VOLUME 23 - NUMBER 01 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 1987

FEBRUARY 1987/$2.95



•Sl•SSUe published bimonthly by the Film Society of Lincoln Center Volume 23, Number 1 January-February' 1987 Stone's Throw ... ... . . . .. . . . . 11 On Valentine's Day .......... . 22 With Platoon Oliver Stone gets Though homey pieties persist -- ----~ nearer the hearr ofthe darkness even in \"liberated\" love sto- that was Vietnam than any di- ries, the muse has made her re- rector to date. The platoon of turn. Jean-Jacques Beineix' selves that Stone has placed on- Betty Blue is the latest flash screen from Midnight Express from the front, or is that edge, through Scarface and Salvador between man and muse, and is a mix of mythic characters as Marcia Pally hones in on the true as they are banal; they're border between his life and itchy. Pat McGilligan lures lens. And Armond White re- Stone into the open and listens turns with a dirty dozen direc- to his war stories-hand-to- tors and the actresses they shot hand in Hollywood for the right and cut to pieces (page 26). Be to tell the ugly truth. my Valentine, snookums. Midsection: In Development The 1986 Movie Revue .. 52 Since the studio system cap- The lonely film critic struggles sized, writers have become out of bed, looks at two days of peddlers and production stubble (chin or legs) in the \"chiefs\" stoplights: red on mirror, and asks him/herself: forever, green once in a blue \"Should I write smarr about moon, and yellow an arrow into this drivel or get my MBA like a parking lot in Hell, known as Pa warned?\" Mirabile dictu, \"in development.\" Bev they handed in manuscripts: Walker dopes out the majors' Anne Thompson has the La-la-land limbo (page 34); morning line on the Oscar Len Klady examples how it nags (page 52); Lawrence \"works\" (page 40); Dan Kim- O'Toole likes this year's mel eyes John Cleese's ideas mug shots (page 54); and Ste- for industrials (page 44); and phen Harvey and Richard Harlan Kennedy sees Britain Corliss 86 the year (page betwixtand between (page 50). 58). Also in this issue: some. So we salute Klassik Klassix and Pensees: \"Colorization\" ...... 76 Avi Timmel, and don't think it doesn't One picture is worrh a thousand wars. Journals •.................. 2 cost to put a slogan like \"You Can Smell Director Lindsay Anderson took film- Our B.O.\" up here. When Jack Barrh Orbits: Cary Grant .......... 78 dom's lions of winter-LilIian Gish, and Mike Wilkins found this Timmel Inside, we all have the silky graces of Bette Davis, Vincent Price, et. ai-to guy, they told him it was a paid arricle wit, beauty, and danger that Cary Grant Maine to shoot David Berry's The and us it was a commission ad. Hmmm. radiated, devil-may-care. Richard Cor- Whales of August; Joanna Ney records liss pays tribute to the man every man the roars. Elliott Stein and Harlan Ken- Greasepaint Guy ........... 68 wanted to be, including Cary Grant. nedy respectively note the graying of Re-Animator director Stuarr Gordon Cartagena and Edinburgh, two festivals tells Meredith Brody about his pre-film Back Page: Quiz #23 ........ 80 on pentimento journeys. life in the theater and great green gobs of Tie-ins we'd like to see. greasepaint grimey gopher guts. Special Advertising Section ... 63 Cover photo: courtesy Orion Pictures Us sell-out? Never. We just wanna sell Co-Editors: Harlan Jacobson, Richard Corliss. Assistant Editor: Marlaine Glicksman. Art Director and Cover Design: Elliot Schulman. Advertising and Circula- tion Manager: Tony Impavido. Business Manager: Sayre Maxfield. Production: Deborah Dichter Edmonds. West Coast Editor: Anne Thompson. European Editor: Harlan Kennedy. Research Consultant: Mary Corliss. Circulation Assistant: Deborah Freedman. Controller: Domingo Homilla, Jr. Editorial Intern: Andrea A1sberg. Executive Director, Film Society of Lincoln Center: Joanne Koch. Copyright © 1987 by the Film Society of Lincoln Center. All rights reserved. The opinions expressed in FILM COMMENT do not represent Film Society of Lincoln Center policy. Publication is made possible in part by support from the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. This publication is fully protected by domestic and international copyright. Subscription rates in the United States: $14.95 for 6 numbers, $26.95 for 12 numbers. Elsewhere, $37 for6 numbers, $70 for 12 numbers, payable in U.S. funds only. New subscribers should include their occupations and zip codes. Distributed by Eastern News Distributors, Sandusky OH 44870. FILM COMMENT (lSSN 0015-119X) is published bimonthly by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, 140 W. 65th St., New York NY 10023. Second-class postage paid at New York NY and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: scmd address changes to FILM COMMENT, 140 W. 65th St., New York NY 10023.

Keeping On: Cliff Island, Cartagena, and Edinburgh Cane and Able Lillian Gish celebrates her 90th Lindsay Anderson, Lillian Gish and Bette Davis. afraid the work would be too much for her. birthday by going to work. It is her That looked like the end of the project. sixth week of filming The Whales while, he pursued Gish, who initially had But, after she recovered , Kaplan con- ofAugust with director Lindsay Anderson reservations about the project because the vinced her that he needed her and that she on CliffIsland, Maine and she desperately relationship between the sisters was so could handle it. wants to get back to New York. \"I've volatile and different from her own with been away so long,\" she says, \"I've just her sister Dorothy, whom she adored. Fi- Whales is the first feature of a group of got to get home and pay my bills, dear.\" nally, Gish agreed to do it-for Kaplan. independently made \"quality,\" low bud- Gish co-stars with Bette Davis, 78, and a Lindsay Anderson, who had known Kap- get films being produced by Alive Films. cast of \"kids\": Ann Sothem, 77; Vincent lan since he did the campaign for 0 Lucky It is also Anderson's first feature shot and Price, 75; and Harry Carey, who after 65 Man , agreed to direct ifall the other pieces directed in the United States. Both British years has finally decided to drop the \"Jr.\" fell into place. After reading the play, cinematographer Mike Fasch and produc- from his name. Bette Davis tumed the role down flat: tion designer Jocelyn Herbert have \"Who cares about these two old dames?\" worked with Anderson before, Fasch on Today, because of bad weather, Lind- she replied. Brittania Hospital, Herbert on IF and 0 say Anderson is filming inside the white Lucky Man. The rest of the production weathered cedar cottage where most of Other actresses were considered, but unit includes crew members from New the story takes place. The film , set in the Kaplan never gave up on Davis. When the York, Los Angeles, and London-who Fifties, is based on a play by David Berry, screenplay was complete, he sent it to her. are still getting used to each other's ways who also wrote the screenplay. A long- Faced with a choice between the TV ver- of working. time summer resident of neighboring sion of Anastasia in which the dowager Peak's Island , Berry drew on his family empress (her role) didn' t have a single T he quintesessential Victorian heroine history for his character study of five elder- scene with Anastasia, and the cantanker- of the D. W. Griffith era, Gish has not ly people threatened by change and faced ous Libby in Whales, Davis opted for Lib- had as significant a starring role since 1955 with hard choices. Unlike On Golden by, and Maine, where she had lived and and Night ofthe Hunter, opposite Robert Pond and Cocoon, Whales contains its raised a family with her ex-husband Gary Mitchum. As the stalwart, life-affirming conflicts within the older generation. Merrill. Sarah, she appears in virtually every scene. The role is demanding, emotional- Gish and Davis play Sarah and Libby, Eventually, Kaplan took the package to ly and physically. She has already been re- sisters who have been summering on the his friend , Carolyn Pfeiffer at Alive Films, quired to beat the bushes for blueberries, island since girlhood when they could run and she joined him as co-producer. But a stand out on a rocky point overlooking the to the cove to watch the whales bob in the month before filming was to begin, Gish bay. Now the whales are long gone, the began to have second thoughts; she was sisters' husbands have died , and Libby, suffering from a back ailment and was now blind, is being cared for by Sarah, a burden both are beginning to resent. F or producer Mike Kaplan~ the filmin~ of The Whales ofAugust IS the culmI- nation of an almost impossible dream. Kaplan was captivated by Gish in 1968 when as MGM publicity head, he promot- ed Peter Glenville's The Comedians, in which she had a supporting role. He was determined to find a lead vehicle for her. Finding an appropriate property, howev- er, proved more difficult than contemplat- ed. When, in 1981, he saw David Berry's play, The Whales of August, he realized that the role of Sarah was perfect for Gish and Libby was ideal for Bette Davis. Kaplan contacted Berry and commis- sioned him to write a screenplay. Mean- 2

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bay, \"everything but drag lobster pots,\" a cane. Her face as smooth and pretty as in eery store carnes the basics and is open a she says. \"And I fear that's next.\" the days of her TV show, Private Secre- tary, she sports a curly, red wig and a blue few hours a day. Occasionally, there are Some of Gish's long speeches have tent dress, and moves her large body gin- been streamlined and her dialogue print- gerly. Some years ago, while performing power failures which knock out the lights ed in bold letters on a pad of paper which in a play, her back was broken when a she holds in her lap. She refers to these piece of scenery fell on her. The prop de- and the electric stoves. \"cue cards\" when her memory fails. But partment has built a sedan chair, covered at the moment the problem is Davis. She in chintz, and the chair is used to carry Both Kaplan and Pfeiffer wanted the wants to cut the line \"Don't cool the Gish and Sothem down to the beach and muffins on the windowsill, or the nuns will back. \"But Bette was too tough,\" Sothem 50-member film crew to be welcome on steal them.\" \"It's ridiculous,\" she says, chuckles. \"She wouldn't use it even after \"nobody cools muffins that way.\" The she threw her hip out and hurt herself.\" the island and so made efforts to involve reference however had been set up earlier in the script, and Kaplan is sure the line Vincent Price plays Maranov, a Russian the community in the production. \"It's will draw a laugh. Davis finally agrees to aristocrat who Libby thinks is a fraud. He say the line if she can change \"cool\" to arrives dressed in knickers, bow tie and important to us that they feel we are in no \"leave.\" Everybody breathes a sigh of re- black cardigan, and carrying a fishing pole. lief. \"My character, Maranov, has been way betraying them,\" says Pfeiffer. Every brought up to do nothing and do it in a Davis describes Libby as \"a disagree- civilized way.\" night they show the residents dailies in the able old woman.\" \"But I've never ducked unpleasant characters. God knows, I've Harry Carey, the most robust member town hall, which also houses the kitchen played a lot of them. Charles Laughton of the cast, plays joshua, a boisterous once gave me good advice. He said, 'Nev- handyman who is the bane of Libby's life. where the crew's lunches are cooked. On er dare not hang yourself,' in other words, Carey met Anderson in 1978 when Ander- try things you think you should not do.\" son was writing his book on john Ford. Monday nights, the company runs old She sits in a rocker by the window, smartly (Carey was Ford's protege just as Gish was dressed in a blue-and-white print dress, films of the cast: All About Eve, Lady Be with a snow-white wig coiffed into a o.w. Griffith's.) Nervous about working French roll, swinging her leg. Despite a Good, and The Wind. stroke and a variety of other medical prob- with such cinema legends, Carey says, lems, she chain smokes with the gusto she \"The first day, I was awestruck and For Lindsay Anderson, the challenge of displayed in All About Eve. scared, so I did an early Marlon Brando, ran around the house and got out of Whales bas been to give the playa more Gish, who remembers when retakes breath. Lindsay came to me and said, lis- were unaffordable, recalls the time ten, old boy, relax, they' re just people!\" cinematic structure, yet to keep it con- Griffith had to do a second take on Birth of Nature is a sixth character in Whales; tain~d within an island in which people A Nation. \"It was because Mae Marsh Anderson and Kaplan agreed that it had to be filmed on location. After scout- keep on keeping on. \"We needed this forgot the American flag that was sup- ing the Long Island area and finding noth- posed to be around her neck.\" \"Yes,\" ing suitable, they spotted the Pitkin cot- place, this uncompromising house, be- adds Davis, \"but the answer is always re- tage while motor boating around Maine's hearsal.\" Gish forgets her line-\"Cham- Casco Bay and knew it was the place they cause the house is a character in the film pagne always reminds me of Paris\"-and had been looking for. Because summer needs prompting; seeing the rushes, she renters don' t leave till well after Labor and it was this combination of character, seems faultlessly present, and the camera Day, filming could not begin until mid- adores her face. The contrast between the September when the Maine weather was and atmopshere which reflects character, two actresses reveals, and works well for already precarious. their characters: Davis, the analytical tech- that attracted me.\" nician; Gish, the spontaneous spirit. In fact, the company has fallen behind its six week shooting schedule because of \"The struggle to make a movie is ex- Like Kaplan, screenwriter David Berry the weather. Plus the actors can work no says that Davis and Gish were also his first more than eight hours per day. And shoot- traordinary,\" says Kaplan. \"Unless you choices for Sarah and Libby. He remem- ing calls for more exterior scenes as the bers the first day Gish stepped off the boat days advance into mid-October. Unless are doing something that hasn't been done onto Cliff Island. \"She got off, wearing you are a lobster fisherman, Maine in Oc- that red and white baseball cap she wears tober is not a hospitable place. There are before or hasn't been done quite in this and made her slow way up tbat ramp, and only 58 year-round residents on Cliff Is- I just broke into tears. Because this was land, an hour and a halffrom Portland by way, I'm not sure it's worth it. The the essence of what the piece was about. I ferry. Some of them find work as drivers or want to show a positive view of old age, in carpenters on the movie. filmmaker's function should be to make Becket's phrase, \"keeping on, keeping on,\" or as Mr. Maranov says in the film , You can't buy a cup of coffee on the is- what they think is right, no matter what. \"one's time is all one's time, even to the land; everything has to be brought in by end.\" boat. The motor homes and all the heavy Otherwise, all you are going to make is movie equipment had to come in by barge Ann Sothem, who plays Sarah's friend, at prearranged times. Food and other sup- sequels.\" -JOANNA NEY Tischa, a cheerful and chatty Mainiac (na- plies come in by water taxi. The only gro- tive of Maine) arrives on the set leaning on Nieto's Show V ictor Nieto Nunez is the soul of the Cartagena Film Festival, the oldest in Latin America. His fam- ily has been in the motion picture business for nearly as long as movies have been shown in the tropics. His grandfather Emilio started with Acevedo Brothers, a pioneering newsreel company, then, branching out into distribution, brought Ecstasy to Colombia and made a fortune with Hedy Lamarr desnuda. Victor went into the business at an early age, and by 1950 was managing a chain of 12 theaters, among them the Padilla, an outdoor 35()()- seater with a huge screen. He then built his own theater, the Miramar, which pros- pered for years with programs of movies and live Mexican singers on stage. This Fifties modeme cinema is still doing well in the lively suburb where it sits at the foot of a steep hill crowned by a 17th-century convent. Nieto had the idea for a festival in 1957; it took three years to set one up. This year, on opening night, he reminisced by the 4

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pool of the Hotel del Caribe, his bony, used to match up with the Mompo river- chismo, written by Garda Marquez, wizened, and beautiful face breaking into front footage and the old wooden bull ring marked the fearure debut of theater direc- a smile as he evoked favorite guests of the in Cartagena-to create a filmic compos- tor Jorge Ali Triana. A claustrophobic past: Fassbinder (who hid in his hotel ite town in whose calles, houses, and pla- westem without real landscapes, it was room for nearly a week in 1978), Arlene zas Garda Marquez' story would be en- shot at a bleak place called Armero. Its ti- Dahl, Joseph von Stemberg, Agnes acted. This mere section was unlike any tle now seems grim indeed, for a few Moorehead, and his all-time number one movie set I had ever visited-this was ur- months after the filmmakers left, Armero goddess, Rita Hayworth, \"who charmed banism! and all its inhabitants were buried by an the pants off everyone in town.\" avalanche when the Nevado del Ruiz vol- T he festival offered nearly a hundred cano erupted; 25,000 in the region were Nieto still runs the show, aided by Vic- films from 25 countries. At Gethse- killed. The protagonist of T/£mpo de tor Nieto Jr., Atahualpa Lichy, and in the mane Hall, in the new convention center, Monr is warned by everyone that he will last few years, with the financial support of the competitive section was restricted to be killed if he remains in town. He does FOCINE, the government's film arm, ''lbero-Latin American films .\" Sidebar and is. The inhabitants of Armero-all headed by Maria Emma Mejia. FOCINE events (Maria Felix, Francesco Rosi retro- the extras seen in Triana's film-had was originally created in Bogota in 1978 as spectives, films based on works by Garda been warned of the possibility of an erup- a credit instirution. It now directly pro- Marquez) were held in pleasant venerable tion. They, too, remained. duces most Colombian films. picrure palaces scattered around town. There was a video market section this year The new Colombian films in competi- Cartagena may be the most beautiful for the first time. Another sign of the tion were a mixed bag. Leonel Gallego's old city in South America; it is certain- times: the only celebrity mobbed by El Tren de los Pioneros (The Train ofthe ly the best preseIVed. The port, founded crowds at this film festival was a TV sex- Pioneers) and A La Salidil Nos Vemos in 1533, was the funnel for most of the pot, Leonela (Mayra Rodriguez), the (See You Outside), Carlos Palau's high- gold and goods plundered by the Spanish Queen of Venezuelan soap operas. The spirited but shapeless account of sexual in Peru, then shipped to Europe. The old town was also agog with preparations for awakening in a parochial school, seemed walled town, srudded with pirate-deter- the Pope's visit; His Holiness was to arrive lightweight contenders. Visa U.S.A., rent cannon, is a museum ofcolonial archi- in Cartagena the week after the festival. A written and directed by Lisandro Duque, tecrure. The baroque Palace of the Inqui- \"simulated mass panic\" was organized at a bittersweet romance shot in Sevilla, the sition, a gloomy repository of racks and the airport one afternoon, with the partici- director's hometown, was the revelation of chains, presides over one of the most pation of 300 Boy Scouts and 200 volun- a secure and sensitive talent. A young cou- charming shaded plazas in all of Christen- teers, most of whom were \"critically ple, hassled by the girl's snobbish parents, dom. wounded\" as part of this security drill. As set out for fame and happiness in New simulated mass panics go, it went nicely, York. They get no farther than the Bogota The place's photogenicity has been no without any real mishaps. airport. The teenage leads, Armando Gu- secret to filmmakers. It was there that tierrez and Marcela Agudelo, have real star Gillo PontecoIVo shot his anti-colonialist I saw four Colombian fearures, enough quality; they're irresistible. All of the epic Bum!, with Marlon Brando, in 1%9. to fumish a decent oveIView, since in re- roles, down to the smallest, are well inhab- A number of the crew fell in love with the cent years the country has produced town, married Colombian women, and re- around seven or eight films annually. Tras el Cristal. mained. Romancing the Stone and The Filmmaking began in 1914. The primitive Mission both took advantage of the old technical infrastrucrure could not deal port's allure. And aU of last summer, with the talkies; production simply halted Francesco Rosi was at work in Cartagena, for a decade until the first sound fearure shooting a film based on the Gabriel Gar- was made in .1939. da Marquez novel Chronicle of a Death Foretold. After a near 20-year recess from During the mute (but not inglorious) cinema, several of PontecoIVo's techni- era, Colombian theaters were often con- cians were again on a set, working once structed along singular lines: the screen more with an Italian director. was placed in the middle of the audito- rium. The literati sat in the higher priced I spent a memorable day with Andrea seats, with the projector in its normal place Crisanti, who has designed every Rosi behind them. The great unwashed were film since 1970 and worked with Anton- in the cheaper seats on the far side of the ioni, Tarkovsky, and Leone. Rosi was screen-they viewed the film and the in- winding up location shooting at Mompo tertities reversed. Practitioners of a since- an old town on the Magdalena River, lost art were at hand (they might be called where Crisanti and his aides had built a \"backward benshis\" )-men who had splendid 120-foot-long paddle boat; it trained themselves to read reversed titles would chum its way to Cartagena at the and who plied their trade vociferously at film's completion and remain permanent- the ends of rows for a nominal fee. ly berthed there as a tourist attraction. We traveled to the dusty burg of Passacabal- Tiempo de Monr (Time to Die, 1985) is los, near which a town was being built full- considered a breakthrough movie. It won scale. On a dusty plain in the middle of no- Best Film-and Best Actor awards at the Rio where, carpenters and plasterers were festival and was well received at the recent completing mills, mansions, a main street, Festival Latino in New York. This tale of a town square-which would later be dumb blood feuding and irrational ma- 6

ited. This moving tale of lost illusions is and passages of memorable Grand Guig- England was sc urrying to his reference perked by a lovely score and lively songs. nol; as the cycle ofabuse comes full circle, books and every archivist to his va ults: Visa U.S.A. received the India Catalina the film is sad, compassionate, beautiful Vorhaus, B., born 1905 in New Jersey.... Best Film award, the festival's grand prix. and deeply disturbing. Of exploitation, made low-budget action pics and thrillers It was fully deserved. there is not a trace. in Britain and America .... was named in An unwonted timeliness attended the There is also no trace of pastiche as such the HUAC hearings as a communist s~ mpa­ showing of Francisco Lombardi's La Ciu- in the film, but its quiet little house in the thizer. ... career ended in 1952 when pro- dad y los Pe\"os (The City and the Dogs), country is haunted by the shades of Gilles jectionists union threatened to blackball a denunciation of the brutality and dumb de Rais, Stroheim, Strindberg, Bunuel, all United Artists films if Vorhaus' work machismo endemic at the Lima Military Genet, and Pasolini. There are moments was shown ... silent ever since. College; the place is seen as a sort of giant when Peeping Tom, Teorema, The Tum Someone had the simple idea of look- prison. The day it was shown, the papers of the Screw, Topaz , and Citizen Kane ing up V for Vorhaus in the British phone- were full of accounts of the massacre of seem to be unspooling in some crevice in book-and there it was . Bernard was alive 260 mutinying political prisoners in three the left side of the director's brain. Angelo and well, lived in St. John's Wood, North Lima prisons, shot down by soldiers on is remarkably portrayed by David Sust- London , and had been enjoying a pros- the orders of an army officer. This tense his first film role. The superb veteran actor perous second career as a hou se con- Peruvian movie is based on a novel by Gunter Meisner appears as the demented verter. Soon he was up in Edinburgh, aged Mario L1osa, published 22 years ago, doctor; Meisner has been seen as Hitler in 81, a spry codger unfazed by sudden fame. which became a bestseller throughout the The Winds ofWar and as Hitler's sister in He enjoyed re-seeing many of his movies continent. When the book first appeared, Gerard Oury's L 'as des as. and walked out of the ones he didn't enjoy. copies were bumed at the Lima Military This may become an exemplary film He also dropped startling hints that he College. Its theme may not be novel- maudit-I'm afraid that few will be given might set up another project. we've all seen films on the nonsensical the chance to be disturbed, revolted, or Vorhaus fanciers, like festival director perversity of military ceremonials-but impressed by its fire and brimstone. Made Jim Hickey, insist that his movies are not here it is smartly done up for the first time more than a year ago, it has been \"ex- masterpieces, and even Lean would prob- in Peruvian dress uniforms. posed\" at the Berlin, Cannes, and Carta- ably agree. But they are outstandingly gena festivals, but has not been released well-made B-pics and quota quickies. A T he joy, the shock of real discovery theatrically in Spain or anywhere else. Sam Fuller before his time, Vorhaus made came at last, with Tras el Cristal (In a The credit crawl at the end includes an at- a tiny budget and a tinier schedule go a Glass Cage). There have been no great testation from a psychiatrist that \"in spite long way, not least in his best movie The new films in recent years-at the end of of the realism of certain scenes involving Last Journey (1935). This is as good a this one, you may well rub your eyes and cruelty to children, the film was produced train romp as The Lady Vanishes. The all- ask: where did it come from, the moon? according to ethical norms.\" sorts characters - a newlywed bigamist No, Barcelona. Catalonian is spoken A footnote to that note can be found in (Hugh Williams) and his unsuspecting there. Tras el Cristal was produced by the the pressbook, which informs that \"con- bride, a doctor-hypnotist bound for a vital Spanish Ministry of Culture and directed trary to what you may think by watching operation (Godfrey Tearle) , a temperance by Agustin Villaronga. This nightmarish the film, the children that take part had a worker, a detective disguised as a drunk, masterpiece may be the most impressive big fun by filming. \" etc. - climb onboard an express which directorial debut of the last decade. -ELLIOTT STEIN happens to be in the hands of a driver who It is set in the Franco era-sometime wants to murder his co-driver. The driver during the Fifties. A Nazi doctor, who had is also on his last journey before retire- enjoyed participating in death camp ex- Edinburgh at 40 ment, and what the hell does he care if the periments on young men, has taken ref- locomotive, stoked with his fury, picks up uge with his wife and adolescent daughter speed and is soon slamming through the in an isolated house in the Spanish T he Edinburgh Film Festival was 40 English countryside threatening cows, countryside. An accident puts him in an years old in August, and nostalgia milk trains , and startled passengers wait- iron lung. One day, an intense and strange was coming out of the woodwork. ing vainly on station platforms for a train young man invades the house, claiming to Tributes were penned , tuckets Were that doesn't stop? be a trained nurse sent to take care of the sounded, haggis was downed. There was invalid. With the doctor's daughter as an dancing in the streets, bagpiping in the Briskly funny and exciting, masterfully ally, he soon becomes the master of the projection rooms and a celebration docu- dovetailing the plots and subplots as apoc- house, and in the course of scenes of con- mentary called Hooray for Holyrood alypse approaches, Vorhaus' film could tagious madness, it becomes clear that he (rhyme with Hollywood) , being Edin- have taught the Seventies' disaster genre a had been molested as a child by the doc- burgh's oldest precinct and containing thing or two . The director does less well tor, and that he has retumed in search of Holyrood Palace, where Mary Stuart with the love-and-avalanche plot of Dusty something far more complicated than re- loved and lived . And for its main movie Ermine (1936), and Crime on the Hill venge. retrospective, Edinburgh dug deep into (1933) is a potty whodunnit crossing Aga- the past to retrieve The Ghost Camera tha Christie with P. G. Wodehouse. Villaronga does not make a false step in (1933) by David Lean's favorite Thirties Bodies thud and wills are read in a never- his first film. Tras el Cristal contains some filmmaker, and the man who gave him his never English village. But even here of the most bizarre love scenes ever con- first editingjob, Bernard Vorhaus. Vorhaus shows a cracking sense of humor, ceived and the best classical suspense- managing to parody a dated genre almost murder sequence anyone has put on- Lean dropped the name casually - as before it was dated - watch the montage screen since the demise of Alfred one often drops bombshells - in a British of gaping faces whenever Something Dra- Hitchcock. It is tinged with grisly humor TV interview, but suddenly every critic in matic happens. 7

