VOLUME 24 - NUMBER 01 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 1988

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•SI•SSUe published bimonthly by the Film Society of Lincoln Center Volume 24, Number 1 January-February 1988 The Great Kin Con ..................... 11 Brit Pack ................................... 18 It isn' t the family that's gone London bobbies, the Royals, bananas, it's filmmakers. Peel and stage actors all head the an- the latest bunch of family fare glophile's list. Harlan Ken- films-from Fatal Attraction to nedy chartS the rise of the new La famiglia-and the theme is British film generation of char- crushingly clear: anything oth- acter chameleons: Miranda er than the way Ozzie wuz with Richardson , Gary Oldman, Harriet is less than zero. Mar- and Rupert Everett don day- cia PaUy analyzes the films glo colors. But none dares more and the trend and argues for a than Daniel Day Lewis, who complex cinema, not a reflex- chats with our man in London ive one. (page 19). Midsection: The 1987 Movie Revue .. .... ... ....... ... 56 A Man and A Woman .....................31 The Next Wave. That's what Redford and Sarkisian (Cher, Resident Wiz (read: film critic to us ordinary people) continue on the beach) David Chute to test the possibilities. The Mi- rides with his pick of'87's New lagro Beanfield War is Red- Faces. When Chow Yun Fat ford's second shot at the helm. makes your list, you either David Thomson wonders know a lot or got some gall. when and if RR'II ever explode Thence cometh West Coast (page 32), and Stephen Sage, Anne Thompson, who Schaefer comers him on the forseeth Nominations Oscaria set (page 36). And Cher, who for '87, and whispereth 'em to has made a career out of being His Ineffable Proseship, Rich- edgy offscreen, is a moon beam ard Corliss, who writ glitter- accountant onscreen in Moon- ing proze, natch (page 60). Not struck. All ears, Harlan before potshooting with Sav- Jacobson tenders his Cher age Steve Harvey at all the (page 42). Sillies of '87 (page 58). Also in this issue: Peepers offilm production, but with Wall see Conference. Elie Wiesel asks if the Street he keeps up his extraordinary, risky walls remember, then what? Journals ................. ............... .2 biz. Gavin Smith profiles the producer. Writer Walter Bemstein lived through Books ........... ....................... .76 the blacklist. From The House on Carroll 25 Years in the Making . ...... .... .61 Vito Russo assays Boze Hadleigh's new Street set, Pat Aufderheide reportS Walt Conversations with My Elders, with is an upfrOnt guy. For ten days each That's us, FILM COMMENT. Co-editor Mineo, Beaton, Cukor, Visconti, Hud- summer, new Brit writers come Richard Corliss recounts his take on a son, and Fassbinder on being gay. And to Oxford and punt, per Marlaine quarter century of having the latest word Donald Spoto sees Leonard Lefrs Hitch- Glicksman. And Armond White turns up on film. Hold the presses-we always cock and Selznick as a paradox case. Eliot Ness pinching the art mafia in do! Spain. Back Page: Quiz #29 ..............80 Pensees: Wiesel on 'Wannsee' ... 74 Cover photo: courtesy MGM Press on Pressman ........... .. .... 27 The most infamous business meeting in Ed Pressman comes on like the Mr. history, which set in motion Hitler's Fi- nal Solution, is the subject of The Wann- Co-Editors: Harlan Jacobson, Richard Corliss. Associate Editor: Marlaine Glicksman. Art Director and Cover Design: Elliot Schulman. Advertisingand Circula- tion Manager: Tony Impavido. Business Manager: Sayre Maxfield. Production: Deborah Dichter Edmonds. West Coast Editor: Anne Thompson. European Editor: Harlan Kennedy. Research Consu ltant: Mary Corliss. Circulation Assistant: Deborah Freedman. Controller: Domi ngo Homi lla , Jr. Editorial Assistant: Gavin Smith. Executive Director, Film Society of Lincoln Center: Joa nne Koch. Copyrigh t © 1987 by the Film Society of Lincoln Center. All rights reserved. Theopinions expressed in FII.~I CO~IMENT do not represent Film Society of Lincoln Cente r policy. Publication is made possible in part by support from the New York State Council on the Arrs and the National Endowment for the Arrs . This publication is fully protected by domestic and international copyright. Subscription rates in the United States: $14.95 for 6 numbers, $26.95 for 12 numbers. Elsewhere, $37 for 6 numbers, $70 for 12 numbers , payable in U.S. funds only. New subscribers should include their occupations and zip codes. Distributed by Eastern News Distributors, SanduskyOH 44870. FII.~I CO~I~IENT(lSSN 0015-119X) is published bimonthly by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, 140 W. 65th Sr., New York NY 10023. Second-class postage paid at New York NY and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: send address changes to FII.~I C()~ I ~IENT, 140 W. 65th St., New )'c:>rk NY 10023.

Un-American Activities WHAT BLACKLIST? A t 11 A.M. on a crisp autumn day, HUAC's haunted house: Kelly McGillis (right) in The House on Carroll St. I'm standing on a pier in New York C ity, on location for The This thriller, Bernstein is quick to note, Bernstein is one of the few guys out House on Carroll St., a Hitchcockian \"is not 'about' the blacklist, although it there making a living on the intersection thriller set during the IVIcCarthy era and starts with a Congressional hearing. But between politics and art, and he likes it directed by Peter Yates, about a blacklist- the fact that the central character is black- there. What he doesn't understand is why ed magazine writer and a villain who looks listed fuel s her, and there's also a political other people don't. But his screenwriting suspiciously like Roy Cohn. The film , person connected to her being blacklist- students are telling him something about which sta rs Kelly McGillis, was scripted ed.\" by \\Valter Bernstein, the Hollywood that. screenwriter who worked from the studio He wants the film to be more than pal- \"The fight I have with the students is heyday th rough the blacklist era (when he atable; he wants it to be \"bang-up enter- wrote and rewrote scripts under pseud- tainment.\" But he wants it to be the old- always about the notion of conflict, as the onyms for television) into the post-studio fashioned kind of bang-up entertainment, basis of drama and as a given oflife. In one era. A supremely professional crew is run- where you not only can tell the good guys class at NYU I gave the kids an exercise, to ning th rough fi ll-in shots Iik~ clockwork. from the bad guys but you know why do a scene from their own lives as a movie People seem bored on this sixth week of they' re good and bad. \"The McGuffin has scene. A lot of what came back was touch- shooting, ready to wind it all up and go some kind of meaning,\" he says. ing or funn y; but without exception, they home. themselves were victim or observer, never \"With melodrama you' re nevergoing to \"You' re Walter's fri end , right?\" says the go very deep. What you can do is to state a protagonist. person beside me, while a production as- social issue, draw the lines, and you can't \"The goal in life for them seems to be sistant anxiously informs the crew I'm on do a hell of a lot more than that. But that's the set. \"He was blacklisted, wasn't he? a lot. It's not disgraceful. It's a ve ry Ameri- to be conflict-free. The students saw no What a relic.\" can form-stories in the way people ex- satisfaction arising out of conflict. They pect to hea r them. \" seem to feel that they can't affect the situ- \"The blacklist-yeah, that's the back- ation-in any fi ght they' re gonna lose. In drop to this story,\" says another crew order to fight you have to have a little member, looking up at the spot from which the villain will fall, ostensibly though the roof of Grand Central. \"This is a pretty young crew,\" he says. \"It's all his- tory to us.\" T he production assistant ca n see I'm circulating, and she trails behind me, ner- vous that I might ask some political ques- tions (public relations man Peter Haas let me know that nobody but the screen- writer wanted to be asked any political questions). Her anxiety is cut short by lunch, when Bernstein appears to take me off their hands. Walter Bernstein is not afraid of political questions. He's also not afraid of making popular movies. \"I tell stori es,\" he says. \"I wa nt to move people, emotion- ally, socially, so they go away dissatisfied in a satisfied way. To push them a little- particularly now, with this orgy of self-con- gratulation that this country is in, which is so phony, so unreal, and to puncture it in some way.\" 2

