The aitics said, ''You've gotta see it:' And movie fans exclaimed; ''You're gonna love it:' Now Spike Lee's surprise hit, SHE'S GOnA HAVE IT, (a seriously sexy comedy) is available on videocassette. SHE'S GOnA HAVE IT. And so do you!
•Sl•SSUe published bimonthly by the Fihn Society of Lincoln Center Volume 23, Number 2 March-April 1987 Class Clowns ....... . . . . . . . . . . 11 Sir Alec ........... . ........ . 26 Seems like everyone is going home The man of a thousand faces who again: Rob Reiner, Richard Pryor, never wants to be known as the man and that past master of shmalz, Neil of a thousand faces, Alec Guinness, Simon. But, gripes Armond White, graces the stage at Avery Fisher Hall either they don't perceive or remem- as this year's Film Society of Lincoln ber it well. Not like Woody Allen's Center honoree. David Thomson Radio Days, a funny tum away from appreciates this gray ghost, who vis- ~ the inflated seriousness ofManhanan its, dazzles, and eludes. Interiors etc. to the pop truth of the Rockaways, or Robert Townsend's Midsection: Heaven... Hollywood Shuffle, a manic debut that limns assimilation and its discon- Here goes the line between church and stage. Mainstream films have tents. pictured The Hereafter as a sleepaway camp, wings and attitudes Tempe Fugitives..... adjusted to fit. But Lo!, along comes Diane Keaton, who tells Marlaine Are they cinema con men in space? Glicksman why she believes in No, they're the Coens in Tempe, Heaven, her docu-cum-twilight zone Arizona, f0110wing up their smarty- talk show and film vault (page 32). pants debut film, Blood Simple, with Next, Jimmy McDonough un- Raising Arizona. It's about uh ... earths a family of backwoods film- crooks in a custody fight? Dumb hab- makers who emerged from a plane its die hard? The silliness of everyone crash to make drive-in films for God in America? Yep. And along the way, (page 38). Then there is the Gospel the Coens carom off the walls of according to Joe Bob Briggs, who genre conventions, winking like says DeMille's idea of God was a crazy. Jack Barth tells how, shot by knockoff ofjimmy Hoffa (page 51). shot. Also in this issue: Stephen Frears of Grit Britain... 15 TV: Home Shopping Club.... 70 Bloke looks Britain in the eye and pokes Come on Down! Naw, stay there in your Oscar-toon.................. 2 it with sharp movies: Gumshoe, My ratty old robe, call the Home Shopping Forward, march! Our battalion of ex· Beautiful Laundrene, and now Prick Up Club number on your screen, and get an perts (Ansen, Byron, Gigliotti, Harmetz, Your Ears, about Joe Orton. Hard man is electronic flea collar for your cat or cat- Jacobson, Kehr, Kilday, Mathews, Sar· good to find and all that, Harlan Kenne- equivalent. Mike Wilkins has the scoop. ris, Schickel, Schiff, and Thompson) dy concludes. For only $2.95! Hurry! have seen the Academy and they is us. As Oscar time approaches, this bunch Frankly Funny............. 59 Orbits: Carlos Clarens ....... 75 hangs together, few desertions. Mel Frank, veteran funnyman from the Mary Corliss recalls her colleague, col- Forties, has either co-written, produced laborator, and friend of 20 years, Carlos Journals.................... 4 or directed it all. He tells Jonathan Ben- Clarens, who could charm the silver out Park City, Utah, site of the U.S. Film air how he's come to Walk Like A Man. of nitrate. Festival, the skiing-est spool-a-thon any- where. John Powers went and reports 12th Annual Grosses Gloss ... 62 1986 FILM COMMENT INDEX. 76 the moguls didn't think the talent had After a dead start, the biz rolled up the edge. Len Klady profiles the comeback second highest dollar numbers ever. But Back Page: Quiz #24 ........ 80 of cinematographer Conrad Hall. And ticket sales were flat. As in network TV, Andrew Horton visited the bayou set of the majors are watching their market Cover photo: 20th Century-Fox. Schlondorffs A Gathering ofOld Men. share slip. Anne Thompson dopes out '86's payout. Co-Editors: Harlan Jacobson, Richard Corliss. Assistant Editor: Marlaine Glicksman. An Director and Cover Design: Elliot Schulman. Advenising 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: De borah Freedman. Controller: Domingo Homilla, Jr. Editorial Intern: Gavin Smith. 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 pan by suppon from the New York State Council on the Am and the National Endowment for the Am. This publication is fully protected by domestic and international copyright. Subscription rates in the United States: $14.95 for6 numbers, $26.95 for 12 numbers. Elsewhere, $37 for6 numbers, $70 for 12 numbers, payable in U.S . funds only. New subscribers should include their occupations and zip codes. Distributed by Eastern News Distributors, Sandwsky OH 44870. FILM COMM ENT (ISSN 0015-119X) is published bimonthly by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, 140 W. 65th St. , New York NY 10023. Second-<:Iass postage paid at New York NY and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: send address changes to FILM COMME NT, 140 W. 65th St. , New York NY 10023.
Looney Platoons and Marlee Maladies Platoon stands out among its competitors for the Motion Pic- ture Academy's top Oscar like the Ancient Mariner at a Victorian tea. The other four contenders are the sort of refeened entertain- ments that cop nominations and, sometimes, awards; and only one, The Mission, cost more than $8 million. Platoon is an experi- ence that leaves grown men shaking and sobbing in their seats. And though Platoon had only a$6-million budget, it should satis- fy the Academy's size freaks, the ones who insist on Big films for big prizes. Our twelve-member jury votes unanimously for Pla- toon, and for Oliver Stone as best director. Our swamis also bet heavily on Paul Newman to win his first Oscar in seven tries (\"How many times can the Academy insult him by depriving him of an Oscar?\" asks A1jean Harmetz); on newcomer Marlee Matlin to take Best Actress (it's irresistible- like Harold Russell playing Johnny Belinda); on Dianne Wiest to accept a consolation prize for Woody Allen; on Dennis Hop- per to win this year's citation for Emotional Reclamation Project; and on some Brat Packer to have fun mispronouncing Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's name as he hands her a screenplay statuette. This alternate juror still likes Kathleen Turner, and counts on a heavy write-in vote for The Fly as best picture. The winners will be announced on March 30. -R.C. BEST PICTURE BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR BEST ORIGINAL Children ofA Lesser God (Paramount) Tom Berenger, Platoon OA, JM SCREENPLAY Hannah and Her Sisters (Orion) Michael Caine, Hannah and Her Sisters Woody Allen, Hannah and Her Sisters The Mission (Warners) Platoon (Orion) ALL 12 AH, RS OG, AH, OK, JM , SS, AT A Room with A View (Cinecom) Willem Dafoe, Platoon Paul Hogan, Ken Shadie, John Cornell, Denholm Elliott, A Room with A View BEST DIRECTOR Dennis Hopper, Hoosiers SB, OG, HJ, Crocodile Dundee Woody Allen, Hannah and Her Sisters Hanif Kureishi, My Beautiful Laundrette James Ivory, A Room with A View OK, GK, AS, SS, AT Oliver Stone, Platoon OA, SB, HJ, GK, Roland Joffe, The Mission David Lynch, Blue Velvet BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS AS, RS Oliver Stone, Platoon ALL 12 Tess Harper, Crimes ofthe Heart Oliver Stone, Richard Boyles, Salvador Piper Laurie, Children ofA Lesser God BEST ACTOR BEST ADAPTED Dexter Gordon, Round Midnight OK, RS SCREENPLAY Bob Hoskins, Mona Lisa Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, The Color Hesper Anderson and Mark Medoff, Chil- William Hurt, Children ofA Lesser God Paul Newman, The Color ofMoney ofMoney dren ofa Lesser God SS Maggie Smith, A Room with A View Bruce A. Evans and Raynold Gideon, ALL 12 Dianne Wiest, Hannah and Her Sisters .StandBy Me James Woods, Salvador Beth Henley, Crimes ofthe Heart OA, SB, OG, AH , HJ, GK, JM , AS, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, A Room with A BEST ACTRESS SS, AT Jane Fonda, The Morning After View OA, SB, OG, AH, Hj, OK: GK, Marlee Matlin, Children ofA Lesser God BEST FOREIGN FILM* JM , AS, RS, AT The Assault (Holland) OA, GK, RS Richard Price, The Color ofMoney OA, AH , HJ, OK, GK, JM , AS, RS, Betty Blue (France) SS, AT The Decline ofthe American Empire BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY Sissy Spacek, Crimes ofthe Heart SB, OJ Jordan Cronenweth, Peggy Sue Got Kathleen Turner, (Canada) AH , HJ, JM, AS, SS Peggy Sue Got Married RC My Sweet Little Village (Czechoslovakia) Married Sigourney Weaver, Aliens Chris Menges, The Mission SB, OG, HJ, OK, AT 38 (Austria) OG OK, GK, JM, RS, SS, AT Don Peterman, Star Trek IV · Sruart Byron declined to participate since the Tony Pierce-Roberts, A Room with A public cannot see all nominated film s. ViewOA ,AH Robert Richardson, Platoon AS David Ansen (OA), Newsweek. Stuart Byron (SB), industry analyst. Donna Gigliotti (OG), a~quisitio~s executive. ~Ijean Harmetz (AH), The New York Times. Harlan Jacobson (HJ), Film Comment. Dave Kehr (OK), The Chtca~o Trtbun,e. Gr~gg KIIday.(GK), Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. Jack Mathews OM), Los Angeles Ti\",:es. Andrew Sarris (AS), The Vlllage VOlce. Richard Schlckel (RS), Time. Stephen Schiff (Ss), Vanity Fair. Ann Thompson (AT), Film Comment. 2 2
\"Best organized, most complete book ••• for anpJne interested in movies\" -FILM WORLD Updated 5th Edition - with so much new infonnation it's almost 200 pages bigger! If you could own only one movie book, this is the one. For 3 main reasons: 1. MANY more fIlms - over 12,<XX)! 2. MUCH more information on each fIlm: plot, cast, credits, reviews, ratings, awards, all key statistics, video versions, much more - EVERYTHING to help you decide whether a fIlm is worth your time and money. 3. For every entry, the Halliwell touch: wry, sharp-eyed, challenging. This is the fIlm reference that's FUN to read. A few of the useful features *171 new pbotO§ and pO§ters AD Academy Awards and nomina- * *tiOIlS Oversized 7Yl x 10 - weighs over 4 pounds! Alpha- *beticalli<it: some 1,200 alternate titles Engli<ib and foreign titles of * *foreign fIlms HUGE: 1,150 pages Enjoyable bonus: prom... tional taglines for over 1,000 films o Raves for the older editions 0 \"Stupendous ... complete and detailed and reflective of the author's flair for cocky, keen humor.\"--':San Diego Union \"Remarkable ... massive, practical.\" -Film News \"A knockout . . . almost everything you could possibly want to know about thousands of movies.\"-Chicago Use coupon to get Tribune this indispensable $42.50 \"Magnificent.\" - Times- Literary Supplement \"No other work offers such comprehensive and entertain- film reference FREE ing information in one volume.\"-Librczry Journal -- - .---_--.--._.,,--- - - - - -- -- ---- -------------.---- --- - - - -- - -----.. How the Cub Works • • •a c. . . .• •Yl~/~.'~.'AI• •~.' FC-40 Every 4 weeks (13 limes a yrar) yoo get a free copy of the Club bulletin, PREVIEWS, which offers the Fratured Selection plus a nice choice of Alternates: books on fibm , TV, music, occasionaUy 15 Oakland Avenue' Harrison , N.Y. 10528 *records and videocassettes. If yoo want the Fratured Selection, do nothing. It will come Please accept my membership in the Movie/Entertainment *automatically. If yoo don't want the Fratured Selection or yoo do want an Alternate, indicate Book Club and send me, FREE and postpaid , the new *yoor wishes on the handy card enclo;ed and return it by the dradline date. The majority of Club $42.50 5th Edition of Halliwell's Film & Video Guide by *books are offered at 21).30'7, discoonts, plus a charge for shipping and handling, As soon as yoo Leslie Halliwell. I agree to buy 4 additional books, records or videocassettes at regular Club prices over the next 2 years. I buy and pay for 4 books, records or videocassettes at regular Club prices, yoor membership may be *ended at any time, either by yoo or by the Club. If yoo ever receive a Fratured Selection withoot *having had 10 days to decide if yoo want i~ yoo rnay return it at Club expense for full credit For every book, record pr videocassette yoo buy at regular Club price, yoo receive one or more Bonus Book Certificates. These entitle yoo to buy many Club books at deep discoonts, usuaUy ~% off. also agree to the Club rules spelled out in this coupon. Name _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ *These Bonus Books do not coont toward fulfilling yoor Club obligation but do enable yoo to buy fine Address State Zl'p _ __ bO<is at givraway prices. PREVIEWS also includes news aboot members and their hobbies. Yoo C1'tY * *are welcome to send in similar iterru. The Club will publish any such item it deerru suitable, FREE. This ~ a real CLUB! Good service. No computers! Only one membership per hoosehold. tlIlIIIlIIlIIllIIIIIIllIIIllXIl
oumals Taking Shots: Park City, Cajun Country, and Connie Hall DOWNHILL AT PARK CITY A n anecdote for starters--or is it an McElwee and southem belles. epiphany? The location is the U.S. Film Festival higher standard, yet most ofthe films were one seems to have noticed that it's the dar- in Park City, Utah, a spruce goose ski-re- as dreary as their titles: My Little Girl, Her sort just begging for Tom Wolfe. The Name Is Lisa, A Walk on the Moon, ing independents that do all the business.) scene is a restaurant where they'd sooner Square Dance, No Picnic and Season of This sense of purposelessness even blacken a redfish than cook anything Dreams (changed from, umm, Stacking). hooved. The speakers are a Powerful In- Such fare put the lie to the lavish claims seemed to infect the dramatic film jury, dustry Executive and a Major West Coast made for indies in the age of Stranger which (predictably) ignored the festival's Critic (I'm not major), who guzzle red Than Paradise, Kiss of the Spider Wom- funkiest and most audacious movie, Riv- wine while a devoutly blond waiter sniffs an, Salvador, Re-Anirnator, Trouble in er's Edge by Tim Hunter. The jury at their godless intemperance. Mind, She's GoltLl Have It, True Stories, Played It Safe, splitting first prize be- and Blue Velvet. Instead of following tween Gary Walkow's diverting Trouble Key Industry Executive: \"Everybody these risk-taking examples, the films at with Dick and Jill Godmillow's Waiting keeps telling me what a fabulous time Park City emulated mainstream commer- for the Moon, a warm, witty fantasia on they're having. I think Park City has Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. To passed Telluride as the mountain festi- cial cinema or betrayed the influence of be fair, the Gert and Alice pic deserved its val.\" PBS' American Playhouse and the Sun- prize just for managing to pass through Major West Coast Critic: \"Well, that's dance Institute, two influential bodies de- Sundance and American Playhouse with- what they were trying to do. And they've voted to eamest adaptation, thematic out losing its nerve in its narrative. done it. It's better than Telluride and the staff is actually friendly .\" plod, and boob-tube aesthetics. One You really can't blame the festival for should scarcely be surprised that indie the dullness of this year's schedule. In Key Industry Exec, [nodding]: \"It's a films are still on the bunny slope when its great festival.\" [Sip.] \"If only the movies stylistic exemplars are the likes of El fact, the programmers worked hard to were better.\" Norte, Smooth Talk and, ofcourse, Ordi- nary People. bulk up the weak pickings. Park City of- Yes, if only. For despite its cheery staff, fered world premieres offilms with the in- egalitarian vibes, and immaculate organi- What was missing from almost all this dependent spirit, including Radio Days, zation (under the auspices of Robert Red- Beyond Therapy, and Jim McBride's The ford's Sundance Institute), the 1987 U.S. year's films was a sense of passion and pur- Big Easy (which suddenly made McBride Film Festival was more notable for skiing pose-the personal, political and aesthet- \"hot\" in L.A.). It assembled a top-notch and parties than for the American inde- program of recent Canadian films (topped pendent movies that are its raison d'etre. ic agenda(s) that could fire an indie move- by the superbly un-Canadian Crime Indeed, the 3f films in competition ment, define it against existing cinema, Wave). It paid a small tribute to Britain's Channel 4, which has been as bracing for showed the aching limitations of today's and give it some sass and subversive ener- serious filmmaking as PBS has been debili- indie cinema and suggested that this gy. (Or maybe make some money: No movement isn't moving. Rather, it has settled into a complacent mediocrity whose axiom is \"Play it safe. \" Everyone seemed to know it. In the documentary competition, the jury was so unimpressed by the entries that it wanted to give no prizes at all. When program di- rector Tony Safford objected, the jury ulti- mately awarded top prize to Ross McEl- wee's Shernuln's March, a popular choice already validated by critics across the country. But to express their genuine dis- may at the level of the offerings, they gave Honorable Mention to David Bradbury's Chile: When Will It End?-an Australian film outside competition. The dramatic features set a slightly 4
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Conrad Hall on the set of Black Widow. route into feature direction. A decade lat- er, with the release of Black Widow, Hall tating. And just to make sure there'd be making for no one is sure what. Says Ben is back behind the camera but with new some magic for the audience, the festival Barenholtz: \"Ten years ago, people were insight. organizers even arranged a live perfor- saying that we'd have an American film re- mance by Penn and Teller, who ate fire, naissance ifthere was only money to make Connie Hall had a tough ten years. He levitated the innocent, and mocked the independent films. Back then there was was stricken with Guillian-Barre syn- vanity of Robert Redford (\"Ordinaty nothing. David Lynch had to sneak into drome, almost went blind as a result of Bob,\" as the Sundancers call him on the the AFI and spend two and a half years to medical treatments, was physically unable sly). make Eraserhead. He put a vision on the to work, gave up his commercial produc- screen, but he had to use everything he tion house, and found himself on the P ark City's most dazzling magic sur- had to get it made. verge of personal bankruptcy. faced in four haunting shorts by \"Ate- lier Koninck,\" whose work ranks with the \"Today, video means that there is \"When I think about the films I would most thrilling cinema of the last two dec- money for independent films, but the have made in the past ten years it makes ades. (The \"Atelier Koninck\" team is great irony is that now there are no film- me sick all over again,\" says Hall. \"You composed of British producer Keith Grif- makers. Where's the vision and talent? don't stay alive in 'the industry' by doing fiths and the Philly-bom identical twins I'm walking around this festival and I'm commercials, you are totally forgotten; it's Stephen and Timothy Quay.) Virtually in- laughing my head off. I mean, nobody the worst thing you can do to yoursel£ It describable in narrative (or moral) terms, knows how to make a fucking movie. \" would have been better for me to stay at these weird, obsessive, puppet films offer my craft and work toward changing my ca- an ineffably powerful blend of surrealism, -JOHN POWERS reer from the inside.\" expressionism, Punch and Judy hijinks, and Eastem European arcana to move you CONNIE'S COMEBACK Hall's retum began in the vegetable in ways you don't quite understand. section of a Hollywood supermarket Watching the exquisite Leos Janacek: In- I n 1976, Oscar-winning cinematogra- where he encountered director Bob Rafel- timate Excursions (1983), or Bruno pher Conrad Hall, at the height of his son, whom he has known for some 20 Schultz's Street of Crocodiles (1986), you career, took a self-imposed hiatus from years. Rafelson hadn't done a film since are reminded of the sublime possibilities feature filmmaking. With cameraman The Postman Always Rings Twice in of movies charged by personal vision and Haskell Wexler, he established a produc- 1981, and Hall was pondering his future. passion for the medium. tion company to make commercials, a Their idle talk about collaborating stuck venture which was intended to provide with Rafelson, who 18 months later, Regrettably, this vision and passion both an income base and free time to pur- tracked Hall down in his native Tahiti. were in short supply at Park City-doubly sue his other interest, screenwriting-a \"There was this message from Bob. sad since the majors have given up film- When I called him back, he told me the story of Black Widow and asked me if I was interested. I said it sounded good and he suggested I fly back to read the script. It was as simple as that. \" \"Conrad Hall and I are known to be volatile personalities,\" admits Rafelson. \"When I choose who I want to work with, the first thing I look for is talent, followed closely by temperament. I like temper- mental people, because what evolves is concem, which ultimately transcends the friction .\" When Hall re-entered the industry it was not as difficult for him to catch up technically as it was psychologically. \"There are a few new time-saving innova- tions, but that's about it. The real change is in the audience and the way the studios perceive it. Everything is geared toward people in their mid-twenties, and the prime ingredient in today's movies is vio- lence. That puts me on the outside. I be- lieve in the power offilm to do good in the broadest possible sense of what that im- plies.\" H all was bom in Tahiti in 1926. His fa- ther was James Norman Hall, who co-authored Mutiny on the Bounty and Hurricane. Hall studied joumalism at USC, until he got a 0 + in creative writing. So he enrolled in USC's film program. 6
After graduating, Hall and two classmates o Enclosed Is $1.95 ($5.95 + $2 shipping) cash, check 6736 Castor Avenue • Philadelphia, PA 19149 set up a small production company and 2151722·8298 drew lots to be the director, producer, and or money order. Send your new Video Catalog, plus cameraman; Hall drew the lens. periodic updates. NOTE: foreign orrJers (except APO, Canada, Mexico) add S20 shipping/handling. In the Fifties, Hall's work primarily consisted of sponsored films, commer- o Enclosed is additional $3.50 ($11.45 total, $31 ,45 cials, and second unit footage for features, foreign). Include your Adult Video Catalog. I am over including Disney's oscar-winning The 18 years old. Living Desert. With the demise of his Name ____________________________________________________ company, Hall worked as an assistant and camera operator for Ted McCord and Er- Address ____________________________________________________ nest Haller. His first solo credits were for City ___________________________ State ______ Zip ___________ the TV series Stoney Burke and The Outer Limits. His feature career began in ear- nest in the mid-Sixties with Harper, The Professionals, In Cold Blood, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which won him an Oscar. Hall saw McCord and ,Slavko Vorka- pitch as his greatest teachers. \"McCord was an especially good teacher because he needed the collaboration of his crew and especially his operator. He was a great art- ist but tremendously insecure. He never went to rushes-never. So I got the job of going to the projection room and defend- ing the integrity of the cinematography.\" Hall, in tum, acted as a teacher to his assistants and operators including William Fraker, Jordan Cronenweth, Charles Rosher Jr., Tom Del Ruth, and Bobby Byrne. Richard Brooks, who directed three features shot by Hall, calls him one of the great teaching cameraman. \"Con- nie likes to go in and tum things upside down and force himself to find a new way of photographing it. He is one of the best (cinematographers) that ever was,\" says Haskell Wexler, who calls him \"fearless.\" Hall, however, like McCord, considers himself insecure. \"I like to solicit every- body's opinion. It generates some won- derful ideas.\" At the time of his Oscar, both Hall's professional and personal life underwent a lot ofchange. During Butch, he fell in love with actress Katharine Ross. He also be- gan to receive offers to direct, and while he concedes to have taken films \"for all the wrong reasons,\" he started to tum things down on principle. \"The Sixties were very much alive, and I had given nothing to the new sensibili- ties and freedoms that were being staked out. I never threw a brick, I never marched, I never held a flower. I was get- ting better pictures, making more money, and having a wonderful time, while every- one else was struggling to change society. So, I thought, I'll do that with my instru- ment. I'll stop my instrument. I went into retirement to write and to find films to di- rect that would influence society in a posi- tive way.\" Phone ( 7