T hree movies from Poland grabbed see ms self-defeating. A 60-year-old Eduardo Guedes' pseudo-picaresque the political limelight at Edinburgh. retired electrician, splendidly played by Rocinante , in which John Hurt traipses Krysztof Kieslowski's No End is banned in the pachyderm-like Marius Dmochowski across Britain and is astonished to learn the Eastern Bloc. The authorities wo n't (Poland's Jean Gabin) , comes to Cracow that the place is sick, stricken, and full of bear a film w hose dead lawyer hero for a banquet honoring the 30th anniver- class schisms. (pl ayed by Jerzy Radziwilowicz , Wajda's sary of the building of the Nowa Huta Man of Marble) looks on approvingly steelworks , in which he took part. Medals The Good Father. from beyo nd the grave as his plucky are dished out all around , but he doesn't widow (Grazyna Szapolowska) carries on get one. Why? Whodunnit? Is there a for- Once again, Edinburgh rounded up his battles against the state. Plain but gotten (by him) but unforgi ven blot in his choice items from the East. They piquant - the \"ghost\" motif is surreall y past? Prowling through dark corridors of also threw in mini-tributes to two direc- matter-of-fact, not fey or winsome - the power, the film depicts Eastern European tors, one dead , one very much alive. movie's plot is enriched by it s range of bureaucracy as a maze of conspiracy and characters, embracing every fla vo r of obfuscation. Even with a sword for defi- The deceased director is Filipino political respon se. The widow fights the ance and a ball of thread for finding yo ur Gerardo De Leon , whose rip-roaring good fight on behalf of persecuted Soli- way back to d ay light and honesty, yo u adventures in diverse genres - musicals , darity wo rkers or political dissidents, won't go through this labyrinth without comedies, gangster films - survive in despite learning more than she wants to meeting the Minotaur at least once, dodgy prints, some of which sear the ret- know about her husband's sexual past. maybe fatally. ina. The black-and-white compositions of And her two lawyers, her hu sband's ex- 48 Hours (1950), a prison-break drama, colleagues, are a grimly comical Tweedle- British cinema, too , is doing its bit in invite comparison with Raoul Walsh and dum and Tweedledee . One is an old the age of paranoia . Absolutely Fritz Lang. Unfortunately, I had to leave compromiser who'd rather buy a deal with everyone feels he's being got at in Mike after 70 minutes due to incipient blind- the judge than champion a losing cause or Newell's The Good Father, a tale of sun- ness. But I enjoyed what I saw and heard. client. The other is a glitter-eyed young dered parents and tug-of-war kids . Chris- ideologue who'd rather see a client die on a topher Hampton adapts the novel by The alive filmmaker is writer-director- hunger strike than recant a protest or Peter Prince, and Anthony Hopkins grabs producer-star Jackie Chan , heir to Bruce plead not guilty. the plum role of a SO-ish South Londoner Lee as Hong Kong cinema's reigning w ho's split up with his wife, resents her hyphenate. Chan has more humor than Kieslows ki's first film, the black-and- monopoly of their yo ung son, and seeks Lee (who wasn't slow with a gag himself) , w hite Camera Buff, shimmied deftl y vicarious revenge . He steers a similarly and his 1983 comedy-action romp Project through the ambiguities of life under total- plighted friend (Jim Broadbent) through A outdoes Lee in most other depart- itarianism. But No End adds color, literally the law courts, to sue for custody of his ments , too. Visual gags vie with thumping and figurativel y. The guiding hand reach- (Broadbent's) son. fight scenes and heart-stopping action ing out to the heroine from the next world stunts-all the latter performed by Chan - the hu sband steps in to influence events Moral squalor reigns - the lawyer they himself, including shinnying up a swaying at times - is presented as a beatific alter- hire is an oily upper-class thug (Simon SO-foot flagpole to release his manacles. nati ve to the steering hand of the State, Callow) who smears Broadbent's wife by Nothing like the rapturous groan of collec- reaching deep into people's homes and citing her student-demo past and her les- tive vertigo that went through the audi- so uls. bian present - and Hopkins devours ence at this point had ever been heard in every morsel of cynical dialogue . But Edinburgh before. Neither Roman Wionczek's Dignity excitable critics who claimed Newell to be nor Kazimierz Karabasz' A Looming a master of sleaze on the strength of Up the hill, in the auld town near the Shadow measures up to Kieslows ki. But Dance with a Stranger should take a look castle, sits one of the world's few surviving yoked together as a mandatory double bill at this picture and think again. It is grungy camerae obscurae. From a periscope they make intriguing viewing. (Poland without style. Shot for Channel 4 televi- mounted on a roof, a 350-degree image of won't allow the second to be shown with- sion, it looks every inch a TV movie, all 20 the city in motion - traffic , buildings, out the first as an ideological counter- inches grainily expanded to 2000. people, scudding clouds - is reflected weight) . Dignity is an anti-Solidarity tract Hopkins, though , is a treat. onto the \"screen\" of a circular white table. masquerading as a film. Its lone and aging Hickey has made much of Edinburgh, hero (Jerzy Braszka) , a factory worker I have been subject to several assassina- which is unique among film fests - part of who won't be bullied into going on strike, tion attempts in the UK since writing the a larger festival of art, music, ballet, opera, is the shining knight of the state-approved article \"The Brits Have Gone Nuts\" (Film and theater. Jerzy Raziwilowicz can take union up against the Solidarity renegades. Comment, August 1985) . But I still think time off from scorching audiences in At the end the hero is wheelbarrowed out British cinema is suffering an epidemic of Andrej Wadja's stage version of Crime and of the factory by his bUllying workmates self-mortification. Sometimes this can be Punishment to drop round to filmhouse as and dumped outside the gates. The fun, as with Alex Cox's Sid and Nancy, the star of Krzysztof Kieslowski's No End. bruised fighter for status-quo socialism, which shows the Punk Era throwing up all Cross-media electricity crackles. Four who only wants to support his famil y and over the sceptered isle- ghastly but decades in the business have not dented his right to work, glowers back at the funny. But there are also hard-labor mov- Edinburgh's variety and vitality. massed ranks of nasty radicali sm. The ies like Michael Caton-Jones' lugubrious audience feels it ought to be booing or Riveter, a National Film School featurette - HARLAN KENNEDY hissing as if at a pantomime. about a father and son who leave Glasgow to start a new life in the Scottish isles , A Looming Shadow whacks this rub- meeting woe, misery, and rain in much the bish so firml y over the head that the dou- same measure as before. Or like Ann and ble-bill idea, from the Party's viewpoint, 8 s·

The Film Society ofLinco[n Center cord1a[§; invitesyou to 6ecome a mem6er. Get involved with the world's most provocative art ,-- - - I~ail to (use~velope in~gaZine): - , form-film-by joining The Film Society of Lincoln Cen- Film Society of Lincoln Center. ter. Membership brings you-and the Film Society- I o Member 140 W. 65th St.. NY. NY 10023 many benefits. II 0 Sponsor Name II What's in it for you? A free subscription to Film Com- I Mdffiu State Zip I ment. Advance mailings on our activities-like the New I 0 Benefactor City I York Film Festival and New Directors/New Films . Special I o Regent Day Phone I ticket discounts . And the chance to be a part of the scene that knew about Scorsese, Bertolucci, Forman , I 0 Check enclosed for . 0 Bill me I and Spielberg-to name but a few-before they were I Make check payable to The Film Society of Lincoln Center. I household names. L Contributions are deductible to the extent of the law. -------------_-.1 What's in it for us? As much as S200,000 in matching funds from the National Endowment for the Arts in a Challenge Grant. In fact, since the Grant must be mat- ched on a three-to-one basis, your membership contri- bution now could help us raise as much as S800,000 . GENERAL MEMBERSHIP For 550 you receive for one year: - The right to purchase 2 subscriptions to the New York Film Festival. '-A free subscription to Film Comment. -Advance mailings about all Film Society activities . -Discounts on tickets to New Directors/New Films . -An elegant New York Film Festival Gift. SPONSOR For 5700 you receive for one year: -2 tickets to Opening and Closing Nights of the New York Film Festival. - 2 5200 tickets to our Spring Gala. including dinner with the stars . -Invitations to special screenings and cocktail receptions with the Film SOCiety. -Guaranteed right to purchase 4 tickets to all Festival films . -A subscription to Film Comment. -An elegant New York Film Festival gift. -Your name listed in our house program . BENEFACTOR For 51 .350 you receive for one year all the privileges above plus: -An additional 2 (total of 4) tickets to Opening and Closing Nights of the New York Film Festival. -An additional 2 (total of 4) 5200 tickets to our Spring Gala including dinner with the stars. -A press pass for two to all Festival press screenings and con- ferences . -A limited edition New York Film Festival poster. REGENT For 55,000 you receive for one year all the privileges above plus : -An invitation to a private dinner on Opening or Closing Night of the New York Film Festival with the directors and actors . -Invitations to preview screenings of major studio productions at their screening rooms. -An invitation to a private seminar on the films selected for the New York Film Festival conducted by the Festival 's director. 9

Feature Fil1ms from Direct Cinema LimitedSroken Rainbow ACADEMY AWARD Navajo who have already \"A powerful, eloquent, BEST DOCUMENTARY been relocated into tract devastating documentary.\" FEATURE 1986 houses off the reservation, San Francisco Chronicle we explore the tragiC and far- reaching effects of this ill- BROKEN RAINBOW is about conceived program. the Navajo Indians of Arizona, \"BROKEN RAINBOW speaks Produced by Maria Florio 10,000 of whom are being eloquently for a silent minority and Victoria Mudd relocated by the Federal and . . . could lead to reason .\" Narrated by Martin Sheen Government. Through inter- Variety 69 minutes views with traditional Hopi and Navajo leaders, and with Einstein on the Beach: collaborated on the restaging of and Wilson which introduce this tradition-breaking opera. their work to audiences 2The Changing ,~ Blue Ribbon American The film examines the work unfamiliar with their theatrical Image of Opera through the insights of Glass and musical concepts . Film Festival 1986 and Wilson . It incorporates EINSTEIN ON THE BEACH is a rehearsal footage which offers a must-see documentary for In 1984 the landmark production, rare look at the creative methods everyone who cares about EINSTEIN ON THE BEACH, was of two of the most important contemporary music, theatre , staged at the Brooklyn figures in modern American dance and performance . Academy of Music. It was the musical theatre.' It contains first time since 1976 that its footage of the opera itself, as An Obenhaus Film produced for principle creators , composer well as interviews with Glass Brooklyn Academy of Music Philip Glass and designerl 58 minutes director Robert Wilson Is'lands, tiny atolls in the mid- Pacific . With declassified \"Shocking and powerful. .. a Half life: First Peace Prize government archival film and memorable film .\" David Stratton, A Parable for Winner 1986 contemporary interviews, HALF Variety the Nuclear Age Berlin Film Festival LIFE presents a restrained but \"A devastating investigation.. chilling picture of a cynical astonishing contemporary record Director's Award radiation experiment on human film .\" David Robinson , for Extraordinary populations. Its parable is a true London Times Achievement 1986 one that haunts our past , present U.S. Film Festival and future . What ATOMIC CAFE Written and Directed by does for laughs, HALF LIFE does Dennis O'Rourke This compelling and beautifully for politics and morality. 86 minutes crafted film reveals the effects of U.S. nuclear testing on the inhabitants of the Marshall las Madres: The Academy Award Aires , in the Plaza de Mayo. and the painful search to They demanded to know where discover their fates. The Mothers of Plaza de Nomination their missing children were . struggle described in LAS Best Documentary These middle-aged and elderly MADRES continues to this day Mayo Feature 1986 women sparked an international in many countries . The film goes campaign for the release of all beyond national borders to I~ The year was 1977, the darkest politically \"disapp'eared \" remind everyone of the plight of persons . LAS MADRES DE LA disappeared persons hour of military dictatorship in PLAZA DE MAYO now number everywhere. in the thousands. In this moving A film by Susana Munoz and Argentina. Fourteen ordinary documentary, the Mothers tell of Lourdes Portillo their children's di'sappearances 64 minutes women began to meet publicly every Thursday, risking their lives by marching before the presidential palace in Buenos Isaac in America: A ISAAC IN AMERICA is an experience and maintaining an The Cafeteria Journey with Isaac intensely cinematic, penetrating exuberant approach to life at 8ashevis Singer and honest portrayal of one of every age. THE CAFETERIA is a moving America's. most remarkable \"A little gem, one of the best film based on Isaac Singer's writers . The film offers a rare evocations of a writer's story about Jewish refugees opportunity to take a trip with the personality .\" trying to escape their past in Nobel-Prize laureate into his Michael Wilmington post World War II New York City. past through one of his highly Los Angeles Times autobiographicql short stories . Directed by Amram Nowak Starring Bob Dishy and It is a film for everyone who Produced by Kirk Simon · Zorah Lampert cares about literature, Jewish Executive Proqucer Manya Starr Directed by Amram Nowak life and culture, the immigrant 58 minutes Produced by Kirk Simon Executive Producer Manya Starr For information contact: Direct Cinema Limited 58 minutes P.O. Box 69799 Los Angeles, CA 90069-9976 ~,: (213) 652-8000 cmema limited

• .... - 10, wretched, cartoonish melodrama, others saw as the perverse downside of reality. rd Stone next embarked on a series of col- Oliver Stone with his platoon in Vietnam. laborations with some of the more inde- pendent-minded, flamboyant, boxoffice Oliver Stone interviewed directors in Hollywood, notably John Mi- by Pat McGilligan lius, Brian DePalma, Michael Cimino and , less memorably, Hal Ashby (Stone H as Oliver Stone been getting to would rather not discuss the botched-up you lately? If so, you have plenty of company-film crit- yet still eminently watchable Eight Mil- ics, many Hollywood studio lion Ways to Die). The result was a num- executives, and right-wingers/left-wingers (for polar opposite reasons) everywhere. ber of the more dubious, outrageous, ac- tion-filled movies of the Eighties. (Also, Not that Stone had been keeping a low some of the more ambitious and fascinat- profile, previously. If anything, he has courted recognition and controversy from ing.) Scarface and Year of the Dragon, the very beginning. He has not been hum- ble, and he is not in the struggling caste of particularly, were excoriated by commu- nity organizations for racism and inauthen- - screenwriters. No, he is one of the best, ticity, but Stone doesn't hedge much or best-paid, and best-known. His career began in high gear with Mid- apologize. (Defending Dragon in one night Express in 1978, the brutal, real-life story of a young American imprisoned in interview, he blamed the negative reac- Turkey for drug-smuggling. Stone's first, tion to the film on \"organized Chinese major, produced screenplay (discounting groups\" and people like (independent student and low-budget efforts), Express filmmaker) Wayne Wang, who \"doesn't brought a hailstorm of criticism from peo- know shit-excuse me-about China- ple who believed it depicted the Turks in town. If Wayne Wang is to be believed, broad , racist strokes, copped-out on or then the Chinese are some of the most negatively slanted the prison homosexual- boring people in the world.\") ity, and in general deviated from Bill Hayes' book, on which the movie was Having been tagged with charges of ra- based . There was also a script Oscar for cial insensitivity, Stone might well seem Stone and a best screenplay award from to hold right-wing sympathies. But his the Writers Guild. What some saw as Oliver Stone. subsequent sneak attack as one of the most left-wing (albeit, iconoclastically so) 11

directors in Hollywood surprised a bit, nam flashback this year, a year that is shap- ments, even in its grotesque images ofbat- though the town ain't really going to go ing up as a trendy nostalgic tribute to the tie and death. The film's multi-character down in history for the size of its left-wing grunts ofVietnam. In good time there will ensemble ofyoung unknowns is anchored salon. also be Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jack- by three central performances: Willem et (adapted from the novel The Short- DaFoe as Sgt. Elias is the conscience of Indeed, most of us can be forgiven for Timers), 84 Charlie Mopic, a shoestring the platoon; Tom Berenger as Sgt. not being prepared at all for Oliver Stone, Sundance project, Lionel Chetwynd's Barnes, the dark angel ofdeath; and Char- the director. Few will remember Seizure, Hanoi Hilton (about P.O.w.'s), and James lie Sheen (Martin's son) is recruit Chris a low-budget horror film filmed in Canada Carabatsos's Hamburger Hill, another Taylor, Stone's alter ego. Berenger does a by the then 25-year-old Stone, a recent foot-soldier paean. (Carabatsos, also a riveting 180-degree tum from his Big Chill NYU film school graduate. And you had to screenwriter turned director, did the script prototype, and Sheen cannot help but be up pretty late at night to see The Hand, for Clint Eastwood's Heartbreak Ridge, evoke his father, similarly mired in his second directorial opus in 1981, a grand Clint's way of saying, 'Hey, don't forget Apocalypse, Now. (Likewise Charlie is guignol ditty with Michael Caine haunted Grenada, too.') burdened with disconnected voice-over by his dismemberment. Not half-bad; in narration-a weakness in both Apoca- fact, having seen it on Hollywood Boule- Vietnam is as personal as it is political for lypse and Platoon.) Stone, a great movie vard during its very brief run, I thought Stone. He is mesmerized by exotic cul- buff, relishes such resonant connections. that it is actually half-good. tures and by the possibilities and truths in America as reflected in its immigrant cul- I t is interesting to compare briefly movie It was an open secret in L.A. during the tures, and this enchantment crops up re- directors off the set with the stylistic line last decade that Stone was a frustrated currently in the settings and concerns of spun out in their films. Hawks, cold and \"cause freak\" whose commercial sell-out his movies. The headline of one weekly witty, dry as tumbleweed; Peckinpah, a was a disillusioned \"detour into the main- paper in Los Angeles dubbed him \"The poet with writer's block, whimsical and stream\" (his words) after more cherished cinema's low-rent Lord Jim.\" Probably dangerous whether drunk or sober; Scor- projects had foundered. His long-planned that anonymous headline-writer meant a sese, manic and hyper, driven intuitively, adaptation ofVietnam Vet leader Ron Ko- low-rent Joseph Conrad (one ofStone's lit- with no direction home. The best of the vic's Born on the 4th ofJuly came asunder erary gods), but however inadvertent the auteurs personify their films somehow. It days before shooting was to begin, and his reference, Lord Jim is kin to the obsessed, is clear, with the back-to-back whammy of script about Russian dissidents was op- deeply-flawed, anti-heroic probers and Salvador and Platoon that Stone will be tioned but never made. Stone was grow- pariahs that lace Stone's work. with us as a director for quite some time- ihg rich and fat with assignments but in- the aloof kid with the preppie perks, driv- creasingly dispirited by his own As a Yale drop-out, Stone spent two en to seek the heat and corruption under- stagnation. Around the time he finished years in Vietnam teaching Vietnamese- lying the ordered world. The Hand, he attended a screening of Chinese students in 1965. Then, after an Warren Beatty's Reds and was struck by interval of travel and writing, he returned One-on-one, Stone is intense, tightly- its vision and daring. Consequently, to Southeast Asia to volunteer as a soldier reined-in, boiling over, alternating fury Stone's own political and creative goals in the War. He serveo with the 25th Infan- with laughter; you can't be sure when he is were revitalized. try Division near the Cambodian border kidding. \"Husky and broad-shouldered,\" and was wounded twice. He was awarded Stone has a big, Humpty-Dumpty egg- T he first fruit of that was Salvador, a the Bronze Star for combat gallantry and a face that is bland and ingenuous. But the pell-mell immersion into newspaper Purple Heart with Oak Leaf Cluster. Pla- eyes blaze, and when the grin cracks headlines and Central American back- toon is from his one-year-plus tour ofduty. open, you half-expect lava to pour out. Ul- alleys that putJames Woods and Jim Belu- He says the story of the film is telescoped timately, he is much more studied and shi together in a compressed account of from his own experiences and that just like thoughtful than the Angry Young (well, the recent, tragic rending of EI Salvador. the character of Chris Taylor, in Vietnam actually 40) Screenwriter I had imagined: Even with its flaws, Salvador came on like he did some \"morally repulsive things.\" Stone evinces the writer's sober intent on a hammer blow, showing the influences of coming across, on being precise, on being a comic-fantastical Borges, a high-steam Platoon, will likely be controversial for understood, on making his point. Also, he Scorsese, and a polemical Godard. If years to come. It charts the dead logic is funny. James Woods doesn't get an Oscar nomi- of tbe \"morally repulsive\" war; it may be nation for his hurt, raging, bullying perfor- the benchmark Vietnam War movie (from I didn't but should have asked him mance as journalist Richard Boyle, there is the U.S. point of view), the one by which what words he might choose for his tomb- no justice in the world. But that may have all films about combat are measured. It stone. We did fool around with some ten- been the point of the movie after all: takes the futility of the war and the rape of tative credos. \"Show the ugly!\" I suggest- There is no justice in the world. Even Vietnam for granted, and instead focuses ed. \"Yes ... ,\" he agreed, \"But show the more than Under Fire and Missing (and on the searing intimacy of fear and hate; good!\" Platoon is an ugly, painful, doom- they would make a nice triple bill with Sal- on the psychology of the battlefield; on laden film, with much that is honest and vador), Stone's film was the bitter pill of the civil war-within-the-war, the left-wing beautiful and, yes, good. Apart from its in- truth about the suppressed story behind versus the right-wing (as it were) of the sol- trinsic historical value as the first feature the story down there. diery and the command. Platoon's verisi- film directed by a former vet, I believe militude amazes-Stone has recreated Stone when he says his goals in making it Salvador opened the doors to Platoon, (on-location in the Philippines) the eerie, were in part modest and private. Rather Stone's Vietnam memoirs, written more moral chaos, and gotten the period on- than affecting a grand, universal state- -than a decade ago, and one of those more target. ment about men in war, he is content to personal scripts shelved after \"dying exorcise his own ghost from Vietnam. of encouragement\" in Hollywood. Get Unlike the herky-jerky style of Salva- ready-Platoon will not be the only Viet- dor, Platoon is very assured, lyrical at mo- -P.McG. 12