When Darryl F. Zanuck got too big for Warners in 1933, he launched Features as Lavish as Your Twentieth Century Pictures and soon produced 17 out of 18 winners. Favorite Fox Costume Epic Whereas 21-year~ld Fox Fihns was slowly running out of pizzazz. The marriage made sense - and, for a generation (as Hollywood counts) v'Detailed filmography: every 20th Century-Fox picture from made money. After another generation oftroubles, the studio found its the 1935 merger thru 1984 - casts, credits, plot synopsis, running time footing again with movies like The French Connection, the Star Wars series and Romancing the Stone. v' 780 photos - many rare - a real pictorial history This mighty volume chronicles the ups and downs. But above all, you'll v' History of both firms before and after the merger, and the giants who made both studios important *want it as . . . Easily the most complete and detailed record of some 1,400 20th Century- v' Academy Award winners from Fox * Fox fiIms v' HUGE! 496 giant 9 x 12 pages A stunning pictorial history v' Complete index of some 1,400 films - including a photo index! Rave for the old edition v' Printed thruout on good paper that does justice to the rare photos \"No aspect of the company's massive contribution to film history is overlooked ... many fascinating v' Nicely arranged: chronologically by year, and alphabetically facts ... an indispensable, well-produced record of within each year v' EXTRA! The Lot That Was: 21 priceless photos ofthe Fox lot over the years, with many of its best sets the hundreds of films associated with one of the v' EXTRA! (and for researchers, alone worth the price of the world's greatest studios.\" - FILM REVIEW book): complete list ofFox Films, year by year from 1914 thru 1935. Includes stars, director, producer, Academy Awards. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . • • • • • • • •: Even includes 33 stills of great rarity In short, acoffee-table book you'0 use ,over and over. One ofthe : Use coupon to get : bedrock books in the library of every real film buff. r----------: this $34.95 giant FREE J--------------------------~ .......:I • •••••••••••••••••• ..YI~/~IiT~.TAIIi.~IiT I How the Dub WOIb a••a ella II Every 4 weeks (13 times a year) you gel a free copy of the Club buUetin, PREVIEWS, which offers 15 Oakland Avenue • Harrison, N.Y. 10528 the Featured Selection plus a nice choice of Allemates: hooks on films, TV, music, oocasionally I I *records and videocassettes. If you want the Featured Selection, do nothing. It will come Please accept my membership in the Movie / Entertainment *automatically. If you don't want the Featured Selection or you do want an Alternate, indicate Book Gub and send me, FREE and postpaid, the Revised *your wishes on the handy card enclosed and return it by the deadline date. The majority of Dub and Expanded $34.95 Edition of The Films of20th Century- *hooks are offered at 2().30% discounts, plus a charge for shipping and handling. As soon as you I *ended at any time, either by you or by the Dub. If you ever receive a Featured Selection without Fox by Tony Thomas and Aubrey Solomon. I agree to buy 4 buy and pay for 4 hooks, records or videocassettes at regular Dub prices, your membership may be additional books, records or videocassettes at regular Gub *I having had 10 days to deride if you want it, you may return it at Dub expense for full credit. For prices over the next 2 years. I also agree to the Gub rules I every hook, record or videocassette you buy at regular Club price, you reoeive one or more Bonus spelled out in this coupon . Fe-A5 Book Certificates. These entitle you to buy many Dub hooks at deep discounts, usually ~% off. I are welcome to send in similar items. The Dub will publish any such item it deems suitable, FREE. Name These Bonus Books do not count toward fulfilling your Dub obligation but do enable you to buy fine *hooks at yjveaway prices. PREVIEWS also includes news about members and their hobbies. You Address I City _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ State _ _ _ Zip _ _ * *I This is a real CLUB! Good service. No computers! Only one membership per household. I -----------------------------------~-~-------------------------------!