life crisis. According to Schlesinger, \"Con- nie's greatness as a cameraman stems from an acute understanding ofstory. He wants to know what the drama is, then finding the look comes organically.\" Hall has one specific regret: \"I would have loved to do Hurricane, I really un- derstand that story. It's Tahiti's Les Mis- erables. So, when Polanski dropped out of the remake, I begged De Laurentiis to let me have a go at it. But he said it was too expensive for a first time director. He got a very good filmmaker Gan Troell) who, tragically, had not the slightest bit of affin- ity for the milieu or characters. The Gohn) Ford version with Jon Hall and Dorothy Lamour was infinitely better. Connie Hall is back. \"I feel very much as if I've emerged from a cave into the sun- light. I have an armful of scripts, ideas, treatments that would fulfill my life if I ever got the chance to do just one,\" he says. \"So, I haven't given up .The Black Widow experience has made me even more tenacious. It's taught me to stick with something I know how to do well. That's the only way to stay alive in the in- dustry.\" -LEONARD KLADY Schlondorff directs Holly Hunter and Will Patton. BLACK LIKE MICH He became more interested in industry lead to partial or total paralysis. Systems Achilly, slate grey day in November. labor politics, via the cameraman's local of within his body began to destroy nerve Route 90 out to Thibodaux, Louisi- the International Alliance of Theatrical endings until antibodies were sent out to ana, is a montage of FOR SALE signs, Stage Employees (IATSE). In a speech he combat them. abandoned building sites, stilled oil rigs. wrote but never gave to the 56th biennial Last year was a terrible year for Louisiana, convention in 1982, Hall let fly: \"Below \"You almost always get well but it's as the decline in oil prices sent this one- the line. I hate the term. It sounds like very painful and slow. Obviouslyyouratti- industry state into a dive: Louisiana expe- something that could make you go blind. tude changes when you think you're going rienced the highest unemployment in the Below the line. Below the belt. Beyond to die or become permanently paralyzed. I nation and hard times for most everyone, the pale. Beneath contempt. Below the chose to deal with it, in part, through psy- but especially the blacks Volker Schlon- line. It's a mean, cold, rotten expression, chotherapy. And working in a profession dorff wants to portray in this film . and it stands for a mtten idea. Ifyou didn't where your eyes are so important proved a know any better, you'd naturally assume tremendous asset. I was able to use \"imag- Schlondorff is making a CBS movie of that whatever took place above the line ing\"-sending a visual message to combat Louisiana novelist Ernest (The Autobiog- was righteous and aboveboard, while the errant systems. It sounds fantastical raphy ofMiss Jane Pittman) Gaines' 1983 down below the line was the realm of the but it worked. \" book, A Gathering of Old Men . The film devious.\" is shooting in and around the sugarcane His medical treatments included corti- fields of Cajun country, an hour's ride Mter three years ofputting aside job of- sone shots, which prompted cataracts as a south of New Orleans. Set in 1978, the fers, Hall finally did Fat City, directed by side-effect. He describes the period be- story is a cover-up by 18 old black men John Huston. Today, he considers it one fore they were medically removed as over 70, each ofwhom claims to have mur- of the few pictures he's done \"that dered the same white Cajun. watching a \"spider's web close in. \" counts.\" Day of the Locust, Smile, and Hall finds it ironic that his eagerness to Dressed in jeans, boots, and a rumpled The Marathon Man, followed. Director white shirt, Schlondorff calls for silence. work behind the camera again increased. Coming through the cane is a straggling, John Schlesinger advised him during the ''I'm doing what I know how to do and, at almost stumbling, crooked line of old filming of The Marathon Man that before the same time, what I consider more fun black men. They each carry a rusty shot- he shot another film, he should direct one. than anything in the world-scenario gun. On cue they aim up into the oak writing. I've always felt writing was an branches and fire a volley to produce shells A ftera trip to Tahiti in 1980, Hall began easier way into directing than switching to show sheriff Richard Widmark evi- to have frequent bouts of fatigue. He from cinematography. dence for their crime. was diagnosed as having Guillian-Barre syndrome (detailed by novelist Joseph Hall's stories range from the impossibil- Schlondorff works to shape the march- Heller's No Laughing Matter), which can ity of love in the modem world in Wild Palms (somewhat reflecting his years with Ro, ss) to Rubbio, a yam of a gigolo in mid- 8
ing and the firing to strike the right bal- Dangerously nor Roland Joffe's The Kill- pie get lynched , get d rowned , get shot, ance between decrepitude and defiance. ing Fields caught such arresting images of guts all hangi ng out-and he re he come up with ain ' t no proof who did it. T he C inematographer Ed (True Stories) Lach- conte mporary chaos. proof was them two little childre n there in Of these black me n, in this story, who the m two coffins.... And let's don' t be man adjusts constantly for the swiftly dim- getting off into that 35, 40, 50 years ago ming N ovembe r light. reflect on the ir past and feel shame that stuff, e ithe r. T hings ain' t changed that they never took stro ng stands about im- much ro und he re.\" 1 he old me n not in the scene sit quie tly portant things in the ir lives, Schlondorff around on tree stumps or a few chairs pro- says, \"This trauma is what the story is real- \" I've been working so long now in so vided by the crew. Schlondorff is low-key ly about: to me that is political. In the many diffe re nt countries- Italy, France, and steady in his me tllod . He knows what the United States, and even Lebanon,\" he wants, but liste ns and watches his ac- world today, words like right wing and left- says Schlondo rff, \" I have come to see that tors to see what they bring with the m. E r- ist no longer make much sense. Ideologies if you look at life straight, mankind is the nest Gaines stands quie tly by, built like a same all over. T he only thing that comes line backe r, answering Schlondorff's ques- are dead all over the world , more or less. in between people are cl iches.\" But that doesn' t mean that politics are tions. (\"Is it pecan or pecan?\") ove r. \" -ANDREW H ORTON \"Casting this film drove me crazy,\" lo- And so one of the old black me n lashes cal casting director Wilma Frances te lls out at the film 's white she riff: \" Black peo- me . \"Just try finding 18 black me n over 70 who can act! \" The film features Lou Gos- JOHN FORD & sett, Woody Strode, Tiger H~ynes, Julius 15 HOLLYWOOD Harris, Joe Seneca, and some jazz musi- SCREENWRITERS cians, and locals from the Thibodaux area, some of whom still work the field s, sit on WHAT A(OMBINATION porches, and go fishing along the nearby Backstory John Ford bayo us . \" If you see Bertrand T avemier's Interviews with The Man and His Films Screenwriters of Round Midnight,\" Schlondorff says, \"you by Tag Gallagher Hollywood's Golden Age can see how well jazz musicians can act: \"Gal lagher has performed a monu~ Dexter Gordon is wonde rful.\" So Danny Edited by Pat McGilligan mental tos k of schol arship .... Ta ki ng Barker, one of the last of the old-time th e book as stro ight bi ogrophy of my New Orleans dixieland players, is signed \"A lively oral history, both cha rm ing friend of 40-odd years, I fo und it up. So is Papa John C reach, the fiddle and informal . . .. 0 montage-like pic- faSCinating and informative, fil ling player who has done and seen and played many gaps in my knowledge.\" ture of Hollywood under th e studio -P hil ip Dunne, Los Angeles Times it all , from Sixties rock to mainstream jazz syste m, as wel l as a n intimate glimpse Book Review to classical. \"An almost flawless blend of criticism of the an omalous craft of screen- and biography about one of America's If anything like the stillness of these old writing - its frustrations and intermit- greotest film directors .... 0 fa scinat- men transfers onto the film (from a script ing work. The thoroughness of his tent pleasures.\" research is evident on every pa ge.\" by Charles Fuller, who wrote A Soldier's -M ich iko Kakutani, New York Times - Gib Johnson, New York Times Story ), network T V will redeem itself for a Book Review \" If what we lived throug h in Hol ly- \"Gallag her's book is both the best night. Schlondorff was so taken by Papa wood then was a Golden Age or a nd the most defini tive [of Ford John Creach that he asked him to do much even 0 gil ded one, these men and books] .... one of the major film ofdle music for the film and added his_fid- books of rece nt yea rs.\" -Wil li a m K. dle playing into the narrative's finish. The wo men di d mo re to shape it t han the Everso n, Films in Review night before, Danny Barker and Papa famous names on the gli tter ing sur- $3 5.00, illustrated John jammed at the Sheraton Inn with face. It is remarkable how diverse New Orleans musician Deacon John . The and eng rossing their variou s sto ries \"gathe ring\" has caught on. are.\" -Ring Lardner, Jr. $27. 50 , il lustrated What is a white middle-aged European doing in Louisiana filming a black story? A t bookstores or o rder toll -free 800-822-6657. Visa & Mastercard o nly. Schlondorff wonde red , too. In fa~t, he tried to avoid the project. But he heeded University of California Press the maxim \" If you do your homework, there should be no proble m.\" Adds Berkeley 94720 Schlondorff, \"It's a simple sto ry . . .. that shows how people refu se to give up- the ir dignity, even under extre me social and economic pressure.\" There is continui ty in Schlondorff's sensibility. These cane field s are n' t that different from the potato field s in the opening of The Tin Drum: he respects place and how it shapes people's lives. Schlondorff has even managed to shoot A Circle of Deceit in Beirut, mid-battles. Neithe r Peter Weir's The Year of Living 9
Woody Allen and Robert Townsend. ... by Annond White film len edits across the social barrier between white Manhattan and Jewish Brooklyn as Noone ever asks Woody Allen COMMENT if it were just ethereal. Townsend drives for a deeper accounting of his back and forth between Watts and Jewishness; the needling voice Westwood, intentionally maneuvering and profile seemed enough. between cultures. For Allen, it's a ques- And until Radio Days, that was all. His tion of putting his Jewish world and white new film has a fully expressed ethnic con- WASP dreams together. Townsend reifies sciousness similar to Robert Townsend's the question of fact vs. fantasy into an is- Hollywood Shuffle. The prevailing truth sue of momI responsibility and ethnic in each film is the disproportionate impor- pride. tance pop culture has in the imaginative life of the ethnic working class: Pop pro- Neither film shows any difference be- vides contmsting images of escape, then tween working class Jewish life in Forties' defines the utopia to be dreamed for. Rockaway and working class black life in Eighties' Los Angeles that truly matters in The onscreen representation of each the context of showbiz aspimtion. :rhe man (Allen narrating as himself and im- American media-controlling dream is the personated by a child; Townsend starring same for both: Movies seem to reward as the struggling actor Bobby Taylor) is hard work with luxury-an industry illu- poised in tmnsition, uncertain and dumb- sion sustained by its own manufacture of struck at the possibility of growing up and rich, flickering images. Woody participating in show Allen's near-mastery of this business at last. Al- form in Radio Days is 11
Murphy style) a bracing sophistication. HOw many people have accepted Woody Allen's high-cult posturing as a way of ratifying their own climb out of a ghetto mentality? The fact that Radio Days is the first good movie Woody Allen has made since Annie Hall (1977) and his only sign of artistic growth in ten years has been obscured from the public-and pos- sibly from Allen himself-by the mass media's tendency to absorb popular artists and absolve them of any ethnic signifi- cance. The reviewer who called Hannah and Her Sisters \"the best movie ever made about the Jewish longing for assimi- lation\" got it wrong. The movie actually was symptomatic of that longing. Allen's sycophantic pandering to WASP pretenses was confused with the honest expression of same. Becoming the establishment pet stunt- ed Allen's special viewpoint and outsider's acerbity; his daring admissions of ego and insecurity became smug and defensive. As his films took on literary European af- fectations his instincts seemed over- whelmed by the process of assimilation. Allen's serious phase-Interiors, Man- hattan, Stardust Memories, A Midsum- Simon's Brighton Beach Memoirs. mer Night's Sex Comedy, Zelig, Broad- way Danny Rose, Purple Rose of Cairo the very twinkle in the eye of Robert cultural assimilation is not compatible and Hannah-seemed totally facetious Townsend, whose quirky, energetic Hol- with their backgrounds, or else requires a when not simply embarrassing. This infe- lywood Shuffle is the happiest writer-di- sacrifice in self-esteem and so is an impos- licitous output offered no sign of personal rector-actor debut since Allen's Take the sibility. knowledge or emotion. It was as if Allen Money and Run in 1%9. These are the secret truths ofAmerican made a gentleman's agreement to avoid These comics-turned-filmmakers have entertainment. Allen's comic reminis- being Jewish or, as a last resort, to satirize their eyes on a particularly bourgeois cence and Townsend's docucomedy de- and patronize it. That accounts for the prize: joining and affecting the main- velop the ideas beyond typical, superficial myth of \"class\" that surrounds Allen's stream in social fact and artistic practice. ethnicity, as found in films by those giants movies; they were WASPier than films by The two films mythicize pop culture (ra- ofself-deprecation Neil Simon and Eddie the WASP, John Avildsen. dio, movies, TV) as the grail of American Murphy. Brighton Beach Memoirs and Bergman and Fellini became touch- mass acceptance. For certain ethnic The Golden Child are inflated with the stones for Allen, who wanted to make seri- groups the mass arts (and sports) are the egotism of successful men who don't look ous non-Jewish art so badly that in remak- first step on a political, self-determining back; they have the cold irrelevance of ing Fanny and Alexander as Hannah, he sojourn. Showbiz represents a high social blind ascension into the mainstream, con- misinterpreted Bergman's view of the plateau and realm of power-a belief re- fessing nothing except a beliefin the luxu- Jew: an outsider and purveyor of magic flected in Allen's skeptical, bemused re- ry and not the hard work. That showbiz who saves the WASP hero; Allen turned creation of radio game shows and Town- mainstream and luxury are what Radio Bergman's Jew into the death-plagued in- send's of TV detective dramas. The Days and Hollywood Shuffle examine at sider whose infertility is cured by the filmmakers' obsessive concern with what, a distance, and from the position of ethnic WASP family! Perhaps working through essentially, is trivia is changed by the ten- sion dramatized between the appeal of self-acceptance. The perspective itself is that perversity allowed Allen to come back pop culture and the ethnic ethics it covert- Iy assaults. not warm or successful; these films work to his roots in Radio Days. He keeps the Allen's and Townsend's loose-narra- because they show the arbitrariness of pop Jewish and WASP worlds separate, alter- tive, episodic films are galvanizing dis- affirmations. There's no pretense, as in nating memory with fantasy. Amarcord is plays of each man's psychic attachment to Hannah and Her Sisters, about the expe- the obvious model, but this rigorous mem- the cultural forms he parodies, backed by rience Allen is capable ofauthentically de- oir is more like Fellini's earlier I Vitelloni, a scrutiny of the related social climes of lineating or the WASP lifestyle that infatu- where social observation held emotional- New York broadcasting and Los Angeles ates yet eludes him. Allen's return to what ism in check, resulting in an unusual puri- film production. In working out the di- he knows is a moral and artistic break- ty of feeling. lemma of upward mobility, they find that through; it is an imperative of the sort that Radio Days itself is like radio, the me- enlivens Hollywood Shuffle and gives its dium that brings the magical and the mun- refusal of black success at any price (Eddie dane together-most memorably in the 12
sequence of the entire nation alert and breathless during a crisis broadcast. The control Allen has developed with pace and active frame composition seems a benefit offinally discovering his reason for making movies. He understands his relation to the WASP world through a nostalgic but not nebulous reconsideration of its media- sanctioned allure. Having owned up to what formed him, Allen accomplishes his most vibrant, sensuous filmmaking, con- trasting dark, intimate scenes with glow- ing spacious ones-the womb vs. the world-and his humor is felt in both areas. With the homey/urbane dialectic ofRa- dio Days, where ethnic foundations are regarded as respectfully as cosmopoli- tan expansion, Allen's film career recalls the progression Leslie Fiedler observed in his 1959 essay \"The Jew in the American Novel:\" \"Long before the Jewish novelist exist- IVitelioni. ed in America, at any rate, the Jewish character had been invented, and had to shield their identities or Allen turned Radio Days has a large, splendid cast of frozen into the anti-Jewish stereotype. Indeed, one of the problems of the into a rabbi behind bars-recalled characters, split into the ways Allen knows practicing Jewish-American novelist arises from his need to create his pro- Fiedler's admonition: \"Neither a Jew be- them best: the Jews in intimacy, the white tagonists not only out of the life he knows, but against the literature on coming an American ... nor an American celebrities in awe. The simplicity of this which he, and his readers, have been nurtured. In order to become a novelist, who was a Jew; he communicates in the method is so right that the film resonates, the American Jew must learn a lan- guage (learn it not as his teachers teach nonJanguage of anticulture [and] becomes it's suffused with love. Neil Simon's self- it, butas he speaks it with his own stub- born tongue) more complex than a his own stereotype.\" Who can deny A1- love in Brighton Beach Memoirs must ac- mere lexicon of American words. He must assimilate a traditional vocabulary len's unique typecasting (\"Intellectual count for the casting of WASP pros Blythe of images and symbols, changing even as he approaches it-must use it against comic;\" \"Not as vulgar as Mel Brooks;\" Danner and Judith Ivey as a bogus pair of the grain as it were, to create a compel- ling counter-image of the Jew, still \"The American Ingmar Bergman\") as adult sisters in a crowded Jewish home-a somehow authentically American.\" anything but an anomaly? He even used shocking attempt at ethnic upgrading that The failure to do this until Radio Days has held Allen back (it may also be what the insidious joke \"I wouldn't want to be- reduces these actresses to shtupping the holds him in analysis). Like Rob Reiner in Stand By Me, Allen was worshiping at long to any club that would have me as a audience with shtick. Simon has gone far- someone else's shrine, promoting ersatz truths. And millions of people agreeing member\" merely to make credible the ther than Allen in passing offJewish sensi- with his fake sentimentality didn't make it less hollow or offensive. Is there anything Jewish intellectual's delusion that success- bility as \"the norm;\" he now seems unable more ersatz than the Gershwinated open- ing of Manhattan, with its luxe patriotism ful competition with the whitll world to give any behavior its correct value or to extolling an idea of New York that every- one knows does not exist? makes one an accepted part of it. wrest human experience from the me- Allen's indulgence of such popular ro- With regret, Fiedler noted how \"the chanics of gag writing and plot cliches. mance was a self-denying act, proving his comic's insecurity. (He was as much a prefection of the movies [could seal] that climber as was Gershwin.) In Take the victory.\" But the art of Radio Days cracks Unlike Radio Days, Brighton Beach Money and Run, his too-humble, self-ef- it. Mia Farrow and Dianne Wiest are no Memoirs wraps itself in its sugary satisfac- facingJewishness-seen in the way Virgil Starkwell's parents wore Groucho masks longer bogus sisters, but as Aunt Bea and tion with the good old days. Simon wants radio gossip Sally White they are reflec- to commemorate his past without seeking tions of a common urban female plight, to understand it. His alterego, Eugene, fondly observed. These are the fairest fe- seems most ridiculous when he and his male characters Allen has devised since brother have Long Day's fourney-type Annie Hall and are surprisingly, perfectly fights with all the unpleasantness re- embodied; this time the actresses aren't solved; this is O'Neill for idiots. The pretending to be Everywoman according poignancy of Radio Days comes from the to Allen's Keaton-smitten WASP idealiza- intimate suggestion (and brave realization) tion. They're also among the few Allen that the passing of Allen's youth was also characters who don't talk just like him. his loss of identity. Instead of saying the 13