Y OU have worked with some pretty Platoon. disparate directors. Or maybe I should say, directors who have lit- wall about him and I guess, being the writ- down then, and I was saying it's about tle in common other than personal flam- er with lesser credits at that point in time, time we gave it back; and he was taking boyance and operatic filmmaking styles: he didn't brook any of my input. the John Wayne point of view that this Alan Parker, John Milius, Brian De- was one of the most traitorous acts in his- Palma, Michael Cimino, Hal Ashby. Did his deafness have any political con- tory. But we had a wonderful time-he Let's start with Milius and Conan. notations? Or was he merely attempting to showed me his gun collection-he's a ter- 'masculinize' the material? rific skeet shooter. I'm quite the opposite. It was very difficult and complicated to I did all my shooting in Vietnam, and I get rights to the [Robert E.] Howard I think he masculinized it and went have never fired a weapon since. Conan books. [Producer] Eddie Press- more with his friends-more with the man spent a fortune in legal fees, and then bodybuilding aspect of Arnold [Schwarz- Y OU think Year of the Dragon was a enegger]. I think Arnold has a more ro- successful collaboration? I couldn't direct because I had no clout. I mantic side. John populated the movie Not ultimately, no. I had a very good begged Ridley Scott to do it. I went down with surfers and bodybuilders. And the relationship with Michael [Cimino]. He on my knees to him. This was off The Du- look-he made it look like a Spanish wrote the screenplay with me; he was ellists, we hadn't even seen Alie.n yet. He western. I know it was shot in Spain be- there all the time. He breathed me. He said yes and then he said no. It broke our cause it was cheaper there, but I wanted to shared everything in his life with me. With heartS. Instead, he did Blade Runner. shoot it in Germany or Russia-and to get Michael, it's a 24-hour day. He doesn' t the whole Russian army, thousands of really sleep. You get into his skin, he gets Because we were depressed by Rid- people in the green, fertile fields of into yours. He's truly an obsessive person- ley's tumdown, we turned it over to John Russia. The picture should have been ality. He's the most Napoleonic director I and Dino [DeLaurentiis, as producer]. AJ- green; John made it rocky desert yellow, have ever worked with. His gaze is on the though I like John-I think he's a great more a [Sergio] Leone Western. It was all future. His gaze is on history. He has no cheap-they cut back on the extras, the time for pettiness. raconteur and a John Wayne figure-ulti- fights were done on the cheap, the rocks mately he didn't want to collaborate with looked like cardboard boulders. For Dragon, we did an enormous me. He rewrote the end and my criticisms amount of research . Getting information were ignored-to the detriment of the There was no collaboration essentially. from the Chinese was very hard. For Scar- I wrote my stuff and I never really got a face, it was easy to get the Latins to talk, picture, I think. He put that whole snake second pass. John rewrote, I gave notes, but I couldn't get the Chinese to talk cult stuff in, which I didn't like at all, and he tore up the notes, and then we never about gangsters. We went to about 20, 30 which cheapens the story. A snake cult- talked about the movie again. banquets in Chinatown, where we had to eat fifteen-course meals, gorging our- who cares? Were you at all sympatico? My original draft was a $40 million mov- Not at all. We used to have tremendous fights. The Panama Canal deal was going ie. It dealt with the takeover of the planet and the forces of life being threatened by the forces of darkness. The mutant armies were taking over, and Conan was the lone- ly pagan-as opposed to Christian-hero; he was Roland at the pass, he was Tarzan, he was a mythic figure. I loved that he had been enslaved and suffered, and that he rose. What was great about the Howard books-actually, 13 books-was Conan's progression from a peasant to a king. At the end of the movie, in my draft, he is the king, and it means something that he came from these roots. Then he foregoes the kingdom and tells the princess, \"I can't be a king this way, as your husband. I can't inherit the throne. I will earn my throne. \" Then he went riding off to the second adventure, which was supposed to be the follow-up sequel. If they'd done it my way, they would have had a Bond- type series, 12-13 pictures, which is what I had wanted to do. How did Milius' sensibility clash with yours? DePalma seems apoliticalifnot in- tellectually vapid, but Milius seems to rev- el in being a right-winger, while Cimino has been accused of being one. Let's face it. John has a certain deaf- ness. Hedoesn' t1isten.ltwas theleastsuc- cessful collaboration I ever had. Whereas, with Cimino, he listened very well. He lis- tens to you. John doesn't. He has a stone 13

selves, trying to get friendly with these battle. Scarface. I was the man who wrote it. I guys who wouldn't tell us the time of day. was muy macho. We got information finally from a dissi- Mickey's performance comes across as dent gangster group, very on the outs, smug, and in focusing on him, the film Do you feel they missed the subtlety? very unhappy, who took us down to Atlan- lost its authenticity. Well, if you really examine Scarface, tic City and showed us the inner workings of what was going on in the gambling I personally think Mickey was marvel- it's very much a left-wing picture. Though world, and also showed us what was going ous casting by Michael. No actor wanted Tony Montana [AI Pacino] espouses anti- on in Chinatown. We met with a lot of the to do that part. Mickey wasn't even a star Communism, he's very much a rebel. Ul- biggies . . . . at that point. For DeLaurentiis and Ci- timately, he's undone by the establish- mino to bank $20 million on him was a big ment when he gets stuck in a bank How do you react to criticism that the step. movie is a slur on Chinese people? laundering deal, because he wants to bet- Why didn't any major star want such a ter their deal. He goes to a cheaper fence, The movie is hyped up a bit, but it was juicy part? which turns out to be a federal operation, essentially honest about the Golden Tri- angle [the opium poppy triangle that bor- They went right down the list. Certain- and gets busted, which sets in motion his ders Laos, Burma, and Thailand], the use ly it was because ofMichael in some cases. fall. In the end, the only way he can save ofyouth gangs as the little surface fishes to And a lot of people didn't like the right- himself is to blow up a diplomat, who is knock off, to exploit, to run numbers, based on Letelier, but because the diplo- while the whales deep down are involved wing, racist nature of the character. He is a mat is with his wife and his children, Tony in the enormous dope shipping from right-winger. He is a racist. That is the Southeast Asia. This is serious business. can't bring himself to do it ... he refuses. The Chinese are the biggest importers of way the character was conceived and writ- heroin in this country. They outdo the ten. He's a sexist on top of it. You had to AmI wrong orare you in some way ob- Mafia, yet nobody knows about it-they have a big pair of balls to play that part. sessed with drug deals and the drug cul- do it quietly. There are rarely busts-ex- ture-it starts with Midnight Express, but cept this recent one, the United Bamboo You don't think the film ultimately continues on through Scarface, Dragon, Gang. You should read the testimony. It's comes down on his side. Salvador, Platoon, even Eight Million hilarious. It's right out of the movie. Insofar as he is the protagonist? Ways to Die? Who hyped it up? You? Cimino? As far as being racist and sexist? [Laughs.] Well, I am the Big Chill gen- I said it wasn't a totally successful col- laboration. Dino got his paws into it. For You're asking me a very tough ques- eration. I grew up with that. And I was hit example, the original ending of the movie tion. I condemn vigilantism. I don't be- was brilliant. The Mickey Rourke charac- lieve in it. On the other hand, there's a cer- with drugs in Nam. Certainly, drugs ter had two women in his life. The Chi- tain part of me that hates the bureaucracy played a part in my life for several years nese Mafia character, John Lone, was also that prevents the original idea from com- supposed to have two women in his life- ing through. I'm a little tom on that as- after Nam. But I kicked it all before Scar- a Hong Kong wife and a New York wife, pect. face, which was my farewell to all drugs. I which a lot of these Chinese have. In a The fact is, nobody in that Chinatown really wrote it off in a big way. What better precinct wants to do anything about the farewell than a guy falling into a ton of co- moment of sentimentality, he brings the drugs, and this guy is a mover and shaker caine, and when he looks up at the camera Chinese wife to the States, because he is who wants to rock the boat. That makes having problems with his Hong Kong son. there is all this white powder up his nose. I He installs her, separate from his other him, per se, interesting as a protagonist. I think it's very funny. wife, in a New York apartment. The Mickey Rourke cop character finds out don't like the way he does it, his excesses, But I saw Midnight Express as a story about it and after he can't get him legally, the unrelenting humorlessness of his char- with a bust or wiretap, busts him for biga- acter. That's more Michael than me. In about justice, really. He could have been my. He wants to insult him and take away his \"face.\" By taking away his \"face\" he Scarface, Tony Montana is a nut, but he's busted for carrying a pistol. The charge somehow forces the issues to a head. funny . .. I always thought it was a come- didn't really interest me, it was the sen- dic Richard III, the rise and fall of a petty Ultimately, it's not in the movie, which tence. Platoon is a realistic assessment of is resolved through more conventional hood. means at the shipyard-all the typical what went on with drugs in Vietnam, as far Was DePalma faithful to your screen- as my memory serves me. I wrote it in '76, Billy Friedkin-French Connection stuff, play? To a large degree. seven or eight years later, so obviously which I didn't particularly care for. That's 1)0 you feel Scarface was successful? some things are blurred. But it's a larger because Dino has a very Fifties mentality, To a large degree. The dialogue will and he demanded to know how could theme for me than drugs. Stanley White, the Mickey Rourke char- last. A lot of young lawyers and business- acter, the hero of the movie, be an adul- men quote me the dialogue, and I say, Does it make you nervous delving into terer? How could he be married to one \"Why do you remember this?\" They say, non-white, lower-class cultures? woman and fuck another? We said, \"It's exactly like my business.\" Apparent- \"Dino, drop dead, you're living in the He- ly, the gangster ethics hit on some of the No. I find it interesting. As a middle- len of Troy epics you're still doing.\" Mi- business ethics going on in this country. class white man, I find it very exotic. I did chael won that battle, but in the process a lot of research for Scarface and Dragon. we lost the other one, which was a key Scarface has probably got me more free I'd been in prison myself on a drug bust prior to Midnight Express. Obviously I champagne everywhere in the world than cannot be inside the skin of other peo- any film I've ever worked on. Gangsters ple-but this is an old argument.... I've bumped into in Paris-gay gang- sters-who bought me champagne all How do you feel about charges that the Turks are treated racistly in Midnight Ex- night long and said, 'How did you know?' press, the Latins in Scarface, and the Chi- nese in Dragon? When I went to Salvador, I got a lot of my \"ins\" with Major D'Aubisson and the I think the Turks probably had a point. right-wing Arena Party because they loved Actually, there was a little more humor in the screenplay. The Turks were shown as a little crazier, not just as torturers. There were scenes with the Billy Hayes charac- ter being tortured, then you'd move the 14

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camera over to the next cell and there and I was never the same again. people and beds for only 3,000 and I had would be another Turk watching TV, or My father was pissed offat me. He said, to sleep on a floor for three weeks. The checking out ofprison at night, or bringing [public defender] lawyer wouldn't even hookers in; it was like a carnival. There is \"If you go, you' re going to screw up your come to defend me. So I called my father no sense of values in those jails, no uni- education and you're never going back to and he said, \"Where have you been? You formity . I found that hilarious. There was Yale.\" Years later, before he died, I said to were supposed to call?\" I said, \"Dad, I a lot of that in the screenplay. But not in him, \"See Dad, I did screw up. I never have to tell you something. The good the movie. I think the Turks probably had did go back to Yale. But I'm a lot happier news is I'm out ofVietnam. The bad news a good rap on us. It was a little rabid. But now than I would have been if I had is I'm in jail.\" He called upan attorney and we were young. stayed . offered him $2,500. This guy showed up that afternoon, beaming, he loved me, Scarface, listen, I knew I was going to I did some social work on the streets of rolling his hands-a scene right out of Philadelphia before I went overseas. The be in hot water, but I did it because I really Hill Christian Association-we used to go Midnight Express. That's where I got a lot wanted to do that whole fascinating South down, paint houses and do fix-it jobs, and of the Midnight Express stuff. Florida scene. When I was in Miami in live with blacks in the ghettoes of Phila- 1980, there were something like 200 drug- delphia. But I was essentially a tom right- He got me off. I don't know how. The related homicides that year-and, in fact, winger. My father was right-wing; he charges were ultimately dismissed in the there were two Colombians who were hated Roosevelt all his life, and he hated interests of justice, which means they killed by chainsaws and carved up worse the Russians. I grew up in that Cold War than in the movie. There was a fascinating context that we all did, from the Fifties on, were bought. The files were destroyed. theme there of immigrant growth; a kid learning to fear Russians and hate Com- Was coming home culture shock for with two cents in his pocket arrives on the munism like cancer. shores of Florida and inside of two years is you? a kingpin making $100 or $200 million a I reacted accordingly in Vietnam. To year. Where else in the world ... ? me there was no doubt, even when I was a Huge. Enormous. Because nobody was teacher there, that the Communists were fighting the War. That was the problem. Why are you continually drawn to such the bad guys and we were the good guys, It wasn't the hippies or the protestors. foreign or exotic milieus? and that we were saving the South from They were a very small group. It was the I grew up fairly internationally. I trav- the North. That was my reading of the sit- uation. I felt teaching was good. But now I mass indifference. Nobody cared. That elled a lot. My mother was French; I'm wanted to see another level, a deeper lev- half-immigrant. I've always felt that urge el, a darker side. What is war? How do was what hurt. Nobody realized their sons people kill each other? How will I handle were dying over there. People were going to rise, that driven thing that Tony Mon- it? What is the lowest level I can descend about the business of making money. to to find the truth, where I can come back tana has, coming to a new country. Mak- The whole problem with that war is ing my mark-I've always had that hun- from and say, I've seen it? Where can I go that Johnson never made it a war Either ger. And I'm interested in alternative you go to war or you don't go to war. You points ofview. I think ultimately the prob- for that experience? just don't send poor kids and draftees and lems of the planet are universal and that let the college kids stay in college. That nationalism is a very destructive force. Just You embarked on your career as a writ- doing provincial American subjects is real- er before Vietnam, with a novel. divides the country, per se. ly boring. It's just not all I would like to do. I had written a book in Mexico before A fter the war, you drifted for two or When did you get interested in Asia? the war That was in 1966, when I thought three years, acc;ording to your official Probably in '65 when I read Lord Jim. I was going to be the next Marcel Proust. I press bio- was furious that no one would publish it. That was a marker novel for me. It turned Mostly I was furious with myself and part- I don't know if \"drifted\" is the word. I my head around. I left Yale in '65 because ly I joined the army to obliterate this ego I was drifting in my head for three, four, five I really wanted to see another world. Ev- had devised. years. My first wife helped me enormous- erybody was the same. I felt like a charac- ly through that period. When I came back from Nam, I still ter in [Alan] Parker's The Wall. I was be- had this desire to express myself but I I went to NYU film school on the GI bill. didn' t want to go back to writing that Scorsese happened to be the first teacher I ing groomed for financial-commercial book. Somehow, I felt that novels weren't met and he helped tremendously. His en- America. I didn' t have any feeling of indi- happening. I was just dealing with every ergy, his devotion to film, helped me feel vidual worth. day. There was no thought about the fu- ture or what was going to happen next. I focused. Going back to that time, nobody What was it about reading Lord Jim was just counting the days. I was too tired that touched you? to do anything else. really believed you could study films. Films were exotic pleasures from Holly- I wanted to see an alternate reality. I felt Besides, several days after I got back, I wood, and I was from the East Coast and like I was cut off. There had to be another was busted for marijuana in Nixon's bor- didn't know anyone in the film business. way- I didn' t know what it was, but I had der war in Mexico and I was thrown in the to see the world thru different eyes. I tank in San Diego. Federal charge, smug- Why did it appeal to you? gling, five to 20 years. And I was just back knew that my eyes were blinding me. from Vietnam, right? I was really pissed Because it didn't seem like work. off. [Laughs. ] That's the way they treat I couldn't my put finger on it, but I knew I the vets?! I got the picture right away. It [Laughs.] Because I loved movies. My took some guys years. It took me about had to get out, move physically, to start to mother had taken me all the time when I five days. was a boy. She was a double-feature freak change. The prison had something like 15,000 at the RKO on 86th St. She used to make I went to Asia without knowing a soul me skip school so I would accompany her. there. It was great. I remember that first I loved it but it wasn't serious. It was just trip like Two Years Before the Mast. The something you did. first time I was really, really free on my What was your relationship with Scor- own-it was a great feeling. I was 18 or 19 sese? A student. I did three short films in 16mm, black-and-white. He was very 16

r helpful with auto-criticism. He knew a lot I think the anger has dissipated with I hope not. I've been criticized for that. about movies. I remember him having long, long hair and always being exhaust- time. I got married, had a child . . . life's I like the wife in Year ofthe Dragon very ed from having stayed up to watch the much. I also like Maria in Salvador a lot. I late, late show. He'd talk about the movie been good to me compared to other vets. he'd seen at five a.m. that moming in lov- know that she's been criticized as simplis- ing and intimate detail. I catch your sarcasm over The Big Chill vision of the Sixties. In a sense, you tic, but that's the way she was, and that's I think you can see his influence in your missed out on that decade. the way a lot of those Latin wom~n are. work-you have a lot of his passion and Not all. But some are-very simple, very fury on the screen. Probably. The Sixties I thought were devoted to that Latin ethic of being one That's great. horrible. I think the Eighties are much man's woman. I try to write truthfully. But your work also has a bitter, angry better. [Laughs.] The material that interests me and the edge that sometimes is hard to take. Does that hurt? ideas that r ye done have all been ex- I don't consider myself bitter or angry. I J was doing more dope and acid than treme-Florida drugs, Chinatown drugs, consider myself passionate about the justice in Turkey, civil war in Salvador. theme. Maybe there was some bittemess the hippies. But I was out of touch. after the war about what was going on in These ideas tend to attract male heroes in- America in the Seventies. Hmm, angry When you see The Big Chill, is it like a . .. possibly, yes. But I don't like the con- foreign movie to you? stead of heroines . . . because they are life notations of bitter. and death issues more than Woody Allen Oh, yeah. issues of angst, acceptance, and love . You're warming up to \"angry.\" Platoon is your Big Chill. Was Seizure your first screenplay? Angry for quite a while in the early Sev- Yeah. Oh, no, I'd been writing ever since film enties. I loved films like Taxi Driver. I drove a taxi in New York and was closer to Does that anger or sadden you? school, but with no success. Roben Bolt that character, that personality, after the Not anger at all. Saddened that I missed helped me enormously on Cover-Up, war. I had a hard time readjusting to civil- ian life. I was out of sync. I wasn't living in it-especially the healthy relationships. l which was a very strong, leftist, anti-FBI a Larry Kasdan vision of the world. I was script. I loved that screenplay. Bolt, who is living in a much more nightmarish one, never had a coeducational existence. I and I think Marty Scorsese and Paul socialist and quite leftist in England , Schrader really caught alienation very well grew up in that old pre-War America in that picrure. It really reflected me, too. helped me write and rewrite it, but we where everybody went to boy's school and couldn't get it made. Even so, it got me an agent, the first agent I ever had. then went into the Army-with more By this point, in the mid-Seventies, you boys. Everything was boy-oriented. I re- describe yowself as a \"leftist.\" member the Sixties and the enormous I was emotionally disgusted. I thought the cops were pigs. I was with Jimmy Mor- sense ofsexual liberation. Women staning rison on that one. I was into more radical to come out of the closet, and fucking was in, stylish, fashionable. I missed all of that. I caught up later, in the Seventies. Does that affect the way you write fe- male characters? 00000000000000000 PRE-PRODUCTION NEWSLETTER 00000000000000000 . . RESEARCHES SAC AND NON-UNION FILMS CURRENTLY IN 1(. LISTS CASTING DIRECTORS & P.RODUCERS SEEKING PRE-PRODUCTION IN N.Y. - CALIF. - ALL THE U.S.A. TALENT AND SERVICES FOR UPCOMING FILMS TOLL FREE CREDIT CARD ORDERS 1-800-222-3844 IN PA. CAll: (717) 342-8802 rS-E-N-D-C-H-E-C-K--O-.-M--O-N-E-Y-O--.-D-f-.-T-O-:-N-A-T-IO-N-A-l -f-ilM---S-O-UR-C-E-S---------------------------------------- 260 West 35 t~ Street, Suite 702 Ne. York, Ne. York 10001 N.me __________-1=P~\\ea~e ~Pri-nt)------------ o VI.. 0 Mllter Card - - , - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -_____\"\"'. • ____ Acc:ount. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ City/SlllelZill _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ Explfliion D.I.:- - 1 _ I - - 1 __~~~~---- Mo. Day Yr. AulhorllMl !;;gnal\",. MONEY BACK GUARANTEE YEARLY SUBSCRIPTION LIMITED TIME ONLY: $39. 9S ~~~!~S::::I=l~~I~~!; MONTHLY NEWSLETTER ~----------------------------------------------------------------------------------~ 17

violence. When they took over NYU, and member you! Thieu threw you out! ,\" and Iy a story of the Seventies, Ron's story, all the kids trashed the place, when Cam- Boyle replies: \"Then, somebody threw very angry. bodia was invaded, I thought they were Thieu out!\" But the Salvadoran death nuts. I said, ifyou want to protest, let's get squads were there. Rene Chacon and Jose And nobody in Hollywood would risk Madrano, two of the prime movers in the making Platoon? a sniperscope and do Nixon. That was my death squads, had been in Vietnam study- ing counter-insurgency techniques. No, not really. It had been sent around reaction. Why don't we fight instead of this bullshit? I was never really in sync. I Salvador chronicles the Vietnam of the by my first agent. People liked Platoon was more like Travis Bickle than I was a Eighties, and Platoon the Sixties. The missing link, the movie you failed to make but didn't want to make it. So I was put student protestor. Still, I didn't politically in the Seventies is Ron Kovic's Born on the into a really inexpensive movie, Midnight see it. I was more into the rock-and-roll. 4th of July. Express. Parker and Puttnam really Watergate was a key turning point. I It's a tragedy the picture wasn't made fought to shoot my screenplay, because it read a lot of the stuff and began to meet then. We were three days from shooting. I w?uld have been compromised other- more people and to broaden my contacts had spent a year on the screenplay, work- wise. in the world. I started to learn. Politically, I ing with Ron Kovic, who had written a ter- was relatively uneducated because I had rific book, poetic, a wonderful piece. I saw For a long time I gave up on Platoon. hewed to my father's line. Watergate real- the whole movie in rehearsals. We Apocalypse, Now and Deer Hunter came ly sort of hammered the point home that changed what we had to change. Pacino the government was a lie. The govern- was white heat. Friedkin, the director, out, and there was a kind of lull. It was ment lied to us about Ho Chi Minh and it had dropped out, which was a real shame, lied to us about the Vietnam War. I wrote but he had been very ably replaced by over. Nobody wanted to make Born on Dan Petrie. But then the money fell out. the 4th of July. So I got the message. Platoon then-in '76. It was one of those crazy half-German, What compelled you? half-U.S. deals-three days before shoot- America didn't really care about the truth ing. AI wouldn't wait. He went to do the of the war. It was going to be buried. Wa- To tell the truth as I knew it before it tergate was over, Carter lost, Iran had tak- was forgotten. [Norman] Jewison picture, And Justice en the hostages, liberalism was dead. The for All. It was very hard. Kovic was very truth was dead. I got harder and cynical. V ietnam is such an obvious subtext in So I buried the screenplay. several ofyourfilms . It's a sort ofbad broken up. I really went into a nosedive. running joke in Salvador. At one point, Cimino tried to resurrect it, Actually, I would have left it buried if it but the original costs had mounted to hadn't been for Cimino, who came back All of these guys were in Vietnam. where it was too expensive. That was real- into my life in '84 and wanted me to do Boyle keeps running into the same guys. Not only were the American troops there, Dragon with him. I didn't want to do it. like the Colonel, who says to Boyle, \"I re- But he convinced me by telling me that after we did Dragon, he'd produce Pla- toon, I'd direct it, and we'd get Dino to finance it. I fell for it It sounded great. And though Dino ultimately did not make the movie, it was Michael who brought it back to life. All of a sudden he was saying, \"It's commerical, let's do it, this is some- thing people are ready to see now....\" When Dino passed on it, I was really heartbroken. I couldn't understand why it was resurrected in order to be killed. But it was alive as an idea. [Producer] Amold Ko- pelson brought it to John Daly at Hem- dale. Hemdale loved it, and Orion bought into the picture, and we got it made. Orion wanted me to do Platoon before Salva- dor, but I really wanted to do Salvador first-because it was ready to go. Salvador was one cause you knew very little about. I didn't know anything about it. Boyle, I had known for years as a scoundrel, a ras- cal, and a knave. I had bailed him out of jail a few times over the years. I was going nowhere in my life, creatively. Richard was a breath of fresh air for me. He came down here on New Year's, 1985. We talked and he showed me notes on Salva- dor. I loved the idea. We got a story, struc- ture, we went to Salvador, we wrote a screenplay from January through March. That's three months-with the travel and everything; because during that period we also went to Honduras, Costa Rica, Be- lize, Mexico. We were just floating; I was 18

