in a timeless spaghetti west- which only glinting shades and a ve- headed wife of the outlaw leader, ern scenario to take on a gang of coffee- neer of laconic calm can conceal. He played by Sue Kiel, who gives Strum- addicted outlaws and their more deadly plays it tongue-in-cheek, ofcourse, but mer his first, fiery screen kiss. His dia- womenfolk. Almost a \" dry run\" for he has an unmistakable deftness, a si- logue is dry throwaway comedy, but Walker, Straight to Hell-its title de- lent, hidden quality, which is also the odd close-ups of Strummer frame him rived from a bitter, melancholy Clash actor's recognition that the pauses be- listening, watching, waiting, usually song on Combat Rock-was shot in Ta- tween words are more powerful than fora woman. bernas, near Almeria in southeast the words themselves . Spain (a familiar spaghetti western lo- One of the actresses on Straight to cation where Cox had made the video It seems he had already turneu down Hell remarked that Almeria Joe resem- for Strummer's \"Love Kills\" anthem one chance for stardom as a British de- bled a younger, softer Bogart. He does, for Sid and Nancy), on $1 million, in linquent on the loose in Spain. Says too, no matter that Granada Joe looks three and a half weeks, with a script Cox: \"Joe was offered the part of the more like Richard Gere in King David. young British gangster in The Hit, and But Strummer's face is more sensual then he saw Tim Roth in Made in Brit- than lived-in, the lips always parted 48