household with dirty walls, or Down and Davis has said that controversies like The Ow in Beverly Hills, which shows a nou- Color Purple will continue until black art- veau riche Jewish home as a dream palace, ists get the power to make their own mov- _ _ _ fmlaettnetr.s Jews' sense of personal improve- ies. Townsend's modem insight recog- nizes power even in images like The past was better, like the cheap nostalgia of Hollywood Shuffle is a renegade pro- Color Purple. He cherishes media repre- Stand By Me and Brighton Beach Mem- duction as casual in tone as Kentucky sentation, as Woody Allen does, for the oirs, Allen ruefully admires the ethnic, Fried Movie, but it offers a shrewd look at formation of his aesthetic sense. That's non-orthodox, left-leaning past that coun- Hollywood's benighted attitudes and non- what inspires Hollywood Shuffle, just as tered his formation by pop. Or maybe he's thinking. The parody of producer/casting we know that the radio/Rockaway juxta- just saying goodbye to it. directors shows Townsend's sharp skill for positions Allen re-creates are what in- recognizable caricature. And satires ofTY spired Radio Days. Robert Townsend starts out with programming, like \"Sneaking in the Mov- the consciousness that Woody Al- ies\" and \"Death of a Breakdancer,\" are A t this point in his film career and eth- len has only just acquired. Black fresh enough to prick the preconceptions nic consciousness, Townsend doesn't artists never enjoyed the ascension/accep- otherwise unexplored in the current mov- afford himself the luxury of reflection, tance delusion of Jewish artists, whose in- ie scene-the pomposity of critics, the basking in his awe of Hollywood. Yet his stitutional camaraderie insulated them complacency with which exploitation reflexive instincts give Hollywood Shuffle from having to know better as it also pro- movies are regarded . All this, coming its edge, defusing pimp and junkie stereo- tected them from injury. (Which explains through Townsend's passion about ethnic types by comically exaggerating them or why Richard Pryor's memoit; 1010 Danc- stereotyping, makes Hollywood Shuffle a using new-to-movie vernacular and street er, is a more tough-minded, if less accom- rare ethical satire. It drives home the point humor. He digs at ethnic cliches to avoid plished film than Radio Days.) Town- of cultural and racial misperception that the Groucho-mask compounding Woody send embraces the identity he couldn't most people ignored in Soul Man. (No Allen used in Take the Money and Run; shunt anyway, and this gives him a skepti- fault of the filmmakers themselves; Soul that film accepted the established contri- cal attitude toward the mass-media repre- Man , a more ethics-minded cross-dressing vances ofJewish comedians as their spirit- sentation of blacks that his onscreen char- film than Tootsie, was, perhaps, not dis- ual essence, and for Allen this was as much acter covets. Townsend's debut resem- tanced or skillful enough to relax people's intellectual pretense as ethnic naivete. bles the scattershot improvisation and anxieties about race. Not a very good film, Townsend won't accept a previous stand- comic-intelligence-preening-through-a- it still made points and touched nerves as ard of \"advancement;\" Hollywood Shuf- low-budget of Take the Money and Run, we like to think only good films will.) but he undercuts denigrating ethnic ste- fle means to change black movie history. reotypes. He makes a Sam Spade charac- Townsend extends his satire over a ter into Sam Ace, where Allen toadied up large field, responding humorously and ir- He even keeps Eddie Murphy, the gruel- to them, turning the Jewish street reverently to a long exposure to movie and ing Groucho of his day, on the hook, cov- hustler's advice in the title into a comic TV junk food-the diet Hollywood di- ering all bases so that there's no chance of criminal code. Virgil Starkwell was both a rects at blacks. Unlike Allen, Townsend is leaving his people as figures to be laughed derisive and evasive creation. The hus- perforce part of a cynical, disenfranchised at. ... tling dance that Townsend's Bobby Tay- audience, so he's justifiably caustic about lor must do to get TV or film work in con- the range of media influences. His sensi- The richness of Radio Days shows temporary Hollywood squarely addresses bility as a black American has been of- what Allen's films have lacked. He had assimilation and its discontents. fended , overlooked by the mainstream, or seized the freedom to create without circumscribed and preconceived in Blax- questioning it-without earning it-and Once a stand-up comedian, Townsend ploitation. Accepting neither-showing so made a lot offunny movies but few that chafes at the fact of ethnic stereotypes his jive as just a new shuffie-Townsend's matter. A black filmmaker can take noth- Jewish colleagues often accept; he doesn't satire epitomizes the same revisionist en- ing for granted. That, at least, gives share their sense of ironic projection ergy Fiedler cited at the birth ofthe Jewish Townsend an intellectual adval)tage. Un- (which is what built Hollywood), where American,novel. He shows a need to be able to assume that making movies will identity is submerged in other character- true to the experience he knows and to automatically raise him in society, or speak izations and your responses are detached. create against certain lies that have stood well for his people, Townsend is forced to This detachment, the source of most me- uncorrected, unchallenged, without bal- follow the modernist practices that have dia cliches and inauthenticity, has con- ance. occasioned the best movies of the past 30 signed ethnic groups to buffoonery or vil- years. His spoofs reexamine conventional lainy on screen. Jewish filmmakers rarely Yet, Townsend's fascination with pop filmic representation and rethink his rela- subvert it even for themselves, which culture is not embittered with disillusion- tionship to pop. The remarkable scene of doesn't mean they are above swallowing ment. He savages Mandingo, Roots, Bobby playing a movie junkie to his kid and believing stereotype; just that they are even Rambo as jovially as playwright brother, or Allen's father, aunt, and uncle reluctant to deny it-because a film like George C. Wolfe's The Colored Museum turning a radio broadcast of \"Copacabana\" Hannah, which depicts a vulgar Jewish satirizes A Raisin in the Sun and ror Col- into a song and dance act, charts a period, ored Girls.. .. Interestingly, like Wolfe, its illusions and its down-home reality. Townsend is too smart to continue the fa- cile dismissals of The Color Purple. But These are the richest moments in re- he accurately catches the confusion that cent movies. This doesn't mean that Rob- has stirred around it (climaxing in a protest ert Townsend and Woody Allen should scene that also plays out Bobby Taylor's only make movies about their own ethnic private and professional paranoia). Ossie types, but for complexity and meaning it's the best place to start--or to start all over again. ~ 14
• ,'Iby Harlan Kennedy Stephen Frears. Alan and I've worked together so much t embarrasses me to be thought I'm beginning to know the way he thinks more artistic than I am,\" says Ste- the biggest British outcasts and anti-he- and works. On this film I kept saying to phen Frears, looking big, bear- roes of all: the late, great, and extremely him, 'I've done this line before in another like, and unartistic amid the sprawl of his gay playwright Joe Onon. play. I won't do it again.' \" west London home, a-tumble with chil- dren. Placed by some critics on an auteur Prick Up Your Ears is Frears' film of With a cast that includes Gary Oldman, pedestal after My Beautiful Lawzdrette, Bennett's screen adaptation of John Alfred Molina, and Vanessa Redgrave, Frears looks distincdy uncomfortable Lahr's biography ofthe author ofLoot and F rears' film caters to aficionados of two dif- when asked to don a toga, stand on a Entertaining Mr. Sloane. Anyone think- ferent eras of \"New British Cinema.\" plinth, and explain why this mini-budget ing that the life might have been knocked Oldman and Molina are actors firmly of film about a small comer of Britain had an out of J. Onon by this creative domino the now generation, stars of Sid and Nan- insanely large success on both sides of the process reckons without knowing Ben- cy and Letter to Brezhnev, respectively. ocean. nett's comic originality. One of the Be- And 20 years ago Redgrave was on the yond the Fringe team way back when, launching pad of new cinema Swinging \"I don't really know. Do you?\" he says. he's become a prolific and ever more sur- Sixties-style, with Morgan, A Suitable \"Wasn't it something to do with the real playwright whose latest West End hit Case for Treatment, and has since negoti- classic English mixture of comedy and is Kafka's Dick. It is about... . Well, sur- ated a career of great anistic and personal tragedy,\" I said, \"mixed up so you mise for yoursel£ Next film: Sammy and confrontation perhaps today matched no- couldn't tell the difference?\" Rosie Get Laid, from a script by Kureishi; where else. \"Ah ...\" English reticence is emotional goodness, what's a family newspaper to discomfon; so a depressing saga of punk \"I became a director just by drifting, violence, social struggle, homosexual and do? really. I worked in the theater at first but heterosexual love that crosses class lines, soon realized I had no real feel for it,\" and Pakistani immigrants coming on like F rears makes the point about Prick Up Frears says. \"Then through Lindsay An- the Mafia can tum into a densely funny sa- Your Ears for me. \"It's not aboutJoe derson I met Karel Reisz, who was going tiric fresco. Yes? Onon as such. Alan has completely built to make Morgan. It was filmed just Frears pauses and thinks. \"Do you up his own creation from the book. It's an around here, Holland Park. So I worked think so? Perhaps you're right.\" Alan Bennett script, which makes it much on that. Then I went into television, and Frears, born 55 years ago in England, is more interesting than Joe Onon's life. not long after that ca,me my first feature, the one British director to whom you can Gumshoe.\" take a good script in the certain knowledge that he won't muck it about. Not too Mter that movie's chequered career- much. Frears will bring out the best in a some critics were underwhelmed by this screenplay without \"personalizing\" it be- Alben Finney starrer about a man with yond recognition. And he can afford to. trenchcoat-and-Bogan daydreams; others The writers he's worked with for televi- raved, including the New York Times' sion and the cinema-Neville Smith Vincent Canby-further film offers failed (Gumshoe), David Hare (Saigon: Year of to flood in. So Frears went back to the the Cat), Peter Prince (The Hit), Haoif small screen for more teledramas, includ- Kureishi (My Beautiful Lawzdrette), and ing his first of six Alan Bennett collabora- Alan Bennett (numerous TV plays and his tions, A Day Out. current film Prick Up Your Ears)-are a roll call of the wittiest anatomists of mod- Right around this time British TV was em Britain: a Britain not internationalized in the heyday of realism and the docu- or glamorized for expon purposes (no mentary style, when one name reigned Olympic runners sprinting for God, no pil- supreme in small screen drama: Ken lars of the Raj), but a Britain of the gritty Loach. here and now. Frears tunes in to these North Country \"I couldn't believe that this man could dreamers playing detective; these British tum out these wonderful films and TV stoolies and hit men running across Spain plays the way he did. He was a machine like demented tourists; these outcasts of for 'producing masterpieces. He'd motor class and race trying to spin-wash a new up the Ml and out would drop another England. And in his latest film Frears and masterpiece: Cathy Come Home, Alan Bennett have gotten hold of one of Kes. ... The trouble was that, because he was the boy wonder of the sse, he influ- enced styles all over the place. And when I worked for the first time with Brian Tu- fano, who was Loach's cameraman and a marvelous craftsman-almost a legend at that time-I had to say, 'I don't want this 15
\"The original idea for 'Laundrette' was to be a British 'Godfather.' But you can't do that sort ofgrand drama about Britain today. . .. That disappeared when Churchill died. Now it's not grandeur you go for, it's pathos. Pathos and comedy.\" to be like a Ken Loach film .' And I was terrible. The lines are terrible. Can't you characters standing still and making make it better?' So we did. We kept shov- speeches. We wanted to make it all light- unlike Ken, because I was much more in- ing in more lines.\" er. Our first idea was that the film should terested in the writer's contribution. For be a son of British Godfather. But we real- me, TV was a writer's medium. And I was And the movie changed in other ways ized you can't do that son of grand drama good at getting good scripts. Instinct for as it went along. \"We took out a lotofseri- about Britain today. The possibility for self-preservation, really. ous speeches about 'England.' That was that disappeared when Churchill died. after the shooting. There were too many \"But realism taught me how to make the best use ofwhere you are. Ifyou're out \"WILDLY FUNNY\" on location, you can't dictate the weather or the look of the sky. So you become THE GUARDIAN adroit at fitting the elements into the story. I did a TV play with Peter Prince, and we \"50 FUNNY A PLAY. SO had bare trees on location when itwas sup- SPLENOID A FARCE\" posed to be spring or summer. And he said, 'But the trees are bare.' And I said, DAILY EXPRESS . 'Well, we'll have to change the season. I'm too busy, I can't sew leaves on all ·' SO ENTERTAINING :' these trees.' \" ··SO AMUSING:' SO HILARIOUS:''' IT 'S This passivity in the face of Nature--or ONE OF THE MOST in the face of other givens like a script, a ENTERTAINING AND crew, or a budget--<:an also give the im- HILARIOUS PLAYS pression that F rears is a journeyman rather IVE SEEN FOR YEARS than an artist: a man who accepts assign- ments rather than seeks out dreams. But SS C. CRITICS as his reputation has grown, so has his nerve. Increasingly, he's on the lookout for challenges and surprises, and \"imagi- native solutions to familiar problems.\" \"I map out scenes more than I used to, and use storyboards and so on. That's not to constrict myself but to form a base from which to improvise. It can help you think on your feet, when something unexpect- ed comes along. There's a shot in My Beautiful Laundrette where the camera cranes right up and over the roof. What happened was, we suddenly had all this equipment arriving on a day we hadn't booked it. Including a giant crane, a Tulip crane, and a hothead. And so I thought I had to do something with it. I'd better pull my finger out. So we went over the roof of the building, and out of the blue you get this rather spectacular shot suddenly lift- ing the whole story.\" F rears, with a little help from Hanif Gary Oldman in Prick Up Your Ears. Kureishi, went over the top more than once in My Beautiful Laundrette. The wonderful role played by Shirley Anne Field-a dumb brunette dripping in furs and with a pinbrained proverb for all occa- sions-just grew like topsy. \"She just kept saying to Hanif and me, 'This pan is 16
Now it's not grandeur you go for, it's pa- But the kind of direct campaigning zeal \\NOEPENOENl lR\\LOG'I thos. That's the best you can hope for- we had on British TV in the Sixties and ON \\}\\OEO pathos and comedy. So the film tumed early Seventies, that's gone. from The Godfather into a son of street During the heyday of Black Humor literature in comedy.\" \"In the good old days, we used to say the early 60s, the core of darkness (inspired by that a TV play by Jim Allen could bring the the Cold War, the Death of God , and many other Nonetheless, Frears won't buy the next docks out on strike in Liverpool. A play then-burning social issues) was generally tem- provocation I put to him: that all British like Cathy, Come Home actually could pered by the humor wrapped 'round it by the cinema has ever really been good for is change amitudes, and even the law, about relentlessly grinning author. There's a long realism and reticence, with the odd dash housing. How this all began, and when tradition of gallows humor, stretching back of irony or satire. and why it ended, I don't know. Legend beyond Shakespeare to Chaucer, and forward is, it began the day Tony Garnett became to . . well ... 1988. With this film the tradition of \"I don't know how true this idea is a story editor at the BBG. [Garnett then be- the independent cinema's mock-Hollywood about English reticence and the realist tra- came Ken Loach's producer and later a di- humor is turned inside out. dition, \" he responds. \"Was Carol Reed re- rector in his own right.] But today it's all alistic? I don't think so. David Lean? Or different. A lot of BBG drama is arthritic. B. Ruby Rich Michael Powell, whom everyone's so Costs spiral, and the result is fewer but keen on today?\" 'weightier' plays and films. So we get A MAN, A WOMAN, AND A KILLER is a tragic things like Brideshead Revisited.\" . epic, a love story, a documentary about drug Meaning, Frears isn't? \"Well, I think Powell was very variable. N Ow that Frears has severed most ofhis addicts, a comedy, a portrait, a commentary and The trouble is, now he's back in critical TV ties and jumped out into the fea- a tapestry. Mostly, however, it's a film about fashion, you're supposed to like all his ture film world, what about the British violence. Not Peckinpah spleen-punching films. Have you seen Gone to Earth? It's film industry? What is it? Is it healthy? And violence or Coppola bleeding-horses-heads daft. The color is wonderful, but the story. does he consider himself pan of it? violence-by comparison these are cartoons, ... And there are films that are supposed embarassingly vapid , self indulgent and boring . to be masterpieces, like Blimp. That's a \"I never really think ofthe things I do as movie which defends reactionary atti- being pan of the British film industry. I al- -Linda Taylor tudes. I think a director like Powell is de- ways think of the British film industry as meaned by that kind of blanket approv- films with Jack Hawkins. Or the kind of ••••• al.\" films David Puttnam makes. And I never understand the paroxysms everyone A MAN I nod in response, but I'm still nagging keeps going through about 'the state ofthe A \\NOMAN away in my head about realism. The British film industry.' Ajoumalistcame up AND A KILLER whole concept of realism has so many elu- to me the other day, when the latest crisis sive offshoots and implications that trying about finance, or takeovers, or something ••••• to define it is like chasing soap in the bath. had blown up, and said, 'What is all this One essential component of realism is about the ailing British film industry?' Of While Americans were paying $4 or $5 to have that-like the best of Reed or Lean, or course, it's always been ailing. It's a dino- their jangled state mellowed by Steven Spiel- even British Hitchcock-the film is root- saur. It's getting more expensive, and it berg 's fantastically successful fantasy ET, San ed in a milieu intimately known to the has less idea ofwho sees its films. How do Francisco filmmaker Rick Schmidt was creating filmmaker. Realism's premium is of low you fill all those Odeons and ABGs?\" EMERALD CITIES, his provocative, compassion- value in America: \"reality\" changes with ate \" howl \" at the gathering tide of nuclear the state border (landscape, styles of This all sounded to me like a director \" Iuna-cy,\" the psychic and physical violence, and speech, even legislation); and dreams (the ready to take a fast plane to Hollywood, at the deepening affliction of numbing cultural an of the imagined) are held in higher re- the drop of a contract. Was the Golden malaise. gard than pragmatism (the an of the possi- West beckoning? ble). But in Britain realism is integral to Vic Skolnick the nation's cinema. Because Britain is \"Y-e-e-s,\" he said hesitantly, suggest- NEW COMMUNITY CINEMA geographically so small, Brits know when ing a man half wanting to modulate into a director is monkeying around with au- \"N-o-o.\" Purchase your 3 cassette trilogy (specify thenticity-even if the audience is in VHS or BETA) for the special price of London and the film is set in Yorkshire. I pushed a bit more, from another an- $100 (plus $5 shipping/handling. Please And because the country is so beset with send money order payable to: social and economic problems, gilt-edged gle.Did he like American films? dreams take second place to hard-nosed \"I like American cinema, yes,\" said . \" . j ,', practicality-even the practicalities of p0- litical crusading, from coal strikes to \"Get Frears. \"John Ford .. . ,\" he continued the U.S. missiles out.\" dreamily. \"But if I· do go out there\"-he snapped back-\"I want to be sure I make Aren't realism and the push for social the films I want to make. The trouble with change pan of the British heritage, up to, American films is the standard of writing. including, and beyond the TV docu-dra- British writing is so good, but you read mas Frears grew up amid? American scripts and they all seem to have been done by word processors. They're \"Ofcourse. And pan of the point of My full of cliches and B-movie lines. I'm sure Beautiful Laundrette was to show how ter- there is good American writing. But I'm rible things are in the country today and to not sure where it is\". define life in Britain under Mrs. Thatcher. And at the same time to make fun of it. At this point a child waddled up toward us. \"Stick 'em up,\" the kid said. ~ 17
Praising ~rizona' by Jack Barth But what's striking about Raising Ari- while you were watching. zona is not the self-conscious showing-off The Coens are able to pack such cine- Raising Arizona is the second child that might shatter credibility in less capa- of those blood brothers Joel and ble hands, but the visual precision and matic density only through unusually as- Ethan Coen. It stars Nicolas Cage narrative economy of the film. Raising siduous pre-production. The film was as H.I. (\"Hi\") McDunnough, a good-na- Arizona surpasses Blood Simple thanks shot at or near Carefree Studios (home of tured armed robber, and Holly Hunter as not so much to its higher budget and fancy the old New Dick Van Dyke Show) in his wife Edwina (Ed), a cop who falls in footwork, but to its superb script. greater Phoenix. They spent ten weeks love with him after years of photographing before the shoot not only rehearsing actors his mug shots. They cannot have a baby of A typical movie-movie scenario might but running through scenes on location their own, so they kidnap a quintuplet. be a minute of belabored ambience fol- with cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld. lowed by some character development, They were able to storyboard the entire The Coens' first film , Blood Simple, and a joke-pause-pause-then a talking film based on the actual locations. was more than a startling debut; it un- heads scene that explains the story, some veiled a new sensibility: Anything goes, as transition footage, a close-up of a sign, Joel works with the actors, but Ethan is long as it energizes a scene, or gets a laugh, pseudo-snappy dialogue, an angry huff, a otherwise a co-director. Sonnenfeld is in- or looks \"wacky\" (their word) without car chase ending in a spin-out and explo- volved early on, and has a lot to say about ruining the mood and undermining the sion, a wise-guy comic actor telling off the camera setups, movements, and lighting. plot. This might confound the cinemati- bad guy, and a kissy-kissy resolution. In The machinations begin in the scripting: cally illiterate or appear \"film schoolish\" to Raising Arizona, there's never just one Instead of writing scenes and figuring out the overliterate, but it's great if you've thing going on at a time, or if there is it'll later how they'll play, the Coens work out o.d.'ed on decades of narcotizing same- happen quickly from an odd angle. And the look as they work out the story. The ness. when it's over you keep on thinking about script, which made it to the screen almost stuff you didn't have time to think about verbatim, is replete with camera direc- tions and editing notations. 18