financing the whole thing mysel( I said to to get Salvador nwde? ing himselfon cocaine. Richard, \"We're going to make this pic- I pulled back quite a bit from a lot of Exactly. I wanted excess, ·because ture starring you, Richard....\" heavier stuff. I pulled a lot of the violence that's the way it is down there. There's a out of it. We weakened a lot in the story. And I read Ray Bonner's great book The picture was two hours. It was original- scene at the end of Salvador that captures ly supposed to be two-and-a-half hours. Weakness and DeceiJ. He was The New But I couldn't get that version played, so I that madness: These guys are ready to kill York Times correspondent there before cut ruthlessly. So this version is a bit chop- Boyle, they're beating him up, they're just py-it's been criticized for being chop- about to shoot him when they get the he was fired-Accuracy in Media went py-and they're right. It's lumpy. word from the Colonel that he's an impor- after him. I read the book, met the peo- tant hombre, so they let him go. In the ple, and when you're down there and it's There are scenes that are abruptly cut: next scene, they're having beers together six inches from your face-the poverty the scene where the Colonel saves Boyle's and slapping each other on the back. [James Woods] ass, and they all go back That's the way it is down there. You can and what people go through-you do get into the whorehouse together-in my go from light to dark so fast. South Ameri- script that scene develops into an orgy. A can audiences would have understood angry. It's a tragedy. Borges-type scene. I wanted it to go from that scene and liked it. If Shakespeare were alive, he'd prob- darkness to light. I wanted to have that crazy South American mix 0fblack humor When we screened the movie for NOM ably be a screenwriter, and I bet you he'd with tragedy. I wanted to play with absur- American audiences, nobody knew how be dealing with the canvas of EI Salvador. dity as an idea. to take that scene. It was too early in the It's such a huge story, and nobody in movie. Is this suppose to be a comedy or is America really knows about it; 30-50,000 I had this tremendous scene: Dr. Rock this a serious political movie? Very much people killed by death squads. Another is getting a blow job under a table, Boyle is an Anglo frame of mind. . . Why do we 500,000 split the country. That's approxi- fucking a girl while trying to pry informa- have to have that kind of specific inten- mately 15-20 percent of the population tion from the Colonel, and the Colonel is tion? Can't we just drift with the movie dead or gone, because of this right-wing so drunk out of his mind that he pulls out and see where it takes us? The previewer, repression, essentially a military mafia this bag of ears and throws the ears on a an expen on this son of problem, advised supponed by the U.S. It's very clear cut to table and says. .. \"Left-wing ears, right- us to take it out. me. And it's very clear cut to the people wing ears, who gives a fuck?\" He throws there, it's not ambiguous. the ears into a champagne glass and pro- I also had scenes with [Jim] Belushi in poses a toast to EI Salvador and drinks the the whorehouse that were deemed too Did you encounter any political oppo- much-a funny scene when he is making sition to the script? champagne with an ear in it. it with Wilma-that shocked audiences. It was too lurid. But to me it captured the Not really. I knew what the reaction The equivalent of Tony Montana gorg- exact flavor of Central American whore- would be because I had had problems with other scripts that had been turned Aglimpse into the mind of down over the years. I had a reputation one of Italy's great modern filmmakers around town as a \"cause freak.\" On the Michelangelo Antonioni, basis of Bom on the 4th ofJuly and Defi- director of such films as ance-which was a Russian script I did , fawentura, Blow-up, and involving dissidents-and others. Salva- The Passenger, here provides dor was just too anti-American for the 33 sketches for films as yet American money people. Also, the track unmade. record on Central American films was real . THAT BOWlING ALLEY \"A delightful collection ... 1limit my reading to one item per poor. Missing didn't do any business in ON THE TIBER night to extend my pleasure and then dip in again at this country, even though it got Academy TALfS Of ADlREOOR random.\"-Richard Leacock lIMSINID BY WIllIAM ARIOWSMITII Award nominations, and Under Fire was a \"Antonioni displays a stark, Now in paper vivid and sometimes haunting total disaster in terms of receipts. quality as a writer. ... [His] Certain people hated the script. Most- $7.95 258 pp. imaginative prose ... seems almost poetic, as the sketches ly, studios would \"pass,\" meaning they conjure strikingly visil>le don't ever tell you why. But anti-Ameri- images.\"- Virginia Quarterly canism, I heard, was a factor. It took the Review English (Hemdale) to make it. They had a sense of irony about it. They saw these At better bookstores or directly from: two scuzzbags (the Richard Boyle and D[ Rock characters) as funny, almost in OXFORD PAPERBACKS Monty Pythonesque terms. I sold it as \"Laurel and Hardy go to Salvador.\" Oxford University Press. 200 Modison Avenue. New York, NY 10016 I wanted the movie to stan that way and then twist. Dr. Strangelove was a great model for me, as a kid, because it went from extreme absurdity to extreme seri- ousness. Another very strong influence was Viva Zapata-because of that liberat- ing pulse beating through it. The movie that most influenced me as a filmmaker, to be a filmmaker, was Godard's Breath- less, because it was fast, anarchic. I'm into anarchy. Were there scenes you had to sacrifice 19

houses. Stone on location. locked in a Cold War struggle and this thing is determining your life and my life, Certainly you didn't compromise on 15 miles off the coast of NmeawkeYiofrkthhearRbuosr~ your characterization of Boyle. what difference does it and our generation's. Until you or I figure James Woods portrays him as one of the a way to get beyond this cold war shit, our most repulsive protagonists ofall-time. sians are in Nicaragua? If they are. lives are fucked, we're predetermined to die. Oh, Richard is much worse than Jim- It's not a question of Capitalism or my. Richard's a very colorful character. H oW directly did the writing ofPlatoon Jimmy didn't want to play him as raggedy Communism when your kid dies of dys- tie into Watergate and the war? and as scummy as Richard really is. Jimmy It didn't tie in politically, really, be- wanted to make the story more heroic, entery or diarrhea; it's really a question of cause Platoon isn't about politics or the whereas I wanted to push it in an anti-he- roic direction. Jimmy feels he's made health, education, and welfare. And govemment's fault; it's about boys in the Richard more attractive to a larger group of jungle. But Watergate was like peeling an people, although some people would say, they're not getting it. Next to Haiti, El onion. There was a sense of liberation of \"That's attractive?!\" Let's say he made an oppressive burden being lifted off. I're- him more accessible. But the real Richard Salvador is one of the worst offenders in member this tremendous energy in the is far worse. country, this sense of pride, and the hope the Westem hemisphere. American gov- and feeling that the bad guys could be de- You did a fantastic job of telescoping feated and the good guys could win. I'd unrelated true events in an almost \"living emment officials don' t seem to realize that say that, maybe in the same spirit, I was newspaper\" kind ofstyle. probably saying to myself, \"Let's peel the revolution is a response to social and eco- onion, let's get to the truth of Vietnam.\" I knew no one else was going to make a picture about El Salvador. I really knew it. nomic conditions, not a Cold War game. Has Platoon changed much in ten So I felt I had to tell this whole thing. It's years? It's a North/South conflict, not an East! like a War of the Roses, another Richard It's very similar. The same story exact- III. I took two years and tried to fit it into West one. ly. Just minor points. Some characteriza- tions are more rounded, but essentially it's two hours, and obviously I was knocked It goes beyond that, I think. Mr. Rea- the same, simple story-probably the for it. I didn't show [President Jose Napo- least writing I've ever done, more like a leon] Duarte, whom I consider to be a gan, and various administrations in this puppet for the military mafia; a false front newspaper report. Actually, Salvador was century, have truly betrayed our constitu- put up by the U.S. to show there is a de- pretty simple too, because it was more of mocracy. But when Reagan was elected, tion by denying to others the right to revo- an explosion about Boyle's life. Very the entire left-wing of the parry-Kiki Al- varez and Juan Chacon and others-were lution and self-determination that we have straight. The Salvador script took six dragged out of the schoolroom where they weeks; Platoon four or five. Generally it were meeting by the death squads and in our constitution. And what the Catholic found three days later with their balls just comes in a burst and I just do it fast- stuffed in their mouths. I wanted to show Church expresses in the encyclicals: 12 hour days. that scene. I didn't have time. The screenplay was already 150 pages long. \"Where there is a manifest, long-standing Was it painful to write Platoon? The entire left was wiped out, the equiv- alent of the Democratic Parry, while fuck- tyranny, there exists a legitimate right of Once the writing started, no. To get to ing Mr. Reagan talks about the fucking the point of doing it, yes. I wrote it in a Nicaraguans as if they are the bandits of armed insurrection.\" [Archbishop] Rome- moment when I was broke. I had left my all-time, calling them Marxist and un- first wife and I was going nowhere. That Christian, when under the so-called Chris- ro called for that, and he's the pivotal fig- was in the summer of '76, the 200th anni- tian Democratic administration in Salva- versaryofthe U.S., with all this patriotism dor next door 50,000 civilians have been ure in the movie. going on. Getting the pitch was the hard- killed, mostly by the military. That's the est thing. hypocrisy of American foreign policy. It Obviously, America and Russia are rouses my anger. How did you get the pitch? I remembered it. That war never went So you're no longer in any sense anti- Communist? away. Those images you don't forget that easy. In '76, it was still burning. Then it No. Not at all. I've changed totally. I've was a question of organizing the structure been to Russia. I've written about dissi- of the tale. It's hard to go back. I got very dents-and I know the story there, to good technical advisors on the movie be- some degree. But I don't see Central cause to remember details is very hard. To America as really being Marxist. I think try to get the boys to talk Sixties talk was Nicaragua may call itself Marxist in re- virtually impossible. They just didn't take sponse to persecution and repression. But to words that were used in the Sixties. But even if they are Marxist, which I don't the actual feeling of combat, I think, think they are, so what? They have a right stayed with me. The fear stayed with me. to be what they want to be. I don't see a Also, the difficulty of fighting. problem. If a Russian nuclear sub can be Rambo and Top Gun make it look real easy, but I remember the NVAs as being terrific fighters. They were always nailing us. I liked Apocalypse and The Deer (Continued on page 60) 20

eOn Valentine's Day: I e etnetx by Marcia Pally still looking for a little harmony. There are moments on the boat when I am in Jean-Jacques Beineix, director of perfect balance with the waves. I steer Diva and this year's French entry through them with just two fingers on to the Oscars, Betty Blue, is on the the wheel. I can sit there, riding, for 17 phone with a journalist who couldn't hours. Sometimes the camera, after an extraordinary amount of work and make it to interview him in person be- technique, finds the smile of a woman in just a certain way, and I see this har- cause he couldn't find a taxi. The sub- mony. For a day it helps me accept my fears that I will age or become stupid ject of the talk is \"Life in America.\" and pretend that I know everything and stifle the next generation. I don't It's a bowl of cherries, Beineix tells the ever want to do that. That's why I have to keep climbing. I have to put every- reporter who can't be bothered with thing at stake every time. But it's hard. This is the great contradiction: do I plebe transportation. Never been keep pushing, driving myself for a glimpse of those moments? There are grander. Never been richer. \"What do so few of them.\" I think about American cars?\" Beineix Maybe. But it's the only game in town. The rest is complacency. Bei- doesn't miss a beat. \"It's stupid to buy neix finds his peace making movies that run wild. While the restofhis coun- a car that goes 140 mph to drive 35 trymen film the ennui and charms of the bourgeoisie, Beineix looks for mph . What? I have a car that goes 140 loose screws. His characters bound on springs that are about to pop and vault mph, but,\" straining to keep his voice into the corners of their obsessions. down, \"I drive it that fast in France.\" In Diva , a young mailman (Frederic Andrei) lusts after an opera singer who He also climbs mountains and made refuses to record her performances. He dreams of stealing her voice, and it up the Matterhorn. He sails his 35- for months he plots to pirate a tape- his pianissimo pornography. Beineix foot boat in the Atlantic. The storm shot Diva in neon-bright primary col- ors that float in a velvety black no that followed him to the Azores and man's land. One scene flies off the tangent of another, and the story ca- blew him to Portugal didn't stop him reens with the abandon of our hero's delivery truck. The critics hailed it as from going out again. But, Beineix Beatrice Daile. a stylistic splash. In his second film, concedes, he had a \"boring child- Moon in the Gutter (based on the nov- el by David Goodis), the images are hood.\" He studied philosophy in col- authority. \"I'm not part of this busi- just as smashing and the plot as rude. The film takes you for a ride through a lege and got highest scores in the ness,\" he shrugs. \"I'm between cul- port city slum where a stevedore (Ge- rard Depardieu) dreams of a pristine baccalaureate exam, except in math, tures-not quite bourgeois, not a woman (Natassia Kinski) and the clean, cool life of the rich. The critics where he got a zero. \"Since I was so worker. I'm part adventurer but too panned it as ponderous. good in math, I decided to become a shy to be a real one. I've been on the Adapted from Philippe Dijan's 37' 2 Le Matin, Betty Blue, in Beineix's doctor.\" He studied medicine for a ocean, mountains, motorcycles, horse- most vivid work to date, tells of a young man named Zorg (Jean-Hugues year but, bored, took a job in TV osten- back. But in a strange city I'm afraid to Anglade) who has run out of steam. sibly to race around in production go out because I don't know where I'm vehicles. going.\" Now 40, Beineix apprenticed as an Beineix asks me what I'm wearing to assistant director on a dozen or so films a reception later in the evening. \"I'm by Rene Clement, by both Jean-Louis asking because I want to know how I and Nadine Trintignant, Claude Berri, should dress. I like to be as visible as and by Claude Zidi. He worked with possible, but I don't want to be stared Jerry Lewis on The Day the Clown at with hostility. Unless I'm with a Cried and with Moshe Mizrachi on group of friends and we're all being Madame Rosa. Beineix shot his first crazy together, I'm a conformist.\" short, \"Mr. Michels' Dog,\" in 1977. It Beineix smiles, shrugs, pouts, and was nominated for a Caesar. Two years considers the ceiling. and one more AD job later, producer \"I've traveled, met people, had lots Irene Silberman asked him to write of women. But I haven't been able to and direct an adaptation of Delacorta's hold on to one. I have no children. I roman noir, Diva. That film claimed think I would like a child, but I know four Caesars. after a year or two I will move, go away. Beineix still isn't sure he belongs. My only home is film, but this is not a Small and boyish, he squirms around roof; it is fights with bad businessmen on his palmy hotel couch in a black T- and decadent capitalists who want shirt, black pants, and a scraggly week- profit without risk. old beard that fails to give him \"I have been a lot of things, but I'm 21

He meets up with an unruly siren, Betty (Beatrice Daile), and falls in love. Without manners, inhibitions, or fear of failure, she sets his life spin- ning. She makes him believe in him- self-and in his novel. But the force that propels her is all faith and desire. Like the genius that spurs both art and madness, it cannot accept the world. Betty goes very crazy. The critics split. Some were transported by Bein- eix's mad Magdalene; others yawned. Beineix's theme repeats itself: In each film, an ordinary fellow meets his muse, compelling and uncompromis- ing as air. She literally brings him life. In Betty, however, she also brings her own point of view. Unlike the Aphro- dites of Diva and Gutter, Betty is flesh and blood, opinionated, stubborn, and available. And unlike the heroes of Diva and Gutter, Zorg achieves his dreams. Despite Beineix's doubts about belonging in the business, his success is showing. Beineix both is his uncompromising Betty-as wild and driving-and wants to have one all his own. But he'd also like a reprieve from her insis- tent inspiration. He wants both muse and mother, or mother of his child- which comes to the same thing. Un- fortunately for him, divas rarely settle down. \"The rich have the means to pro- tect themselves,\" Beineix says, explaining his interest in the little guy who reaches beyond his grasp. \"I pre- fer les gens populaires. They are clos- er to their own weaknesses and their own grandeur.\" Gutter, he continues, is about \"fake\" or the false promises of advertising and movies. Diva is about the chimera of theater. \"In Betty I tried to escape from 'fake' and look at how people can real- ly inspire each other, especially men and women. I wanted to talk about passion and sexuality, about all the things men and women share. And about the details that suddenly make life full of beauty and intensity. I'm bored with archetypes and speeches and long descriptions of love. I leave this bullshit for the soap operas. I like the quality of the unsaid, like the lovers' argument in Betty that is recon- ciled by a few notes on the piano.\" Not only are the relationships in Betty more down to earth than in his earlier work, the storyline is more con- tinuous and traditional. \"I can't commit suicide every time Jean-Jacques Beineix.

There are four rules: dramatize every move you make; advertize every move;'make every success seem twice as big as it is; and make every failure work for you. I make a movie. Even if I think of my- new ways. It's like fighting the conser- rails about film deals in the U.S. \"Al- self as subversive or rebellious, I know vative parties.. . . I am screaming, no? ready there are rumors in Europe,\" he I have to give the audience a chance to You will lose patience with me. Some- growls, \"that I am in exile in America understand what I do. Young directors times I am much worse, but the pres- and am making a big movie here.\" I sometimes go too far. It's a quality of sure is bad now because Betty is suggest it fits the loner image he's been youth and also the limitation. I think successful and everybody wants me to painting. Gutter is a masterpiece, but it's also make a film for them-studios, agents, \"Perhaps this image is not the result pretentious. I thought the images actors. And notonly in France; inAmer- only of choice. Perhaps it is because I would be strong enough to mesmerize ica, also. They all want to sign me up can't do any better. I don't feel I fit in audiences. They weren't. and I want to resist them,\" he says, con- with the standard of French culture. \"The critics were very good to re- tradicting reports that he's eager to The French lack challenge, ambition. mind me that there are rules. For ten make a film in Hollywood, as well as his They have pretensions but no pragma- years working in film I learned about own attraction to the idea. \"I want to tism. So I try to challenge. We have to those rules. And when I finally over- choose the right script, and I have to be improve the rules all the time. But this came the guilt of not following them, my own producer. attempt at subversion would be direct- they wanted to stop me. They were suc- \"I ask myselfifl should make the big ed at America if I lived here. I try to cessful. In Betty I'm trying to be effec- American picture. Am I forcing myself keep being alien.\" tive but more pragmatic. So I reinforced into more fights with a new bureaucracy Sounds seductive. What's this prob- the structure, the chronology.\" and a new language? And here I don' t lem with women you mentioned have the same fences, the same protec- before? tions as in France. I don't know anyone. \" I have never been with one more s Betty a compromise? There is so much anxiety about making than two years. I'm reckless and rest- a film; to add more is dangerous. I don' t less. I am always looking for something I \"Yes. But a good one because the want another failure. I can't afford an- new, for something else. But maybe it's other personal failure. just that my process of maturation is spirit is intact.... I'm still attacked by I committees for the defense of the old regime who claim my work is empty, all \"The phone never stops, and every- slow. Maybe I need to change pace.\" surface images, and that I don't one is pushing. And I have to play Out of the blue, Beineix says, \"Ex- J consider dramaturgy or the actors. But games with all of them.\" cuse me. May I ask you ifyou are a danc- they are old fashioned. They are like Like his 15th-century mentor, Louis er?\" He mumbles something about the academies of the 19th-century deal- XI, Beineix is a consummate strategist. long necks and the Russian school. \" I ing with Impressionism. They think When bad reviews come in, he gets an- was with a dancer who studied in Rus- cinema should serve reality in a literal gry and plots out the next step. When sia. We were together for two years, but sense. They ask where the message is, good reviews come in, he plots out the I left at the end of Betty. You don' t like but they don't see that the image is the next step. He explains to me what inter- the question. But don' t be angry. It's message. They don't understand the ests him about playing film ' politics- just that I can see you. You are hiding theories of Toffler or McLuhan, which pitting agents against studios and danc- behind your scarf.\" are not new. They don' t see that we can ing with the press. I don't have to be angry. Print is my use reality and give it another dimen- \"There are four rules: dramatize ev- revenge. sion in film . The image that begins with ery move you make; advertize every \"I don't think you'll take your re- reality is open. We play with it. move; make every success seem twice venge this way.\" \"There's a gap between the audi- as big as it is; and make every failure Divas, Bettys, and ballerinas ... ence and some critics. There are a few work for you. I love these games. It is all who try to revise their codes, but others such bullshit.\" Beatrice Daile, dubbed \" the new use cinema to promote themselves and It turns you on? Bardot\" by Parisian tastemakers, their ethical patterns. They cheat \"On one level. But I also hate it. I do has doe eyes, black hair, and the most themselves and the audience. When it to avoid .the void. I hate that it is so curvaceous body I've seen since Twig- the writer from Vanity Fair says Betty hard to make films. I also despair. gy flattened tits ' n' ass. Her most lubri- Blue has 'fruit-salad brains' or that the \"I have fantasies about returning to cious feature is her sizable mouth, film is pointless except for the sex, it commercial films. There I am a director which, a colleague informed me, drives means he's interested not only in a tra- for hire. You want to make a film about men mad thinking about what it could ditional treatment of narrative but in chocolate or cars? No problem. I ask for do. Brought up in Le Mans, Daile bolt- conservative messages and morals. a lot of money. I am cold, mercenary. ed to Paris, where she took up the punk \"These critics won't succeed. It is a Commercial directing improves your scene around Les Hailes. A photogra- political fight. People ask me why I technique. It's quick, exciting, and pher spotted her hanging around Place bother to respond to them: because over. It's a way to keep moving and not de la Republique, took a few shots, and they affect not only me but other artists see that you are aging.\" landed her on the cover of Photo Re- who try to work with form and images in A call comes in from France. Beineix vue. Helmut Newton grabbed her for a 23

photo spread in Vanity Fair, and Bei- With Jean-Hughes Anglade. ing], but these are love scenes. They neix signed her on as Betty. are even in the missionary position. their bodies, how can they deal with \"She imposes herself,\" he has told a the body of the other? How can they \"I didn't get any official trouble thousand reporters. \"You cannot in- be sexual? about them, but everyone asks me vent a character like that.\" But not all about the sex. In France, Betty is rat- viewers are as impressed. One man told \"So there is a lot of nudity in Betty. ed 'No one under 13'; in England, me her mouth looks like the grill of a Perhaps I was relieving some personal 'No one under 18.' It has no rating Pontiac. More problematic is Daile's inhibitions. I know there are some here because it's an independent. I character. Her temper tantrums are a people who say I shouldn't do that in think the studios didn't pick Betty up self-indulgent pain in the ass. public. But I think there are some oth- so that they didn't have to put it ers who are a little like me, so I relieve What's the appeal for Zorg? their fears, too. through the [MPAA1board and get an \"He loves her.\" Beineix seems sur- prised by the question. \"She gives \"I don't support censorship of any X.\" him what he needs. She says what he kind, but I wonder how people can deserves; she kicks his ass. She gives criticize nudity in film and not vio- While Anglade is an accomplished him back the passion he forgot.\" lence. You can put brains on the floor, actor, Daile is new to the field. Would you stay with her? cut throats, and show rapes, but you Beineix used beginners in Diva and \"Would you stay with General Pat- get an X because of nudity. There are then switched to stars in Gutter. ton? But it is still an interesting picture. sex scenes in Betty [jettisoning shame If people are asking themselves, at the outset, it opens with a long, \"It's interesting how people em- 'Would I stay with her?' the film is pro- slow zoom into Betty and Zorg fuck- phasize this difference. Implicitly it voking them. But Beatrice gets all the says that all you noticed in Gutter was attention. No one notices Anglade.\" Kinski and Depardieu. But Victoria Jean-Hugues Anglade has a chis- Abril was fabulous; the man who eled body and naive eyes. They dis- played the brother should've gotten an arm and then arouse, apparently award. The black woman is a singer without design. Anglade played the who speaks no French and memorized lead in Patrice Chereau's The Wound- every line by heart. The critics go im- ed Man, the roller in Subway , and mediately to the 'knowns' because it's Zorg in Betty Blue. In my book, he easier to talk about them.\" and Gerard Darmon (as Eddie, the owner of a pizza parlor and pal to our In Gutter, Abril has one of the sex- doomed duo) steal the picture. iest scenes in recent cinema. In a run- \"Anglade. acts with great tech- down yard filled with stripped cars and nique. It is sizzled, precise, elegant. trash, she rocks on a home-made He never overdoes it. It is a very high swing. At the crest of each arc, her legs level of work. But in this business, sweep near a battered truck. Sullenly people don't talk about technique. she kicks it, then falls away. Again and They don't understand the difference agaIn. between text and context, subject and treatment, or between what is created \"I prefer to work with unknowns by the script, the camerawork, and the and beginners, but I've made only acting.\" three films. When I've made 20, I'll Perhaps not, but they do notice know better what I like. I'm afraid to male nudity. Much of the attention work with established actors because Anglade has purloined from Daile can they know too many things. They'll be blamed on his frontal frankness. teach me too many things. I'm afraid \"I felt ashamed of the way women they'll control the picture and control are treated in movies,\" Beineix ex- me. It's better if they stay with their plains. \"This doesn't mean I don't security about what they know about like the bodies of women and looking their business. I need to work with at the bodies of women. I do very people who will put their image at much. But if the woman is nude, the stake. Natassia took risks and works man must be nude, too. If he is not, hard. If you look at Depardieu's per- then it means there is something formance in Gutter, you'll see he did shameful about men's bodies or there something there that he never did be- is something shameful about being fore. I wish him never to be worse nude. Neither is good . On one hand, than he was in this film.\" if nudity is shameful and men show women nude, there's a problem be- Depardieu wasn't happy working tween men and women. That's bad with Beineix and, when Gutter for relations between men and women opened, spared no public occasion and that ends up being bad for me. On from venting his dissatisfaction. the other hand, if men are ashamed of \"To discover new people,\" Beineix says, \"is the interesting part of this job .\" I never got an answer to my ques- tion. Would you stay with Betty? \"I have stayed with much worse.\"@ 24