sense of securi ty, and I think they don' t. every screenplay. \"Anybody's best work is you've got up, you feel like death. They' re sca red. \" done when they are full y expressing Vodka in before the tube of tooth- themselves,\" he says. \"If you have the paste. You get in front of the fucking For him , it was different. \"I came out of kind of political orientation I have, it's typewriter. Seven cigarettes have gone a whole diffe rent e ra, the era of the Span- tough. The rea l problem is self-censor- down, a pint of coffee's gone down, ish C ivil War. I was lucky. I was in the ship. It's like with runne rs, you hit a wall. another beer. You go and wake up your army, as a correspondent for an AmlY Th en the choice has to be made. You' re wife to annoy her. Back to the type- magazine,called Yank. I went overseas and always risking going too far to make some- writer. And there's still that same was part of the whole anti-fascist struggle. thing 'palatable.' \" piece of paper there, looking at you. And what do you do? And still. .. And \"I felt part of an inte rnational move- then by noon, you ' re drunk. And so you go to bed. You go to bed, wake me nt-that there was nowhere in the But a movie with politics in it, even as a up, and still that sheet of paper.\" Yet world I could go where the re wouldn' t be backdrop, in an Ame rica whose ideal is to the eagerness doesn't slip from the someone I felt with , fi ghting for some- be \"conflict-free\"? Bernste in's optimistic: young writers' faces . thing everybody believed in . It was a time \"I be lieve- wishful thinking or nor; I of political aberration , but it was marvel- have to believe it-that ifit's a good mov- \" We can' t really help ,\" Robin son ous. There was a naivete and a romanti- ie- a movie that has a meaning and an late r says. 'The only thing we can give cism, but the re was also such courage, emotional kick to it-people will re- anyone is a bit of encouragement to sit such warmth . Kids now 'don' t have that spond . But it's got to be awfull y good.\" there for the next 15 years and write. kind offramework, unless they' re lucky.\" That's why I'm here, to teach people On set, the crew is convinced Carroll and encourage them to go on. Saying, And the media environment doesn' t St. is awfully good. \"It's an action film ,\" listen , I wrote for 15 years without get- ting anywhere at it, maybe is an en- help , he figures. \"The assault in films and says a man who's waiting for an actor's foot couragement to someone who is sitting there and has written their first script. advertising-not consciously intended to go through a painted mesh. \"The sus- I don' t know whether it is or it isn' t. pe rhaps-has tended to destroy commu- pense stuff is great-the Grand Central But it's true . It takes forever. Forever ni ty, any real community, which implies part is rea lly gripping.\" to break through. action, which implies drama on some lev- \"The reason I came here,\" Robin- son continues, \" is because one gets in FeL\" or Carroll St. , the production design to a bit of despair about film in En- His expe rie nce with The Front, one of people pored frame by frame over gland , and whatever way you can help , you feel you should. It's also the other his most successful film s and one that also Point ofOrder, the E mile de Antonio film thing, that when I started writing, this kind of setup-it would have been deals with blacklisting, convinces Bern- on the McCarthy hearings, to get the lovely to be involved in this. And it's only a half day out of my life. Other stein that the blacklist era, with its tande m \" look.\" Costume designer Ri ta Ryack is than that, it' s very pleasant to come to Oxford.\" the mes of government suppression and bidding an e motional adie u to her co- Founded in 1980 by a group of Ox- moral choice, is a touchstone: \"any refe r- worke rs, after a challenging job. It wasn' t, ford undergrads setting out to finance a feature film , the OFF has since de- e nce to it and people say, 'Hey, they did she says, that the pe riod was difficult, and veloped the annual LIoyds Bank Na- this?' and make their own connections.\" they'd played it straight on the costuming. tional Screenwriting Competition and And it also convinces him that Ame ricans \" But body types have changed. Men now the Screenwriting Program. The lat- ter, led by Foundation.director Rupert would rathe rsidle up to the issue than con- work out, and the clothes hang diffe rent- Walters and Program directors Peter Dunne and Susanna White , is now in front it in e nte rtainme nt: \" Marty Rin and ly. And with women, the cult of the ema- its third year, and was designed to pick up where the monetary encourage- I tried for a long time to approach the sub- ciated was not fas hionable yet. \" ment of the Competition leaves off: to create a facility for developing young ject head-on, and nobody was inte rested. She' d watched Point of Order again and screenwriting talent, provide a link with the film industry, and to foster It wasn' t till we got the idea of going at it again , with an eye for me n's suits. It re- contemporary British screenwriting in a country where the tradition is vir- sideways, picking up the stpry of a 'front' called he r early childhood, when the Mc- tually nonexistent. and as a comedy, that we began to get Ca rthy hearings had been on te levision The Program's participants are writers whose scripts are chosen from some inte rest. And even the n we had to and her family was in \"a n uproar\" about among the Competition winners and screenplays submitted by industry af- get a star-we we re lucky to get Woody the m. filiates and the writers themselves. During a ten day workshop, they learn Allen. \" And what does she think about a movie how to tell a story for the screen , how But this is the Eighties and \" the whole today that recalls that period? Ryack cocks the me of suppression is much more envel- an eye at me. \"Isn' t that a trick question?\" oping now-it's been inte rnalized. The she says. And the n she rele nts: \"Well , the powers-that-be don' t have to do as much, political climate in the U.S. is scary to me because the re's not that much oppos ition. now. Maybe now's the time for a film that They don' t have to crush the left wing of raises the subject. \" the labor movement, wh ich was one of the -PAT A U FDERHEIDE big reasons for the blacklist, because it's not the re. T hey don' t have to take away passports, because \\~/here will people go AND THEY'RE O.F.F. and what will they do whe n they get the re? T\"And the whole issue of judging now he Oxford rain streams down , while inside the medieval coffer doesn' t exist. T he question of informing of Merton College, participants that was so strong and biner is not alive now. That ques tion of where you take in the Oxford Film Foundation ' s your stand-it's the big diffe re nce be- Screenwriting Program li sten up to tween now and the n.\" writer-director Bruce Robinson . Whe re you take your stand is a proble m \"When you ' re a writer,\" he tells his that still confronts him , however-with audience , \" it' s 6:30 in the morning, 4

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to use equipment and actors as story- telling tools, and the pros and cons of the writer-director relationship. A sort of continental Sundance Institute, the Program was co.nceived and founded by two Sundance vets, both Americans residing in London, film director Mike Hoffman and producer Rick Steven- son (their own project, developed with Sundance and called Promised Land, is due out this year) . The Program is held at Merton College in late August. It's a picturesque setting, like taking a walk through a storybook left out in the rain. A s the bells of Oxford toll in the Bruce Robinson puts young writer George Monbiot in the picture. background, independent pro- ducer and Program consultant Sue is a full time writer; George Monbiot complete with addresses and tele- McGregor holds a story meeting with is a journalist; and Chris Chakraborty phone numbers, only emphasizing the John Bevan, 23. \"Cut down on the has worked in theater). Susanna program's fairy-tale quality. dialogue as much as possible, so that White, 26, describes what the Program every single line is concise and says is looking for: \"Less people who know \"We try to make it as non-compet- much more than is indicated in the about screenwriting, than who can tell itive as possible,\" says White. \"We text,\" she advises Bevan, a legal aid good stories in a good way. People don't have big screenings. We don't worker, who used a map to write his here tend to write for theater or write spend any money on props, or cos- script, based in Ireland . \"The last poetry or novels, but not very many tumes, or anything like that. It's thing that I want is that at the end of think of writing for the screen.\" purely a workshop for the writers. the week, you feel so discouraged that Writers are chosen anonymously, We're not trying to get people to write you go home and never put your pen based on the submitted script, and by their best project during the week.\" to paper again,\" McGregor adds. consensus of the Program directors, without regard for budget or genre. Paterson thinks the program could Later in the week, scenes from the be even more relaxed . \"It's supposed scripts will be shot by various visiting Unlike Sundance, directors are not to be an opportunity for people to directors using a cast of professional brought in with projects, but are at- come into a situation with a lot of film- actors (Helena Bonham-Carter one tached to a professionally cast script. makers and relax sufficiently to throw year) and a crew consisting of industry While not the Program's aim, some of away a few inhibitions. I don't want it volunteers and OFF alums. The equip- the scripts are produced, such as last to be a massively competitive situation ment is donated by the industry, from year's Competition winner, Shadow on where everybody's scrambling for time companies like Lee and SamuelSon, the Earth , recently directed for the BBC with David Puttnam.\" and the film, by Kodak. by Chris Bernard (Letter to Brezhnev), one of last year's visiting directors . The Program is also an opportunity There are also workshops to attend, for directors to work together and for ranging from \"Storytelling with the \"The hardest thing in this busi- film professionals to experience other Camera\" led by director Charles Stur- ness,\" emphasizes Andy Paterson, 28 facets of production. \"You get a feel- ridge (Brideshead Revisited) to \"The and production director, \"is simply ing of collaboration,\" remarks Olivia Editing of White Mischief' with editor contacts. To know somebody that you Hetreed, \"and as an editor, I can go Tom Priestly (1984). And there are can actually call to read your script. and sit in on the first discussions of the screenings and discus~ions: Withnail And what they'll get out of this week directors with the actors, which is and I with director Bruce Robinson, is contact with 40 or 50 people who are something I just never get to do. To Prick Up Your Ears with director Ste- working in the industry. Which in the do everything in unison. I mean, you phen Frears, and Mona Lisa with di- end, is probably worth more than any- come out of it at the end of the ten rector Neil Jordan, among others. The thing.\" There is also no thee-and- days just feeling wonderful.\" last days of the workshop are set aside thou at the Program. Everyone who for practical matters-seminars with attends-directors, writers, consul- An ideal situation. Though not per- lawyers, agents, and marketing spe- tants, and crew-is listed in a roster fect. If there are problems with the cialist Hi Smith of United Pictures In- Program, they reflect those of England ternational. itself. There are few submissions by Though six participants usually at- tend the Program each year, this year numbered only five. All were male, in their early 20s, though from diverse backgrounds (Duncan Williams comes from a farm in Cornwall; John Exshaw, who co-wrote a script with Williams, 6