- Joel Coen adjusts the \"wackiness\" ofasetup for Raising Arizona. The Coens'self-conscious vision invigorates every shot. Sonnenfeld pre-shot super-8 video to scious.\" Okay, so they're self-consciously rectional Facility For Men State Farm Road Number 31 Tempe Arizona, a mop- test the feasability of settings and camera self-conscious. It's better than being un- ping con has cleaned a little more floor. Hi returns to the same cell where the same movements. Forexample, they were hop- conscious. As Sonnenfeld says, \"We want cellmate keeps the same JFK photo handy while he rattles on about crawdads. ing to use a lake with the World's Tallest to give you the impression there was a real Hi returns to the same parole board, with a portrait of Barry Goldwater hanging pon- Fountain-a man-made 2S0-foot spout- director and a real DP working on this.\" derously over the proceedings, where he is always released, since he \"never uses as backdrop to the picnic scene. They dis- Maybe the bugaboo is the \"self' part. live ammo.\" And when he gets qut, he heads back to the convenience store for covered the fountain was invisible on film The prefIX \"self' appends to such pejora- another cycle of \"rambunctious behav- ior.\" Hi is a recidivist, in life as well as in and the lake firoo off too much glare, and tive morphemes as \"indulgent,\" \"cen- crime. But he decides to break out of this rut. were able to reconsider the setting. tered,\" \"serving,\" \"content,\" \"abuse,\" He weds Ed. With the same words as In order to reinforce their visual ideal- \"destructive,\" \"important,\" \"righteous,\" the parole board condoning Hi's release- \"Okay, then\"-the minister accedes to \"Sharp and Crisp,\" says Sonnenfeld-the and \"ish.\" But \"self-conscious\" means the marital bonding. Hi's job is \"a lot like prison,\" except for Ed \"and the paycheck, trio screened The Third Man and The \"showing awareness of one's own exis- and at the end of the day he and Ed watch the sunset as if it were the tee-vee: ''That Conformist just before shooting, as they tence.\" It doesn't mean \"awareness of no- was bee-yoo-tiful.\" did before BlQod Simple. body but oneself,\" and when applied to a They decide a baby-a.k.a. \"a crit- ter\"-is the next logical step, but unfortu- In The Conformist, expressionistic vi- filmmaker it boils down to \"expressing a nately Ed is barren. Hi's lengthy criminal record precludes adoption, so, unless they suals vie with the plot for your attention: personal point of view.\" Yeah, that sucks, can obtain a baby somehow, gloom and more rambunctious behavior seem inevi- Venetian blind shadows prowl across the we want to see movies made by studios, table, or, as Hi says, \"I preminisced no re- turn of the salad days.\" When Hi and Ed screen, dull train window landscapes ex- not people. learn of quintuplets born to Nathan Ari- wna, the Unpainted Furniture King, the plode into outrageous romantic vistas. Because Raising Arizona gives you unfairness of it all hits hard. Since this is the point where they start their new life, And nobody told Bertolucci he was show- that uncommon feeling that there was ing off like film school. In fact, Vincent somebody with a vision actually present Canby, who slammed the self-conscious during the writing and shooting, it's worth camera of the Coens, wrote o(Benolucci, going through the film with the film- \"His cinematic style is so rich, poetic, and makers, and considering how and why baroque that it is simply incapable of they made their choices. meaning only what it says ... there are ex- cesses in the film, but they are balanced Pre-Title Sequence by scenes of such unusual beauty and vi- tality that I couldn't care less.\" TBlood Simple and Raising Arizona he theme before the main titles is rep- etition: Hi keeps robbing conven- work for the same reasons. Self-conscious? When they filmed the tracking shot along ience stores. Hi's courtship of Ed, a cop, the bar in Blood Simple-the camera advances with each arrest (they hold hops over a passed-out drunk-Joel said, hands as she fingerprints him, and he slips \"No, it's too self-conscious.\" Ethan re- her a ring). Each time Hi returns to the plied, ''This whole movie is self-con- Munroe County Maximum Security Cor- 19
Tempe fugitives Evelfe and Gale. track. The baby chase employs a new twist on an old sound effect: the ticking of the movie starts here, too. Act I a clock approximating the lub-dub beating of a heart. In the nursery, the clock ticks I n conceiving the extended prologue, H ichases the quints around the nursery steadily and soothingly. Hi exits to fetch a the Coens wanted to approximate the in a scene that wouldn't compel at- stray tot in the hallway, but there the tick- rapid ruming of pages in a storybook. To tention without the visual kick of a scram- ing continues, eerily, becoming subjec- that end, they worked with Sonnenfeld bling, acutely low-angle camera. The tive yet still unobtrusive. The sound for a look that would be \"colorful and Coens know that a knee-high placement serves as a subtle counterpoint rather than beautifully lit.\" Hi's voiceover unites the injects potency into the most straightfor- a cardiological thump. quick shots while telling the story and re- ward of scenes; the trick is to ration it. As vealing a lot about himself The audience Sonnenfeld says, ''The lower the camera, Subjective sound joins self-conscious emerges from what could have been just a the more dynamic it is. You get a sense of camera a few scenes later, as Hi takes a parade of antic capers with a vivid sense of power from the legs, from the things on family portrait. He plants a camera on a tri- the floor.\" pod and sets the timer. The Coens' cam- Hi's bent psychology. era tracks in toward Hi's camera as the The sequence cloaks sight gags (the How does he get so low? A cinematog- sound builds, creating farcical suspense. rapher can use a shovel-nose mount to Goldwater and JFK icons) and slapstick bring the camera a little lower, but needs a When they first shot the scene, Joel (Hi locks himselfout of his getaway car) in Ronford 7 camera mount head to get the says, \"We shot it static. We went back four a captivating succession of images. Just camera below the tripod. However, for weeks later and shot it as a tracking shot. It because the opening is all about repetition those times when you want to get so close wasn't storyboarded as a tracking shot, it and pointlessness, it doesn't mean it can't to a surface that it becomes an abstract ge- was something we decided to do after we be fun to watch. ometry-such as the pool table shots in shot the scene. We looked at it and said The Color ofMoney-a right-angle prism 'Wouldn't it be nicer if it were tracking \"Storybooks\" don't come easy. The is necessary. The prism attaches to the m. .?'\" dramatic desert sunset, for instance, was front of the lens at a 45-degree angle. filmed over the course of 40 minutes with When the camera itselfis tilted 45-degrees They asked Supervising Sound Editor motionless stand-ins. The camera was from level, the prism is thus at ninety-de- Skip Lievsay to create a mix of low-level hooked to an intervalometer, which auto- grees. beep (the timer), thunder, and the sound matically snapped about one frame per of a photoflash warming up. The result is three seconds. (For an Arizona sunrise lat- Since the prism is reflecting the image strangely evocative-a conspicuous ex- er in the film, they shot a far-more-spec- with a mirror into the lens, narurally it's ample of the Coens creating something tacular Arizona sunset upside-down and not as keenly focused as a shot with a di- fun to watch out of virtually nothing. reversed the negative.) rect lens. For a film like this, where \"sharp\" and \"crisp\" are the bywords, Son- I n RaisingArizona, Nicolas Cage shows In fact, the whole film is \"colorful and nenfeld mostly avoided the prism, but a new him-funny and endearing. He's beautifully lit.\" So the pre-title sequence used it for a few shots in this scene. not trying to be deep (Birdy), or macho doesn't look much different, but it does (Rumblefish), or goofy (Peggy Sue Got play differently. Scenes are brief, some The Coens also played with the sound Married), so he succeeds at all three. He played for quickie laughs. It would be too delivers the highly-stylized dialogue as much to take for an entire film, but it gives some nutty regional vemacular, not some you something to think about as the cred- mannered invention. Cage's unlikely its roll by. casting-\"a leading man in a character ac- tor's role,\" as the Coens describe it-goes against everything he's done since Valley Girl. His abnormal hair arrangements and hound-dog face evoke enough sympathy to make his wooing of Holly Hunter's pert policewoman Ed believable. Plot Complication Number One sets in as Hi's prison pals, Evelle and Gale, liter- ally bust out of jail, bursting through the surface of the earth on a stormy night. The scene was shot under suitably miserable conditions. A six-foot-deep hole was exca- vated and covered with a mud-packed foam sleeve. Boards were placed in the hole for reinforcement. After Gale (John Goodman) pops up, he reaches back down to grab the hand of Evelle (Bill For- sythe, not the director). Forsythe's leg was attached to a cable, and as Goodman pulls him up, a crane helps lift Forsythe out of the muck. As they erupt from the earth, they raise volcanic screams to the torren- tial skies, the first of many such outbursts. 20
AFILM BY JIM JARMUSCH ill TERRIFIC MOVIE ...A beautiful, melancholy, kidding escape fantasy.\" -David Denby, NEW YORK MAGAZINE \"A PURE PLEASURE FOR b~e',,1 AVAIlABLE COMEDY CONNOISSEURS KEYVlDE03 ON VIDEOCASSETTE ...It's like no movie you've ever seen. Benigni is pure genius, Waits w.alks on the wild side, Lurie is full of bravado.\" -Rita Kempley, WASHINGTON POST IITHREE OF THE DAMNEDEST PEIFO.,.CES IN AI ECCENTRIC ENSEMBLE SlIKE THE MIIIIROTHElS.n
Their arrival at Hi and Ed's trailer and \"The critter's done been swioed. \" their suspicions about Nathan, Jr. send Hi into dreamland that night with a pair of by UFOs, he responds, \"Now don't print of their own children's destructive pres- fearsome visions---Dne a premonition, the that son. If his mama reads that she's just ence. Of course, by kidnapping Nathan, other manifest guilt. Hi dreams of the gonna lose all hope. \" His conclusion to the J[, the quint who carries his father's Lone Biker ofthe Apocalypse (Tex Cobb) dire speculation is, \"Remember, it's still name, Hi and Ed only accentuate that the tuming day to night, destroying little crea- business as usual at Unpainted Ariwna, child isn't theirs. tures, and leaving scorched earth in his and if you can find lower prices anywhere wake. Sonnenfeld thought since the Biker my name still ain't Nathan Arizona!\" When Glen suggests wifeswapping, Hi is more an ambiguous embodiment of evil belts him. Since Glen is Hi's boss, this will than a flesh-and-blood entity, he should Nathan Ariwna represents the biologi- cost him his job. Alas, Hi must retum to appear overlit and cartoonlike, with the cal parent as pragmatist. He's distressed robbing convenience stores. He picks the same exposure value as his background. that his namesake has been snatched, of wrong store with the wrong clerk with a course, but he's also still trying to cope Magnum-the grotesque \"Whitey\"- Then, in an extended tracking shot with the attention received and demand- and the chase begins. Huggies in hand, Hi dream, the camera careens down the ed by his now doubly-famous quintuplets. flees on foot, when Ed, pissed off at Hi, street toward the Arizona manse, up a lad- His materialist side might be more upset abandons him at the robbery site. The der to the nursery window, and into the about his \"collection\" of celebrated off- hose-slicked night streets gleam colorful- nursery, flying toward Mrs. Arizona's gap- spring being broken up than about his ly, reflecting the red and blue of the police ing mouth and quaking vocal chords. child being the victim of a heinous capital lights. Bullets flying, Hi steadfastly tries to Here, movement was more the problem crime. keep a grip on the diapers, but the police than lighting. It was broken up into three shoot the box away from him. separate shots: Glen and Dot, Hi and Ed's \"decent\" friends, arrive at the trailer with their wild T he Coens are fast workers; they can 1) Racing through the streets was brood. They are warped working-class polish off pages of dialogue in hours. achieved with a \"Shakycam,\" a camera at- parenthood at work. As opposed to Hi and Rather than argue over a shot and waste tached to a piece of lumber with dowels Ed, who kidnap Nathan, Jr. out of a con- time and money, one of the brothers will for handholds. Two grips run like mad- fused need to \"complete their lives,\" give in. But the chase scene after Hi robs men with the Shakycam, lifting it over a Glen and Dot know exactly why they the convenience store ate a large part of car, approaching the house. They stop at must have children: to keep Dot placated the shooting schedule. the foot of the ladder. The camera had an with a constant supply of cuddly critters. extremely wide-angle lens (9.8mm), with Glen and Dot lose interest in the brats The night shooting with wide-angle which almost everything is in focus. once they pass the cuddly stage. Theyad- lenses meant problems for Sonnenfeld. mire the baby-referred to by Ed as Hi, \"A major pain of using wide angles is the 2) A remote camera rides up the ladder lighting-there's nowhere to put the toward the bedroom window. It comes to J[ (''Till we think of a better name\") and lights.\" This necessitated the use of high- a stop at the curtains. Hi as Ed, J[ (\"As in Edward\")---Dblivious 3) Impossible to stop at the ideal dis- tance from the quivering tonsils, the third part of this mega-dolly was shot in reverse with the camera upside-down, starting at the mouth. They rigged fiber-optic light- ing around the lens to illuminate the vi- brating epiglottis. Six grips pushed the dolly away from the woman as fast as pos- sible, and at the-end of the shot a set of curtains was dangled in front of the lens to match with the remote~mera shot com- ing up the ladder. The Coens had to cut the \"tail\" of this shot, an astounding close- up of the inner throat, because it came after the camera movement had ceased, and it defused the excitement of the rapid motion. It wouldn't have matched well with the next shot, a close-up of Hi's terri- fied eyes. Act II N athan Arizona meets the press. Ari- zona (nee Huffhines) is the one char- acter who, until the end, is played for broad laughs. The proud papa comically reiterates Hi's guess as to the abductee: \"Nathan, J[, I think.\" When asked about the rumor that the tot has been carried off 22
speed Kodak 5294 film , which he and the sionally. The Coens had to get them to can see things as they really are anytime Coens now regret. \"It's grainy, low-con- trast, and has a salmon cast,\" Sonnenfeld loosen their camera mounts, to see that a you like, but it takes a vision-by necessi- complains. Mter finishing the film, the Coens agreed not to use 5294 again and to little vibration would add a sense of ener- ty self-conscious-to alter realities and go with 5247 or a new stock, 5297. gy. The early dailies so worried the film's suggest new ways of seeing. Sonnenfeld used 5247 (daylight film) whenever possible. The Coens were will- producers that they considered selling ing to sacrifice lighting for depth of field, which meant Sonnenfeld needed the Tpublic shares in the picture. But the Coens he doberman pulls himself free and wider lens and less lights, and therefore gathers his canine comrades to join in 5294. The Coens also prefer to cover a persisted; sometimes they even reshot scene with quick set-ups from several an- gles rather than fuss with lighting for one scenes that came out too slick. The team the chase, which has now become a full- angle. Nevertheless, the film still looks sharp and crisp. One ofSonnenfeld's solu- avoids the use ofa Steadycam for the same fledged scrimmage. A trigger-happy cop tions was to overexpose the negative. ''The blacks are richer and the grain is re- reason. ''The Coens are control freaks,\" pursues Hi through the grid ofa supermar- duced,\" he says. \"You can bring it back down in the lab.\" His camera reports says Sonnenfeld. \"With the Steadycam, ket. Airborne groceries abound, dogs (instructions) to DuArt Labs in New York testify to that lab's work: \"Make look the camera just floats there out ofcontrol.\" yelp, the store manager blasts away with nice.\" Of course, the Coens can take this to his shotgun, a screaming shopper steams The Coens exemplify the concept of the self-conscious camera, and that extreme. In the next scene, where Hi is across the aisles with her cart .. . and means \"Shakycam-yes, Steadycam- no.\" With a Steadycam, a Stanley Kubrick chased through the supermarket, Sonnen- through it all, Hi, in an ultimate expres- movement resembles the work of, say, \"Savage\" Steve Holland. With a Shaky- feld wanted to raise the low camera six sion of brand loyalty, quests for Huggies. cam, however, you're experiencing the character's point of view, or at least the inches. The flourescent lights on the ceil- It's an overblown commercial, and Hug- filmmaker's. Consider the following se- quences: ing distracted the eye and caused a flare on gies didn't pay a cent. Hi vaults a fence into a yard, where he the lens. The Coens countered that a Mter Ed picks up the relieved Hi out- confronts the slobbering jaws of a dober- man. The dog leaps-and stops within higher camera wouldn't be as \"wacky.\" side, the Coens crank the hysteria meter inches of Hi's face, reaching the end of his chain. The surprise of the yanked chain is Wackiness prevailed. past \"Brain Damage.\" Like every Ameri- comparable to the THWACK of the newspaper at the door in Blood Simple. \"Everytime I put on a lens, Joel and can couple in a coupe does, they screech at (Meanwhile, Ed reconsiders and returns for Hi. An insert shows the cute baby- Ethan would ask, 'Does it look wacky each other-pausing for Hi's calm direc- \"Awww\"-cringing cutely: ironic com- ment about easily-evoked audience senti- enough?'\" Sonnenfeld worked mostly tions back to where he dropped the Hug- ment, or homage to overkill king Blake Edwards? Hmm.) Hi scampers through a with a 17mm lens, which makes things o gies. (Hi: \"See, I come from a long line of suburban home, as the camera tracks be-' hind him on a Shakycam. look pretty distorted and artificial, \"like frontiersmen and-Tum left, dear\"). When used with a wide-angle lens, the you're shooting them in miniature. Lots of Time to calm down with a gentle montage Shakycam is not all that shaky. Careful at- tention shows the background buckling in exteriors look like they were shot inside of peaceful sleep: Whitey, the conven- what Sonnenfeld calls the \"rubber walls\" effect. Of course, your eye naturally fol- with a cheap blue screen. \" ience store clerk, with a copy of Juggs in lows the running man, and is likely to miss the buckling unless you're a background But it's this wackiness that differenti- his lap; Nathan Arizona, Sr. asnooze in his freak. The Coens originally had Cage holding a camera pointed at his face as he ates just another mundane chase from a armchair; Ed and Nathan, Jr. in bed; Gale ran through the house. It looked too bi- zarre, like a close-up of Hi with a bad rear- sequence that startles and surprises. You and Evelle, passed out in the livingroom; projection. It's not so easy to get a sense of shaki- ness; union grips and gaffers are accus- tomed to doing things smoothly, profes- 23
knife sticks in the plank. The effect was designed by Ethan: the knife is already in the plank, spring loaded on the non-cam- era side. Cage releases the spring to sync with Cobb's throw, and it jabs through the plank. The Coens experimented with some unusual points-of-view in this scene. Son- nenfeld designed a \"Barrycam,\" with which he-camera in hand-was strapped to a hunk of lumber resting on a pivot. When The Biker unleashed his haymaker at the camera, the grips dropped the Barrycam to the ground, sim- ulating Hi's point-of-view, reeling from the mighty blow. The shot was too weird- looking to use, however. Another jarring shot that didn't make it was a \"p.o.v. fist\" of The Biker's haymaker-the camera it- self punching Hi. \"He's our little Gale, Jf. now.\" H i and Ed return Nathan, Jr. to his real family, a singed copy of Dr. Spock and Hi, sadly composing a farewell note to about to take control. the only evidence of the ordeal. Touched Ed. Meanwhile, Gale and Evelle have mis- by their parental feelings, but mostly grateful he won't have to pay a reward, The Biker storms into Nathan Ariwna's placed the baby in the middle of the road. Nathan, Sr. convinces Hi and Ed to stick office. For his only interior, The B*er They let out the biggest scream yet. it out together. That night, Hi has a had to be lit differently than before. It's a \"Male bonding,\" explain the Coens, who dream, very moving and sad: \"The shades dark room, and he has dialogue; there's a like screaming in movies. ''The humor of and shadows of the people in my life danger he'll seem too real ifhis face is illu- big men in a small car screaming.\" The wrassled their way into my slumber.\" minated. So production designer Jane irony of all this hi-decibel vocalization is Musky put in a big bright window behind that in Raising Arizona, even the lowliest Hi dreams ofan elderly couple and their The Biker to light him abstractly, in sil- characters express themselves with Algon- descendants packed into the trailer. Their houette. (Besides, Tex Cobb had just re- quin eloquence. Gale, while simulta- granddaughters prance around in circles, turned to the set from another role for neously munching cornflakes, chewing singing \"Ring Around the Rosie.\" An I which he'd been clean-shaven, so there gum, glugging a Coke, and smoking: \"So was a danger of exposing the fake beard.) many social engagements, so little time.\" enormous table is set for a Thanksgiving feast. \"And the old couple wasn't screwed Back at the trailer, Glen threatens Hi They race back to the tot, braking to a up, and neither were the kids or their with his knowledge of the kidnapping, halt just inches from his pink head-shot, grandkids ... Was I just fleein' reality, and Gale overhears. Hi is getting shat like I know I'm liable to do?\" The table upon from all sides. Despite this misery, ofcourse, in reverse. (Not even John Lan- groans under such taste treats as bundt the Coens are able to develop Glen's char- cake and celery with peanut butter. acter a little further with a nicely gratuitous dis would have that much confidence in CAUTION: I DRIVE NAKED sticker on his his stunt driver.) The shot began with the Daringly, now, the film invites you to side window. The Coens' swirling camera car's front bumper rocking (Note the feel beneath the comic overlay. His dream documents a titanic struggle in the trailer MondalelFerraro bumper sticker). The between Gale and Hi. Screaming, howl- car then reversed down the road, and the goes on: \"And it seemed real. It seemed ing-these are different shouts, not cries camera undercranked to speed up the mo- to the heavens but yells of effort and pain. tion. In the lab, the bumper-rocking part like us. And it seemed like ... our home. The scene ends with one mighty roar from of the shot was slowed down to normal If not Ariwna, then a land not too far Hi. His child's been swiped; he's in big speed, and the rest of the shot was gradu- away, where all parents are strong and trouble. wise and capable, and all children are hap- ally sped up again to restore the fast mo- py and beloved ... \" And then, the Act III tion. punchline. \"Maybe it was Utah.\" Ed returns and Hi pledges a new, re- This close brush leads Gale and Evelle Is it too much? Are we offended that sponsible attitude. His words are to yet another view of parenthood, comically undercut by his calm assem- summed as \"He's our little Gale, Jr. we've had the rug pulled out from under, blage of the arsenal needed to rekidnap now.\" They bring the tot along to the just as we were beginning to care about Nathan, Jr. The Coens refuse to set up Hi bank robbery, afraid \"if we get killed in these old folks? as a hero, yet impart the sense that he's there, it could be hours before he's discov- ered.\" Even though you hope Hi and Ed will stay together and keep plugging away, Eventually Ed and Hi must square off and maybe someday live out Hi's dream, with The Biker, who if not absolutely in- you can't playa farce for 90 minutes and vincible, can eat garbage cans whole. He suddenly inject a little assembly-line sen- hurls a knife at Hi, who reflexively swings timent to establish meaning and elicit a plank as a shield at the last second. The warmth. The Coens are just flexing their mus- cles a little, showing you what they can do. ~ 24