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On Valentine's Day: II by Armond White Betty in Zorg's head. Advancing the enig- smirkingly behind jokes like the old ma of the muse in modern fiction (film) Cannes line: \"The Italian cinema is the Betty Blue, Jean-Jacques Beineix's exercises more than male conceit (a legacy cinema of producers' mistresses; the eponymous heroine, makes men of Fitzgerald as well as Griffith before French cinema, the cinema of directors' mad . She has the individual unpre- him); it also details the creative fennent mistresses.\" There's a personal integri- dictability of an actual person-say, the that results from sexual awe and involve- ty--or temerity-to be discovered in the woman he spotted on a magazine cover ment. Betty Blue unbraids the tangle of way some directors direct their wives on- and cast in the title role, Beatrice Dalle- love and fiction that can now be seen as an screen. As Betty Blue suggests, it may not and such an intense erotic effect on Zorg abiding film aesthetic, from the time of be just incidental to their creative practice Uean-Hugues Anglade), the sttuggling Lillian Gish stroking the phallic bedpost but also the strongest evidence there is of writer/hero, that she warps both his and in Birth of A Nation to Woody Allen di- genuinely personal cinema. And to the Beineix's vision. More than a generously viding Diane Keaton's personality into the surprise of both knee-jerk feminist critics imagined sex kitten , Betty is also too hu- three alter egos of Stardust Memories. and macho auteurists, on the conjugal man to be real-that is, a definitively screen women can pull their own ideologi- modem, accurately complex, fantasy fe- The emotional sense of Betty Blue su- cal weight exposing, by implication or un- male: seductive yet beyond the control of persedes the customary critical mystique conscious effect, the limits of male per- the man who loves, wrestles with, and (cowardice) that would politely separate ception. The coup of Betty Blue is that it dotes on her, and to whose inspiration the themes of artists from their personal portrays art and love as always a contest of owes his possible success and future Cre- lives and intimate affectations. Betty egos and a voyeur's delight. ativity. He is also the one who put her on Blue's mix ofcreativity and love suggests a film; the movie syncretizes Beineix's love dynamic long operant in art, especially Not that it hasn1t been done before. troubles with his art troubles; the Pygma- filmmaking, where the central object of lion-Galatea metaphor resounds most just adoration is sometimes the paramour- ORSON & RITA when it risks comprehensibility. Beineix the wife--of the director. Olivia DeHavil- dares the intricacies of contemporary sex- land brought us close to a similar realiza- The Ladyfrom Shanghai, made during ual angst where lust twists into guilt and tion in 1976 when she said at the American the dissolution of Welles' marriage to passion touches upon ego-devouring mad- Film Institute tribute to William Wyler Hayworth, brings the PygmalioniSvengali ness. that \"the relationship between an actress myth into the modern age. Welles' meth- and a director is the closest thing there is to od was to wrestle with the muse rather Imagine a post-Bertolucci Tender Is the sex. \" That statement is hot enough to than serve or adorn it. By cutting and Night dramatizing its creator's life in tenns melt criticism from its cold pretense of ob- bleaching Hayworth's hair to make her of his psychic projection. As Beineix Ror- jectivity into new understanding. into Elsa, he reinterpreted her already es- schachs the nature of modern romance tablished Hollywood persona and ex- and creativity, he also splits and recom- Beineix's fevered insight into the freak- pressed his own spousal envy, skepticism, bines his levels of discourse, going from out zone of psychosexual identification (to and increasing detachment. The plot's literal to subjective realities, erotic to ide- which he has raised this apologia for Moon dynamic is bound in the hero-director's ational modes-Betty in Zorg's bed to in the Gutter) helps clear away the jaded, surreptitious knowing about filmmakers -sexual suspicions. Obsession runs through and their mates/muses that has hidden and effects the shape, tone, and pulse of The Lady From Shanghai. Fellini and Giulietta. Victor and Victoria: Edwards with Andll\\'s, 26

this movie as drugs do a junkie's body and magic-mirror-maze sequence. Here In Ginger & Fred, 30 years after Ca- senses (Barbara Leaming's biography of Welles also projected his cuckolded self biria, Masina is still plucky and sensible, Welles notes that he tried cocaine for the (Everett Sloan as Bannister) into the mad- emanating redemptive common sense. first time during this period). Welles said house domain of Elsa's perplexing beau- The best parts of the movie show her te- he intended \"something off center, ty. Objectification becomes the subject, nacity in the face of Fellini-figure Mar- queer, strange ... a bad dream aspect.\" as does its root attitudes of worship, lust, cello Mastroianni's floundering cynicism. The psychic warps and idiosyncrasies possessiveness, and disenchantment. (As Masina's embodiment of her husband's make The Lady from Shanghai the lo- Hayworth's limited capabilities fused into ideas Iyricizes and transforms them (Mas- cus for the evolving history of conjugal Elsa's luminously opaque character, it troianni has been merely an eloquent movies. didn't mean that she could not act the mouthpiece). It is this two-way empathy femme fatale as well as Barbara Stanwyck that distinguishes Cabiria from a typical It's obvious that Welles' inspiration in Double Indemnity; she could pout, and MadonnalWhore dialectic, as 'seen in the came partly from thrill. The result was that's tabula rasa to a man obsessed. Her Jules Dassin-Melina Mercouri Never on Hayworth's alluring image and the film 's very presence is overwhelming, sphinx- Sunday , or John Frankenheimer's direc- . cynical, disorienting momentum that like; the actress triumphed through the di- tion of Evans Evans in The Iceman Co- scoops Vertigo, Hitchcock's myth of the rector's adoring iconography.) meth. male control freak. Welles' mystery story is a neurotic correlative for the knowledge The killings that take place amid shat- The scene of Cabiria's encounter with and possession of a woman that a man tering mirages of Elsa are the cinema's the actor and actress replays her own ro- seeks. Playing the protagonist Michael- most sophisticated liebestod. The scene's mantic longings in the conjunction of fan- (defined as \"living on a hook\"), \\~lelles literal deconstruction suggests the folly of tasy and reality and distills the poignancy tums male obsession into a virtuoso quest. attempting to control a lover whether on- of wishing. The scene equates the appeal Michael's dizzying encounters with Elsa, screen or through an idea in one's head. of movies with the innate desire for cou- moving from the park to Acapulco, the \"Maybe I'll live so long I'll forget her,\" pling-for fulfillment and as an end to aquarium to the Chinese theater and car- Michael says. \"Maybe I'll die trying. \" loneliness. Later Fellini substantiates it nival , has self-reflexive logic. The cou- This makes Lady From Shanghai the with the quick, front-and-back view of ple's progression from nature to artifice most inexorable film nair of its period. Cabiria in the piazza at night, so lost in rev- parallels Welles' process of turning his ~e1les allows us to experience the juicy ery she is oblivious to a john hailing her marriage into film. ambivalence of what can drive a man from a truck. In identifying her still , crazy. dreamy essence, the film's view ofwoman He created the classic modes of conju- goes beneath the sheets and the skin to gal exposition: the sinister boating trip that FEDERICO & the emotional life that one shares with a becomes a photographic essay on the rela- GIULIETIA mate. tive mysteries of nature and loving (a land- scape/body combination suggesting un- It is, of course, a director-husband's ob- BRIAN &NANCY charted sexual terrain), repeated in the ligation to see that conventions of female Michelangelo Antonioni-Monica Vitti characterization are broken and the ac- When details of Nancy Allen's divorce L'Avventura. The courtroom inquest into tress-wife's integrity is given vent. Fellini from Brian DePalma hit the press, snick- perfidy and fidelity (suggesting divorce devised lofty, worldy-saint constructs for ~rs about an S&M relationship were com- trauma) that reappears in the David Masina in La Strada and Nights of Ca- mon. They are not sensibly supported by Lean-Ann Todd Madeleine and the Ni- biria, but the nobility is agreeably offset by any onscreen evidence. DePalma's film cholas Roeg-Theresa Russell Eureka! the impishness Masina asserted as FeI- deployment of Allen comes out of the lini's holy waifer. A modem-age muse, thriller's Victorian era victimization and Welles' instinctual investigation of vi- she was woman taken off the pedestal , wicked taunting of the innocent. That Al- sion and character presentation originated praised for human frailty. Ien cockteases in Carrie is one thing; the terms by which one reads conjugal filmmaking in the famous, diagrammatic wews. Stephane Audran with Claude Chabrol. Roger Vadim and Jane Fonda. 27

Dressed to Kill turns the tables and shows and all-modem couplings that such obviousness backfires; convinced of his strong-arm, Strindbergian dramas as Ing- Allen as the object of vengeance: a sexual mar Bergman's attempt to explain away. wife's appeal, he finds no means of con- woman confronting the dangers of her WILLIAM & vincing us. In 10, stridency represents her MARGARET own attractiveness. To regard this as only no-nonsense sanity; in Darling Lili, sub- Legend says that William Wyler fell in chauvinistic is to deny the great empathy love with Margaret Sullavan while filming terfuge accounts for her infinite variety, The Good Fairy. Their one movie togeth- DePalma exhibits, particularly in his own er (the marriage was also brief) is a lucky and, most perplexing of all, Victor!Victo- accident of the filmmaking practice and use of a mirror construction moving from the romantic motive. As Luisa, an orphan ria gives her Garbo-Dietrich ambiguity in Budapest, Sullavan is first seen narrat- Angie Dickinson's character to Nancy Al- ing the fable of \"The Good Fairy\" to her through farcical, preachy transvestism. younger charges; later, as an usherette in a len's, turning lurid sexual fantasy inside movie theater, she points the way for pa- Andrews was much better served by trons with an electric wand. From muse to out. guide, Luisa demonstrates the inspira- Robert Wise in The Sound of Music and tional function assigned to women (par- DePalma's thriller form unveils the de- ticularly in movies) and satirizes it through Star! Edwards, lacking the sensibility to her own good fairy relationship to a trio of viousness of the erotic imagination, but he men. Surely Wyler and Sullavan realized create a comedy to her style, also shows a that the depiction of a female character re- needs his wife's animus to do so. The veals a writer's and director's attitudes and lack of confidence in what must be her sympathies about women, which are then film's structure goes from mental pornog- focused onto one actress, who must bear personal qualities, perhaps even a distrust the weight ofthe creators' ideologies. This raphy to its acrid realization, then back to becomes the film's central, Pirandellian of them. After the $16 million fiasco of subject. the fantasy realm now disturbed by grisly Paramount's Darling Lili (a broken valen- This film 's hall of mirrors scene actually actualization ofsexual fear and desire (Mi- predates Welles, but it is a rougher, more tine), Edwards' career skidded. He re- simplistic version of the ideas about fe- chael Caine's transsexual). Without pro- male representation that Welles exer- treated to the Pink Panther machines, un- cised. In fact, a painstaking Hollywood fessing feminism, DePalma kids his own craftsman like Wyler helped standardize til he could stick his wife in behind Bo what we can now recognize as the classical peekaboo mentality. cinema's patriarchal, sexual patterns of vi- Derek's cleavage in 10. sual representation and narrative tech- Dressed to Kill is so engorged with lust- nique. Wyler's control of modeling, com- An unparalleled instance of a director position, and close-up shots corresponds fulness that DePalma practically enters to how the three men in the story secretly flaunting and martyring his wife, S.O.B. guard, advise, and cherish Luisa. The hall the psyche of the Other (a kind of bed- of mirrors multiplies Luisa into a chorus argues that Darling Lilts boxoffice failure line of muses, fakel y costumed and larger room telepathy that would do a husband than herself, but a figure of adoration was due to a sleaze-trend-Last Tango in non~theless; the reflections affirm Holly- proud). He is attentive to a woman's vul- wood's endless replication of female Paris(! )-and not Edwards' own heavy- Icons. nerability as well as her seductiveness. handed candybox style. , BLAKE &JULIE This electrifies the film's comic highpoint S.O.B. implicitly blames Julie An- The banality of Julie Andrews' film ca- when Allen, in black widow lace and gar- reer is no joke, so when husband-director drews' sweetness-and-light image. Ed- Blake Edwards parodied her image in ters, tempts Caine, \"You wanna fuck S.O.B., the comedy was tired and un- wards also makes the producer character funny. Belonging to a slapstick tradition, me?\" The dream she narrates for him, a Edwards' semi-elegant Cinemascope (Richard Mulligan) the creative force on framing is often confused with subtlety sublime porno tease, makes the scene and eloquence of expression, but he bel- the set instead of the director (a near mute lows what Lubitsch would imply. In The highly self-conscious. DePalma strikes a Man Who Loved Women, he poked the William Holden). The impotence of the camera up Julie Andrews' skirt to show chord deep in heterosexist memory, and why Burt Reynolds is attracted. Edwards' director is an odd but convenient alibi for his exploitation of it lays it bare-not as a Edwards' new exploitation of his wife. It's proper masculine or cinematic view of not supposed to be his idea that since Julie women but, specifically, as the kind of Andrews can't be profitable on her own hard-on image-conjured during a she should be stripped. bloody, sweaty, carnal frenzy-that men With taboos and brassiere straps down, are heir to. ' Edwards intends us to be thrilled at An- De Palma questions what one can do drews' profanity (his own vulgar comment with the reality of sexual impulses and of on what the real woman is like?). But to images that exist in film as a consequence eroticize Julie Andrews he'd have to hu- of male-female mathematics. (Antonioni manize her first: Edwards goes back- profoundly depicted this as a neorealist wards. The strip scene itself takes place in terror when Monica Vitti is watched by a a hall of mirrors visualizing the director's courtyard full of men in L'Avventura.) many contemplations ofwho and what his DePalma never gets past this stupefied wife is (the male dancer in the scene even horniness, but he confronts it with an ob- resembles Blake Edwards). Those multi- sessive regard for the female body and an ple images seem to prefigure the Victor! undeniable depiction of female physical Victoria hypotheses that Andrews has a and psychological soft spots. rich multifaceted personality but it doesn't Examining expressions of fear proves negate the smarm of basing an entire film more revealing and empathetic than sim- on the naughtiness of your wife's breasts. ply assigning an emotional state to an ac- Something's amiss here. In That's Life, tress and having her play it out (as Anto- Edwards' best film since the Sixties, the nioni does for Vitti in Red Desert). Allen most subtly sprung joke is that Julie An- humanizes DePalma's genre satires. Her drews plays a singer who never sings. Ed- willingness to display her body, to sharpen wards' frothy domesticity honors Andrews her comic skills in reaction to his manipu- as a companion only. lative ones, made them the Nick and Nora NIC &THERESA of modern noir. Fearlessly acting out her husband's fantasies , Allen helped peel the sexist covering off movies, exposing possi- Erotic secrets are Nicolas Roeg's spe- cialty, and he's visualized many of them ble fissures and tensions in their own- 28

with his wife Theresa Russell , a low- fundament of the acting profession but of CLAUDE & voiced movie natural who gains skill with marriage too. That's why Cassavetes and STEPHANE each picture, triumphing recently with her Rowlands are more convincing intimates Marilyn Monroe impersonation in Insig- as the brother and sister in their own Love A man can serve two mistresses, proves nificance. That film tests the propriety of Streams than as husband and wife in Paul Claude Chabrol in his beloved genre exer- the Roeg-Russell partnership, which be- Mazursky's The Tempest. They embrace cises that also iconize his wife Stephane gan with Russell as an object of necrophi- the truisms and exceptions of creative col- Audran. He preserves the crime genre's lia in Bad Timing. Monroe's own career laboration, coordinating their personalities sexist strictures through methodical medi- and marital crisis with Joe DiMaggio and with their strongest fantasies . Cassavetes' tations on Audran's high-cheekboned al- the vicissitudes ofsex stardom are relevant long-take attentiveness and Rowlands' lure and chic remoteness. She consents to to the work Roeg and Russell make for showy honesty define the husband-wife such role-playing more knowingly than themselves. Past scandal and sensation tendency to fetishize acting. Who's Rita Hayworth could have-the case of a challenge their modem ingenuity and Afraid of Virginia Woolf might be their sophisticate outsmarting herself into ac- risk. Roeg takes the dare that the Monroe- holy grail. cepting the form's phallocentrism. obsessive Norman Mailer merely approxi- mates in drama and prose, but it's only be- Cassavettes and Rowlands. In La Femme Infidele, Chabrol doesn't cause Russell is pulling alongside, testing so much transcend James M. Cain as pro- her talent and projecting her own ego, that JACK & SISSY vide that kind of female pathology a taste- Roeg's films apparently finesse the con- ful, intellectual affirmation. Audran's troversies and rifts of each partner's jealou- So far Jack Fisk only directs movies in taunting, imperious sensuality, which syand humiliation. which wife Sissy Spacek appears, a direc- charges Chabrol's antique movie ma- torial correlative to the tail wagging the chines (even in \"nice\" parts like Le The sensuality of Russell's Eureka! dog. They threaten to become the Ameri- Boucher), is also what makes her suspect. bedroom scenes derives from mutual can- can Bryan Forbes and Nanette Newman, Yet her cool demeanor is never penetrat- dorabout forms of intimacy. Roeg's depic- except that Fisk doesn't dare cast Sissy as a ed, even in La Rupture (Chabrol got clos- tion of sex and satiety seems more imme- Stepford Wife. The quiet lyricism Fisk er to the intimacies of marriage only by diate than, say, Bertolucci's or Jean Vigo's brings to the small rituals of family Iife- projecting it onto Paul and Daniele Ge- because Russell's complicity intensifies brothers at play or a child and an adult gauff in Une Partie de Plaisir.) One ex- our identification of the performance. Her house guest sharing lemonade-seems pects more of the man who made Les person is on the line as a bravura act of trust inseparable from his devotion to Sissy. If Bdnnes Femmes, but obviously Chabrol is in her husband-director's tasJe. Roeg Raggedy Man was like dinner and ghost content with a classy femme fatale act, and clearly failed her in EurekaPs bizarre stories at the Fisks', Violets Are Blue so uses the genre's limitations with haugh- courtroom scene (making Russell crazier might be an evening of their home movies ty pride and in good faith. La Femme Infi- and more incoherent by the minute), but showing Sissy's noble career woman zest dele ends with a tracking close-up of Au- her stunt as Monroe, explaining Einstein's and her hometown naturalism. (She frolics dran, like the last shot of Garbo in Queen theory of relativity or having explicit men- amid ponies and on a sailboat.) There's Christina. It's the cuckolded husband's strual pains, uncannily respects the range icky presumptuousness about a film- POY; Chabrol readily understands a bour- offemale endeavor and suffering. It recalls maker-husband's vaunting his wife's lus- geois male's possessiveness even when he Jean Renoir's audacious showcase of wife ciousness or heroism. Violets Are Blue re- seems to have lost. Catherine Hessling in the coquettish short verses the angles of soap opera, but it has Charleston (1927). This vigorous, jocular the same tired emphasis on virtue. The JOHN & URSULA & embrace of the period's raciness also only difference is trendiness, the New showed off a movie couple's conjugal dar- Male Sensitivity. Fisk and Spacek con- BO ing and pride: it was a private French post- struct a feminism that is more ideal than card given to the world. real , a couples' agreed-upon fantasy. No filmmaker has presented better evi- dence than John Derek of a man's search JOHN & GENA for his better half. That's how he has used his camera and wives Ursula Andress and John Cassavetes has kept his respect for Bo Derek. They could all pose together in Gena Rowlands' \" mercuriality\" by sub- before and after ads for a sexual transfer- mitting it to his all-inclusive anteater ap- ence device. In Once Before I Die, his de- proach to human behavior. Having ex- but as a director, Derek, onscreen, sec- plored the middle class (Faces), showbusi- onds a remark about Andress, saying: ness (Opening Night), and the \"Yeah, she's a beautiful girl.\" And the soft underworld (Gloria), this couple have jaw, pointed chin, and oval eyes he shares publically shared more emotional ex- with Andress gives the remark strangely tremes than any other showbiz team, may- narcissistic overtones. In Tarzan and Bo- be ever. Yet because their virtuoso versa- lero, both starring Bo Derek, the wife as tility is always the same, there's no danger physical specimen stands outas the prima- of schiwphrenic unpredictability. ry aesthetic concern even over amateurish photographic trickery of pastoral images A Woman Under the Influence, a de- and artsy sunglares. The misfortune ofBo luxe improv, praises the seesaw stability of Derek revealing all is that her Amazon their marriage. The fulcrum is the cou- build tempts one to perceiveJohn Derek's ple's understanding of their shared art; fantasies baroquely. Subjugating these they know that gestural ploy is not only a 29

look-alike wives onscreen extends the 'n' roll and Playboy magazine, criticized This attitude is much more egalitarian usual process of mannequin grooming into the patriarchal designs the town and three than the seminal and sexist idea of The an act of self-symbiosis. Facial resem- men in particular place on Juliette's inno- Blue Angelaurgens starred in a remake blances and schlock taste combine with cent nature. three years later). Jurgens says of Bardot- Derek's past as a dark petulant Hollywood Juliette, \"She has the courage of doing juvenile to form a slough of cheap narcis- If film critics ever accept the sexual ap- whatever she pleases and when she sistic glamour. preciation of women as part of a humane pleases.\" It's a compliment ripe with envy tribute, Vadim will seem a pioneer. and desire as is his advice to the young This martinet procurement is so joyless There's generous wit behind his leer. husband Trintignant: \"Juliette's like a and inept that Derek's wives show a colt that needs breaking in, and you're still bland, dry desirability. They aren't al- InAnd God Created Woman (Vadim's a boy.\" lowed to be demure; only the writing and directing are ingenuous. The subject is es- And God Created Woman. Vadim, a self-styled erotic philosopher, sentially John Derek's roue spirit, but search for biblical justification was a witty pushed the nature-animal parallels Grif- there is no Russ Meyer joviality. The title stroke), Vadim dashed the fake female fith style: Bardot-Juliette's closest friends Once Before I Die could only mean one consciousness of those first-time sex are pets, including a rabbit named Socra- thing, and Derek spells it out in an ungra- scenes in which the woman says \"Is that tes and a prodigal bird who, like the adul- cious mercy-fuck metaphor: a young sol- all there is?\" A pomographer might trade terous friend in True Heart Susie, retums dier confesses his desire to Andress, and on the wickedness of Eve, but in Vadim's home after a misunderstanding to eventu- her submission is intercut with a war ma- film the men-Curt Jurgens, Jean-Louis ally symbolize Juliette's caged spirit. This neuver-felled trees and an armored tank Trintignant and Christian Marquand- nature naivete is part of the film's comedy trudging through fire. And in Tarzan, a are blamed for their own lustful collapse. and is rooted in Bardot's almost tactile ani- sexually awakened Bo Derek simpers, \"I mal presence. Her tigress hair and strong think it's a dream ... but it's nod\" fol- neck (like Jane Fonda's-everyone has a lowed by Tarzan's castration battle with a favorite type) testify to a sunbathing, gargantuan penile serpent. These are sand-between-my-toes physical life. Mae Myra Breckinridge movies with lurking West had to contrive such lines as, \"I work disdain. at being happy,\" or \"Something powerful in me makes me behave foolishly,\" but ROGER &BRIGITTE they resound with ironic, personal force & JANE coming from Bardot-the greatest female sex symbol in the movies. Vadim weakens Eight years after Alexandre Astruc pub- to this when he has Bardot dance the lished his notion of camera-stylo, Roger mambo to show her primitive sensuality, Vadim began his practice of camera-prick. but he's often sharper and funnier as when The success ofAnd God Created Woman she simply takes off her shoes on her wed- in 1956 was also the commercial break- ding day or makes a joke of propriety by through for the French New Wave. Go- posing in a wedding veil. dard even heralded the film for its casual updating of the French filmmaking ethos. The generation of alienated women re- Vadim brought impudent flair to the insti- presented by Bulle Ogier's abandonment tution of Gallic Love Wisdom, trouncing to pop music in La Salamandre starts the insouciance of Sacha Guitry's com- here. Juliette's query \"Do we ever get edies that featured his third wife, Jacque- what we really want?\" anticipates Ber- line Delubac, and the popular sentimen- trand Blier's own Freudian question about tality of the Martine Carol romances women. And Bardot's vibrancy in her directed by her husband Christian Jacque. scenes with Trintignant suggests a world- liness whose very concept would wreck Marriage can blur distinctions between Eric Rohmer's fragile universe. pupil and teacher, know.ledge and igno- rance: whatever Vadim and Bardot's pri- In the sci-fi comedy Barbarella, outer vate relationship, the liberating result of space looks like fertilization under a mi- their union was the rare unbiased celebra- croscope. Vadim, who sees sex as the great tion of female sexuality. frontier and adventure of life, praises Bar- barella-Fonda's \"incomparable talent to Vadim's new mode of tongue-in-cheek preserve the security of the universe.\" eroticism began an era of male enlighten- ment about female sexual prowess. As Ju- Barbarella contains Jane Fonda's best liette (a pun on Marcel Came's Fifties' comic performance. Her simplicity is sex- fantasy heroine Juliette au la Cle des ier than mere innuendo; she puts a bloom Songes) , Brigitte Bardot's sex appeal up- on the campy, intergalactic Candy rou- sets her town's social and economic val- tines about \"adjusting my tongue box\" ues-a political evaluation of sex not seen and \"exaltation transference.\" This is the onscreen since Barbara Stanwyck's 1933 kind of role Arthur Miller should have gold-digger farce Baby Face. Vadim, in a written for Marilyn Monroe, but none of move as timely and revolutionary as rock Monroe's screenwriters understood much about role-playing and sexual existential- ism. (It's not the problem of a single gen- 30

der.)Jane rewards Vadim's understanding What's shocking is Godard's timidity. Godard' s reticence (or was it Karina's) in- and confidence with a smart coda to or- gasm: \"I see what they mean when they The moment conveys wonder at his wife's dicates the regard of sexuality at the heart say it's distracting.\" Speaking slowly, judi- ciously, her intelligence destroys the male presence and fear of his art's capacity to of conjugal movies. Each adoring shot of sovereignty of the classical cinema's post- coital close-up. Through the authority of absorb, falsify, and outlive it. This is a sur- Karina builds an inquest into her individ- Fonda's sexual experience, Vadim lets her toss The Look right back at him. prising revelation because while we as- ual beauty, and every plot-tum empha- Honor without humor would be con- sume Godard is more conscientious than sizes her intelligence, her moral choices. stricting. Vadim's sex comedies salute the aspect of his wives he cannot control. It is most filmmakers, this isn't an area where In Made in the U.S~ A. , Godard countered Barbarella's sexuality that defeats tyranny and the hideous pleasure machine. She he should be any more self-conscious than the prevailing wisdom-that film noir goes on to glory just as, after their divorces, Bardot in Contempt and Viva Maria and Blake Edwards, John Carpenter, or Ni- does for the male ego what melodrama Fonda in They Shoot Horses, Don't They? made good on skills they honed cholas Ray. Yet he is, and more subtly ro- does for the female ego-by casting Kar- with Vadim. mantic, too. ina in the Humphrey Bogart detective JEAN-LUC &ANNA Godard links cinema practice to the role. As always with Karina, Godard inter- Of the many film conventions that Go- dard has challenged, the least examined male desire to touch, preserve, and control rogates the role being played on the set by has been his autobiographical impulse, even though it inspired one of the few a love object. The poignancy of the \"Oval measuring it against the woman he knows. genuine shocks in movie history: the \"Oval Portrait\" sequence of Vivre sa Vie , Portrait\" sequence is Godard's attempt to This has made Karina's body of film work starring Anna Karina, when the reading of Edgar Allan Poe's tale is interrupted by avoid the folly of possessiveness as much peerless, the ultimate example of marital Godard saying, \"This is our story, Anna, the artist painting a portrait of his wife.\" as in Anna Karina's baleful eyes. Godard and creative teamwork. complicates his favorite theme, the prosti- By using the \"Oval Portrait\" to get the tution of women, by pointing out the cine- rigorous, analytical effect of Welles' mirror ma's and his own exploitation of Karina. maze, Godard gives all husband-wife col- The Karina films are Godard's most laboration in movies a necessary, near- tender, analytic husband-wife collabora- morbid scrutiny. He revises Poe's dedica- tions; he may pose her reading To Die of tion to sacrificial muses to reveal the male Love in Made in the u.s.A. or dancing artist's obsession that movies have subse- the Madison in Band ofOutsiders, but he quently institutionalized. A confluence of does not make charm a summary of her love and work, these conjugal movies character. catch both director and actress in the con- It is interesting that Godard never un- tradiction of private and public habit and dressed Karina onscreen as he did Bardot explode the classic exploitative model. If (who in Contempt is made to resemble creativity in the movies is the closest thing Karina by wearing a black wig). Apparent- to sex, then there are no innocent parties ly a lover keeps some things for himself. in the objectification of women. ® EAST-WEST FILM JOURNAL A response to the recognition that film can uniquely enrich understanding between peoples and cultures at both the popular and scholarly levels. [n the fir st issue, Winter 1986: Dudley Andrew Film and Society: Public Rituals and Pri vate Space SPECIAL FIRST YEAR CHARTER Do nald Richie Vi ew ing Japa nese Film : Some Co n s idera ti ~n s SUBSCRIPTION RATES: William R othman H o llywood R econsidered: R efl ecti o ns o n t he C lassical Individuals Charter rates Regular rates Michitaro T ada Am erican Film Institutions $12 .00 $15 .00 Shao Mujun The D estiny of Samurai Film s $24.00 $30 . 00 Wimal Di ssan aya ke C hinese Film Amidst the Tide of R efo rm Jo hn C harl o t Art . Vi sio n , and C ulture : Sa tyajit R ay's Apu Tril ogy R evisited Single copies: Individuals $8.00; Institutions John Tulloch Fro m Ape· Man to Space·Baby: 2001, An Interpretati o n $16.00. R espons ible Soap: Disco urses of Au stralian TV Drama TO ORDER: Send check or money order. VISA and MasterCard also accepted, (include acct. no ., expo date, and signature). 31