women writers , perhaps a symptom of WINNER a still largely male-dominated society and workforce. Also, two of the par- FORBEST ticipants were both O xford under- grads, emphasizing the \" Oxford\" in WE'RE THE MOVIEST!,M the Foundation' s title, which is off- putting in a country where the class You're the winner when you order the No membership fee, no minimum, system still carries great weight. wqrld-famous Movies Unlimited Catalo!!!, our no obligation to buy. Just pure entertainment. It can also be wondered whether the biggest and best ever. It gives you unlimited And great value. program is perpetuating a particular access to video entertainment -over 600 BBC worldview, where written mate- pages packed with fully described titles in Don'l set11e for runner-ups. Order the world's rial is almost entirely Oxbridge in or- every category: The Classics (aAd Not-So- moviest video catalog today! igin. \" Television in Britain,\" explains Sebastian Secker-Walker, a script con- Only $7.95Classics). Foreign Films • Family Fare. sultant, \"has been chosen and crafted by script editors and producers from Incredible Rarities • New Releases • 1000's straight up here. I read lots and lots of and 1000's of titles available. Nobody has submissions, and you feel that people, particularly from other parts of Britain, more- nobody else even comes close! plus $2 shipping & handling are struggling to express themselves. But the way they start thinking is, Movies Unlimited service Is a winner, too- Colalog Fees Refunded With lsI Orderl 'How can I write the way that they' re writing in London now ?' That's ex- order with contldence trom one at America's Like adult movies? Enclose an additional actly it. They' re using that as a role -----------------------------.oldest and most reliable videoservices. model , which isn' t appropriate nec- essarily for the stories that they want o Enclosed Is $9.95 ($7.95 + $2 shipping) cash, to tell. It's not that the BBC is looking $3.50 for our spicy Adult Video Calalog. for these Oxbridge things. They' re trying to break out of it. But it's a dif- check or money order-Norlh Amertca, APO and MOVIES UNLIMITED ficult cycle to break out of. The ques- FPO only. Send your new Video Colalog. plus tion is, whether the Program can expand , or whether we just need more perIOdic updales. NOTE: foreign orders send programs: one based in Liverpool , Wales, or whatever, which can serve $29.95 ($7.95+$22 shipping/handling). 6736 Castor Avenue as a model for other programs, where Philadelphia, PA 19149 people, say in Glasgow or Edinburgh o enclOsed Is $3.50 addlnonal, $13.45 10101. include get together and identify common ground. your Adult Video Colalog. I am over 18 years Old. \" There's not a great tradition in this foreign orders send $33.45. 215/722-8398 country to have a film language, \" adds Secker-Walker. \" There have been Nome _____________________________________________________ some wonderful English films , but un- fortunatel y, they h av e al ways re- Address _ ____________________________________~___________ mained a minority thing. And certainly now, when the industry is so small , City___________________--~______ Stote,________ Zip_________ how do you actually get people from all over Britain to start talking about Phone ( them selves? We can make Passage to India, we can make Upstairs, Down- stairs, whatever. We can make world- quality films. But when it comes to talking about now, we' re a bit uneasy. Our voice slightly cracks. We' re not sure how to talk about Britain today. And that's the thing. There are few films that have done that. \" If you've seen Letter to Brezhnev or Beautiful Laundrette, those things are very new . People are so exc ited. There is modern Britain on the telly! There are future generations that could look back and say, 'Ah , that is what it was like in the Eighties.' \" -MARLAINE GLICKSMAN 7

BASQUE TO THE journalists from Spain, France, Belgium, signs. This time it's \"Coppelia\" and the FUTURE Sweden, Palestine, and Italy, the Tower first scene of a teenage girl admiring her of Babel-like variety of opinion and man- new breasts (''I'm at my peak, from here H ard to feel like a citizen of the ners wonderfully proved otherwise: that on I can only deteriorate\") warns that this world when the purely American 'crosscultural com munication merely re- ain't kidstuff either. The girl, who evokes dynamism of DePalma's The Un- quires a lively articulation and, some- Elizabeth Taylor's Velvet Brown , is one of touc!w.bles overwhelmed most of the oth- times, a gracious reiteration of what one three English orphans living with their un- er entries at the San Sebastian Film Festi- really means to say- sort oflike the super- cle and his Irish in-laws enslaved in his val. The wide, thoughtful program of new lucid discourse ofThe Untouchables. That toyshop. Carter's expose of the oppressive European, American, Soviet and Third the Festival jury awarded a prize to Candy sexual ideology in fairyt<lles eventually World film s-plus choice sidebar retro- Mountain suggests indeed that some fur- turns into a reverie of the Irish mystically spectives devoted to Robert Siodmak, ther translation was needed to catch the liberating themselves from the English. films about Chile and a \"Los Olvidados\" essence of that film's fake existentialism. No movie could do all this smoothly and section of forgotten intemational clas- The Magic Toyshop plays out in several sics-was unexpectedly sundered by Unlike the festival's other rarefied cine- self-contained segments as if it had been DePalma's showy gangster epic and the ma efforts, The Untouc!w.bles itself proved compiled from a longer TV series. Director half-hour salute to Paramount's 75th a bigger topic than its ostensible subject. Dennis Wheatley lacks Neil Jordan's sen- an niversary that preceded it. No snob Discussions naturally marvelled over the sual flow, but ifthe fantasy sequences are cou ld ignore the familiarity and warmth film as both an exercise in American inge- less than inspired, they' re at least ade- Hollywood icons held for the audience of nuity (the train station seq uence got in- quate. The Magic Toyshop confirms An- far-flung movie addicts gathered in the stantaneous applause) and typical Ameri- gela Carter's standing with Hanif Kureishi Basque region of Northem Spain. Even can violence. The jury had to find a way and Dennis Potter as the most audacious my best cosmopolitan impulses were re- out of Hollywood 's shadow and did so by English screenwriters of the Eighties. Her placed by inklings of chauvinist pride. awarding its grand prize to Michel twofold modernist project (to wrest myth Khleifi'sNoce en Galilee. But the preemi- from the nursery and find an autonomous, This happened after several days of ex- nence of the American narrative tradition politically correct relation to fiction) struck iting screenings with polite groups of film had already been noted , unforgettably. me as pertinent to the embarrassing sway devotees reflecting on some just-see n sol- Hollywood held over San Sebastian. e mn practice of Art. But following Los In- That tradition was curiously advanced tocables de Eliot Ness, the same studious by the best European film in the Festival, So it was a pleasant surprise to see su- audience was buzzing. H ad I come all this Dominique Deruddere's Crazy Love (re- perpower immodesty addressed in High way to see a film-not even near DePal- titled Love is a Dog From Hell for post- Season, Clare Peploe's Graham Greene ma's best-trounce the European compe- Bmjiy Stateside release), a Belgian film meets Noel Coward comedy. It's a droll tition ? As at home, there were individual from tales by Charles Bukowski. It follows scrutiny of tourism and international in- misgivings about the picture, but a general 12-year-old Harry Vos's tormented rite of fluence. Jacqueline Bisset and James Fox suspicion lingered: compared to dead-in- passage from erotic to morbid obsessions. play an estranged artist couple on the isle the-water highbrow entries like Maurice There's always a hint of one in the other, of Rhodes discovering their place in cul- and Fabio Carpi's Bluebeard, Bluebeard, starting with the deathly glamour of the tural tradition through the kind of sexiness DePalma's kinetic splendor and larger- movie images that first transfix him. Two and sparkle (shot by Chris Menges) that than-life myths seemed closer to the idea actors (Geert Hunaerts and Josse de Paul Mazursky neve r found for Tempest. of great filmmaking. Pauw) play you ng and adult Harry and Peploe humors the European traveller's Deruddere uses their physical differences citizen-of-the-world dilemma by express- The art vs. entertainment question was kinesthetically: After a beguiling pubes- ing chagrin at privilege and redeeming it primary because San Sebastian's Teatro cence Harry develops the worst case of through their appreciation of local beauty Victoria Eugenia and Teatro Principal are acne in human history and a serious de- and native custom. It took going to San such glorious places to see movies: grand pression. At his 1962 prom his eyes gleam Sebastian and finding Yankee pizazz be- (not kitschy), multi-tiered palaces where from a full sentimental engagement with striding the Atlantic like a Colossus to un- any film flashing on screen gains scale, songs like \"Angel Baby,\" \" Love Hurts\" derstand the wit and poignance of Pe- magic, dignity. In this setting the rousing and \"I Love How You Love Me.\" They ploe's ambivalence. pleasures of The Untouchables seemed to never meant as much as they do here with be what it's all about-certainly more so the irony Deruddere insinuates. Crazy The art film convention is to exploit than the American entries Candy Moun- Love expresses Harry's romanticism with alienation in a foreign country, which Jury tain , Slam Dance, The American Way and an eerie, formall y perfect logic. The film president Alain Tanner did in his other- the vile The Believers. The passe bohe- ends as inevitably as the pop myths that wise striking Une Flamme Dans Mon mianism and empty slickness of those pic- inform it. There's a final sick twist but not Coeur (shown out of competition). He tures bore little resemblance to the Amer- so sick that it cannot be understood. This cops out on Myriam Mezieres' rambunc- . ica I know or the humor and energy of our isn'tan ersatz American film as others have tious sexual display with a lost-in-Cairo best movies. made of Bukowski, it's a genuinely metaphor. Trite alienation is too easy to strange, visionary European art movie but do; after 20 more minutes of it in the Ger- Does joining the international film with the trenchant emotional articulation man entry InDer Wuste I sneaked out to a community necessitate such arty pos- of crosscultural pop reveries. sidebar showing of Stormy Weather, for a tures? It shouldn't. In several late night taste of home and alienation in one. And roundtable dinners with filmmakers and I n Britain's The Magic Toyshop, Angela when the Nicholas Brothers took flight in Carter (the source writer of Neil Jor- their spectacular staircase number.,-you dan's The Company of Wolves) reexa- guessed it-San Sebastian erupted again. mines another fairy tale for psycho-sexual -ARMOND WHLTE 8