Available Now- AtI12 \\Olumes of The Motion Picture Guide ByJay Robert Nash and Stanley Ralph Ross e Title eQ G0()O Note: 0(1979) 130m LorimarlUA c The type size Q Motion Picture Guide 's BEING THERE····· shuwn in this Critical Rating sample issmaUer Peler Sellers (C hance), Shirley MacLaine (Eve Rond) , Melvyn Douglas (Benjamin than that of oG Year of Release Rond), Jack Warden (Presidenl Bobby). Richard Dysan (Dr. Robet1 Allenby), The Motion Original Running Time Ric hard Basehart lV/admiT Skrapinou} . RUlh Anaway (Louise). Dave e lenan Picture Guide. () Production Company (Thomas Franklin J. Fran Brill (Sally Hayes) , Denise DuBarry (Johanna Franklin), Oteil Burbridge (L%), Ravenell Keller 111 (Abbaz) . Brian Corrigan (P oliceman), o Releasing Company o Color or Black & White ~~~~~~he ~:~~~~~'1B~~;:r~i~a~~'dJ:~~~1~~~:;·n7.rn;~th~; ~~~~~: j::~~;;'~: C) o Cast and Roles o Synopsis, Analysis and we \" Mun\" Bunon (Lewis), Henry B. Dawkins (Billings) , Georgine Hall (Mrs. Anecdotal Review Aubrey), Nell Leaman (Constance) , Villa Mae Barkley (Te resa). Alice H iTson (Arst • Production Credits Lady) , James Noble (Koufman) , S andy Ward (Sen. Slipshod). Danna Hansen (Mrs Slipshod) , Milcn Kreindel (Dennis Watson), Ka lnerine De HetTe (Kinney). Sam o Film Genre Weisman (Co/son), Elya Baskin (Korpofou) , Tnann Wyenn (Ambassador Goufridi) o Videocassette Availability Perfection Never nave 1W0 hours and ten minutes gone by so quickly. Sellers is an m Motion Picture Guide's innocent IIlilerate who has lived in a nouse wilh an old man ever since ne can remember Tne old man dies and Sellers muslleave the cocoon He nas never been Parental Recommendation in the real world and only knows of it Inrougn watcning television, nis one and all · C) MPAA Rating consuming passion On tne streets, ne is nil by a limousine owned by MacLaine who is manied 10 a kingmaker. a man benind all tne President's men !Douglas) Sellers' Entries also include British and honesty IS charming and nis prosaic answers seduce Do uglas and MacLaine and foreign titles when applicable. even tually the Presiden t (Warden in a sensational performance). Sellers becomes a nahonal celebnty by appearing on nis favo rite medi um . television His answers to ~~~~~i~:~::~~~~;:n~~~~~~~~:'1 ~: f~~~:~~:~i~:~~zee) ~~IIt~: ~U~il~~~~ ~:~~; 0 film find s all sorts o f hidden meanings to nis simple words: His [ruthfulness attracts the policy makers in Ine political party and by tne film 's end they are ~eriously conSidering Sellers as a presidential nominee, Tnat , in a nutsnell, is tne story, yel Ihe details would take many nutshells to cover Sellers nadn 't been this good since his early Brilisn comedies, Macuine ;s sincere and funn y as Ihe sex·slaTVed wife. Douglas IS such a presence on screen that irs difficult 10 look at anyone else in a scene .1 Douglas is the re Tne movie was made in Los Angeles. Wasnington , D.C. and al The Biltmore . Vanderbilt·s incredible Nortn Carolina mansion. As in the caSE! 01 ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST. BEING THERE took many years to gel done It was worth Ihe wait. Though ostensibly labeled a comedy. BEI NG THERE goes way beyond comedy, beyond satire, and out in lo a world of its own t'a~~d~::~;~~~(~~:~~~~~~:: ~,~b:hnwM~~:I.~~~i~; ~~:de:a~i,Sa~O~~j~!~~ G SchopPE!. set d, Robert Benton . makeup, Cnarles Schram, Frank Weslmore. oComedy 0 mCas. (PR :C MPAA:PG ) C) ''AjUm lover's treasure. .. a definitive reference work.\" the mail-in coupon.The price of The Motion Picture Guide is - Roger Ebert, co-host, \"Sis kel &Ebert &The Movies,\" and Pulitzer .$.7..5.0...S..h.i.p.p..in..g..is..f.re.e..t.h..r.o.u..g.h.o.u..t.t.h.e..U..n.i.t.e.d..S.t.a.t.e.s.... ............. .... Prize-winning film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times. For fastest service call us toU-free at 1-800-624-6283 It's here! The wait is over!The most complete film reference work In Iowa call collect at 515-247-7500 Ext. 489 ever published is now ready for shipment in its entirety! [fyou are into film in a bigway, you must have the 12-volume Motion Or send to: Picture Guide in your personal library, at your fingertips, to consult with every film you see or buy. .... CineBooks, Inc. Principal authorsJay Robert Nash, creator ofmore than two . . PO. Box 11367 dozen encyclopedicworks, and Stanley Ralph Ross, award-winning 1V and film writer/ producer, give you livelyand penetrating CineBooks Des Moines, IA 50340 reviews in their own highly personal styles as weUas their own critical ratings. o' Please send me the complete 12-vo lume Motion Picture Guide the payment basis indicated below. If I am not completely satisfied, Compared to other film reference works,The Motion on Picture Guide gives youmore.More casts, roles,credits and vital statistics. More historical background, more anecdotal informa- I understand that I can return the set within 30 days and receive a full tion. And more excitement. Supplement volumes, available annu- aUy, will keepyour set up to date. It's the most comprehensive film refund of the purchase price. record ever created!The Guide's 50,000 entries cover virtuaUy every English-language film ever produced, as weUas a large I wo uld like to utilize the foUowing book purchase option: selectionofforeign films and the films ofthe Silent Era. o $65 - volume per month 0 $750- enti re set in one shipment Included in the set is a two-volume Index listing more than 150,000 performers and productionpeople- every name that (O utside of the United States add appears in every cast and credit listing throughout the set! 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The Eyes ofAlec Guinness by David Thomson dressing up and disguise. The English films of that time (1945-60) enjoyed such Proposal for a summary: sport and took it for granted that virtuoso versatility was a measure of fine acting. We're never going to get Alec But for Guinness, I suspect, this was con- Guinness. On a plate, or in our venient cover. He won great praise for the hearts. We never had a chance. He has not wanted to cameos in Kind Hearts, but all his D'As- intrude, or believed in being possessed. He maintains the poised, gray presence of coynes were remote fancies, stooges seen brilliantly but at a framed distance, not a courteous ghost, one who knows the big quite ghosts but corpses-in-waiting for the film's heart and soul, Louis Mazzini (Den- thing is somewhere else altogether, and nis Price), that very candid and reasonable who is therefore a little amused (yet too killer. Price was neglected because of polite to remark on it) that we keep look- ing for it here, now, in vulgar appearance, Guinness' range, and Kind Hearts is still in what's happening, the action. He is a contemplative. regarded as a lark, instead of an ironic por- trait of doomed revolution. Not for him those large moments of ful- some revelation, glimpses into an emo- As for Fagin, quite properly he is an tional pit so deep we see the actor's guts. oiled Machiavelli for children-a melo- No, he is not seen; he watches. There is dramatic figment of Jewish guile and in- no neediness or sentiment in Guinness trigue, an unforgettable, cloying voice, the actor, no allure of intestines. He is all and the most thorough disguise Guinness spirit, and that ethereal gaze which is ever found onscreen. But consider how thinking ofsomething else, a grace quietly urging our attention away from , or even much more disturbing Oliver Twist would through, himself. be if, just once, Oliver awoke from dreams to see the cloak, the hooked nose, the wig, He is the great deflector among actors, and the whole filthy apparatus lifted off so the one whose hope it is to carry a major that a slender, pale young man (smart Alec character through a work and have him still secret, or private, at the end. Best of from The Card) could relax for an hour, a all, perhaps, not quite noticed. man whose cool, balanced face was yet Rebuttal: more chilling than Fagin's varnished mal- Can this be so? Does this accommodate Ice. his Fagin in Oliver Twist, the eccen- tric octet of D'Ascoynes in Kind Hearts I t is the fascination of Guinness' Nichol- and Coronets, the punctilious dementia son in Kwai that we recognize how little ofColonel Nicholson in The Bridge on the River Kwai, or the Gulley Jimson of The impression this man would make in civil- Horse's Mouth, whose every sigh lets us ian life, or even in a war that happened not to present him with the occasion of the smell booze, paint, mischief, and genius? stupid bridge. Nicholson is not a shining Aren't there intestines in Gulley, to say soldier or a profound man; he is a clerk nothing of elemental digestion? picked on by blind destiny and then en- larged by a grim, petty, perverse lack of Proposal for an answer: proportion. Guinness caught exactly the infuriating stubbornness of the hollow There is no dispute over Guinness' skill man-he did something that David Lean and frequent availability as an imper- hardly comprehends in presenting a no- sonator. He has had his Hitler, his Pope, body at the center of a lofty epic, not just a and his Obi-Wan Kenobi. In his early glamorously mysterious leader but some- movies, especially, he offered himself for one whose limits make him inaccessible. (It is worth wondering how Guinness would have shifted the tone of Lawrence ofArabia ifhe had played' the lead-as he did on stage, when the man was called 26
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When an actor will not seek love, and has never thought of, much less cultivated, the attractiveness that most easily hooks love, then he seems impenetrable-because he has outflanked the most common tradition ofhis profession. Ross.) Guinness brought an unexpected Gulley's notoriety was another version of made, of what he wanted or meant by spiritual dignity to Kwai; his own lack of Fagin's detachable costume. them. There is no ego or justification. Yet narcissism made Nicholson's suffering it is far from an unintelligent book. It is more shocking. He alluded to a level of It did not much aid that enterprise that very well written, generous to others, and grandeur in small, pinched men that did John Bratby did Gulley's murals, for obliquely revealing of Guinness' own def- not require great acting for its proof. Bratby was a painter cast to match the raw, erence, self-effacement, and insecurity. barbarous, empty-headed vitality of the He lost his father early, and was moved Gulley Jimson, of course, does growl, Jimson act. If only we had had just Gul- around a great deal as a child. The book bristle, and stink. And The Horse's ley's face looking at the paintings, so that makes plain the extent and quality of his Mouth settles for that glorification of the we had been taught to see Guinness' belief in God-he is Roman Catholic. outlaw artist. Yet there are hints in the clear, worshipful eyes amid the unshaven Ronald Neame picture of a true mystic in blear of the Gulley make-up. Those eyes Has there ever been so notable an actor Gulley, which is to say not the kind of are made for looking at Blake, or a Bresson with such faith, or one whose very appear- mystic who could own up, eloquently, on film. They would have told us more than ance is more informed by service to a high- some Dick Cavett show, not a man whose Bratby's pictures, and we might have seen er, invisible calling? secret can be found out so that the paint- how Gulley was a saint, inhuman, in a ings can be made clear and clean, but a rowdy bear's outfit. If only Michael Example: mystic who is beyond words, rescue, or Powell had made The Horse's Mouth. \"Ego, as a very young person, with no PR, a visionary for whom Gulley's grouchy slob act is only a way of warding How does biography fit in? professional experience, assumes that his off sympathetic questions. Guinness did naturalplace in the scheme ofthings is up- the script for The Horse's Mouth, and I'd Alec Guinness' autobiography, Bless- stage centre but quickly learns that, for a guess he wanted the mystery whereby ings in Disguise, does not even men- long time to come, he must be down- tion all the films he made, and it gives vir- stage, very much to the side, and with his tually no account of how or why they were back halfturned to the audience. With the passing ofyears he grows to like this posi- With Sian Phillips in Smiley's People. tion and in later life, when he has a little say in some theatre productions, he often expresses the wish to sidle into a play rath- er than take the bull by the horns. The bold statement is never likely to be his: he is well aware he is not in the same class as Olivier, Richardson, Gielgud, or the oth- er greats. His pleasure is in putting little bits ofthings together, as ifplaying with a jig-saw puzzle. \"The fiends which chase or jostle him are Impatience, Fretfulness, Hurt-Pride, Frivolity, Laziness, Impetuosity, Fear-of- the-Future and, lurking nearby, Lack-of- Commonsense. . . . He is not at all proud of himself or his achievements and is equally attracted and repelled by the lime- light, as ifnever quite sure how to present himself, or who he is or what he would really like to be. Deep in his heart he han- kers to be an artist ofsome sort, but he is only an actor.. .. An actor is an inter- preter of other men's words, often a soul which wishes to reveal itself to the world but dare not, a craftsman, a bag oftricks, a vanity bag, a cool observer ofmankind, a child, and at his best a kind ofunfrocked priest who, for an hour or two, can call on heaven and hell to mesmerise a group of innocents. \" -Blessings in Disguise (Knopf, 1986) 28
What is left then, after dismantling guise, and it goes like this. When they CINEMONDE most of Guinness' most celebrated were filming The Swan, Guinness and roles? Do modesty and reticence disap- Grace Kelly became friends. There was a presents ... pear? Can the man who admits to so many poor or foolish films be a great screen ac- group ofIndians near the movie's location, THE DEFINITIVE tor? one of whom presented Guinness with a POSTER CATALOG tomahawk. As he departed the location, We know he is, even if he haunts us in fragments more than blasts. I simply try to the actor tipped the hall porter and asked remind us all of the tranquil, lucid, and re- mote plainness of Alec Guinness when him to slip the weapon into Grace's bed. himself: this is the actor of The Man in the White Suit, The Prisoner, Our Man in Years pass. Miss Kelly marries her Havana, Dr Zhivago, The Swan; this is the man whose George Smiley, on televi- prince. Then, one night in London, re- sion, led us to see how close intelligence and dedication have come to the end of tuming from a stage performance, Guin- their tether. Smiley is no supreme solver of riddles. He is the doctor to tangled in- ness finds the same tomahawk in his bed. trigue, bound by duty to watch how peo- ple and their loyalties perish. He is most His wife knows nothing about it. moving as a man of ordinary presence and unactorly bearing, whose steadiness is There is another interval of years, until trapped in situations but who never resorts to dramatics as a way of getting through. Guinness hears that Princess Grace will We do not get him for our fantasies be- make a tour of poetry readings in America cause he does not tum himself over to us, like a begging infant or a supplicant ego with an English actor, a man Guinness has asking for love. And when an actor will not seek love, and has never thought of, much never met. Still, he contacts this actor and less cultivated, the attractiveness that most easily hooks love, then he seems aus- begs a small service: Will he put the axe tere and impenetrable-because he has- outflanked the most common tradition of back in the lady's bed? This is accom- his profession. Then it comes as no sur- prise that the actors Guinness most cher- plished, \"in Michigan, I believe.\" The The country's paramount col- ishes are \"ugly,\" \"plain,\" or \"unfashion- next day, on their tour, Grace asks the oth- lection of original movie pos- able\"; players who never shrink from their er actor casually whether he has ever met ters - rare, classic, contem- own powerlessness: Emest Milton (a great that Alec Guinness. \"Sadly, no, \" the man porary - such as \"Maltese Fal- Hamlet of the Twenties, but a supporting replies. con,\" \"Snow White,\" \"Jezebel.\" actor later), Pierre Fresnay, Charles ComprehenSive catalogue with Laughton, Cyril Cusack, Eileen Atkins. In 1979, Guinness goes to Los Angeles over 350 prime lithos. Your to receive an honorary Oscar. When the chance nowto acquire previously Think of that cast, and think of Guin- evening is over, he makes his way back to inaccessible graphics. $6.00 ness with them, and you begin to see how very alert you would have to be attending the Beverly Wilshire Hotel and draws CINEMONDE to them. For if you do not easily \"get\" an back the cover of his bed. There is the actor, if he does not believe in uncompro- 1932 POLK STREET mised giving-and if you are still interest-. tomahawk. And Grace, ofcourse, is sound SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94109 ed-then you .have to search all the way asleep in Monaco, or perhaps taking the through to the elusive, ineffable soul, and 1-;::==========================::;- make what you will of it. Only then will next day's petit dejeuner. you appreciate how much Guinness has always offered in his eyes and his voice- The last passing occurs in England, in The Complete Films of less characters waiting to be understood Chichester, where Grace has stopped for than a readiness of the spirit and the mind. Desire. further poetry recitals. Another agreeable KENNETH ANGER third party inserts the tomahawk in the Project for an Alec Guinness movie: bed where she is staying. She decides to ,~ take a nap, but nothing happens: she must I t will never be made, but I propose it as a way ofexplaining Guinness' rapt gaze, have merely lain on top of the coverlet. So and because maybe we owe him an im- possible extra. Not many actors as worthy ingenuity goes further. The tomahawk is have so often endured being miscast or now put in the princess' lingerie drawer. underused. Not long thereafter, a scream is heard, the The story is told in Blessing in Dis- \"satisfying\" scream of discovery. \"A short time later she met her tragic end. Some fool, who had heard the story, wrote to me suggesting the silly thing should be buried with her. As ifone would \" ... comes from that beautiful night from which want to be buried with a joke.\" emerge all the true works. It touches the quiCk of It would need Bunuel, and it won't the soul and this is very rare:' - Jean Cocteau . have him, or Grace, or an Alec and Grace who never age more noticeably than the VOLUME 1: Fireworks, Rabbit's Moon, Eaux Indian blade. What would it mean? Is it d'Artifice (34 min., b/w) love never uttered? Or sex not yielded to? Is it a joke, or a suave, deadly obsession, a VOLUME 2: The Inauguration of the Pleasure reason for living? I suppose it's another Dome (38 min., color) bridge, a ritual that looms over its perform- ers. But I think it's a film, and I would love VOLUME 3: Kustom Kar Kommandos, Puce to see those ardent, restrained Guinness Moment, Scorpio Rising (37 min., color) eyes-nearly Japanese-gazing on the shining metal. It's entirely appropriate to VOLUME 4: l\\1vocation of My Demon Brother, Lucife! Rising (39 min., color! Each volume is $50, and the boxed set of four is available for $200. The first 200 sets will be signed and numbered by the filmmaker and include a 24 pp. monograph on Anger's films. All orders are prepaid INYS residents add 8'.% sales taxI. Please add $2 per tape for shipping and handling, and specify VHS or Beta format. Exclusively from: Guinness that his best film might be one mystic ~IRE VIOEO not noticed, not even made. A film for the 24 HORATIO 5T. #3F, NY NY 10014 mind's eye. ~ (212) 645-2733 WRITE FOR OUR CATALOG OF AVANT GARDE CINEMA, LIVING THEATRE, ART; BIOGRAPHY AND SPIRITUAL VIDEOS