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· ection In Development 33

The Majors: Jeffrey Katzenberg. tors-John Landis, Walter Hill, and Dick Midler in Ruthless People. Benjamin-and two different studios- by Beverly Walker Universal and Paramount. \"We studied Bill Murray character has become a wom- ten years of Dick Tracy comic strips and an and we're writing a romance for Red- The historic antipathy between the got the essence of what the character was ford! When the clock started running, oth- screenwriter and management has about, and why he had endured. We er writers were brought in behind our been rekindled anew over \"devel- loved the material and thought we were backs. When we found out about it, we opment,\" the movie-biz term given to a ahead of the crime spoof genre,\" says quit. We don't believe in competitive complex process by which most screen- Epps moumfully. After all their effort, the writing.\" plays are born, written, and rewritten in project came to a dead halt when Warren the Eighties. Studios invest between $30 Beatty expressed interest in doing his ver- Dale Launer hewed out more than a and $50 million a year doing it, but rarely sion. Stars can do that. They are still Hol- dozen drafts ofRuthless People to sat- make movies from the assembly-line ef- lywood's most revered commodity. isfy an equal numberof(ruthless?) people, forts they commission. The ratio, by in- including the film's three directors. dustry consensus, is 15 to 1. \"We became desperate to align our- \"Their approach to story is like shuffling selves with producers who could get mov- cards. The script stopped working. The A protracted committee proceeding, ies made,\" Eppscontinues, \"so we struck studio was discreetly looking for another development requires a writer to work in a deal with Don Simpson and Jerry Bruck- writer, but the start date was rushing to- tandem with a half-dozen executives, pro- heimer to write Top Gun, based on their ward us. Finally, three weeks before film- ducers, directors, accept their critiques, idea. To their credit, they left us alone for ing began, I went off on my own and did and utilize their reaction to create a screen- the many months it took to do the first another draft which, ironically, restored it play. As American mainstream movies draft, and when they read it, they liked it, close to the original.\" In industry lingo, have become ever slicker, homogenized, but the Paramount upper echelon didn't. what happened to Launer's script is called and formulaic, development has been fin- They didn't believe any movie with all \"over-development\" or \"developed gered as a primary contributor to their that aerial stuff would be commercial.\" out. \" soullessness. Certainly the writers think Cash and Epps did another draft at the be- so. hest of a certain executive, and then the Despite the pain they went through, project was shelved. these men finally saw their work on the Jim Cash and Jack Epps, Jr., authors of big screen. The management chaos at 1986's most commercially successful mov- This brought to five the number of un- Paramount brought Top Gun off the ie, Top Gun, were \"in development jail\" produced Cash and Epps screenplays. shelf, and though Cash and Epps feel for nine years before having anything pro- Two earlier works, Whereabouts and their screenplay was more complex and duced. More than two of those years were Dangerously, were still bouncing from dramatically sound than the movie that spent doing multiple rewrites of Dick Tra- one studio to another, circulating in the emerged, they credit Simpson and Bruck- cy, sequentially, for three different direc- netherworld of development, but that was heimer for their perseverance and chutz- scant encouragement. So they tumed to another man who gets things done, Ivan Reitman, hoping he would be their salva- tion. \"Halfway through the first draft of Legal Eagles, we were pressured to send pages to Dustin Hoffman, who was set to star. Against our own rules, we did-and suddenly found ourselves working daily with Reitman.\" Then Hoffman dropped out and Bill Murray came aboard. \"We were forced to begin anew, from the top, even though we had never fin- ished a first draft\"-the dashing of an- other Cash and Epps cardinal rule: that they be left alone to write the first draft all the way through without revisions. Then Murray bailed out, and Robert Redford entered the picture. \"We had thrown in the towel by then, but Ivan persuaded us to come back for Redford. How could we refuse? We had yet to see one of our screenplays in a theater. We started all over again, and next thing we know, the 34

pah in getting it made. The film's phe- Associates puts the typical allocation at be- Development is almost an industry nomenal success has led to a contract with tween 10 and 15 percent of their yearly unto itself, and not every studio wants Universal, where Epps will soon direct his budget. In annual reports to stockholders, or can afford it. Orion, RKO, Lorimar, and first feature. Dale Launer has since writ- the monies are wrapped into such categor- ten two more scripts and hopes to make ies as \"receivables, net of allowances for all of the independent companies prefer his directorial debut soon as well. doubtful projects,\" or \"films in process,\" or \"studio overhead.\" Warner's and Para- packages-a script that is close to ready, There are, however, legions of mount each are reported to have more screenwriters earning lucrative sums via than 200 projects in their bought-and- with the elements (star, director, produc- development whose work remains unpro- paid-for \"development pool,\" the major- duced . Beverly M. Sawyer has written ity of which will never become movies or er) attached. . several pieces about people who happen be \" turned around\" so that another entity to be brown or black (Stompin' at the Sa- can buy them. Unlike the playwright, And whereas a \"tum-around\" script voy; Pepsi) that are on back burners all poet, or novelist, the screenwriter's labor over town. Since reluctantly moving to is owned by whomever commissioned it used to be tainted by the implication that Los Angeles five years ago, playwright (studio, company, producer). Terry Curtis Fox has written four screen- it wasn't up to snuff, it has become much plays, but none has yet been made. Spec- This classic capitalist bias is reflected in ulatively, he did a screen adaptation of his the Eighties term for almost any type of sought after by the studios and production own play, Cops, and expects it to be real- film industry interaction: \"doing busi- ized this year, at Tri-Star. After a decade ness. \" People who do business together companies that don't develop. They're of writing, John Romano will receive his should be \"in sync\" with each other, and first screen credit this year, for Orion's that is a matter of \"casting.\" If you' re do- economical, and the studio can see what Trail of the Fox. Taking matters into his ing business with Paramount, for exam- own hands, Steve DeGamett used assign- ple, you should know that it's a main- it's getting. Bruce Moccia ofRKO spends a ment money to buy back his script, Mir- stream, high concept studio favoring acle Mile, from Warner's and will go into tightly wound premises that unfold. No lot of his time sleuthing out such projects. pre-production shortly as its director. \"dust\" (i.e., rural) pictures or costumes. Fox is more tony; Warner's eclectic, and \"RKO believes that the reasons for a pro- Some projects remain stymied for years the verdict is out on Columbia until David despite the tender loving care of numer- Puttnam gets going. ject being in tum-around are essentially ous writers and directors. A notable exam- ple is Truman Capote's Hand Carved Development funds are used to com- political or logistical, and have nothing to Coffins. Optioned by Lester Persky in mission screenplays and to option novels, 1979, it has been in development at four plays, and magazine articles. Sometimes do with its inherent quality. Perhaps the different production entities (currently: called \"Hollywood's welfare system,\" de- Taft-Barish). \"It's a story that has never velopment also feeds , develops, and nur- star is no longer available, the director has been without a home,\" notes Persky, tures writers, directors, producers, and \"but it has been victim to numerous stars. If one wants to establish a relation- lost interest, or the executive who spon- changes in studio management. Such dis- ship, or \"get into business\" with some- parate directors as Hal Ashby, Jonathan body, it's well to let them know it with an sored it has gone elsewhere.\" Moccia says Demme, Sidney Lumet, and Michael Ci- office, telephone, expense account, and a mino have variously been associated with commission to \"develop\" something. that David Puttnam has put a great many it. Maybe it won't work out the first time around-that's not uncommon-but if Columbia projects developed by prede- Sweet Libby, the story of Thirties torch you' re \" in sync\" with each other, some- singer Libby Holman , has been a pet proj- thing may come along that will. Ifyou luck cessor Guy McElwaine in tum-around. ect of producer Ray Stark for more than a out with Eddie Murphy, the wooing mon- decade. Wanting another Funny Girl, ey will look like chickenfeed. \"We are delighted. Some are excellent Stark has found his vision untranslatable by numerous writers, including Gore Vi- Thus producers like SimpsoniBruck- and we're considering them. \" dal. His office declined to confirm wheth- heimer are given lavish deals (at Para- er it is an active property, though Debra mount) and Bette Midler is enticed to set Of course, the studios picking up turn- Winger has it on her agenda and may be up her All-Girls Production Company at contractually obligated to Stark after back- Disney. Things don' t always work out as around projects must pay the fees, which ing out of Peggy Sue Got Married. intended , however. Midler's associate, Margaret Jennings, says they have yet to include monies previously paid to the T he development system is run by the get an okay from studio executives for major studios, one of the few areas of movies Midler most wants to make, and writer and anyone else involved (such as the film industry they can almost totally that the ones she has starred in (Down and control. A generous sum is earmarked at Out in Beverly Hills, Ruthless People, producer or director), and sometimes an the beginning of each year-reportedly Outrageous Fortune)' were executive almost $14 million at Paramount in ideas, not hers. \"We're not given much overhead fee as well. Even so, they still 1985-and then simply used up, like a latitude,\" says Jennings. \"Bette would rich kid's generous allowance. like to make a musical and a drama, but make good economic sense according to management seems to know what it wants Studios will not release figures for de- her to do, which is comedies. ,-, Orion production vice president Michael velopment, but an analyst at Steve Kagan Barlow. \"Orion is continuing the old UA filmmaking philosophy, which is to give enormous latitude to certain writers, pro- ducers, or directors, and let them author their own script, rather than the studio as is happening in other parts of town.\" What's happening in other parts of town is what much of the shouting is about: scriptwriting by consensus. The committee method is variously re- ferred to as the \"Paramount school of film- making\" or \"the Jeff Katzenberg school of development\" after the studio and execu- tive who headed the team that made \"high concept\" movies de rigue'ur, even respectable. It's old news by now that the scripts of An Officer and a Gentleman, Flashdance, and Beverly Hills Cop were masticated in executive suites before go- ing on to become hugely successful mov- Ies. Implicit to this Eighties ethos is the conviction that motion picture executives can administrate or direct the writing of a screenplay that will lead to a hit movie; that their contribution is vital; and, fur- ther, that the \"developed movie\" is the motion picture for this time, as valid as the style or genre of any previous era. It is a 35

computer age perspective: the executive- fly without elements.' that was clear and preferable to these in- user inputs to the writer-terminal. \"At the end of the week I make more visible groups.\" T he seminal figure in this concept is Jef- phone calls to studio development execu- The networking system evokes horror: frey Katzenberg, formerly of Para- tives to find out what's been submitted. \"All those buzzwords and phrases they mount and presently chairman of motion There is a whole network of development make up come back to haunt you,\" says pictures and television at Walt Disney execs who exchange information, barter writer Beverly M. Sawyer. \"One day over Studios. Along with greatly expanding the and gossip, have lunch. But there's only a lunch, somebody decided flashbacks role of the executive in the creation of a certain amount that can be relied on; the were out; the word got passed and became screenplay, Katzenberg codified a system passing on of rumor and gossip in itself can writ.\" Dale Launer would like the execu- of information retrieval on screenplays and be a form of barter.\" tive to simply state the problem and let writers now widely used throughout the him find its solution. \"Somebody said my industry. Katzenberg also instituted a se- The remainder of this young usc grad- third act needed 'top spin.' What is top vere work ethic in which executives work- uate's job is nurturing relationships with spin??\" ing under him virtually make a Faustian writers. \"If a writer likes you and the bargain: to be in the movie business they team , he may give you a break-pitch you T he development process of recent have to throw out everything else in their his ideas first or give you information years usually starts with a verbal pitch life. about a previous script that's about to go between writer and executive, although into tum-around.\" treatments, magazine articles, books, and The Katzenberg method is bible to even a preexisting screenplay will suffice mid-level executives with various titles Writers and their representatives natu- to get the show on the road. Often the first (development, creative affairs, produc- rally have a wholly different perspective writer is dismissed after a couple of drafts tion) whose highly visible but revolving about development: \"It is an agonizing and others brought in for a swipe at it. door positions leave them feeling uncom- process,\" says Jane Sindell, a Creative Art- When this has gone on for a while, rarely monly vulnerable. Many people consult- ists agent with major screenwriter clients. less than two years and often more than ed for this article were defensive about \"The writer is pressured to huny up, and six, the studio has to decide whether to their work, especially as it related to devel- then the project is put on hold indefinite- make it, shelve it, or put it in tum-around. opment, and palpably afraid of being fired ly; the rewrite notes are given by a com- If the project stalls, writers pray for turn- should their name appear in print even as a mittee of who-knows.\" Writer-producer around status. This allows them to keep source of pure information. Gerald Ayres (The Last Detail, Rich and the material alive by buying it back (costly Famous) concurs: \"The interminable de- but not unheard of) or offering it to others. One savvy (but anonymous) develop- laying tactics are created by insecure ex- ment executive describes the nuts and ecutives to lengthen their short-term jobs. But some studios are not good sports: bolts of how the system works from the Ifthey make a decision and the movie's a they won't relinquish a property that they side of the bosses: 'The job has two parts, flop, they will almost certainly lose their developed, presumably for fear it might covering the town and working with writ- job. have a notable success and come back to ers. Covering the town is a phone call haunt them. Wamer Brothers and Colum- process. On Monday morning, I call \"Today, you can't identify the en- bia are dubbed the \"Black holes of devel- agents to find out what they read over the emy,\" Ayres says. \"You don't know who's opment\" by people in the business. Or weekend. They might say, 'Well, I got holding things up or whose point of view the roach motels: \"Projects check in, but this really good comedy ... ' or There was holds sway. In the old days, everybody they don't check out,\" said one executive. a kinda good thriller but I don't think it'll knew that the man who chomped on the cigar was boss, the man you could wrestle \"The process works brilliantly when with. However despotic it may have been, \"Don't Woo with Words- Show Me\" ticulate person writes the best,\" he contin- ues. \"Why should a writer have to 'per- The story will be the star of films pro- want to direct,\" says Lawrence. \"For the form' his ideas? Some people who give duced by the new United Artists, says pro- past several years, the star has often been great pitches have expended all theirener- duction president Robert Lawrence. He the operative catalyst in a film project and gy in doing them. \" recently disclosed the company's first as a result there has been a demise in the three pictures along with a slate of26 prop- well:Crafted screenplay. We want to do All things are possible at the new U.A., erties in development. Significantly, two things a little differently by making the including the verbal pitch, but there is a of the three are based on original scripts, script the catalyst. We think that by devel- policy about them. \"We will not take a which their authors will direct. Dennis oping the best material, we'll attract the meeting for a verbal pitch unless we've Feldman will make his directorial debut stars and directors we want to work with.\" read a previous script by the writer and are with Real Men, from his own \"spec\" confident he or she has the skills to pull off script, anc~ Charles Shyer will direct Baby In recent years, movie writing has been a screenplay, should it be cbmmissioned. Boom from his . and Nancy Meyers' geared to getting the development deal, screenplay. And Bo Goldman (One Flew usually via a verbal pitch to executives. \"Nobody here considers themselves a Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Melvin and \"That method has been disillusioning writer, nobody will be writing dialogue. Howard) will make his directorial debut and has produced very few movies,\" says We will give considered notes and, hope- with an adaptation of Susan Minot's book Lawrence. \"What sounds like 'a fine fully, our input will be validated down the Monkeys. U.A.'s development slate also idea,' for which you've paid $75 thousand, line. Our entire staff spends a lot of time boasts such top writers as Lany Gelbart, has a tendency to evaporate. Months later, coming up with constructive comments, Douglas Day Stewart, and Joe Eszterhas. when the script is handed in, you find from which a position paper distilling the there's very little resemblance between it U.A. point of view is made for the writer. \"Our approach is very material-orient- and that inspired verbal pitch. So far, they've said we were a great help. ed, and we're supportive of writers who We hope so; we want to support the art- \"I've also found that often the least ar- ist. \" 36

everyone has the same vision, the writer as more hopeful , era than the present. \"My and ... couldn't possibly know how to well as the team,\" says Wendy Dytman of family were immigrants, and movies took write them! MGM. Regrettably, bravely, Dytman ad- me somewhere. I've been knocked mits that is an almost utopian ideal. Fac- down, but not out, and I've always man- -Raymond Chandler, tions often form and \"scripts can be aged to find an ear for what I wanted to The Atlantic Monthly , ruined if the team insists upon taking the do.\" material in a certain direction that is just 1945 wrong.\" Author John Romano, also a Yalie, but of another generation, is eve'n more ex- Grouching by screenwriters is noth- \"Every individual on the team inevita- travagant: \"Don't let anybody tell you ing new, of course. It has been go- bly has a different viewpoint,\" says Dale that art only happens when an individual ing on since the advent of sound, Launer. \"Criticism of my third screen- expresses himself, that art can't be made when studios converted from silents to play, Love Potion #9, was so contradic- by committee. That's a romantic, 19th- talkies and actual scripts started to appear. tory that it canceled itself out.\" Launer century version of individualism. The Writers' angst reached a boiling point dur- feels strongly that the group process 13th century is a better reference for the ing the Thirties and Forties, when moguls should be abandoned altogether. Cash present. That's when they built cathe- put them in cubbyholes, demanded a pre- and Epps will not countenance outside drals, when sculptors, architects, and cise number of pages per day, and often commentary during the writing of their craftsmen were tumed loose to create assigned several writers to the same proj- first draft. \"The script development proc- something that was great, the results of ect, unbeknownst to each other. ess is so fragile,\" says Epps, \"that some- which could not be attributed to anyone one's interference at that stage can tilt the person.\" For a few bright years in the Sixties, whole applecart. \" writers were courted, their original scripts However upbeat this point of view, it is filmed, and their presence welcomed on \"You find yourself trying to prove your an exceedingly marginal one in the whole the sets of movies they wrote. But that talent to people who have none, and who history of movie authorship in the United time passed, and the Eighties brought a are incapable of understanding why you States. reversion to the screenwriters' beginnings. even do it. You start living by their rules and end up writing for them,\" laments Writers are employed to write screenplays When the Great Depression crippled Sawyer. \"Everybody has read Syd Field's on the theory that, being writers, they have the publishing industry and commercial book [Screenplay and Screenwriter's aparticulargift and training for the job . . . theaters, serious writers were forced to Workbook] and uses his paradigm and and are then prevented from doing it with find a paycheck in Hollywood. By the buzzwords: it's all they know. They try to any independence or finality whatsoever, mid-Thirties, hundreds of playwrights, push every idea, every piece of writing on the theory that being merely writers poets, novelists, and newspapermen had through a formula.\" they know nothing about making pictures come West to write for the bastard art, the movies. Stephen Vincent Benet-who \"The whole construct is about how lasted only a few weeks-John Dos Pas- many people can say no,\" says Terry Cur- tis Fox. A Hitchcock Reader Indeed, too many people giving opin- EDITED BY MARSHALL DEUTELBAUM ion is central to what writers object to in AND LELAND POAGUE the present scheme of things. The change came in the last half-dozen years, accord- The first anthology to appear in over a decade ing to Harry Chomer, who developed ma- on the films of Alfred Hitchcock. Five stimu- terial at several studios, and is at least par- lating sections-Thking Hitchcock Seriously. tially attributable to a conglomerate Hitchcock in Britain. Hitchcock in Hollywood. mentality that tends to create numerous The Later Films: A Psycho Dossier-each of bureaucratic layers. \"Everybody hates the which has an introductory essay by one of the process, but everybody's got a stake in editors. Plus seven new studies. it-not just writers, but a whole host of agents, lawyers, producers, and various 356 pp .. illus . $34.95 hardcove r. $19.95 levels of studio executives, too. Writers paperback. certainly would not get so much work if the development process didn't exist.\" of related interest. • • Since so many people are sharing the 'Film Criticism: A Counter Theory big development pie, it's not surprising to find divergent points of view. Veteran WILLIAM CADBURY AND LELAND POAGUE screenwriter David Z. Goodman, who wrote Straw Dogs among many other Through important discussions of Alfred Hitchcock. Michelangelo An- films and teleplays, says he can take the tonioni. and John Ford . presents an objectivist. anti-intentionalist. heat: \"It's the rules of the game. Every realist tradition of aesthetics as basis for film theory. profession has them, and this is the shape of screenwriting at this time.\" Goodman 304 pp.. ill us. $23 .50 hardcover. lives in Montauk, Long Island, and comes to Los Angeles only as a respite from ex- Mail orde rs: $ 1. 50 postage p er boo k . Iowans: include 4 % sa les tax. Writ e or call Jar Jree tremes of weather or to do business. A catalog. mid-Fifties graduate of Yale in playwrit- ing, Goodman may reflect a different, 37

sos, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzger- Wamer in nine weeks. And everything the Screen Writers Guild, which, in tum, went exactly as he said.\" became a branch of the Author's League. ald, James M. Cain, among others, made However, the organization functioned no bones about their motives, which were The writer was low man on the totem like a club for the next 15 years, as writers well summed up by Anita Loos: \" I want pole, and just about every aspect of Holly- worked without basic standards of equity nothing from Hollywood but money, and wood life conspired to keep that fact up or collective bargaining rights. Credit was anyone who tells you that he came here for front and crackling. At MGM, writers allocated as the producer felt like it-to anything else . . . lies in his teeth .\" weren't allowed to have couches in their friends, relatives, or, under a pseudonym, offices. They either met their deadline or himself The key issue then as now was creative they found themselves on the \"Available\" autonomy. Story conferences, enforced list. In the studio commissary, they were In 1937, a Supreme Court decision collaboration, and team writing were expected to si t with others of their salary upheld the National Labor Relations Act, hated. \"A story isn' t a story but a confer- bracket and socialize accordingly. \"Every- allowing the Screen Writers Guild to func- ence,\" went the day's bitter axiom. The one accepts the dollar sign as the only indi- tion as a union , but it would still be an- story conference was the producers' prin- cation of a writer's worth,\" said Dudley other five years (1942) before the first con- cipal instrument of control over content, a Nichols. For much of his career, Nichols tract with producers was signed. necessity since, it was alleged , producers had the good fortune to work primarily for didn' t read. This tale was by no means The first seven-year agreement stipu- apocryphal: MGM hired someone whose \\\\t' t'; lated a minimum of$125 per week, $1500 sole function was to read the readers' syn- flat for stories, and eliminated spec writ- opses aloud to producers. Raymond Chandler. ing. Prestigious writers such as Preston one man , John Ford , who praised him ex- Sturges, Nathanael West, Ben Hecht, or Class consciousness ran high and un- travagantly, and publicly, and who consid- Robert Riskin received more money, but doubtedly accounted for some of the acri- ered him an equal partner. This was most still nothing as much as directors, produc- mony between writers and management. unusual in classic Hollywood, where di- ers, or actors. A 1938 survey tumed up the A 1941 survey showed that writers were rectors avoided any favorable commentary following data: a mere 17 writers eamed younger, more of them native-bom, bet- on the screenplay. $75,000 or more in compensation as com- ter educated, and \"specialized\"- i.e., pared to 80 actors, 54 producers and ex- fewer drifted into writing from other jobs, Writers tried to control their material by ecutives, and 45 directors. and certainly not from nickelodeons, the writing solo; by associating themselves rag trade, or the scrap metal business. with a prominent director or producer; or If a similar survey were taken in today's by becoming a producer or director them- Hollywood , the economic dynamics The \" Hollywood-as-destroyer\" legend selves. But they needed the protection would be the same. And screenwriters are was constantly being stoked from back of a guild or u~ion. It was a long time still lambasted about their high income East. George Jean Nathan and Edmund commg. and low ethics, and have generally suf- Wilson in particular railed against the film fered a tamished image. The New York industry and popularized the idea that I n 1921 , the Authors Guild and the Dra- playwrights who went to Hollywood pros- matists Guild amalgamated to become Times' Vincent Canby wrote (April 1984): tituted their talents. The whole problem of trying to eam a living in the land of the \"I can't imagine why any person who took heathens and harlots became known as a himself seriously as an artist would pursue \" mal de Hollywood .\" (screenwriting) for more than five min- utes.\" Later in the piece, Canby tartly ob- There was enormous snobbery among served that the amount of money paid for writers as the writer-author, usually from screen scribbles should be sufficient to the East, looked down his nose at the con- cover a host of plaints and lamentations. tract scenarist. One of the most despised producer tricks was the assignment of a \"He's not entirely .wrong,\" responds veteran screenwriter to \"polish\" a high- John Romano. \"The money for screen- stature author's solo effort. \"There are writing is high, as in architecture, so the writers in Hollywood who have never had writer will feel justified even if the 'build- an idea in their lives,\" wrote Raymond ing' isn' t built.\" Chandler, \"and they are a pretty dreary lot of hacks.\" But Romano doesn't otherwise share Canby's views about the lowly nature of The contract writers had some advan- screenwriting, and he particularly de- tages, however. They were not required plores the image of it perperuated by the to do much rewriting, according to Alan media. \"It's pure snobbery. There is a Rifkin , whose 30-year career encom- tendency to think of screenwriting as passed all the studios before he retired in something you can do with one hand while your heart and soul go elsewhere. 1963. \" I remember the onset of Picture Some people still find the novel respect- Snatcher, at Wamer's. Zanuck had seen a able despite the gibberish that gets pub- lished. Screenwriting is a hard form to newspaper headline about a murder trian- master. Even as a literary exercise, it has a gle resulting in the first electrocution of a definite craft appeal (and) as strict a defini- woman, Ruth Snyder. He called a meet- tion as a sonnet or a villanelle.\" ing, during which he told us the storyline, advised the director he'd start shooting in Romano's passionate erudition is at four weeks-which meant we had to have least partially attributable to the Yale the script finished by then-and said the Ph. D. he holds. \"A lot of literary people picture would open at the Hollywood are increasingly working in Hollywood. 38