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The Family Goes Bananas Vittorio Gassman (center)-paterfamilias at the core ofThe Family. by Marcia Pally the apartment's rooms, the film smiles on each generation's loves and losses, F amily revisionism has been, till COMMENT though most of the story linge rs on recently , the province of Carlo's early years. America's peripatetic Puritan- with a troubled homosexual, played by ism and religio-sexual panic. that most devastating ofhetero heroes, While at university, he falls desper- But here it is in the work of a mature , Marcello Mastroianni. ately in love with the wild , intense Ad- definitely un-Puritan European, Et- riana (Fanny Ardant) but marries her tore Scola, whose new film is titled The In The Family , Carlo (Vittorio Gass- jovial, good-natured sister, Beatrice Family . man) thinks back on his life on the oc- (Stefania Sandrelli). As soft and invi t- casion of his 80th birthday. Beginning ing as Ardant is angular, Sandrelli im- Scola's Family pounds its points in 1907, it is filled with pare nts 'and bues Beatrice with the calm we all with less maddening insistence than aunts, siblings, children, their chil- want in Mom. American brand family films. No Fatal dren, and their children, all passing Attraction, this . Scola is, after all, a through the corridors of the famil y's Never marrying, Adriana becomes a man of intelligence. But The Family is large Roman apartment and Scola's concert pianist in Paris, and through- not A Special Day-Scola's film about channel through time. Shot entirely in out her brilliant career, Carlo remains a sexually lonely housewife (Sophia fascinated by her-and no wonder. Loren, of all treats) and her encounter Beatrice, not terribly exciting to begin with, never finishes her degree and gets comfily frumpy as the years go on. Nevertheless, as age yields wisdom , 11

Carlo knows he made the right choice. to nostalgia and the family becomes hell. And don't you forget it. When Beatrice dies , Carlo tells the haven of choice. We think so wish- Michael Douglas plays Dan , a hap- fully , and put our wishes into our fan- Adriana in a tirade that's the center of tasies and films . pily married New York lawyer who has the film that \" everything\" is because a one-night stand while his wife of Beatrice. \" Everything\" is the fam- There' s an additional twist to the (played by the glowing Anne Archer) ily. Adriana is left alone with her art, family movies of the Eighties. Here and daughter are out of town. Before and when the by now voluminous clan we have not only cheers for the home the weekend is out, Dan's fling , Alex tumbles in for Carlo's octogenarian front but terrified screams at intimate (Glenn Close), becomes obsessed with bash, Ardant's bony body looks barren relations outside it-stereo sallies for him , and chaos overtakes her mind indeed. None of the giggling gaggle is tradition. Family is pitted against sex, and both of their lives. Terrified her- \"because\" of her. and home harmony, against lust and self, she terrorizes his famil y and chaos. E ven in Scola's movie , cer- nearly tears it apart. The pet gets Though mommies are nice , Scola's tainly the least preachy of the lot, mo- boiled, the kid kidnapped, and the idea of famil y is claustrophobic. All his nogamy with Beatrice confronts wife mangled in a car accident before characters are seen only in the context adultery with Adriana and , in spite of Alex is stopped and the famil y is of famil y. Career, friendship , and any the pleasure of temptation , Carlo once saved . effort outside the home are just larks. again makes the right choice. Divorces are disasters, never solu- As messages go , this ain't subtle. tions; remarriages, and more kids , are But what is this subplot doing here Fatal Attraction tells married men to the best balm. Family seems the only in the first place? The Family would 've stop fooling around or risk bringing the thing that makes life worth living. You made its points and appreciated home house down . It lashes unmarried ca- wonder why anyone bothers to go out life as dearl y without it . If Scola reer women for having made the of the house, which of course the cam- needed something saucy to move the wrong choice , and tells them to marry era never does. plot along, why this old-fashioned lest they go nuts. And it tells everyone good-girl/bad-girl device? Its presence that female desire is demanding , en- E ven in the best of homes, there can in an urbane, mature film suggests just snaring-in short, it will swallow up be too much of a good thing. At bot- how much sex is associated with dan- your life. tom, we all have to try our wares in the ger these days, and how easy it is to see outside world. Scola' s Family is just it as the natural opponent of the famil y Though developed four years ago, too simple , but this take on kiss and that we insist is so safe. before the Bakker and Hart circuses kin is hardly new. Film's romance with (or the Hahn and Rice circuses) and the natal nook is as old as Scola's hero . Much blather has been wasted on before heterosexuals began to worry the idea that AIDS is responsible for about AIDS , Fatal Attraction is the per- T he cl assics-like I Remember this current Puritanical push. After all , Mama or You Can't Take It with a fatal , sexuall y transmitted disease is You-set the standard for cinema' s the best advertisement for the dangers simplistic tone. Even movies where of desire . But our willingness to blame difficulty or tragedy visits the home problems on sex is much older than never question the goodness of famil y that-and the more illicit the sex, the life. It's not that eight decades of cin- farther away from famil y and children , ema all have the same point; they the more blame-worthy it becomes. I don ' t. The subjects addressed-work, suspect that our long-held mistrust of war, love, money, success, fear, fail- sex, ever available to use in times of ure , to name a few-and the values crisis , is what's behind the monogamy that emerge are as varied as modern madness of current cinema. AIDS is life. But not cinema' s take on the fam- merely the alibi . ily. Here we see rather remarkable repetition. Put simpl y, the famil y, A drian L yne's Fatal Attraction was rarely part of the problem, is always the first film to be touted as an part of the solution. And with this sim- AIDS movie-where \"promiscuous\" ple equation, we lose the complexity sex is literally life-threatening. But the subject deserves. Our treatment of again AIDS is merely the excuse to vent love, war, or money is di verse, ironic, our fear of sex. Beginning with an in- or romantic. But we fondle the famil y triguing, credible seduction scene, Fa- like a security blanket. tal Attraction end s wi th a most unbelievable aftermath. Boy meets Why? What's going on with our pro- girl , boy beds girl , and boom, it' s fire jection of the famil y onto film that we and flood time. What starts out as a insist on its inevitable niceness? Nos- savvy look at the complexities of (suc- talgia, of course , plays a part. Distance cessful) marriages and extramarital af- gives good gloss. Filmmakers tend to fairs turns into an emphatic morality be adults , and even the army , 20 years tale cum thriller. In short, Fatal At- later, looks like a beach party, and the traction reads like the stories of Bath- sarge was just a guy with bigger balls . sheba, Salome, and Potifar's wife- Also in the face of life's randomness with all the good parts left in. Forni- and risks, we desperately want to be- cators and adulterers, ye shall burn in lieve that someplace is safe. Add this 12