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Diane Books A Sweet Diane Keaton interviewed H eaven is not Diane Keaton's debut as next to a totally submerged deep-sea div- by Marlaine Glicksman a director. In 1982, she filmed What er. One book depicts life in America, the Does Dorrie Want? a 17-minute docu- other, life in the movies and the differ- \"I remember at the end of the movies I mentary that focused on her younger sis- ences aren't too dissimilar, a point Keaton liked, movies with happy endings, it ter, then a legal secretary. Keaton likes to advances with Heaven. thrilled me to think that life was reduced to question basic questions. a fixed moment in time. I was really sus- Keaton talked about Heaven, after an ceptible to the idea that life, in the bestpos- As an actress, her characters hav~ been extra-long day of L.A. shooting in direc- sible way, was a dream. Happiness was people who were their own best victim, tor-screenwriter Charles Shyer's Baby something that you wanted to grab onto yet who struggled with conflicts that Boom, a comedy about a career woman and stop. Heaven was a notion where ev- course through contemporary lives. Kea- who inherits a baby. In Woody Allen's Ra- erything was perfect; and in beingperfect, ton has struck some remarkable chords: in dio Days (in which the Woody A1len-as-a- heaven was motionless. \" The Godfather I and II, Looking for Mr. kid character, Joe, says: \"My most vivid Goodbar, Shoot the Moon, Annie Hall, memory connected with a radio song was -Diane Keaton, in her intro to Still Life. Interiors, and The Little Dnunmer Girl. when Aunt Bea and her boyfriend took And her turns in Harry and Walter Go To me to the movies. It was the first time I What is black and white, in color, New York, Play It Again Sam, Love and ever saw Radio City Music Hall, and it was and somewhere over the rain- Death, Mrs. Soffel, Crimes of the Heart, like entering heaven\"), Keaton is a torch- bow? That has an angel orches- and Radio Days surprise, seduce, and song singer in a ritzy Forties nightclub. tra, a pork chop orchard, and is just like compel attention. When Allen's camera finds her, singing L.A., New York, Chicago, or Miami? The Cole Potter's ''You'd Be So Nice To answer is heaven. And Heaven, the first One of the most noticeable features of Come Home To\" (\"You'd be so nice to feature-length \"documentary\" directed Heaven is just how much Keaton's eye is come home to and 10veNou'd be so nice! by Diane Keaton. at work, looking for different ways to You'd be paradiseNou'd be so nice to phrase or highlight what we take for grant- come home to and love\"), the first re- Neither a narrative nor a true documen- ed and so forget to see. This marks her sponse is surprise, then appreciation for tary, Heaven is a kind ofcollage ofold film work as a collagist and particularly her the layering. The Diane Keaton I met is clips and Sunday morning religious TV work as a photographer. Her first photo far more similar to Radio Days' efferves- programs (the kind that come after collection, Reservations (now out of cent chanteuse (even after a long day of Gumby and before Face the Nation), in- print), consists of black and white stills of work) than Annie Hall. terspersed with interviews with \"civil- hotel lobbies, void of people but not of ians,\" all conducted by Keaton offcamera. their presence. Heaven is constructed the way Keaton It's a melange of sight and sound, catego- appears to think: a burst of thought, fol- rized by eternal questions: Are you afraid Reservations stops at the Sterling Hotel lowed by another, a doubling back and to die? Do you believe in heaven? Is there in Miami Beach where a plaid couch on a then forward, bundles of thoughts pro- sex in heaven CYou make little dead peo- linoleum-pattern floor butts a fake brick pelled by emotion (rather than vice versa), ple?\" one adolescent asks)? wall. At the Ambassador in Los Angeles, thoughts that vary in cadence and emo- two fake firs covered with canned snow sit tions that vary in intensity. Her thoughts While the clips and TV shows are most- symmetrically against flocked wallpaper, are conceptual, her thinking creative, as- ly in black and white, the stylized inter- separated by a fluorescent light fIXture sociative rather than lineal: More I won't views-shot on white sets that are both (the son usually recessed into the ceiling). say. Diane Keaton is simply Diane Kea- futuristic and retro-are in color. Pat- The floor looks like it's covered in Astro- ton. And Heaven is very Diane Keaton. terned light or an astral image skim Kea- tun. ton's subjects, and like expressionist -M.G. paintings, suggests states of mind. Keaton also published a second collec- tion, called Still Life (also out of print), \"When you take people outofreal life and Keaton drew from the likes of her which she and Marvin Heiferrnan culled photograph them in an artificial situation, grandmother, Mary (Grammy Hall), and from archival studio photographs and fan- whatyou get is asense thatpeople are truly her sister, Dorrie, but mostly people she zines. In it, Mr. and Mrs. Ronald Reagan undefinable. What you want is to place found by scouring Hollywood Boulevard, Gane Wyman) repose, in a 1947 publicity that undefinable quality, which is totally Venice beach, and shopping malls. She photo, on their chaise lounges on their im- impossible. It is also one of the reasons read an interview with Don King, the box- maculately manicured lawn, differentiat- why life is more amazing than it's some- ing promoter and revivalist Christian, and ed from Hollywood below by a perfect times cracked up to be. \" enticed him into participating. \"I'll give hedge, while Ron sucks in his gut and you a piece of heaven,\" King told her, \"if Jane appears to hold on to the chair for -Diane Keaton, intro to Still Life. you give me a piece of the devil.\" King in- dear life. Dolores Gray poses with her vited her to a boxing match-her first- pink poodles, in her pink color-coordinat- Where did the idea of Heaven origi- and Keaton watched it Oreo'd between ed car, in a 1955 MGM photo. And in a shot nate? Muhammad Ali and Larry Holmes. from Paramount's Easy Come, Easy Go Well, a few years back, I took a trip with (1%7), a fully clothed Elvis Presley stands 32
Mn,rrn,'\\nti' visitor was a about dream, these the clouds. It just that, just sort of sparked aU these incredible one shot from The M~r1niIf!ht. which I'd seen It's just the most amaz- ing with all these millions and millions of people and this orchestra. An amazing shot. I thought about doing a religious film, calking to people about religion, wouldn't that be fascinating and wouldn't it be fun to sort of research films that already exist, religious films. Of course, I had no idea it would be difficult to secure rights, or any of those things. How did you arrive at the style of the film, the mixture ofclips and interviews? The style-it was sort of. .. I had an idea for\"the people. I wanted to interview them in an anonymous, sort of nowhere place. I wanted them in a more formal set- up than in their own homes or in the street. So I knew what I wanted for the in- terviews and I wanted as many and as much variety as I could get within the limi- tations ofour budget. I wanted all kinds of shots of what I thought people would think of as rewards, so I went looking for that. So I went shopping, basically, shop- ping for film. Also, I wanted Hollywood's idea of what heaven was, so I spent a lot of. time looking at films. There were images that I wanted about love and images I wanted about sex, you know, because I thought those were the questions, those were the :rewards that we think about, what heaven would be like. I was looking everywhere. We got lucky. We found outa lot about religious films. We couldn'tgetall the rights to everything we wanted. There was something called Millions, which is this incredible \",fIW.UJal. Eddie Kantorwas in that Gold- We it from William Ever- ~~n :QoJIe~ and film historian. and let us have clips use; he was really he
films with, and (for whom] I had just fin- -,~-- r ished a film, let us use a minute of footage from a lot of those good heaven films for ; ?I free, except for printing costs and all that. The Hom Blows at Midnight. How closely did you work with Wil- liam Everson? It's like the David Byrne song, \"Heav- cause we're not talking about an in-depth, en is a place where nothing, nothing really serious piece here. The people we used He was utterly wonderful to us, right happens.\" It's so boring. Without con- turned out to be the people who had a from the beginning. He put us on to films flict ... I mean, What is life without con- more vested interest and who had a more that were in the public domain. That's flict? We don't know. Without conflict, why we got lucky. He gave us a lot of heaven is like a still life. No movement, poetic; or more angry ... Just more. Be- ideas, and ifI said, \"Okay, we need a lot of no nothing. Heaven is just an extension of shots with angels,\" he knew. He knew his life here, I think. cause you can't sit there and look at some- library like nobody.... His mind is amaz- thing for 80 minutes and, \"Well, it's just a ing about detail for every film that he owns It's interesting that you mention a still state of being....\" and films that he doesn't own, pre-'S6. He life, because there is some similarity be- only has, maybe, a few things from the tween Still Life and Reservations and the There were a lot of people who just Sixties; basically, his collection is earlier didn't work at all. Originally, we thought films. film. The sets look like the hotel lobbies in we'd have a big cross section, but it turned out to be people with a more emotional at- Why did you choose older film clips? Reservations, and the people look like tachment to it. And the people who often those in Still Life. Did you intend that? had a more emotional attachment to it Because of the expense. We couldn't were the ones who were lonely, who were even get the rights. You can't pay those ac- To take a person out of their normal sit- angry, who were poetic, who are on the uation and to stick them in their sterile set- fringes of the mainstream. But lovely. I tors, and it's a big, big deal. So there was ting made it more like a dream to me. The fell in love with some of thoSe people. I whole movie is about something that's not really identified with them. Because I no human way we could ever have used real. It's about people's imaginations. It's think everybody really longs for some- about wishes and longings and hopes. I thing. anything too new. don't think of this as a documentary; it's just a strange little movie. How would you New Yorkers were saying, \"Why You mentioned that when you were do a documentary about heaven? It's more weren't there more people like us?\" It younger you saw a film about heaven. seemed very \"California.\" about the imagination. I didn't think it Well, my idea of heaven as a kid was would be much fun to take people off the Yeah, well. Yeah. It was. It was \"Cali- definitely an idea I was curious about and street and talk to them about heaven. fornia,\" and that's where we shot it. liked and accepted and sort ofdidn't think And it recalls the collages that you've Why? about. So heaven images have always done. There was acertain sense ofirony in il, ofmixing the old wilh the new . .. California? Because it's much more ofa been sort of funny to me. Ridiculous, but melting pot for people with kind of stron- sweet. You just can't get away from yourself, ger religious feelings. People come to right? You're sort of stuck with you. You California for dreams. And we shot here But they weren't ridiculous when you and your interests. Right? because we didn't have that much money, werealdd? in truth. It's not like we could just shoot it How about the people? Why those par- in California and in New York and in, you I don't think that as a kid I really had too ticular people? know, Atlanta, or wherever. And I felt many heaven images. I had sort of angels California is the place where people come and clouds, nothing really specific. I think Well, we had a lot ofpeople. A lot of the frequently, dreamers.. .. It's like Na- I believed in it, but I don't think I really interviews just didn't work, because they thanael West, and things like that. thought about it. I think it was about ice were boring. We needed to get rid of peo- ple who we're not going to listen to, be- cream-mundane. So when I was a kid, it wasn't really on my mind a lot, but it really struck me as fascinating later on. When I saw lhe film, I thought two things: il demonstrates that people's con- cepts are media-induced. .. . That's true. It is real hard for people to think about heaven. It's not really any- thing more than a hope or a wish, and it's not something tangible. Obviously it's ab- stract and you can only imagine it in hu- man terms. Most people still in active lives don't think about it at all. It's not some- thing you think about. You think about dying at times, which is actually why I used that idea of \"Are you afraid to die?\" because I think that dying is what brought us heaven. And that was the other thing, that it is about death. Yeah. The images of heaven in the film were often destructive images. That's ttue, isn't it? It's weird. It wasn't necessarily a nice heaven. 34 .
was reminded ofthat right away. Oh no, not really. No. I did feel that those people in Reds were just so wonder- ful, just so great. It was such a dnring idea. Brilliant. It was just brilliant. It was so hard to believe that you could have them and then cut to this scripted movie where we were acting, and it was okay. It gave us the license to tell this story, because they were so mixed about what the actual histo- ry was.... The truth is not a rigid thing. The past is seen through people's eyes who lived it, which is personal and slant- ed, according to how you feel or think. It was so right. But no, I had nothing to say about that. I don't know if it was [Vittorio] Stor- raro's idea or Warren's idea to have the black backdrop and simple, plain lighting. But in Heaven, I wanted to use a pat- temed light that made you feel like you were someplace else. H seaven edit reminded me of gospel did it. And then we got it to Skip Li- \"Every one of them is the best possible music, thot repetition. evsay-he's the best sound guy around. version of themselves imaginable. They Well, we initially had a lot of death im- And I said to him that sound was some- live in the heavens. They're like mytho- ages. And when we first cut the movie to- thing that we really wanted to play around logical beings whom we fashion ourselves gether, we had like 15 minutes of death. with. Why not try it? He was great. after in moments of weakness.\" We were going to open it with all this dy- ing, all these dying shots. Of course, that The way you chose to shoot interviews. -Keaton, on film stars, did not work at all. So then we thought, I notice that you shot the older people dif- in Still Life. What if we had short bursts of it through- ferently, Grace and Mary . .. out? So we have this overlapping sound Why have you chosen to work in docu- from this religious fanatic, like a little buzz Mary is my grandmother. mentary form so far, instead of from the dentist, a little jarring thing, and You shot her like a photographer. You narrative and working with actors and just repeat it occasionally. And we have shot extreme close-ups on her eye, for in- actresses? these images, just to remind you that \"Are stance. Why? you afraid to die?\" is one of the reasons Because they meant a lot. On the sec- Well, it's like real behavior, real people. why people think about heaven and what ond shoot, we did close-ups. We had two And they say things that are surprising. you can get in heaven. Is there love there, bouts of shooting, and we went back and And I've always liked documentaries. It's and how do you get there, and what is it, got some people again, because they were an excuse to explore certain worlds. When and do you believe in it? people you liked and cared about. So I else am I going to get to go to Hollywood wanted to get in closer. Because I loved Boulevard, you know, hang around, and So it sort ofcame out of a mistake. Like Grace. And I loved Mary. go up to people and say, \"Hey, you know, a lot of things. It came out of20 minutes of They showed such strong sensitivity. what do you think about this?\" looking at death images and realizing that I think we needed it. We had the long- nobody's going to want to watch this. You er, more medium shots, the far shots that Is that whot you did? know, it just doesn't work-we just cut it show you the set. And we had some funny Mm-hmm. Oh yeah, and we went to down real fast. things-like the interviews-all on the the Christian Motorcycle Club in Garden first shoot. But when we saw what we had, Grove to find people. We had this guy who has a great voice, we realized that we needed to get some- There's a Christian Motorcycle Club? OJ: Hymers, a religious fundamentalist body that you care about, at least, just a Yeah. We interviewed one of those here. [Dr. Hymers is also in the movie, in bit. I don't think that it's a movie about guys, but it didn't make the movie. It one of the debates.] And I, at home, edit- caring about people, really, but [I wanted didn't work. .But it was a great idea. I ed it by repeating certain things out of all you to] be touched by somebody. So that's mean, it could've, maybe. But we just did of his sermons. I just took out the most when I decided that we had to get in, to all kinds of things to find people. dramatic and put them together. Because get tighter, to try harder with the inter- Was it hard to get backing because it I thought that sound was important. views and hang in with them a little bit was such an unusual idea? more. And then I thought, let's not get I don't understand it myself. It initially It was kind of Paul Bames, the editor; new people, let's stick with people we started as a much smaller film, a shorter Joe Kelly, the producer; and I-we all liked to give us more. film, and it grew. Arid RCA, for some un- worked together a lot. It was just every Did you have any influence on the known reason--{gave us the money]. I day, trying and throwing it out, and trying shooting ofthe older witnesses in Reds? I don't know why; I'll never understand it. I and throwing it out. That was the way we love them for it, but don't ask me, I don't know what they were thinking. But I'm 35
very grateful. Eternally grateful. ish-it's just about anger, about hostility, upset after the interview. Reverend Is it harderfor an actress to get backing by people who feel that because they got Hands talks about .. . the bad end of the deal here in life, you're for a film than an actor? going to be punished in the next life ifyou He was the man who, in reply to the I never really believed that it was hap- don't follow the rules. screenwriter, who asked how we know there's a heaven if we can't see it, said we pening. Itjust sort ofcontinued to go. And I do think that you can't get away from can't see our brain either, so how do we so it was like this magical thing. I never yourself. I think that one is a certain kind know we have one? thought about whether it was easier for an of person, and given the chance you get a actor to get funding-for a film about chance, you get the opportunity to express He was a little annoyed . He told Joe heaven? I think women directors are doing yourself. Then frequently it does have a Kelly I was the worst interviewer he's ever pretty good now, aren't they? kind of, oh, yeah, that's part of.. .. you come across. But I can' t imagine he's know. come across a lot. I asked him questions They're doing better. I don't know how that put him on the spot. I asked him great they're doing. But I think we see In the introduction to Still Life you about homosexuality. Because he knows rrwre actors directing. mention the dioramas at the Museum of that they're the kind of questions that get Natural History. ... people upset. And get him in trouble. I guess that's true. I think it really de- pends a lot on the actress-what she's in- Taxidermy. Right. As an actress, you've played a lot of terested in and how she's going to make And the people in your film, like the very strong women who make big choices things happen. This was an odd situation, California Indian couple . .. and throw themselves into difficult situa- because I'm not someone who really sells Oh, them. That interview didn't work tions, dangerous situations, like in Mrs. something. I've tried to, but I wouldn't and we knew that, but they were wonder- Soffel and like Charley in Little Drummer know how to. . . . Well, maybe that's not ful to look at. Girl and Theresa Dunn in Looking for totally true. See, I don't know how some Did they come dressed that way? Mr. Goodbar. At the end of the films, people just get things done. Some people Yeah. [Laughs] But we asked them to, however, those women are somehow sub- just know how to get things done. I don't because that's the way we saw them-at a dued. Theresa Dunn . . . think about it in terms ofmale and female. shopping mall or something. So we said, See, I don't know if this is an industry \"Would you come and talk about heaven Died. thing, though. I don't know if! could get a in your costumes?\" And they did. But it And Charley was broken at the end. I real feature, a comedy or a drama. That's wasn't really right for the movie, because I saw that in Betty Blue and Something another matter. That's a different animal. felt that we should stick with heaven, like Wild, too, where two very strong female the Western, Christian version of heaven. characters are subdued at the end. So you pretty much got rrwney right They got a little spiritual there-he was See, but I don' t think that Mrs. Soffel away. talking a lot about the Day of the Dead- was subdued. She really defied them to and I just didn't feel that it was right for the the end. And-it's a true story-she got Yeah. It was an idea and we wanted to movIe. caught. She didn't say, \"I'm sorry.\" She do it, and I first thought it would be a lot Why just the Christian version? slapped the guy in the face and said, less money and a lot smaller. And I hon- Because it's too big, the other. To get estly can't figure it out. into Eastern or Indian ideas was not about \"Yeah, I'm going in and this is the man I what I was interested in. I was interested love and go fuck yourself.\" She had to go Did RCA want to have input? in American kind of heaven, Christianity, to jail. You know she was not subdued. They did. We had to show them, along typical sort of apple-pie ideas about hea- the way, the various cuts. We had to show Charley was like a total lunatic. I don't them the IS-minute death stuff-we put ven. ,.. . It's not an educational film where think that she was strong. I think she was them through that. But they were very you inform people; it's about what we all always weak. And always crazy. She was good about the whole thing. know about here in the States. an arrogant, little, selfish kind of actress eavens sense of irony reminded me There's another film about heaven who wasn't very good and who insisted on being good and trying to be good, even HofReservations. It also reminded me coming out this year, Made in Heaven. though she wasn't very gifted 'or talented. With Alan Rudolph. That's right. So she was going to throw herself into this mofyour acting a way, too-the serious terrorist world and be somebody. So she That's a real movie, right? was pathetic, all ambition and no gifts. No counterbalanced by the comedic. Right. I noticed at certain times in histo- brains. No nothing. She was not strong at Oh really? Hmm. I don't know what to all. ry ... say about that. That comes about, doesn't it? I know. And Theresa Dunn was a case history, Was it a conscious kind ofthing? I was wondering if. .. Oh God, I don't think it was conscious. If we're due for that now? if you ask me. A lot of people view that Yeah. Just why . .. movie as a morality tale. I never did. You I mean, I thought: \"Here's what I have. Reassurance. People get more interest- know, like, \"You fuck, you die.\" But I al- How can we make it work?\" Real practical ways viewed it as a story about a self-de- stuff. And the only thing I know is that ed in fantasies than reality. And escape. I structive person who was never able to there are some funny things, and that's really don't believe in heaven myself. find her strength, because she was on the good. You have to ttY to be not too silly People just want to be reassured, and they road to killing herself. So I don't agree toward the end, because everybody's don't want to think. afraid to die. And everybody hopes for with you about those characters. something. And that's what's sweet about Why now? I think that Mrs. Soffel was positive, it, because you feel for those people, you Probably everyone wants to be sedated. feel for yourself. Because you are one of because she experienced real love. And those people. H ow did the people you interviewed for her, that made her life fuller. And at , react after . . . the end, she said, \"You can't take that I also felt that people who believe in , Mter seeing the film? Some people got away from me ifyou throw me in jail for a hell were ridiculous and that the idea of hundred, a million years.\" I think she was hell was something that I could never go along with, ever, because it just is too fool- 36