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Ready (1983), Get Set (1984, '85, '86), Go (1987) producer. Muscle projects zoomed past us at 150 miles while we were chugging along at 30. I f nothing else, the title Hot Pursuit editor Tom Mankiewicz had wamed Fearing a loss of momentum, Lis- ought to instill commercial confidence him that \"as long as there's something berger asked for permission to take the at a studio, yet it took almost four years deemed wrong with the script, it will be property elsewhere, which Wamer's for filmmaker Steve (Tron) Lisberger to sent back.\" After two major rewrites and granted. Virtually his first stop was RKO bring his light-hearted Caribbean chase ten revisions per draft, Lisberger got a Pictures, which had recently retumed to adventure from the idea stage into the- go. film production. ''They were looking for aters-an average length of time by to- \"Progress is very deceptive during de- a script ready to be filmed and gave an day's standards. velopment. It's always a case of good immediate affirmative. Then pure pa- Initiated at Disney in 1983 with a 30- news/bad news. The great euphemistic perwork ate up another four months.\" page treatment, Hot Pursuit stumbled phrase is, 'You'll know Monday mom- The final negotiations included tum- when its first screenwriter presented his ing,\" but there is no momentous Mon- around costs to both Disney and Wam- version of Lisberger's yam. Disney ex- day. About 11 :30 you get a call to fIX er's of roughly $300 thousand. With John ecutives cooled, and Lisberger decided something else. When I finally got an Cusack and Robert Loggia heading the he'd write his own screenplay--else- okay, it seemed anticlimactic.\" cast, Lisberger finally began filming in where. By mid-1984, the project had a Now Lisberger had a script but no September of 1986. Not surprisingly, new home at Wamer Brothers. star. When both Michael J. Fox and An- Lisberger says, \"It's still every writer's The next 14 months were \"frustrating thony Michael Hall passed, Wamer's dream to send a script out on Friday and but very professional,\" as he was pressed put the project on hold. \"We didn't have get a green light the following Monday.\" to make endless revisions. Wamer story enough muscle-a big star or a powerful -LEONARD KLADY This is a medium of expression powered originality.\" hood depends on that method.\" by the times we live in. If Byron were alive Authorship has become increasingly Writers defend themselves by saying today, he'd be making films instead of writing poetry.\" complex during the development era, theywouldn'twork if they made too much with the majority of produced screenplays of a fuss, and that the sudden studio ardor If Byron were alive today, he'd have to arbitrated by the WGAW. Arbitration is the moment a writer gets warm encour- be making films just to pay the rent, ac- automatic if a producer's or director's ages them to make as many multiple deals cording to Terry Curtis Fox. \"It's a known name is listed among the writing credits as possible. \"Unlike studio executives fact that the majority of serious plays on submitted by the signatory; it may be in- who are trained to eviscerate others, many Broadway proceed with waived royalties voked by the challenge of any individual writers write because they tend to be re- by the writer. Today, playwrights teach or who contributed to the screenplay and is clusive by nature,\" says Fox. \"In Holly- live on grant money, or subsidize their not appropriately credited. Often, dis- wood they know they're powerless, so playwrighting with TV and film work. It's putes are bitter. they play the role. When Robert Towne, like being a poet. Those are the terms.\" who is famous for standing up for himself, Fox and Romano are both presently on Dale Launer's second screenplay, loses Greystoke ... loses Two Jakes, it the staff of Hill Street Blues-a means of Blind Date, was rewritten by three peo- goes through the writing community like seeing their work come alive, of hearing ple, including Blake Edwards, who also lightning. \" their characters talk to them. directed it and vigorously sought co-au- thorship credit. Nonetheless, Launer was \"Copyright is a critical issue and control And so the circle is complete, from the awarded sole screen credit by the Guild. a buming issue,\" acknowledges WGAW's Twenties to the present: writers who \"I wrote a dynamic arbitration statement, Sweeney, \"though the issue of control would prefer to work in other media, such and the structure and characters were still has, finally, never been a strike issue. And as drama, are by necessity forced to write mine,\" he explains. He was not the first the Alliance of Motion Picture Producers for the screen, which implies compro- writer to say that in today's market, the knows that. Economic issues are strike mise. There is no such thing today as a writer spends as much time arguing as issues. \" contract writer, so those people who prefer writi!1g: Ben Hecht said the same thing 50 to use screenwriting as their primary years ago. Perhaps writers need to re-evaluate means of self-expression struggle equally. their priorities with regard to the forces But perhaps writers are not arguing that so intimately affect their lives, from Lamentably, screenwriters may never enough. Numerous executives called creative control and copyright to the work- own the copyright to their works, as do them \"pussycats\" who won't stand up for ing rules of the movie game. Though the playwrights. The Writers Guild of Amer- their work in story conferences. Others Writers Guild maintains a dialogue with fi- ica has negotiated a \"separation of rights\" said the screenwriting community is in- nancial entities, producers, and studios, it clause, which gives an original writer some fected by a take-the-money-and-run men- must have its members' backing. \"You control over the fate of his/her work. After tality, and everyone said that most screen- don't get hurt as badly ifyou have passion; five years, the writer may reacquire it, un- plays are just plain bad. \"The present it protects you, to believe in something,\" less it is in active development. There are system doesn't do a good job of repairing says David Z. Goodman, who also cites a two big catches to this clause: A) who had screenplays, but most of them do need re- proverb from Emerson's notebook: the original idea; and B) the definition of pair,\" says Harry Chotner. \"Writers early \"Need breaks iron.\" ~ \"active development.\" \"Studios are at on intemalize commercial values, writing great risk about original work,\" notes what they think executives and audiences Much of the material for 'his anicle 011 past Hollywood pracrices WGAW spokesman Martin Sweeney. want. The whole system whereby movies comes from Richard Fine's HoIIY\\\\lXld and the Profession of Au[hor· ''The system is not geared to encourage get made is wasteful and just terrible, and ship (U.M.l. Research Press, Ann Arbor, 1985). an invaluable source yet there are so many people whose liveli- book.- B.W 40

The Minors: The Bingo Long Traveling All-StarInd . . by Daniel M. Kimmel I n his popular film Difficult Custom- John Cleese in Decisions, Decisions. ers, John Cleese plays a salesman who finds it tough to clinch a deal because One of the first American films to break \"IfI was a salesman, I'd compare myself he has contempt for his client's stupidity. the mold and one of the single most to a quarterback looking for a receiver.\" When one prospect moans that he can't popular training films of all time remains All the while Lombardi is being shot to make a decision about buying Cleese's Second Effort, a 1967 black-and-white emphasize his all-encompassing patemal- line of computers because \"We've never movie featuring the late Green Bay Pack- ism. Shot from a low angle, The Coach had it before,\" Cleese explodes. \"We'd ers coach Vince Lombardi. It was used by tells the hapless salesman that to succeed never sell anything to anybody if nobody over a thousand companies last year. he will need to hunker down and do what bought anything they hadn't bought be- is necessary: \"It is Spartanism with its fore, \". he screams. \"Mankind never Commenting on its longevity, Clark qualities of sacrifice and self-denial, but would have adopted the wheel: 'Oooh, Fetridge, president of Dartnell Corp., the more than that .. . it is the perfectly disci- don't want one of those nasty round film's distributor, says it's \"sort of like plined will.\" things. It's too risky!'\" The audience Gone with the Wind.\" Actually, the film laughs, but the unseen narrator (Ian plays more like Triumph ofthe Will. After At film's end, The Coach gives Masak a Holm) has other things on his mind, and opening with \"Filmed on location in souvenir football and sends him off to he helps Cleese modify his behavior to Green Bay, Wisconsin,\" we see a sales- tackle the world. Masak starts to leave but make that sale. man (Ron Masak) being brushed off by then retums to \"close a sale\" with The Coach Lombardi. Masak gets up to leave, Coach. The film ends with Lombardi Ifyou're a fan ofCleese, best known for but Lombardi chides him for giving up too beaming at his apt pupil. his film and television work in Monty easily. Clearly, this is a man who needs Python's Flying Circus, you may not have lessons in motivation from The Coach. David R. Hayes, who wrote and pro- seen Difficult Customers. It's more likely to have played at your office than at your \"Ron, do you like football?\" asks Lom- duced Second Effort, cheerfully admits local multiplex. Difficult Customers is one bardi. that \"the film is propaganda\" but carefully of several dozen films from Video Arts, an notes that \"it's directed at a particular au- English company that makes manage- \"You better believe it,\" Masak enthu- dience\"-salesmen. Hayes estimates that ment training films: movies and videos for siastically replies. some 40 million people have seen the use in business. Cleese is one of the part- film, which has been dubbed in several ners in the company, and he stars in many With that they're off and running, as languages and shown in Europe and Ja- of the films. Lombardi takes him into the stadium, pan. onto the field, and into the locker room Last winter Cleese appeared before while teaching him that the state of \"men- Football, in fact, has proved to be one of several hundred businessmen and person- tal toughness\" is necessary in both football the most durable genres of business films. nel trainers at Boston's Park Plaza Hotel to and sales. For those who have trouble fol- NFL Video distributes several motiva- announce the latest British invasion. The lowing the metaphor, Lombardi makes it tional films, including Playing to Win, 13-year-old Video Arts was opening up a explicit: \"The salesman who controls the with Fran Tarkenton reminiscing about Chicago office and going after the Ameri- sales ball controls the sale.\" his days on the gridiron. Dick Butkus and can training-film market. Bubba Smith have a film featuring a song One of Lombardi's players drops by that urges, \"Don't fumble the sale.\" And, \"When we first came in we looked at a and also has some thoughts on the subject: number (of films) and felt that the Ameri- can ones have all the knowledge and the expertise, but some of them were the dumbest films I've ever seen,\" recalled Cleese. \"There was a particular guy, whose name I've forgotten, who used to sit and drone at the camera for 25 minutes. Although he knew everything, he was the most unwatchable, boring thing I've ever seen in my life. \" That, in fact, is the image most people have of business training films: dry lecturing or stilted acting, poor production values, and the heavy-handed driving home of obvious points about \"how to make that sale.\" 41 /

in a sequel to the Lombardi film called Rlther Knows Best and Dennis, the Men- sweaty T-shirt. (\"Push the button, pull the lever, check the reading.\") We see (what else?) Second Effort, II, salesman ace, started making industrial films and him only in a tight head shot as he com- Ron Masak is now a sales manager who TV commercials in the early Sixties. plains about his job while continuing his task. It's not what they teach in business passes on The Coach's philosophy to a Then, she recalled, \"When Second Ef- school, he laments. \"Job satisfaction?\" he laughs; if it wasn't for \"the pay packet,\" new generation. fort was made, it had an enormous success he'd be out the door in a jiffy. It's at this point the camera pulls back and reveals his and influence in the industry. Industrial \"job\": feeding coins into a slot machine. While many of the films in the field play films weren't getting a lot of attention Jim Henson's Muppets do a series of up to this macho posturing, film- then.\" Muppet Break films that play like Sesame maker Cally Curtis takes an entirely differ- As to Cleese's introduction of comedy Street for the three-piece suit crowd. \"Put yourself in the customer's place,\" is the ent approach. Instead of high-energy per- to the field , Curtis remains skeptical. theme of one short, which shows a felt- covered Muppet salesman paying a sales sonalities like Cleese or Lombardi, her \"You can't get so funny that you forget call on a gorilla, proceeding to get in the cage with him. Break films, in fact, need films feature such non-threatening people they' re training films. \" On the other hand, not be business related at all, and they may sometimes be produced with differ- as Tom Bosley, Meridith Baxter Birney, she adds, \"The Cleese films have made a ent purposes in mind. The catalogue for Resource Presentations, an independent Burgess Meredith, and June Lockhart. lot of people think more of humor.\" distributor of business films, also includes several shorts produced by the National You is a four-minute film narrated by Leon Gold, president of Roundtable Film Board of Canada, as well as Claude Lelouch's Rendezvous, featuring a point- William Schallert. We see a baby playing Films, who once edited TV's I Love Lucy of-view shot from his Ferrari as he races through the streets of Paris. in a living room, looking at toys and furni- and Death Valley Days, also belittles Vid- In the talking heads category, there's ture and telephones, while Schallert asks eo Arts' impact. \"John Cleese does com- everyone from Walter Cronkite to Dr. Kenneth (One Minute Manager) Blan- us to recapture the curiosity and zest for edy-what else? If you take a survey, as chard droning on about various business subjects. Cronkite, at least, is backed up life of infancy. we have, and ask, 'Do you want com- by some splashy graphics as well as clips from CBS News. Blanchard comes across Another Curtis production, The Time edies?', they say, 'No.' They want con- like the mousy Mr. Petersen on the old Bob Newhart Show as he relates the les- of Your Life, is based on Alan Lakein's tent and realism.\" sons of his book. Other speakers are more dynamic. Tom Peters is lively, in a revised How to Get Control of Your Time and He also prefers the low-key approach. version of his television special, discussing case histories from his book, A Passion for Your Life. It was first made in 1974 with H is films, like More than Money , are tight Excellence. James Whitmore and the ever-present little dramas. \"What we try to do,\" says Dr. Morris Massey, on the other hand, is a downright spellbinder. Massey stands Ron Masak. Whitmore, literally stepping Gold, \"is develop a story that has a mes- in front of a white board with a Magic Marker for two and a half hours in What out of the pages ofa giant copy of Lakein's sage-that has an impact on both knowl- You Are Is . . . ,as he instructs viewers to become aware of their own shortcomings book, offers time-management advice; edge skills and behavior. We try to do it and make changes in their lives. At one point, in discussing prejudice, he an- Masak is again the willing student. He with a minimum of narration or didactic nounces, \"I'm a bigot,\" explaining that he's a product of his growing up in Waco, gets to be more assertive here than he was exposition. We try to get it through the life Texas. The bigot who refuses to change, we're told, is simply cutting his own throat with Coach Lombardi, although, in the of a character-on an emotional basis as by forfeiting part of the marketplace. end, he still learns his lesson. well as an intellectual.\" Massey speaks at high speed, and there's a certain irony in hearing him talk The Time of Your Life film proved so In More than Money (1967), an em- about \"prime time religion\" when his pre- sentation sounds exactly like one of those successful that Curtis despaired when it ployee has problems with his boss' glad- video evangelists. New England Tele- phone uses his tapes in meetings with em- began to look dated . Business films have handing-but-ineffective style of leader- ployees, who nearly always ask to see the film, in its entirety, again. long shelf lives, and a successful training ship and considers his position \"just a Technically, the more recent films look film can literally run for years. In the case job.\" At the end of the film, he quits. of The Time of Your Life, the fashions When Gold remade it in 1984, he decided and the mix of representative business to be more sophisticated. people in the film marked the film as We first meet the personnel director (a \"old.\" In 1985 Curtis remade the film us- woman), who asks, \"What would you do ing a virtually identical script, often going to give your people something to work for shot for shot with the original. The differ- that's more than the money?\" In flash- ences are revealing. back, she then relates the story of the first The film opens with a montage worthy film (completely reshot), as Ken, instead of Vorkapich, as we are introduced to the of quitting the company, transfers to an- theme of not having enough time in the other department for a more challenging day to get everything done. Usually a big job. Gold feels this allows viewers to feel laugh is reserved for the man who, in frus- \"more participative,\" as they share the tration at the constant interruptions, viewpoint of the personnel director in throws his telephone into a wastepaper solving the problem rather than that of the basket. In the new version there are more disgruntled employee or poor manageL women and minorities (now a woman dis- Bposes of the phone), and the aging execu-eyond such mini-dramas lie two of the oddest genres in the field: \"break tive worrying whether he's delegating enough to his subordinates has actually films\" and \"talking head\" films. Break grown younger, going from 52 to 46. films are shorts, generally comic, which \"Today,\" says Curtis, \"there's a lot of are used to open or close meetings and women salespeople. You have to be sure sometimes to kick off discussions. Oddly, you go to the entire audience. Motivation Cleese's Video Arts has only one break has grown up in many ways. I just feel it film in its catalogue, but it's vintage should be low key. That isn't the style of Cleese. the 'Go get'em, Charlie' films.\" In Why Do People Work?, Cleese Curtis, who once wrote for the TV series plays a laborer, toiling at his task in his 42

slicker, and for good reason. \"Our bud- history. Ann Boland, general manager for Video gets now have gone up incredibly,\" says As Montgomery, he's supposed to Ieam Arts' American office, says that the C1eese Roundtable's Gold. \"Something that films are \"doing very well in the American about establishing the scope of one's au- market\" and that there are no plans to re- used to cost under$10,OOO now costs close thority. He overreaches himself by an- make or dub the films with American rath- to $100,000. In general, the films had a nouncing that the British troops will be at- er than English accents. Should any re- more static look than they do now. That's tacking the French. Further, they are like- dubbing be done at all, says Boland, it because we shot them in one day. Now we ly to succeed, since the French are allies, would be done in \"BBC English,\" so that do it in three.\" Adds Dartnell's Fetridge, and thus the British will retain the ele- the British flavor of the films, seen as a \"Today's generation of salespeople grew ment of sUlprise. At the end of he film, a selling point, would not be lost. up with TV and expect good entertain- wiser Cleese goes home and promises to ment values.\" Along with Video Arts, Fe- make a fresh start the next day. Then, Clearly these films, made primarily to tridge beljeves that comedy is the coming after the closing credits, the historical fig- educate people about the likes of custom- thing. \"People say, 'We like humor in ures come out of hiding in Cleese's office er service, employee evaluations, and training. Humor sells better than non-hu- and reveal themselves to be the co-work- salesmanship, will remain little noted or mor., \" ers driven crazy by his mismanagement. studied in academia. Except for the camp But Hayes, who wrote Second Effort, is A more recent Cleese-starrer, called value of something like Second Effort, more reserved: \"My guess is that C1eese More Bloody Meetings, shows him and the intentionally entertaining works will only be accepted by buyers who like of Cleese and some of his competitors, knocked out by an anesthetic at the den- these films are of little interest to those Monty Python. But it will let us do one or who are not part of their intended audi- Second Effort. ences. It would be a mistake, however, to two comedies over the next few years.\" tist's office. When he comes to, he is dismiss them from scrutiny altogether. While Hayes, Curtis, Gold, and their col- strapped to his chair while the dentist, leagues are comfortable about remaining now a menacing inquisitor, forces him to Second Effort has proven to be a con- in the netherworld of business films (\"If! sign confessions that he failed to properly say at a cocktail party that I make training run an office meeting. Should Cleese tinual money-maker not only for Hayes films ,\" says Curtis, \"they think it's Army prove recalcitrant, the dentist's hulking as- and Dartnell but for the heirs of the Lom- films\"), others look at the experience as an sistant, Bonzo, will be happy to apply ad- bardi estate as well. (Lombardi told apprenticeship to Hollywood. One of ditional persuasion. Hayes, \"My kids will understand me Hayes' assistants, Douglas Day Stewart, from this film.\") A videotape from CBS/ \"There's a big difference between be- went on to write An Officer and a Gentle- ing serious and being solemn,\" says FOX called On Television: How to Stay man and Thief of Hearts . Cleese. \"There was a bit of resistance for Cool in the Hot Seat offers the (once) dis- the first two or three years to the idea that H ayes, who admits to having an unpro- you could make jokes about a serious busi- turbing idea of one division of CBS duced screenplay or two stashed ness like training. There was not a great away, constantly tries to expand the deal, because in England a man would skewering some business people on 60 boundaries of what's permissible in the rather be told that he was bad driver, or a Minutes while another division is offering world of training films. In 1971 , he made bad lover, or a traitor to his country than to be told that he had no sense of humor.\" to sell them a tape on how they can look The Professionals with Van Johnson and good on the tube. Forrest Tucker; it included several songs Finally, while film critics \"Ooh\" and subsequently cut from the film. Five years \"Aah\" over the careers of independent later he had an emotional fight between a filmmakers like John Sayles and Jim Jar- musch, they' re paying no attention to the husband and wife in The Salesman cut films of Cally Curtis, who's reaching a lot more people. She likes to relate the story from the final print when managers said of what happened to James Whitmore they didn't want to deal with their em- while he was appearing in a Canadian pro- ployees' home life. duction of Long Day's Journey into Which brings us back to Cleese, who Night. has written some of the Video Arts films and is pushing at the edge of how enter- L ate one evening, after his performance taining a business training film can be. in the five-hour-Iong play, he was ac- Several of the Video Arts presentations, costed at dinner by a woman who had just with very slight editing of the academic re- come from the theater. Whitmore, who caps of the points presented, could at least has also soloed as Mark Twain, Will Rog- play the less staid ;m houses. ers, Teddy Roosevelt, and Harry Truman on stage and screen, was amazed when In Decisions, Decisions, Cleese is a she told him that she thought his greatest middle manager who's bollixing up his as- performance was in The Time of Your signment of moving the company's head- Life. \"I'd just knocked myself out for quarters. Late at night he's visited by Brutus, Queen Elizabeth I, Winston hours up there on stage and this charming Churchill, and Field Marshal Montgom- woman raves and raves about a training ery, who show him how his inefficiencv film!\" would have damaged their own great deci'- sions of history. Cleese then assumes each There are, in fact, people who prefer of their roles (keeping his mustache even as the Queen) as he works his way through Dynasty to The Rules of the Game. ® great moments in decision-making This article would not have been possible wirhoUl the generous co- operation of Hara Ann Bouganim of Resource Presentations, Bos- ton, who provided background informanon and arranged for the screenings ofmany ofthe films mentioned herein. 43