,- puts her together again. In Norman Jewison's Prizzi's Honor l comedy, Moonstruck, Cher plays an It- Home is where the hurt is? Glenn Close, Michael Douglas & Anne Archer in Fatal Attraction. alo-American woman in her thirties who still lives at home with her par- fect film to cap a decade of fundamen- and the two crises erupt for the third ents. (The credibility quotient foun- talist influence. It's the perfect film to act. In the end , Mike goes back to his ders as you try to imagine Cher living act out those deep, unspoken fears family and Claire goes home alone. with mom and dad. ) She becomes en- that sex is dangerous and will bring There's no one watching over her. gaged to a middle-aged boy from the civilization to a halt. In Fatal Attrac- neighborhood (Danny Aiello), and tion, both mother and Freud are right. Fatal Attraction has thriller power; while he's in Italy visiting his dying Someone to Watch brings in issues mother she falls in lo ve with his R idley Scott's Someone to Watch brother (Nicolas Cage). Over Me is virtually a Fatal Attrac- about class. But replace Dan with tion repeat with a less explosive finale Mike, Alex with Claire, and one little Just to show that everyone is and less expensive cast. In this stylish wife for the other . .. and why is this tempted to stray from true love-and- but predictable film, the beautiful , starting to sound familiar? marriage, her father (Vincent Gar- wealthy Claire Gregory (Mimi Rogers) denia) has a fling with a floozy, and her accidentally becomes a witness to a In Garry Marshall's Overboard, Gol- mother (Olympia Dukakis) is propo- murder. With the culprit on the loose, die Hawn gets to play the Alex/Claire sitioned by a New York University she's given 24-hour police protection. lonely lady and the good little wife. At professor she meets in the local restau- One of the guys on the baby-sitting the film's start, she' s a rich, frigid, rant. Though the Family is Threat- beat is Mike Keegan (Tom Berenger) , bitch, nasty and contemptuous to reg- ened, order and fidelity predictably a nice cop from Queens married to El- ular old guy and conscientious carpen- triumph , with the entire clan standing lie (Lorraine Bracco), the daughter of ter Kurt Russell. Through a turn of in the big Brooklyn kitchen toasting a nice cop from Queens, and father of plot worthy of a Lucille Ball venture, hearth and home and love and mar- a future nice cop from Queens. Bracco she falls, becomes amnesiac, and Rus- riage-ali to the strains of \"That's looks and talks like Debra Winger II , sell, widowed, convinces her that Amore,\" the movie's tinny theme. At and her character is the cutest, spun- she's his wife, \"Annie,\" and mother to least Cher' s performance is endearing. kiest woman you'd ever want waiting \"their\" sons. for you at home. Diane Keaton' s new Baby Boom is Annie learns to scrub, cook, pick up more family fanfare without the adul- Mike and Claire have an affair amid after, and wait on her man hand and tery sermon. In this film , a woman's crystal and satin sheets, while Ellie foot . And she really gets into it. She' s corporate schedule stands between her makes meatloaf and washes windows. as good as Anne Archer's Beth and and home life. She can't get good sex, As the killer crawls closer, Ellie un- Lorraine Bracco's Ellie. The more she can't fix a faucet, and-get this--can't covers her husband's hanky-panky, mops, the happier she is, the more ful- put on a Pampers . Naturally, she is as filled and loving. Ah, the joys of miserable as Glenn Close's Alex or schlep. Poor little rich girl sat on a wall, Mimi Rogers' Claire. To save herself had a great fall , and serving her family from the sorrows of spinsterhood , she chucks her business suit and a million- dollar-a-year job for a house in Ver- mont, a real man (Sam Shepard), a baby, and spooning applesauce into little jars. Yech. Oh yes. She does turn the applesauce to profit in a cottage in- dustry-but only to reject more firml y Big Bad Career. Boom is treacly, but I found The Witches of Eastwick more disappoint- ing, perhaps because I expected bet- ter. This George Miller/Michael Christofer adaptation ofJohn Updike's novel sports a trio of sorceresses who want to do nothing with their power so much as build a big, happy home. Witches! These are the bubble-trou- ble-toad-tongue-and-newts' -eyes cho- rus line. What are they doing with diapers? Not so incidentally, Witches rides on an insidious broomstick. About three New England housewives (Cher, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Susan Saran- don) who each have an affair with Mephistopheles , the film begins as a 13