enlarged by her experience. The other ural and, I think, alive. And very simple, don't think that it's particularly easy.... two were just sad people. I think that too. He was very smart and a very gifted Theresa Dunn was really sad-sweet, be- What did your grandmother [Grammy cause of that dichotomy in her: she could teacher. ... Hall] say about growing older? be with the deaf kids, which made her strong, but she was so crazy about men. It Are you working on anything else, as a About the time we were doing the film, was more about punishment, you know, director? she just wanted to die. Because everybody totally sadomasochistic. That she had to was gone, and she didn't want to live any- destroy herself that way. Well, I want to do a music video. I want more. And she was very honest, brutally to do a few music videos, which are much honest about everything. She was Catho- I get the feeling that these aren't charac- more about choreographing your shots, lic, which makes no sense. She got no ters you like. working with professional people. comfort from being a Catholic. She just thought, \"Well, I don't know if there's a I love them, are you kidding? I com- And you'll continue acting? heaven.\" I respected her for that. But I pletely love Mrs. Soffel. And I felt for also love people who have a dream, if it Theresa Dunn, because everybody has Well, sure. I think I'm an actress. But gives them some comfort. And they don't those elements in their personality. And I I'd like to do more directing. It's less emo- punish people with their thoughts. tional, and it's fun because your mind has felt for Little Drummer Girl-I liked her to think in a different way. And are you afraid to die? the least because she was somebody who Any subjects in mind? Of course, definitely. I don't want to was so lost. But interesting. I mean, my die. Are you? God, all ofus have so many elements in us No. I have a movie that I want to try to that are so weak and strong. get on, and I want to try to produce a cou- Yes. Although when you're older there ple of fictional things. But we'll see. I seems more to leave behind. When you're YOU went to the Neighborhood Play- don't know what's going to happen. younger, it seems that it'd be easier. house, and yet fve never heard you say anything about Sanford Meisner. How do y()u feel about growing older I don't think so. It really depends. It and the parts that are available for older could be right for you. But I've seen some I also studied with Marilyn Fried for actresses? old people, because I do this volunteer years-she's a very important person to work at this home [Keaton is a volunteer at me. Sandy had this way of teaching which In the movies? See, look, I don't think the Jewish Home and Hospital for the was really just about playing offother peo- there are any rules. I don't think you really Aged in New York], who are ready to let it ple and leaming how to be real in a situa- know. In general, older people on film- go. And that's kind ofgraceful. Maybe it is tion. He was very important to me. He there's just not as much call for, not as better to live your full life, if you're lucky gave me a way ofapproach 'which was nat- much money to be made from it. I think enough to have a full life. And then maybe all things can change, and as for me, I have it's easier to let go. However, I can't imag- no idea. ine it, to be honest with you. ~ How do you feel about growing older? I feel like everybody feels. I think it's something that happens to us all, and I Film scholarship demands the finest resources. We provide them. The Department of Cinema Studies of the Tisch faculty, students develop the depth of understand- School of the Arts, New York University, offers ing that is the mark of true scholarship. graduate students the resources essential to the For information, return the coupon or telephone scholarly study of film. (212) 598-7777. Our M .A. and Ph.D. programs in cinema stud- ies provide: • A rigorous course of study covering history, criticism, and aesthetics • Exposure to new methodol{)gies-semiotics, psychoanalysis, structuralism, and post- structuralism r------------ I • Personal viewing/study facilities-flatbeds , I I Tisch School of the Arts I analytic projector, and video equipment I I New York University • Access to materials-the department's own 721 Broadway, 7th Floor holdings; rare material from the William Everson Collection, the Museum of Modern Art, and New I New York , N.Y. 10003 York City's many cinemas, libraries, and archives. 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by Jimmy McDonough stand there while I'd jump all over him, catchin' my feet around him, doin' bally \"It's so wonderful up here. So close to stuff. I worked with Bob Hope, Milton heaven. \"-Ian j. Masterson to the plane- Berle, Ginger Rogers, Ethel Merman, all load of hostages he has taken before they of them. I played six weeks at the Palla- crash in Mesa of Lost Women (1953). dium in London, met the Duke ofWales, the Duke of York. I sat this close to Zieg- I t was in a muted, yellow-and-brown The Ormonds. feld. Shoney's restaurant, where she maintains a daily account, that I first ran in the basement of the Mayfair The- \"So, I had a complete life before I met met june Ormond. She is an owlish, ater at 47th and Broadway in New York Ron.\" round woman with a raspy laugh whom I City. \"It was called Coffee Cliff's-Cliff had spoken to briefly on the phone a few was my father's name. My parents were TheWestems times but never face-ta-face. For years I getting up in years and decided to retire had been after her, ever since I saw a yel- from the road, so they opened this club, June put her years of show-biz know- lowing poster for her movie White Light- right across the street from the Palace. how to work designing package shows When the agent sees me, he asks my she and Ron could travel the circuits with. nin' Road, which blasted \"SOUPED UP mother if he could have me audition for \"My first show was called 'Chuckles'-a the Paramount Circuit. The show was line ofgirls, a coupla acts, and three musi- CARS AND BARNYARD BABES\" in fat called 5- ami IO-Cent Follies. The pro- cians-about 15 people all together. Ron white letters on a hot red background. \"90 ducer was Frank Capra. They signed me was not quite good enough for the big time MINUTES OF ACTION; FIGHTING right away. like New York City. I trained him while WOMEN, MOONSHINING MEN AND we did the show .... See, if he had kept FREE-FOR-ALL LOVE!\" \"My ace in the trade was comedy adag- doin' his magic the way he was when I gio-the MC would always look high married him, he would've ... never got From the mid-Forties on, june, her class, top hat and tails, and would just into comedy. But we became very popular husband Ron, and son Tim, known col- down South. I did all the booking and ... lectively as the Ormond Organization, had four shows playing at a time.\" have made moyies. Ron produced, wrote, and directed the pictures; june was CD-C(e- Time off was spent in Hollywood, ator and often sole distributor; and Tim is where june's parents had retired to. Ron's the next generation. The Ormond film mother, an Italian immigrant, lived in San genres include musicals, westems, min- Francisco. \"She used to say to me, 'What strel shows, down-home melodramas, and have you got in mind-you don't want sex-gore shockers, which they learned to him to work, you want him to be a bum?' exploit the hell out of. Then one day, the I'd say, 'No, Mama, I want hjm to stay private plane, which Ron flew to promote home and write the stories.' \" the likes of Girl From Tobacco Row, went into a tailspin--emblematic of the By chance, the Ormonds had settled Ormonds' dissatisfaction with the Fast into a Hollywood neighborhood rich with Buck. The plane crashed, and the Or- movie star cowboys like Roy Rogers,who monds emerged making exploitation pic- Ijved right across the street. \"One night, tures for jesus. Show business is the Or- about 10 o'clock, Ron and I are going to monds' life. bed and there's a knock on the door. Ron opens it and there's this handsome fella all Prologue dressed in black with a pretty girl on his arm. He says, 'Well, here I am! I'm When june Ormond was 14, an agent LASH LaRUE!' And Ron says, 'So came into the nightclub her mother what?' Lash says, 'I want to go on tour.' So 38
Ron wrote him an act. He's still usin' the almost 100 people on the set, but I got'em go to Atlantic City and see ... the minstrel act after all these years! His real name's Al- all where they had to go.\" show. I said, 'We' ll show the boat coming fred, y' know, and he was a hairdresser pri- in, with 'em dancing and singin', and we'll or to gettin' in the movies, but he don't Lippert next showed the Ormonds a put my father up there as the boatmaster.' like anybody to talk about that.\" minstrel film that had done well for Uni- I can see itin my mind, it's so vivid. All the versal. \"Bob says, 'Whattaya think of this, minstrels are terrific in the picture. \" As luck would have it, while on the road dear?' 'Well, Mr. Lippert,' I said. '!t's very with Lash down South, Ron met Francis good, except I think I could make one Sunset & Stooges White and Joy Houck, Sr. , two men al- even better than that.' He says, 'You ready very powerful in the film business. could?' Ron almost killed me after we left. The Ormonds also organized personal Together they were known as Howco, appearance tours. \"Sunset Carson was and they owned the Consolidated The- \"So I went home and said, 'Now I'm a big westem star. We met him through ater chain and controlled four exchanges: gonna make some tea.' And we're sitting Spade Cooley. The women went crazy Jacksonville, Charlotte, Memphis, and in the kitchen and he says, 'Well, come over him. When the show was over we Atlanta. on, give me this great idea that you have.' had to hide him. He was just gorgeous, So I related to him what I had in mind for y'know. We got him on a contract and Ron pitched Howco Lash LaRue, his this minstrel show. He says, 'Tell me that took him out-I didn't go on these shows soon-to-be sidekick, AI 'Fuzzy' St. John, again, tell me that again.' Write, write, 'cause a woman could never handle Sun- roop-doop-doop. Pretty soon it gets down set Carson. So Ron worked with him on and a script, Deadman's Gold. ''They on paper-Yes-sir, Mr. Bones [aka Min- the show. For 13 weeks Sunset Carson strel Man, 1951]. never saw a sober day. He was drunk all bought the script from Ron for $500- Ron didn't even put his name on it, he was \"We got Emmet Miller, one of the big- so sure people would think he bought it time minstrel stars. I had seen 'em all and from someone else.\" With that, Westem met'em down South. As a child I used to Adventure Productions was formed, and after two or three pictures Ron began to direct. Throughout the Forties and early Fifties, twelve Lash LaRue westems were made, among them Mark of the Lash (1948) and King of the Bullwhip (1951). While on the road, the Ormonds met Bob Lippert of Screen Guild, who had sold plates in the theaters during the wac Recalls June, \"Bob Lippert said, 'Could you make a westem for me?' So we made Rimfire [1949], then Outlaw Women [1952]. Ron wrote the script and directed, I did the choreography and wrote one of the songs, 'Crazy Over You.' The picture was very successful, and Bob gave us ten percent-as producers we thought that was pretty good.\" The Musicals The musicals started in 1949 with Square Dance Jubilee, starring rising country stars Cowboy Copas and Spade Cooley. The next Lippert production was Hollywood Varieties (1950), about vaude- ville. \"I wrote this little beginning about vaudeville dying, and Bob Lippert loved it. The picture cost $10,000. I got all the acts I knew from my years on the road- Brit Wood; Whirl, Twirl and a Girl-Rob- ert AIda was the host. We shot with three cameras in a downtown L.A. theater. I worked day and night on the picture, even slept on the set. Only problem was I hadn't come up with the ending yet. I had 20 minutes-the crew was gonna quit at five and we couldn't afford to keep 'em around. I made one of my choreography maps with the dots, an' I said, 'Gimme a few minutes, I'll put this on.' There was
The Shasta live deep in the ground to the ripe old age of800 years. Mother Mary was also a flying saucer enthusiast. Alone with Tim, and trying to make a living with \"Untamed Mistress\" while Ron was on a \"spiritual journey,\" June was desperate for a visitation . .. the time. Very hard to work with. But such endlessly in Ormond movies, not to men- made at the end of his career. As pan of an business you never seen. Couldn't get tion Ed Wood's Jailbait, which Ron also agreement to leave Howco, they traded near the theaters.\" titled. their ten percent interest in Outlaw Wom- en for Black Panthers film footage minus Later, in the Fifties, June put the Little by little the Ormonds edged to- Sabu. \"So we took that and the footage Three Stooges out on the road. \"They ward the most lucrative market for inde- from Ot Harris and shot some new stuff were in between pictures. Weren't very pendents, the exploitation film. ''This using a girl raised by gorillas who was now popular. I guaranteed them so much mon- English hand analyst had made this movie grown-Untamed Mistress. We used sex ey. Curly was dead at the time. I put in about how to read hands, how Hitler's appeal in the advertising: 'Which will be Shemp. Moe was very intelligent. We right hand had a little star on it which her mate, MAN or BEAST?' And ya see took pictures of the Stooges with the audi- could've told you he was a murderer. A lot the gorilla standin' over her,\" June recalls. ence. We made more money takin' the of it was very gruesome-there was even pictures with the Stooges than the theater footage of the concentration camp with all \"I went out on the road with Untamed made on the picture at the boxoffice. It the bodies piled up. We did a terrific cam- Mistress. I had a young man drive the car was a real ball for them. \" paign with a big, hairy Hitler hand in the for me and Tim, when he was out of middle of it and called it The Eternal school. I'd go into a town two days ahead June regrets not taking only one stat; Question. We triple-billed it with Attack of time, giving fliers away, drivin' down Bela Lugosi, out on the road. \"Woulda of the Flying Saucers and Fire Maidens the street in a convertible with a loud- made a fottune. I wanted to, but he said from Outer Space. Made a lotta money.\" speaker, banners, and stuff. And I had a he had a problem: 'I have to have medica- man dressed up like a gorilla. That's what tion.' I thought he meant high colonies, But nothing prepared the Ormonds for you call exploitation. I didn't particularly somethin' like that. I says, 'We'll get it their first real success in the exploitation like it, but it was a way to make money. taken care of.' I thought, I've taken care of field, Untamed Mistress (1957). Back in Hollywood, Ron was plugging the Three Stooges, I can certainly take Lash LaRue pictures. But we never got care of Bela Lugosi. He says to Ron, 'You \"A Ot Harris told us a story about a lit- paid enough for the amount of work we don't understand what I gotta have' and tle boy in Mrica left out in the jungle who put into this stuff: top price at night was 75 motions to his arm, like with a needle. I was raised by gorillas. This is a true sto- cents; matinees, 50 cents. Even with the said, 'Oh, we couldn't get ya thatl' He ry-Ron bought the footage.\" The Or- Stooges~ top price was a dollat I'd be a says, 'Well, I can't go; I got someone here monds had made Black Panther for millionaire today if we had been gettin' who takes care of me.' Then Ed Wood Howco, a 30-rninute shon with Sabu, four dollars admission. booked Bela into the Silver Slipper in Las Vegas, and he got an overdose. He was But with only four prints of Untamed Tim's godfather, y'know.\" Mistress in three months in Texas, \"I made $99,000,\" June said. Howcodistrib- Man or Beast uted the film. ''We'd go here and there, make all this big money, and I'd say, H aving done westerns and musicals, in 'When are y'gonna remit to me?' \" Howco 1 the Fifties the Ormonds turned to sci- then claimed it still owned the Sabu foot- ence fiction. \"Howco had this unfinished )bungJune and Ron. age and filed a suit, which was later set- picture called Tarantula they asked Ron tled. But the Ormonds had their first real to finish. So we hired some girls, put wigs taste of self-distribution. on 'em, and got Jackie Coogan to play a Strangers in Paradises mad scientist. \" The picture was called Mesa of Lost The first major trauma came to the Or- monds when Ron got bladder cancer. Women (1953), which made good money After treatment, he headed off to India for Howco. Although June dismisses the and the East with his friend Ormond picture today as \"the lousiest thing I have McGill the magician for eight months. ever seen,\" it has its moments: The pro- (Born Vic Narro, Ron took his mentor's logue features a scantily clad Spanish Christian name for his surname.) June re- Mesa girl with eight-inch fmgemails. mained behind to work roadshows of Un- Ron's gravelly voice luridly asks, \"Have tamed Mistress. She also befriended a self- you ever been kissed by a GIRL like styled mystic by the name of Mother THIS????!\" The soundtrack combines Mary, who claimed to have contact with odd, dramatic riffs on the piano and a ner- the Shasta people. Now the story gets vous Flamenco guitat This disorienting, atonal music by Hoyt Curtain is repeated 40
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strange: the Shasta, you see, are said to .. ' M~\\) ~tltR l\\\\t t\\GM~ETtt•Wn.l..,.:· live deep in the ground to the ripe old age of 800 years. Mother Mary was also a Please Don't Touch Me. flying saucer enthusiast, and it wasn' t long before June got deeply involved with that, this or do that. So I [thought] that I seems, \"had gone into many of the ash- too. Alone with Tim, and trying to make a shouldn't allow a lot of these flying saucer rams and met many religious people. His living with Untamed Mistress while Ron people to completely absorb me in my whole attitude became metaphysical of was on a \"spiritual journey,\" June was des- thinking. Because it was an ego kick with the healing forces. And I had said to him, perate for \"a visitation\" like she'd read some of them. 'You've had such tremendous things hap- pen to you-and I believe them because about in Calvin Gurvin's The Night Has \"Y'see, not everybody is legit in this you have .pictures and film to back you world. We made a film of Rheinholt up-why don't you and McGill write a 1,000 Eyes. Schmidt's experience, though it wasn't book?\" \"When you hear Calvin's story, you much of a story. But he gave us $10,000 The people who financed the book wouldn't believe it. But I wanted proof and we made it. I forget the name of it \"were friends of mine from the flying sau- now, it was only 35 minutes long, but it cer movement,\" June relates. Logically, So Calvin GUIVin said to me, 'Would you played to packed houses at the flying sau- she suggested: \"Let's put together the really like to have this experience?' I said, cer conventions. He's dead now. A con picture-Into the Strange Unknown.\" 'Definitely,' and he said, 'Tonight, go out man if there ever was one. They put him The Ormonds never made the flying sau- on your patio and look over in the direction in prison because he got money on false cer picture. But \"Into the Strange Un- of Burbank, where the mountain is, and pretenses from quite a few women. He known was a big hit all over the country, you will see three images coming forward, was a real charmer-to some people. But playing the lecture circuit with the flying and when they are almost near get into he couldn't charm me. Takes an awful lot saucer people. \" your house quick and lie down.' to charm me.\" There were detours, to be sure, on the \"At about five minutes of twelve, I saw June starred raising money to produce Ormonds' way to the Sixties. They en- them through binoculars, coming up over Calvin Gurvin's story for Ron-fresh from countered impresario Leo Seltzerand shot the mountains. I hurried into my room. India-to film. Gurvin liked the idea (,I his syndicated roller derby TV show in Los Tim was already sleeping. And I lay there want my parr ofit done absolutely co\"ect,' Angeles. Although it was lucrative and fun for a while-Tim even participated in the quietly. And when they passed over my June quotes him), but Ron demurred: \" 'I children's roller derby-\"the vibes Ron house, my whole house smelled electrical don' t know if I actually and truly believe got from the crowd,\" June says, \"and this (if you ever go into an electrical plant, everybody 100 percent,' \" June recalls one girl, Toughie, were just too much. He there's the smell that comes from the e1ec- Ron said. couldn't do it anymore.\" They also shot troid). There was no smoke or anything, but when this smell enveloped me I could \"I looked at Ron and said, 'Are you kid- Seltzer's Little People, which June de- feel myself leaving my body. Not phys- ding? I'll have to give back all the money.' scribes as \"Gulliver's Travels with midg- ically [but] like a projection, astral projec- See, I had collected money from all the tion; as I looked back I could see me lying saucer people .. . five dollars here, ten ets.\" there and Tim also.\" there, about $18,000.\" Ron told her to give it all back. Then the Ormonds made Please Don't June found herself traveling through Touch Me (1959). Although forgotten to- space, entering a \"great mothership\" with \"I had to write checks, send it all back. I was very disappointed that he wouldn't day, it may be the ultimate exploitation the door coming down \"like in The Day make the picture.\" But in India, Ron, it movie of the decade. A beautiful young the World Stood Still.\" She traveled into a big auditorium with a shadowy figure she refers to as her \"mentor, my guardian an- gel.\" Inside the arena \"were all these rooms, like schoolrooms, and in front was a com- puter. And in each seat was a person sit- ting there, let's call it a spirit entity be- cause I was not there physically, and they had, like, little caps on their heads with lit- tle antennae up there. I walked down this aisle, and when I got to the front, it was like a dais. 'This is tremendous,' I said to myself, 'but none of the people, these spirit entities, have any faces.' And my mentor said, 'That's right. Because they have no ego.' And with that I snapped back and was in my bed. \"About five minutes after I'm back in bed, Calvin Gurvin calls me. He says, 'June, did it happen?' I said, 'It sure did. \", June, however, concluded that not all the saucer people were on the level. \"Y'see, we're each born with an ego, which tells us good and evil, tells us what to do. We're born with the freedom to do 42