The Home Team: fishing video), The Joy of Stocks, Olym- tape. There, on top of his VCR, he noticed ,'I by Marc Mancini pia, The Louvre, and Waves, 60 minutes a book. \"Suddenly I said, \"There, that's ' II listen to anyone with a good. idea.\" of shore breakers-nothing else. It's as if it, this is the Goddam Book of the Future, \"You never know when some- one with an interesting concept will come surrealist list-making had sneaked into the a video book!' \" along.\" electronic age. Hamessing his considerable entrepre- \"My door is always open.\" Who says things like that? Can't be In the minds of many traditionalists, neurial and publishing skills, Karl created movie studio execs. They're the ones who send your script back, stamped \"RE- moreover, this palmy subdivision of home Video Store, a new magazine for a fledg- T URNED, UNOPENED.\" Can't be the 'TV honchos either. They keep their doors video is being plotted out by opportunists ling industry. Next came a few \"how-to\" open all right-to Stephen Cannell and Michael Mann. and targeted for drones. That Rosanna Ar- videos that he distributed himself. The But home video executives talk that way and even mean it. Unlike their fea- quette watches a cooking video while first big break came, though, in 1979 at a ture or network counterparts, they still boast of their openness and accessibility, putzing around Desperately Seeking Su- consumer electronic show, when the che- freely and often. It's a luxury they can af- ford , since home video has yet to ossify via san's yuppie kitchen neatly sums up what rubic ex-surfer met Arthur Morowitz, an idea-stifling arrogance or an old-boy net- work. And no longer are home video execs the mainstream thinks. But before you ex-pom marketeer tumed owner of a anyone's poor cousins. Their responsibil- ities have largely shifted from simply ac- underreckon home video's potential, con- growing chain of video stores, Video quiring film cassette rights to that new, impetuous subcategory of home video: sider the following: Shack, which he formed in part to sell X- special interest programming. Actually, not everyone agrees that Already, the VCR is a routine home ap- rated tapes to the home. \"There's more to \"special interest\" is the right phrase. \"Non-fiction,\" \"non-theatrical,\" \"alter- pliance of entertainment-65 percent of home video than movies,\" argued Karl. nate programming\"-industry mavens have used all these terms at one time or all homes have one (by 1995 it'll be 85 per- He must have been persuasive. Within a another to define a grab bag of how-to's, music videos, comedy concerts, trave- cent). To sustain them there are now near- day Morowitz had ordered $10,000 worth logues, compilation films, and all manner of miscellaneous stuff, some fine, some ly five video retailing locations per urban of product. awful. Not a few video stores even shelve special interest titles under DOCUMEN- square mile. In 1986 these outlets, along The next breakthrough came a year lat- TARY, though How to Pass the Postal Exam sitting next to thedassic Night Mail with mail order services, rented or sold er. Karl's wife suggested that the top sell- would make John Grierson tum in his grave. Several stores and catalogues give over $6 billion of prerecorded video tapes. ingexercise book, Jane Fonda's Workout, up altogether. They simply label them OTHER. Significantly, that's a sum greater than the be adapted to video. Karl began to stack And to browse through those (others) in a video catalogue or well-stocked store is boxoffice take of all movie theaters in the cards in his favor: he talked RCA into an equally unsettling experience: You and Your Horse, 1986 Bridal Fashions, America combined. By 1995, that figure sharing production costs and maneuvered the Kirov's version of Giselle, Gumby's Summer, Playboy Centerfolds, Victory at could swell to $20 billion. himself into the Tom Hayden-Jane Sea, Successful Gold Dredging, PD.Q. Bach's The Abduction of Figaro, The But surely most of these statistics repre- Fonda circle. Some have accused Karl of Baking Bread Series, Elk Calling, Chick Corea in Concert, Yes You Can Micro- sent action from features, not non-theatri- manipulating the whole scenario, but it wave, Giant Blacks and Great Whites (a cals. Think again. In 1981, special interest seems that Karl's politics and plans inter- 44 titles accounted for only 3 percent of the twined quite neatly with those of Fonda. market. Today it's 22 percent. By 1993, if The sell was easy. Karl ran with it; in the Wilkofsky-Gruen Associates, a New process he produced home video's biggest York-based business analysis firm, is cor- hit, made himself a multimillionaire, and rect, they will fully dominate 60 percent of founded a company that leapfrogged the the market. Further, people won't be Hollywood majors to become the field's renting, they'll be buying, at vastly dis- preeminent organization. In 1984 Lorimar counted prices: in 1985 the industry sold bought Karl out; the company is now 22 million prerecorded cassettes to con- called Karl-Lorimar, but Karl is still presi- sumers; by 1995, the experts tell us, that dent. figure will explode to 700 million, largely Bdue to special interest tapes. efore Stuart Karl's pioneering deals, That's good news for no-name film- the home video picture was a fuzzy makers who know that creative opportuni- one indeed. The first Betamax, displayed ties are most available when an industry in 1975 at a price of $2000, seemed a toy has yet to settle in, and extremely good for for the rich. Time-Life, nonetheless, was open-door executives who still choose fre- ready to help them play, selling titles from quently but need beg no more. its vast educational library as early as Feb- ruary 1976. Only modest sales resulted. Every new field needs an avatar, a figure However, a creative jolt shook the indus- around which the ambitious, the try from the most unexpected source: ex- dreamers, and the intrigued can rally. For Monkee Michael Nesmith. His Elephant home video, that figure has to be Stuart Parts music-comedy video-which every Karl. Former waterbed salesman, then studio had passed on--came directly to publisher of Spa and Sauna, the now 33- video stores, a finished, made-for-VCR year-old Karl claims to have had his Eure- product. Ten years later it's still the arche- ka! moment while watching a M*A *S*H typal story, an end-run on the entertain- *Special Interest Programming

ment establishment, an inventive, pol- tract negotiations pivoted on tape-sale re- fice convinced her that there was a real op- ished work that prospered in an unfamiliar siduals. portunity to establish a niche in this Baby medium. (Tellingly, Nesmith's effons to Huey of an industry. She chose catalogue transplant the same format to network All this attention on feature films, how- sales. Already, after two years of oper- television produced a feeble, unfunny, ever, has temporarily masked the real face ation , she has been forced to move to.new, soon-canceled series.) of success in home video: special interest more spacious offices-twice. titles. Maybe Jane Fonda's Workout Meanwhile, 20th Century-Fox li- Tape was a fluke, grossing $16 million. So when Barbara Greenleafwarns that a censed about 50 quality feature titles to But what of The Compleat Beatles, a ma- lot of home video doors are closing, you the few video outlets that had started to fill jor success, of all things? Or The Making had better listen. \"For distributors like America's vacant store fronts (up to then of Michael Jackson's Thriller, which has me, there are probably many avenues yet their inventories had been composed sold nearly a million copies and helped to be explored. But I'm afraid for the idea mostly of stale public domain titles and catapult Vestron to a major producing po- people. With 7000 titles out there and 400 \"adult\" films). To everyone's surprise, sition? And now the vertiginous statistics, new ones every month, the market is be- Fox and Columbia both hurried into the the giddy projections, the executives with coming glutted in many conceptual areas. market. Fotomat, in an ill-conceived but open doors and minds, the filmmakers In a way it's good, since it will force film- influential scheme, began in 1978 to rent who share Stuart Karl's hope that we are makers to think creatively. But at the (and also sell) these new studio-supplied \"witnessing the birth of a whole new cre- same time, the volume of product of iden- tapes through its cramped 3400 yellow and ative medium\"? Is this for real? And how tifiable successful strategies is leading the blue huts. Soon, major record store chains long can it last? industry into patterns of thinking that devoted substantial browsing space to could stifle the freewheeling creativity videophiles. Their success marked the I t's a library-study like many others, all that this business is all about.\" birth of the full-blown retailing phenom- wood and shelves and fine prints on the enon that we know today. wall. It's collection is eclectic and unwa- Steve Bornstein , senior vice-president veringly upbeat: Play Your Best Tennis, of programming at Karl-Lorimar, agrees Since then certain guidepost events Speed Reading, Career Strategies, You with Greenleaf that the industry's \"open- have routed the industry down unex- Can Win. Yet there's not a Dutton, Dou- door\" policy may be closing fast: \"A good plored but ultimately desirable paths. bleday, or Simon & Schuster title to be idea is no longer enough. It used to be nice Magnetic Video sent out its Nine to Five found. Here the names of the \"publish- to have one person constitute a whole ac- tape less than two months after the mov- ers\" are MCA, Vestron, CBs-Fox. And quisitions department. Decisions could ie's theatrical debut. The film's success in here, professional and confident in her be made quickly, every producer could be both markets suggested that, rather than electronic library, Barbara Greenleaf given a fair amount of time. The flood of blunt a movie's theatrical run, releasing a smiles from the full-color cover of her new proposals has grown, yet the acquisitions feature on tape in fact enables it to reach 68-page Greenleaf Video catalogue. departments at most companies have not. an even wider audience. Paramount's re- People can still walk in to us, but they bet- lease of Star Trek 2 and Raiders of the Two years ago there was no catalogue, ter have very clear-cut ideas about what Lost Ark at $39.95 (less than half the typi- no Greenleaf Video, no video-champion they want to do. Those proposals that re- cal feature price of that time) proved that named Barbara Greenleaf. There was quire the least attention to make happen lower prices could heat up demand suffi- only a Vassar-educated historian and writ- are the ones that get our immediate atten- ciently to enhance profits even more. er who specialized in setting up video con- tion. \" With that price slide continuing, no won- ferences for a satellite company. Browsing der the Screen Actors' Guild's recent con- through trade publications around the of- Is home video, then, moving toward that nasty, notorious game that major stu- / dios have played for several years now, the

two-sentence pitch? \"I hope that it won't camera, then really figure it out after Not surprisingly, home video corpora- come to that in our field for a while,\" says you've watched The World's Greatest tions like the idea. It's an easy way to link a Rick Hauser, executive producer for Para- Photography Course. Try applying the title to a respected name, to convert it into mount Home Video. \" But I do feel that words and pictures of The lane Fonda a \"pre-sold\" property. Above all, it en- videos need to find their own mode of Workout book to your own exercise, then ables them to dodge the risk of funding communicating soon, one that is probably truly get in shape by doing it along with those filmmakers who have genuinely very different from that of the theatrical the video. On the other hand, there are great ideas but little else. For now spon- motion picture or even network program- other topics that are better suited to print. sorship is the hottest notion in special in- ming. What I look for is a program that's You can flip back and forth through a tax terest video. eclectic, that draws from all sources to preparation book to complete your IRS re- make itself work, that, from a metaphori- tums, but a tax preparation video can wear And what do the filmmakers think cal point of view, has the freedom of out your VCR scan button-even under about all this? Many-especially those di- vaudeville or of the circus.\" the new tax code. rectors, editors, and cinematographers who have toiled in TV commercials for The aesthetic key to successful special A s much as the industry babbles on years-see home video as a way to come interest video, and the one that will open about interactivity, visual potential, up for a breath of comparatively fresh air. the most doors to a production go-ahead, is and even social responsibility, though, it No need to hammer home sex appeal, fear interactivity. An interactive program in- increasingly focuses on the bottom line. A of rejection , or whatever other mani- volves a viewer, hooks him in. \"If a video lattice of sales-driven expectations has al- pulations advertising demands. For that doesn't establish a relationship with a ready started to hem in the medium. matter, asking Benihana to underwrite a viewer,\" argues Hauser, \"then it's not Among the most prominent: Japanese cooking lesson is less compro- taking advantage of the basic interactive • A video shouLd have a ceLebrity. An in- mising than having Columbia Pictures strength of its own medium. \" dustry pundit once said, \"Bring me a vid- lace their feature film lineup with Coke eo hosted by Mickey Mouse and I'll buy bottles. An interactive video is also one that it. Bring me one that stars a gopher and I whips couch potatoes into action: doing won't.\" This argument culled from fea- T here be dragons in this sponsorship leg lifts for Jacki Sorenson , shouting ture filmmaking is an old and frustrating notion, but for now they are indistinct, French phrases back at Jean Rassias, stir- one. Yet special interest video people unthreatening shapes on a distant horiwn: ring stews with Julia Child. It's the sort of seem hell-bent on imitating their network • A video must be repeatable. In retro- response ill-suited to theatrical film and studio counterparts. Nowhere is the spect it seems obvious: customers will buy (Rocky Horror Picture Show may be the philosophy more eamest than at Karl-Lor- tapes that they wish to view many times grand exception) but perfectly natural at imar. Jane Fonda replicates herself across and rent those that bear viewing only home. the Karl-Lorimar spectrum: swim with once. Yet in the late S~venties, the indus- Esther Williams, play football alongside try thought that sales, not rentals, would The networks, in truth , understood Lyle Alzado, let Jose Eber style your hair, dominate, and that most of these would video's interactive potential from the very cook with the Galloping Gounnet. be the sales of features. Not so. Only a few beginning. They took it to its limits with feature titles bear repeated viewing, Winky Dink and You, the Jack Barry- \" I know that a lot of hits Out there have though as prices continue to plummet, hosted Fifties' kidvid that required chil- star tie-ins,\" Barbara Greenleaf concedes, viewers may be more willing to plunk dren to overlay theirTVscreens with trans- \"but there are just as many videos that had down $9.95 for personal cult favorites. parent plastic, then draw items on it which celebrities and bombed. When people the cartoon characters would then use. really want to know something, they don' t But home video people have certainly Winky Dink was so thoroughly channing care which celebrity is onscreen. They do not given up on sales, for they now know an idea that it occasionally inspired the care about the content and, hopefully, the that the public is willing to purchase spe- pee-wees to become too interactive: a few video's professionalism. \" And Stuart Karl cial interest videos, especially those they were known to skip the plastic and mark adds, \"There's more than entertainment will use over and again. This is why the up the tube itself. here. There's infonnation, a cultural revo- business is so drawn to exercise tapes, lution.\" which of their nature require repeated A third sort of interactivity is one that • A video needs a corporate sponsor. playback, or to \"ambience\" tapes-those computers, laser discs , and arcade games Since the average half-hour special inter- minimalist images of video waves, fire- do best: participants choose plot and per- est video costs between $100,000 and places, aquariums, rainstonns, etc.- fonnance. For this the common wisdom is $200,000 to produce, major corporations which repeat themselves like moving-pic- that video recorders are too unwieldy, that see them as a bargain; the typical 30-sec- ture wallpaper. constant fast-forwarding, pausing, or re- ond commercial costs at least four times versing undennines the pleasure one gets that to produce and broadcast once. More- Finally, the most repeatable of all video from shaping a program's flow. But you over, a video, unlike a commercial, homes genres is the children's tape. Studies show never know. CLue, a video game that al- in on the client most likely to use a prod- that a child watches the same video an as- lows a viewer to solve a mystery, VCR re- uct: lazzercise watchers to Jazzercise tonishing 30 times within the first month mote control unit in hand , has become a classes; Berlitz students to Berlitz schools; of purchase, in much the same way as he major hit, with sales approaching 300,000. The Video Bartender's Guide yuppies or she often insists on the same bedtime And it has unleashed a flood of tapes that straight to the products of its sponsor, Mr. story, night after night. Moreover, in a so- challenge the viewer to umpire odd base- Boston. And the sell can be soft: the cor- ciety where TV has gained an irreversible ball plays or identify film classic se- porate name here and there, the product stranglehold on the attention of children, quences. integrated naturally into the video's go- home video retums at least some influ- lOgs-on. ence to the parent. For with home video, A further aesthetic consideration is that parents-not networks--can be the pro- a video should do visually what no other grammers. So, market analysts project medium can do as well. Struggle with the directions booklet to your new 35mm 46

that children's cassettes will outstrip all self. Tulsa's United Entertainment has may undermine the appealing, promising competing categories in sales-for years also produced a video feature, The Rip- notion of made-for-VCR movies and even- to come. per, which bypassed theaters, networks, tually impoverish its potential for thought • A video producer must be practical. and cable to zero in directly on the con- and talent. \"So many people roll their Let's assume you approach CBs-Fox Vid- sumer. It has sold 40,000 copies. And eyes when I talk about this medium's pos- eo with a package: you've convinced Wil- don't think that hasn't set clever minds sibilities,\" sighs Hauser, whose ' own liam \"The Refrigerator\" Perry to host a whirring. Strong Kids, Safe Kids the industry much GE-sponsored video titled Buying Square admires. \"But I'm certain there's still all Appliances. \"Sometimes people come to \"vestron Motion Pictures Pre- sorts of room for creativity, and low-bud- me with an idea or even a finished product sents....\" You may be seeing this get, made-for-VCR features, maybe shot and I wish they had talked to me first,\" on video and then transferred to film .\" says Adriana Shaw, president of Today soon in a theater or drive-in near you if Home Entertainment. \"Producers work Vestron, which has up to now concentrat- There is precedent here. NBC's 1966 on assumptions that don't exist. We know ed on how-to's, comedy concerts, and gamble on made-for-TV features payed off the market and we could help. And if they self-help tapes, has its way. It's an intrigu- with Fame Is the Name of the Game and don't come to us first, they should at least ing if vainglorious twist, one that may Doomsday Flight, which both achieved do some research as to what's selling, how eventually bring the whole home video lofty ratings and European theatrical suc- large their target group is, and how they phenomenon back full circle to feature cess. Ditto for HBO's quality made-for-ca- expect their title to be distributed.\" films. Only this time Vestron wants to call ble features, which have lessened in num- the shots. ber only because slowing subscriptions A video producer must also do a little have flattened cable's profit curve. Says research on the video company itself. Vestron executives have undertaken a one Karl-Lorimar executive, \"It's been Does it favor celebrities like Karl-Lorimar full-scale effort either to buy cheap fea- done before and it can happen again, this does, music or comedy like Vestron, Mo- tures (like the Australian movie Malcolm) time in home video. It's possible, under town-type entertainment like MCA? Is it or to finance movies for theaters, cable, or some circumstances, to make a feature for disinclined to sponsorship deals and pro- for the home video market itself. Karl- $50,000. Sell 2000 copies and you've ducer-generated market analyses, as Dis- Lorimar, the Movie Store, and others are turned a profit. And with the right dis- ney is said to be? The lesson that most also moving along the feature film path. tribution, these days you can sell 2000 videomakers have learned is that a special copies of almost anything.\" interest home video pitch session moves A troubling undercurrent to all this, unpredictably, that development and ac- though, is the de facto assumption, as T he notion of features-for-VCR also has quisitions people favor those who permit a comfy, homespun feel to it, of teams the discussion to wander into new con- Rick Hauser puts it, \"that theatrical fea- of modest cinematic artisans crafting fine cepts that may have less to do with the tures seem somewhere near the Godhead original idea than that ofthe executive and and special interest video somewhere near the organization that they represent. the washerwoman.\" This very prejudice Above all, home video companies ap- Danny Peary IS a film fanatic. After thousands of hours, he plaud resourcefulness. Says Peter Bieler, emerges from the screening rooms and movie houses with president of the Alamance Company, this amazing compendium of fresh, witty essays. Over 1600 \"We all want to know the same thing: Can alphabetized films from every era and genre: Oscar winners, you cut production costs.while maintain- sleepers, cult picks, blockbusters, horror classics, midnight ing quality? I tend now ,to shy away from movies, foreign classics and video smashes. Read his takes projects with extreme budgetary con- on both good and \"bad\" films t every fan should see: straints, though it's always nice to find an from Eraserhead to Coogan's idea that lends itself to low-budget pro- Bluff, Jules and Jim to Pink duction. One thing you always have to rec- Flamingos, Tootsie to Top ognize in this business is that some TV sta- Hat, from Annie Hall to tion cameraman in Iowa may be They Saved Hitler's moonlighting right now on the station's Brain. Peary, best equipment and producing a how-to for known for his Cult $8000.\" Movies 1 and 2 books, has unique slants on Indeed, a great deal of product flows directors, actors, into home video's distribution channels screenplays, plots, from distinctly unexpected sources. themes and great Though they may be distant from Holly- scenes on every wood and New York, and thus cut off from kind of film from the equipment and veteran talent to be the silents to the found there, \"provincial\" video artisans- sensUITounds. with their lower production costs and He's a film sometimes fresh thinking-have added fanatic. Are you? an intriguing spin to the video scene. Min- neapolis' Jim Kartes has become a legend I'IIBSml BOOIS doing precisely this sort of thing. He cre- ates low-budget videos, prices them as Simon & Schuster, Inc. low as $9.95, and distributes them him~ A G I W Company 47

movies that will find their way directly to tions in music videos, is a lesson that se- what remarkable, creative things may electronic cottages. It's a seductive idea, duces and beguiles. It, too, may not be come from there? We're so early in this but one unlikely to occur. If Vestron or very realistic. Can you name the director stage of the game that there's no way to others find themselves with a quality film, of Jane Fonda's Workout? He did, after tell. In the general industry, it's hard to get they'll place it directly in theaters and thus all, create the most influential hit in home people to listen to new ideas. In the video vault themselves quickly into the big video history. If you can't (it's Sidney Ga- marketplace, it's still easy.\" leagues. Only the low-prestige movies will lanty), don't feel bad. Most movie studio trickle down rapidly to video stores. Fur- executives can't identify him either. And Barbara Greenleaf feels those ideas thermore, the chance of home-video could come from anywhere. \"I was at the companies birthing masterpieces is slim. Yet optimism for the long-run future airporr, retuming from a trade show. My Currently, they seek projects with very may not be entirely bogus. A great many 14-year-old was holding a 'GreenleafVid- exploitative elements-schlockbusters, special interest videos are appallingly ama- eo' sign that we had used. She suddenly they call them. That they may be produc- teurish-a cause, certainly, for industry thought she'd be cute and hold it up like disdain but also a sure stimulus for more limo drivers do. Within one minute two separate people came up and told us ideas ing what was once Cannon-fodder, how- adroit work. Whole areas-telemarket- they had for videos. \" ever, seems not to deter anyone. Vestron , ing, impulse buying, crossover to institu- But before you lay aside that great Karl-Lorimar, and others would be most tional sales-remain to be explored. Low- American novel or screenplay you were writing and starr concocting the great happy to imitate Cannon's strategy, even- er prices may permit a far deeper American home video, listen to Rick Hauser: 'The first great lesson I leamed tually plowing quickie profits back into penetration into the marketplace, thus in Hollywood was that whatever your idea is, someone else has probably had it. Your some real quality work. tapping a reservoir of financing fuel that project will come to be only if you hit a confluence of magic ingredients-subject Some filmmakers entertain a more im- really could, during the next decade, pro- matter, timing, social climate, industry ac- cessibility, the condition of the market- probable hope: that some creative home pel home video, as many predict, to the place itself, and, hopefully, your own unique vision. It's a lot to ask for, no mat- video auteur will blast through, early and front-running position among entertain- terwhat the medium is. But ifyou have all these in place, believe me, there is no unexpectedly, creating an unanticipated ment media. Of course, that conjures up more likely place right now than home video to open doors for you.\" feature hit and legitimizing a whole new grossly unsettling thoughts of an entire arristic path, straight to every VCR in generation of homebodies, the collapse of America. Yet the more usual dream is that health spas, adult education, the movie a surprise VCR feature success will serve to theater industry, and civilization as we springboard a producer or director \"up- know it. ward\" into the big time of motion picture But \"I'm intrigued by this 'other' cate- theaters. The eagemess of major studios gory that we see at the bottom of every to back Bob Giraldi, Bill Fishman, and marketing ti.tle list,\" says Peter Bieler. Russell Mulcahy, who made their reputa- \"What are these 'others'? Who knows A HOME VIDEO • Holdback: The length of time a title is fers to an individual cassette title. E.g., LEXICON: \"held back\" from broadcast in a medi- Do It Debbie's Way, a major success, um other than its first targeted one. has sold over 100,000 units. Home video may not have found an adequate name for itself, but it sure has • Initial bum: The time during which a • Video publishing: Adapting a maga- come up with names for just about ev- title sells the fastest, almost always when zine or book to a video format; e.g., the erything else. (Most of them come from first introduced to the home market. Harlequin Romance series, Consumer the vocabulary of marketing.) The fol- The title eventually settles into a lower Digest, etc. lowing is a primer on the language that plateau of sales. the nation's fastest-growing medium HOME VIDEO'S uses. • Price Point: The point at which a title BEST: • Acquisitions: The deparrment of a sells best. Currently, the most common home video company that decides which videocassette price points end in $_9.95 \"Best\" is a relative term in a still im- already-made tapes should be bought figures (e.g., $29.95). Studies show that mature medium. The videos below, and distributed. Distinct from develop- pricing below any given price point (but however, deserve attention for their in- ment, which deals with concepts and above the next lowest price point) hardly ventiveness and ambition. projects not yet executed. affects sales. The one exception: there is almost no difference whether you price • Elephant Parts. Exuberant, witty, and • Direct marketing: Selling tapes at $24.95 or $19.95. refreshing, Michael Nesmith's through magazine ads, catalogues, etc., Grammy-winning video was a seminal directly to the consumer. Has worked • Sell-through: A video title that is sold moment in home video's shorr history. well for non-fiction works, only ade- to the consumer. Most feature film titles quately for features. are sold to retailers with the intention of • Strong Kids, Safe Kids. To many in serving primarily as a rental item and not the field , this is the special interest video • Firstsale doctrine: U.S. copyright laws for sell-through (except later in used con- they wish they had made. Henry permit retailers to rent videocassettes dition). Non-fiction titles, however, Winkler brings commitment and trust to without giving rights holders a share of tend to sell through, either at retailers or . the delicate topic of child abuse. the revenues. Only the \"first sale,\" to a through direct marketing. retailer or directly to a consumer, pro- • Laura MacKenzie's Travel TIps. duces revenue to the tape's creators. • Units: The way the video business re- There are plenty of travel videos on the market, but most are repackaged, self- 48