September: if not married, then cranky-Mia Farrow & Denholm Elliott. who dies from an overdose, has left his and destroyed dad's trust. Only Clay, comedy in which a Faustian Jack Ni- (Dianne Wiest) frets, the dependable who just says no, eats Christmas din- cholson can act out. But beneath this Denholm Elliott sighs, and Sam Wa- ner in his happy home. Appropriately, Clairol commercial on acid is a neat terston looks like a lovelorn Lurch. Clay is played by that sweetheart, An- message: left alone without husbands, drew McCarthy, who's so clean-cut women will go to the devil. Especially September is psychologically more that my affection for him makes me intelligent, talented women who have complex than the studio pictures, if worry that my cynicism is slipping. sexual appetites. The very premise of only because the star-crossed lovers re- the film cries out: We've got to do main tangled, and because years ear- Fortunately, this parade of promo- something about these vagabond va- lier mama left her first husband for a tional pomp has its exceptions, several gina dentata before they devour us good-looking thug who beat her until of which came out of Channel 4, Brit- whole. she killed him. But September is a film ain's prime funder of new films. Rita, that misses the mark. It doesn't ad- Sue and Bob, Too, Wish You Were Here, Sick of the saccharine the big stu- dress the issues it raises and leaves and My Beautiful Laundrette come to dios were putting out, I turned to my viewers with platitudes that are grossly mind immediately, along with Sammy favorite cynic, Woody Allen, for some inadequate to its subject. Admonitions and Rosie Get Laid (made by the My savvy, sarcasm, or realism, any change to do like mama and find the Right Beautiful Laundrette team without of pace-only to find more romance One hardly help anyone else in the Channel 4 funding). Yet the British with Home. I loved the wackiness of story. approach to the family was evident Hannah and Her Sisters till the outra- even in 1966 with Roy Boulting's The geously contrived finale where all the A nd so it goes. The recent crop of Family Way. Here, a few problems of sisters are married, pregnant, and liv- family films makes The Forsyte married family life-like impotence ing happily ever after. The spectre of Saga seem sober. Even in Brat Pack and illegitimacy-are handled along Keaton shoveling applesauce was bad movies, aimed at the sow-your-oats with the stability and love that families enough-this is just more Motts to audience, home sweet home has its provide. After 22 years, it' s much less me. Allen's new work, September, cheering squad. More and more, these of a bust than Baby Boom. spouts the same gospel in reverse: if films soothe the adolescent itch for in- you're not married and nestling in the dependence by telling kids they're W ithout doubt, the most sophis- bosom of your famil y, you're going to going to be just like their parents (Back ticated treatment of sex, mar- be chronically cranky, teary-eyed, and to the Future), or that they're going to riage, and family today lies in the work riddled with self-doubt. make money just like their parents of screenwriter Hanif Kureishi and di- (Risky Business, Ferris Bueller's Day rector Stephen Frears. They handle A mix of Hannah , A Midsummer Off, The Secret ofMy Success). The rest marriage and home life with the same Night' s Sex Comedy , and Interiors , Sep- of the Brat Pack films , the ones about uncompromising intelligence and tember tells the story of six people who \"problem\" teens, assert that the kids bawdy humor that they reserve for ra- spend the summer together in Ver- are in trouble because they've strayed cial bigotry, Thatcherism , Pakistani mont. Everyone falls in love with from the nest. It's never that the nest politics, and homo and hetero sex. someone who is in love with someone has hornets. else, except for the ex-show girl In My Beautiful Laundrette and mama, played boisterously by Elaine The torpid teens in River's Edge, for Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, Anglos and Stritch. Mama is happy because, after instance, wander around with nary a Pakistanis living in London like to all these years , she's found Mr. Right bit of quality time . In Less Than Zero, have sex (sometimes with the people and is settling down . Everyone else the kids who are blowing their noses they' re married to); use condoms; mopes. Her daughter Lane (Mia Far- out on coke seem not to have families have affairs , children, and families row) whines, Lane's best friend at all. Robert Downey, Jr.'s Julian , they depend on. Sometimes your rel- atives help you , sometimes they screw you , and your favorite uncle or father- in-law may also have a mistress, be a slumlord , or torture political prisoners in the old country. They're the same guys who pinch your cheek and offer you down payments on your house. Life is a mess of simultaneous contra- dictions. Why should marriage and family be any different? Alan Clarke's Rita, Sue and Bob, Too is equally savvy and daring, but far simpler a film. The unemployed fam- ilies in e<:onomically depressed Brad- ford have more than their share of troubles, and two teenagers, Rita and Sue, figure out they have a better deal with Bob, an \"older man\" in the neighborhood whose wife hires the girls to baby-sit. Bob drives the girls 14

Duncan T. Osborne Em21oyment: Executive Recruiter Profession: Actor \"Reading plays helps keep my repertoire for auditions fresh. If you do what everyone else is doing, the director will groan and roll his eyes. You have to constantly choose pieces that show your own personality and style. \" Get the plays that will advance your career. Join Fireside Theatre... UTTLE laop or HORRORS A NEW MUSI CAL BASED UPON THE FILM BYROGER CORMAN BOOI( AND LYRICS BY HOWARD ASHMAN MUSIC BY ALAN MENKEN ••• and take 4 books for $1 ;~~bership. How the Club Plan works: You 'll get your choice of ANY 4 BOOKS FOR $1 (plus shipping and handling) and * Warning: Subject maUer or language may be offensive to some. your FREE TOTE BAG when accepted as a member. We re se rve the right to reject any application . However, once r Fir;;ideTb;atreB~kCTu~ - II Garden City, NY 11535 accepted , if you are not fully satisfied with your introductory books, return them within 10 days at our expense. ~o ur membership will be cancelled and you will owe nothing . The FREE TOTE BAG is yours to keep in any case. l IPlease accept me as amember of the Fireside Theatre Book Club. and send me the 4 books I've numbered in the boxes below. plus my FREE TOTE BAG . Bill me Attractive selection : As a Club member, you 'll have dozens of titles to choose from : the best of every theatre I just $1 plus shipping and handling for the 4 books. I agree to the Club plan as season, Broadway and Off-Broadway successes, practical guides to performance and production techniques, Idescribed in this ad, will take 4 more books at regular low Club prices during and other vOlumes-many not available in any store at any price. I the next 2 years, and may resign any time thereafter. The FREE TOTE BAG is I Imine to keep even if I don't remain a member. How you save money: The Club offers its own complete hardbound editions (sometimes altered in size to fit special presses) . CLUB EOITIONS SAVE YOU UP TO 40% OFF PUBLISHERS' HAROCOVER EDITION PRICES. A shipping and handling charge is added to each shipment. I I IIMr. CX-576 I Ms. __________________~--~------------------ Club bulletin: Enjoy the convenience of at-home shopping with your free Club bulletin, Curtain Time. About every 4 weeks (14 times a year) you'll receive the bulletin describing coming SelecllOn(s) . In addition , up to 4 times a year, you may I IAddress receive offers of special Selections, always at discounts off publishers' prices. If you (Please print) want the featured Selection(s), do nothing-shipment will be made automatically. If Apt. N_ _ __ you prefer an Alternate-or no book at all-indicate this on the order form and return I City I it by the date specified. You 'll have at least 10 days to decide. If you have less than 10 State _______ Zip days, and receive an unwanted Selection , you may return it at our expense and owe I If under 18, parent must sign. I nothing . L - - - - - - - - - - - -Members accepted in U.S.A. and Canada only. Offer slightly different incana·dU FRE E TOTEThe choice is always yours: Your only obligation is to take just 4 books at regular low 12·FT1B Club prices during the next 2 years. You may resign any time after purchasing your 4 with membership books, or continue to enjoy Club membership for as long as you like.