Feature Filims from Direct Cinema LimitedBroken 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 Huey Long Hero, populist, dictator, on a plattom of social reform . His portrait of the man and the era, demagogue. HUEY LONG , from programs provided highways, politics and power. Extensive Halt Life: the makers of the Academy bridges and free schoolbooks at archival footage and A Parable for Award nominated films, THE the same time that graft and recollections by Louisianans who the Nuclear Age BROOKLYN BRIDGE and THE corruption became an accepted knew Long are juxtaposed with STATUE of LIBERTY, captures part of life. Long 's aspirations candid contemporary interviews. the rise and fall of one of were high and his spellbinding America's most controversial and personality and political machine Florentine Films charismatic political figures . might have taken him to the White Produced by Ken Burns and Hailed as a champion of House had he not been Richard Kilberg Louisiana 's neglected during the assassinated in 1935. Directed by Ken Burns Great Depression, Long built his The deftly crafted film ~eveals a 88 minutes career as governor and senator complex and comprehensive \"Shocking and powerful ... a First Peace Prize Island s, tiny atolls in the mid- memorable film .\" David Stratton , Winner 1986 Pacific . With declassified Variety Berlin Film Festival government archival film and \"A devastating investigation .. contempora ry interviews, HALF astonishing contemporary record Director's Award LIFE presents a restrained but film .\" David Robinson , for Extraordinary chilling picture of a cynical London Times Achievement 1986 rad iation experiment on human U.S. Film Festival populations . Its parable is a true Written and Directed by one that haunts our past , present Dennis O'Rourke This compelling and beautifully and future . What ATOMIC CAFE 86 minutes crafted film reveals the effects of does for laughs, HALF LIFE does U.S. nuclear testing on the fO'r politics and morality. 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 '~ DfSArllnl:\",lI- The year was 1977, the darkest politically \"disappeared\" 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 thousand s. In this moving A film by Susana Munoz and Argentina . Fourteen ordinary documentary, the Mothers tell of Lourdes Portillo their children 's disappearances 64 minutes women began to meet publicly every Thursday, risking their lives by marching before the presidential palace in Buenos Isaac in America: A Academy Award past through one of his highly The Cafeteria Journey with Isaac Nomination autobiographical short stories . It is a film for everyone who THE CAFETERIA is a moving 8ashevis Singer Best Documentary cares about literature, Jewish film based on Isaac Singer's life and culture , the immigrant story about Jewish refugees Feature 1987 experience and maintaining an trying to escape their past in exuberant approach to life at post World War II New York City. ISAAC IN AMERICA is an every age. intensely cinematic, penetrating Directed by Amram Nowak Starring Bob Dishy and and honest portrayal of one of Produced by Kirk Simon Zorah Lampert America's most remarkable Executive Producer Manya Starr Directed by Amram Nowak writers. The film offers a rare 58 minutes Produced by Kirk Simon opportunity to take a trip with the Executive Producer Manya Starr Nobel-Prize laureate into his Direct Cinema Limited 58 minutes P.O. Box 69799 For information contact: Los Angeles, CA 90069-9976 d~irec,t ~d (213) 652-8000 cinema ~ limited
After a meeting ofthe Hollywood Christian Association, where Jane Russell went, six o'clock the next morning June had her first taste of heaven: \"I got down on the floor. The tears were coming out ofme. It was in the middle ofthis shopping mall. It was the greatest feeling I've ever had, like 10,()()() baths. \" woman can't have sexual relations with of a woman in high-heeled bedroom slip- care ifa man was married or not. Anything her devoted husband because her mother pers and slip, with one strap falling off her to get into show business. So I formed a has convinced her that she was raped in shoulder. The copy read: \"Why did pannership. If anything happened, Ron childhood. Shot in balmy color, Don't MARRIAGE have to be like this? CRU- would get 2S percent and I'd get 7S per- Touch Me touches offa million minefields EL! UGLY! Why couldn't it bring me the cent, because I was more than Ron's buried with the sexual id of the Fifties: wife-I was his panner, pan creator-I momism, impotence, fetishism, and the happiness I longed for? PLEASE, felt I was entitled to it.\" sexual symbology of cigarettes. The pro- DON'T TOUCH ME!\" logue, ignoring narrative in the Ormond With all her distribution work, June was tradition, includes hypnotism, open heart The movie made a fonune. It was the one of the few women inside the exploita- surgery, genital tumors, even the flagel- only Ormond picture to play Times tion world. \"Kroger Babb, I worked for lants of the Philippines Whipping them- Square. him,\" June says. \"A very interesting selves bloody in religious rites. man-a sensational exploitation man. I Nashville booked his Kipling's Women and that one Please Don't Touch Me's cast drew on 'Lash' LaRue from the westerns; magi- T he Sixties found the Ormonds strug- with the blood-drinkin' Mricans, Kara- cian buddy Ormond McGill; con-man gling. Mter their beneficial dealings moja. Ya gotta work in exploitation-ya Rheinholt Schmidt from the UFO world; with Bob Lippen, the Ormonds were and Ron in a brief cameo. And although soured by the usual fast-to-take-your buck can't be that dainty. It's a masculine busi- augmented by the usual fillips of discor- distributors. So they formed the Ormond dant piano and flamenco guitaI; the Organization. ness. \" soundtrack was an unforgettable, ail-har- Self-distribution always means assum- monica score by June's vaudeville friends, June starred worrying about the dozens Jimmy and Mildred Mulcay. of$l.98 show-biz sirens calling up Ron in ing risks that are minuscule to a major film the middle of the night. \"Ron was a pro- company and potentially crippling to a If the movie was delirious, the cam- ducer, director, and a good-looking man. small one. Just getting the exhibitors post- paign was genius-a sad charcoal drawing These girls were outrageous-they didn't ers, lobbies, and stills from National Screen Service cost $20,000. \"By the time they service the picture they rake it off the top, you n~versee the money,\" June says. \"Ifyou were the least bit na'ive, you could get robbed.\" The Ormonds did it all themselves. \"I knew all the drive-in people. You hadda know 'em. The best territories for our pictures were Cincinnati and Nonh Carolina. Georgia was good; the South is the country for this kinda stuff ''The most horrible picture I ever seen was Blood Feast. Ever seen that? It's the most gory thing you ever seen. I saw it with a guy from Howco. We looked at it one day and he says, 'We don't want it. You wanna distribute it, 'I says, 'Nope. I don't like this type of stuff' He says, 'Looks like somebody made it in their bathroom.' I says, 'Yep, and they should flush it back.' I didn't want any pan of it. Made a fonune in theaters. We went to see one of those pictures Russ [Meyer] made; we had to leave the theater.\" So in the mid-Sixties, which unleashed new explicitness in both sex and blood, the Ormonds left Hollywood and headed for Nashville. Nashville then was a wide- open town, full of money and country stars eager to be in the movies. The Ormond Organization made four successful movies in Nashville. Three of 44
INTERNATIONAL FILM GUIDE 1987. INTERNATIONAL MUSIC & OPERA Peter Cowie , ed . Now in its 24th edition , GUIDE 1987. Catriona Hall , ed . The the world 's most respected film annual eleventh edition of this annual is essen- now includes a special \"Dossier\" on tial reading for anyone who loves class- Canada, tributes to the Locarno and ical music and opera, both live and San Francisco Festivals , plus the usual recorded . Includes informative reports medley of reports from 59 countries . from 19 countries , reviews of new com- \"The best ongoing inventory of the pact discs and LPs from several labels world's film industry\" L.A. Times . and an indispensable guide to the best 504 pp. Illustrated . Paper $14 .95 . music and opera festivals, schools , shops and competitions . 224 pp . Illustrated . Paper $12 .95 . LOUISE BROOKS: PORTRAIT OF AN Who's Who in American Film Now ANTI-STAR. Roland Jaccard , ed . [Updated Edition] Translated by Gideon Y. Schein . Louise James Monaco, ed. Who did what, and Brooks - the legendary actress who when, in re cent American cinema. This rebelled against the idolatry of Holly- updated and revised edition lists the wood to preserve her independence key people who make movies today . It and individuality. Illustrated with over features thousands of cast and crew 90 photographs , this is a tribute to a members from the past decade in 13 woman, Louise Brooks ; a film , Lulu; a separate categories - each an al- director, GW. Pabst; and to an era of phabetical list of names with the title German Expressionism . Brooks' own and date of their film cred its . A running lucid reflections give new insight to the commen tary on today's movies , this woman behind the myth . Essays by guide is an invaluable resource for Lotte H. Eisner, Roland Jaccard , and libraries , professionals, film historians Jean-Michel Palmier shed additional and fans alike . light on this fascinating woman . In- Illustrated . c600 pp. Cloth. $39 .95 . cludes filmography. Illustrated. Paper, 160 pp. $19 .95 . INTERNATIONAL TV & VIDEO GUIDE 1987. Richard Paterson , ed. The fifth ENCYCLOPEDIA OF TELEVISION: updated edition features reports, data SERIES, PILOTS AND SPECIALS. and statistics from 49 nations for any- Vincent Terrace. This three volume one interested in television or the com- collection is the essential reference munication arts . Provides a special work on television programming from focus on the successful Doctor Who 1937-1984. All your favorite shows are series, current sections on TV and included ; primetime , latenight and video schools, books , magazines, daytime . Each entry covers plot synop- ' festivals and fairs . sis , cast, guest stars, full credits , air 256 pp . Illustrated . Paper $13.95. dates and much more . Volume III is a complete Index to Volumes I & II ; a WIM WENDERS. Jan Dawson. A re- mammoth \"Who's Who\" in TV, listing vealing interview with a director who thousands of actors, directors , produc- has become a major force on the inter- ers and writers , as well as their lifetime national film scene . Includes a selection credits . Fully cross-referenced . of Wender's own writings on topics Vol. I 480 pp . Cloth $29.95; from film criticism to Rock 'n' Roll. Vol. 11464 pp . Cloth $29 .95 ; Filmography. Illustrated . Paper $5 .00 . Vol. 111662 pp . Cloth $39 .95 . ------------- ---- ------------,..-------- Special Offer $74.95 Hello Zoetrope: o Also please send me your free When you order o Send me the following books . I've catalogue . the complete set! enclosed the proper amount plus NAME _____________________ $1 .50 for postage and handling ($2.00 for c loth & orders of 5 or ADDRESS __________________ more books .) Or cal l 1-800-CHAP- LIN (in NY 212-420-0590) . Visa & Mastercard acc epted . Thanks. Please allow 4-6 weeks for delivery . _______________ ZIP_____ NY residents must add 8'/.% sales tax . New York Zoetrope 838 Broadway Dept. MS New York, NY 10003
\"As we were comin' down, a shaft ofsunlight came in on Tim's coat. I could hear this voice talk to me: 'What's it gonna be from here to eternity?' You can't stop death comin' on you.\" member Johnny Paycheck. In 1966, the Ormonds produced their masterpiece, Girl from Tobacco Row. The story ofa bad boy trying to tum good, it featured homespun performances by Tex Ritter, Snake Richards, Gordon Ter- ry, and Tim Ormond, plus plenty ofgreat, if dubbed, country music. Like other Or- mond pictures, it cost, June claims, in the vicinity of $150,000-$160,000. \"Ron thought of that title,\" June re- calls. \"He was great for titles. First we thought of the title, then we made the pic- ture. This was the first time I asked drive- in owners to contribute to a picture, but it was such a tremendous title they could see the boxoffice potential. We premiered the 'ffIe wreckage. picture in Evansville, Indiana-a cocktail party with all the papers, a stage show with the four pictures featured plenty of coun- polis, and I outgrossed him. I sent him the Tex Ritter, Gordon Terry was playin' vio- try music, and most of their stock compa- boxoffice statement.\" lin. Oh, they had a time. Never had any- ny ofunknowns were drawn from the local body created such a fuss in a theater. And Wmusic scene: the Mulcays, playing \"Flight ith the completion ofWhite Lightnin' it sold'cause the booker-who was also an Road, June had a crisis. One of the investor-said to other theaters, 'Look at of the Bumble Bee\" on funhouse-sized harmonicas; the debonair, soft-spoken producers on the picture \"was a bad influ- what they did down here in Evansville! Cecil Scaife, a former promo man at Sun ence. He was the devil incarnate. He Look at the gross!'\" Records who had a flair for playing the loved to create misery. He wanted to cre- The money was rolling in. The pictures heavy; Earl 'Snake' Richards, a sullen ate a corporation but didn't want me in it, were doing well. Things seemed good for dime-store James Dean who dressed in just Ron. We almost broke up over this. the Ormonds. Then in 1%7, again catas- black; and the gigantic Gordon Terry, a \"I had gone out to the West Coast and trophe. Today it is rather mythically re- likable singer who played a nasty fiddle was at a meeting of the Hollywood Chris- ferred to as \"The Accident.\" It would behind Faron Young and Bill Monroe. tian Association, where Jane Russell and a change their lives forever. The first of the Nashville pictures was lotta Hollywood people went, every Mon- actually shot in Georgia. \"Everybody kept day night. And a man made an altar call. 'Is The Accident sayin', 'Ya gotta make a Thunder Road,' there anybody out there who needs our so we made White Lightnin' Road [1%5], prayer?' he asked, and I raised my hand \"I'll never forget it. We were on our way which had a lotta racing and a gal in it who because I needed prayer. to a Girl from Tobacco Row pre- looks just like Marilyn Monroe. We shot it miere in Louisiana. Ron was an aviator for 20 miles north of Atlanta on a big dirt At a prayer meeting six 0'clock the next years-head of Southern California Civil track. One of the guys in the picture was a morning, June had her first taste of heav- Air Patrol. He loved to fly-we had our booker for Malco Theaters in Memphis, en. \"Sometimes all it takes with these own plane. So we called the hangar that another guy was a OJ, another owned a ra- things is one word. The Lord comes into moming and told them to bring out the dio station. We put 'em all in. It was good you. I got down on the floor. The tears plane and service it. for business. Plus Ron played a hood and were coming out of me. And all these dea- drove a Stingray, billed under his old cons got around me. It was in the middle \"When we took it out to the end of the of this shopping mall. It was the greatest name, Vic Narro.\" feeling I've ever had in my life. Like runway and revved it up to take off, we June showed White Lightnin' Road to somebody had given me 10,000 baths.\" smelled somethin'. So we're halfway up in Samuel Arkoff of American International Business went on as usual, however, as the air when we smell it again. See, all the Pictures, who offered to play 200 prints as the Ormonds made the country music ex- oil had burned up. The guy had forgot to a second feature to his Fireball 500. June travaganza 40 Acre Feud (1%5), with Ray put the cap on the oil. told Arkoff his film was no good and sug- Price, Minnie Pearl, and Loretta Lynn. \"Tim yelled, 'Look how hot it's get- gested Arkoff \"play your picture as a sec- Understandably static today, 40 Acre ting! Look how hot it's getting!' I said, ond feature to ,mine.\" Feud is at least notable for a completely 'Something smells like it's on fire. Ron, Arkoffscoffed, \"'You'regonnadoitthe drunken George Jones weaving through let's tum around and go back.' And before hard way.' I said, 'Yes, but at least I'm an incredible-if lip-synched-perfor- we had time to make a tum, the engine gonna get those dollars in my pocketbook. mance of \"Things Have Gone to Pieces,\" stopped. So I played against Fireball500 in Indiana- joined on the choruses by then-band \"We were into a tum over this cow pas- 46
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\"Tim plays a hippie. His buddy is another off-breed with long hair. And they ride motorcycles. The minister says to them, 'Ya gotta be Saved!' And the boys say, 'Whaddya mean Saved! \" blah-blah-blah.\" ture. I said to Ron, 'Are we gonna put the Dante's breast. For the Ormonds, the pic- Richards, an escaped con, in Girl from wheels down?' He says, 'No. We're gonna belly it in.' Underneath us are cattle. I said ture went too far; ironically, it was the only Tobacco Row. to Ron, 'We're gonna land on top of them.' He said, 'They'll separate when one to feature all the family members in they see us comin' down.' We tipped the top of a tree. I could feel it scrape the bot- Tstarring roles. he phone call came in 1971. A rever- tom. Ifwe had the wheels down we'd a got Everything about the movie is off-key: end in Mississippi wanted Ron to caught in the tree. As we came down we hit a mound, and that's when I thought the mondo style travelogue that opens and make a religious picture based on a popu- my rear end would go through my head. We went through a fence post. It was a closes the movie (shades of the dreaded lar sermon he'd been giving in church. wonder I wasn't cut to pieces. Had we turned over or something we might've Russ Meyer); the odd references to the The Ormonds were ready for the call. caught on fire-we were loaded with gas. hippie lifestyle that June claims made the The first picture was called If Footmen \"It was a strange thing. As we were co- min' down, a shaft of sunlight came in on movie so timely; the white girl who sings a Tire You, What Will Horses Do? \"Jesus Tim's coat. And I could hear this voice talk to me within myself. 'Well, this is the soul song, not only lip-synching but mim- was saying after you die, if you think you end. What is it gonna be from here to eter- nity?' What is eternity? What is eternity if ing the exact movements of the black girl got troubles now, they are just the Foot- you knew like we knew that within mo- ments you're gonna be dead? There was who sang it in the studio. The Exotic Ones men. Whaddya gonna do when the horse- every reason we shoulda got killed. There's nothing you can do about it, you (retitled The Monster and the Stripper for men come?\" June explains. \"The enemy can't stop death comin' on you. To me then, eternity just measured from here to home video) is unlike any other movie in on horseback is what counts .... the evils there. But the voice inside me said, 'You're not gonna get killed.''' Then the the world. While watching LaBeef beat of communism and what happens if com- plane hit. Ormond regular Cecil Scaife to a bloody munism takes. over. We didn't distribute \"Ron crawled out about six feet away from the plane and said, 'My back is pulp with his own dismembered arm, it, just made it for a flat fee-$16,000- broken.' I just knew I was hurting. I was in the back seat, it was all bent up. I was June gestured to the screen and whis- because Ron felt obligated to the Lord for scared of fire. Ron's back and ribs were pered, almost to herself, \"See? My own saving our lives.\" Footmen didn't exactly hurt. I had three fractured ribs, and my vertebrae were all o,ut of place. We were in Blood Feast.\" set the world on fire, even the small world the hospital six weeks. Tim wasn't hurt at all. And so the Ormonds had another hit on of the Baptists. \"When we were in the hospital we de- their hands. Wherever The Exotic Ones It took The Burning Hell (1974) to do cided we would leave the stuff we had been doin' and go into a different type of played, grosses went through the roof. But that. work. We decided the Lord had spared us and we were gonna do somethin' else. it was not to be. \"I had a problem with that \"The Burning Hell is the most potent, Soon after, we started making religious pictures. \" picture. Right after it opened, the man soul-winning picture that has ever played But before the Ormonds left exploita- who owned the lab-a very wealthy man, a church,\" says June. \"It cost about tion, they had one more picture to make. The year was 1%8. America was obsessed a good friend of Ron's-sat down at his $60,000, plus prints, and the reverend by Nixon, the Vietnam War: The Or- monds were in New Orleans making a desk and blew his brains out. Well, it was who produced it made his money back in a statement of their own, an apocryphal one, called The Exotic Ones. A hyperkin- rough to have this happen. See, when you year and a half and showed a profit of two etic gore movie studded with way-out bur- lesque routines, tawdry strippers, and set up your deal with the lab, you agree to million dollars. It took eight months to cheapo violence effects, it featured a scene in which gigantic Sleepy LaBeef, as pay on time until the prints are paid off. make. I think we had less than $2300 left, the monster, rips off stripper Georgette We had 100 prints out in 27 exchanges, after all that work. But I wanted to tum out and lowed the lab $28,000. I was payin' a good picture. $1000 a month. And the guy who took ''Tim plays a hippie along with his bud- over the lab-a real vulture-wanted it all dy, who is another off-breed character in 30 days. The picture had only been out with long hair: 'Man, he don't believe in a coupla months-there was no way I NUTHIN' '-the boy who played him is could pay-it was unheard oil\" dead now-and they ride motorcycles. So The Ormonds withdrew all prints from they come into this minister's house and distribution. \"I wasn't gonna leave it out challenge him. The minister says, 'Ya there for the lab to make money on. I told gotta be SAVED!' And the boys say, everybody in the exploitation business, 'Whaddaya mean SAVEDr blah-blah- 'Don't take that picture if they offer it, blah. That type of stuff. 'cause it's my picture and you're my ''They go off riding on the highway, friend.' So nobody would touch it.\" and the one fella has an accident and gets Things were suddenly bleak for the Or- killed. He hits something, his head is cut monds. They had a blockbluster picture right off. They had just spoke to the min- that couldn't play anywhere. The exploi- ister. And here Tim is standin' on the tation business had turned sour. highway, and his best friend is lyin' there with his head cut off. Whaddya Mean 'Saved '? ''Tim's so flabbergasted, he heads back to the minister's place. Well, he's in the \" ... its written all over your face-every middle of givin' a sermon to his congrega- crooked tum, every runnin' mile. Now tion. He says to Tim, 'Come in. Sit down.' you're standin' at the crossroads. Nobody Tim listens to the sermon-about going knows which road you'll take. Not even to hell and whatnot. And Tim goes forth at you.\"-Preacher Tex Ritter to 'Snake' the end of the picture and tells how it is to 48
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