home and offers them a detour in the Wish You Were Here: cheek. Claudia fells the belief that abuse back seat. Between chewing gum and never occurs in \"good\" homes. It turns giggling, the girls have the time of Tom Torpor called Nuts. Streisand out that her stepfather had sexual re- their lives. plays the nice, white, upper-middle- lations with her until she was 16, and class Claudia who becomes a prosti- paid her for it-but this is not the rad- Every time Rita and Sue try a more tute and is up on manslaughter charges ical part. Incest is as common as the conventional sexual setup, it ends in for killing a john who attacked her. All cold, and so is the idea that \"promis- disaster, and by the end of the film the good liberals-the psychiatrists, cuous women\" must be emotionally they happily admit that the trio is the lawyers, mother, and stepfather- damaged. (If promiscuity certifies best home they have. Radical in its want to do the right thing. In concert, mental imbalance, what does that sexual relations, Rita, Sue also credits they try to have her declared mentally make men?) What's astonishing here is the need for affectionate continuity incompetent and put away where she Claudia's insistence that her home was that is usually associated with tradi- can get \"help.\" She insists she acted indeed a good one. Her stepfather was tional families. In this film, however, rationally and that she'll win at trial. a kind and good provider; her mother, your house doesn't have to look like a generous and caring woman. \"Of Donna Reed's to get it. After much backing and forthing be- course they love me,\" Claudia says tween Claudia, her public-defender with some exasperation, \"So what?\" In David Leland's Wish You Were lawyer (Richard Dreyfuss), and var- Here, home is an amusement park ious courts, Nuts builds to Claudia's Nuts rejects the simple-minded no- with more than its share of roller- final courtroom monologue. First, she tion that family life is either whop- coaster rides. Set in a resort town on sweeps aside the idea that turning pingly good or tragically bad. Parents, Britain's coast in 1950, it tells the story tricks is a crazy thing for her to do. It's it claims, can't be divided into psychos of a sassy, 16-year-old girl whose a hell of a lot better, she acidly points who violate their children, and nor- mother died when she was eleven. out, than doing some slob's laundry for mals-People Like. Us-who are un- Her father, a barber who puts a lot on 40 years or marrying for a Mercedes. endingly terrific. Parents are both, at appearances and respectability, So much for monogamy madness. once. So if we're going to know the doesn't know how to love her. \"When I give a blow job,\" she taunts, family, we look at all the laundry. \"I'm in control ... and I'm responsi- To get attention and affection, ble.\" But if we do, what will happen to Lynda (played by the impish, 17-year- our need to believe that the family is old Emily Lloyd) hikes up her skirt to In a more provocative passage, ever-loving and always safe? Are we show the boys on the boardwalk that ready to give the fantasy up? After all, her legs are as good as Grable's. After we do love our illusions and rely on being bumped out of beauty school them to get by. and given a job in a bus depot, she re- peats the show for the drivers. She'll You could say that our family fan- challenge anyone to a contest in ob- tasies are not very good ones. If we had scenities, including the psychiatrist to faith in the merits of marriage, we whom her father takes her, and she wouldn't need all this cheering. graduates from swearing to screwing in Maybe we should just get ourselves fairly short order. It never occurs to another illusion, one we felt more sure anyone that Lynda is very bright but of. very bored, and that sexual improprie- ties are more interesting than roots or This, I think, won't do either. We routes. need sex, affection, and company. Over the long haul, we need to share Though Lynda is at odds with her trust, jokes, disappointments, and family, they're hardly the bad guys. late-night TV. We need it in spite of all Lynda's father isn't abusive, just bun- the problems . So mating is probably gling and bottled up. And when Lynda here to stay. Maybe it's time to take gets in trouble, it's her earthy aunt solace in this and recognize that we who helps her out. Over a cup of tea, don't have to protest so much. We the aunt gives her niece money and ex- don't have to bolster the traditional plains what Lynda can expect if she family over and over or restrict our- does or doesn't have an abortion. selves only to booster films. We're Spunky kid that she is, Lynda finds going to have our families, nostalgia her own way. She not only has her and all, even if we admit their foi- baby but wheels him right down Main bles-and even if families are chang- Street to her father's house with a pin- ing. We can afford the complexity the wheel spinning over the pram. All subject deserves. told, Wish You Were Here gives us a complex view of fathers, daughters, Sammy and Rosie have an \"open\" sex, and families. Wish more Ameri- relationship. He's having an affair with can filmmakers were there. a woman who has a \"w\" tattooed on A few, at least, are. This fall, Barbra Streisand produced and starred in each butt cheek so that when she a Martin Ritt film based on a play by bends over it reads \"WOW.\" Rosie has a fling with a bisexual, black trans- *vestite. But theirs is a \"Iove-and-mar- riage,\" all the same. 16

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by Harlan Kennedy W hene ve r Americans get seize d by a eulogistic fit about Britain--or just want to find something nice to say when they're over there-\"We love your ac- tors\" takes pride of place above even \"We love your royal famil y\" and \"We think your policemen are wonderful. \" And for many awed non-Britishers , British acting belongs right up there with the royals and the men in blue. Britain is the country of Shake- speare, Marlowe, and Bernard Shaw; of Garrick, Kean , and Olivier. It rep- resents-at least in reputation-the ar- istocracy of theatrical tradition , the lawbook of theatrical style, and the ya rdstick of theatrical achievement. Only a few years ago at the Oscar cer- emony, Jon Voight (in the audience) looked as if he was having an orgasm at the sight and sound of Lord Olivier (onstage), delivering a few harmless , florid platitudes in response to a life- time achievement award. The hype about British acting is, like all hype, hyperbolic. Olivier, Gielgud, Richardson , Scofield and Company have all given their fair share of rotten performances over the yea rs , in among the tours-de-force . And they often visibly have trouble adapting an unwieldy theatrical technique, trained by decades of throwing their voices, gestures, and facial expressions to the back of the gallery, to the medium of CInema. Slowly, though , the rise of movies as a second force and second recruiting ground for British actors has meant Brit Pack godfathers Tom Courtney and Albert Finney in The Dresser. that each new generation of young with these amphibians. In the age of put faces and personalities to each of thesps has become more adept at de- My Beautiful Gandhi, A Room with a the names. They not only shuttle veloping amphibian skills. They can Mission and A Prick up Your Maurice, freely between stage and screen, move around on land-treading the even an instant mental roll call sum- they're equally fleet of foot between firm boards on Shaftesbury Avenue or mons up Gary Oldman, Ben Kingsley, high-contrast roles. Surely the Rupert in Stratford-on-Avon-and they can Rupert Everett, Jonathan Pryce , Bob Everett wearing long hair and doling also swim in that strange, foreign, vis- Hoskins , Miranda Richardson , out a king-size Cockney accent as the cous medium called cinema. Frances Barber, James Wilby, Julie rock star in Hearts of Fire can't be the Right now, roused by the late Walters and lately, Daniel Day Lewis. same Everett we remember as the vel- Eighties film renaissance in Britain, Today's young British actors are so vet-throated aesthete in Another Coun- the country's acting scene is swarming quick-change and versatile it's hard to Continued on page 23. 18

I II I digree in British acting, one should I point out that Lewis' pedigree is prob- ably the most frighteningly august of any actor in film history. His father, Cecil Day Lewis, was the English poet laureate, succeeding such noted ver- sifiers as Tennyson and Masefield: this means he wrote poems for royal occa- sions and was paid an annual stipend of £40 and a butt of sack (!). And his mother, actress Jill Balcon , was the daughter of British film mogul Sir Mi- chael Balcon , he who launched A. Hitchcock's career (assigning him his first film The Pleasure Garden in 1925) and then went on to found Gainsbor- ough Pictures and later Ealing Stu- dios. Goodness knows what else Sir M. did between breakfast and lunch on the other days in his SO-year life. Hardly surprising, then, that when Daniel Day Lewis rode up on his mo- torbike to meet me in Wardour Street-throbbing heart of London's movieland-I first asked him how a man with such a background had failed to miss out on a career as an accoun- tant. As Tomas in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. his metamorphic talents in My Beau- (S cene: A room with a view in War- tiful Laundrette and A Room with a dour Street). \"I don't know,\" \"] Bring You View, Lewis is about to bow again in laughs Day Lewis, sitting down and Frankincense. ' , two equally diverse starring roles: as a plunking his gear inadvertently on the middle-aged Englishman abroad in Critics Circle cat. (He apologizes to A CHAT WITH Pat O'Connor's Stars and Bars and as her, but the cat does not accept and a Czech neurosurgeon in Philip Kauf- slinks off.) \"As far as my mother's con- DANIEL DAY LEWIS man's The Unbearable Lightness of cerned, she'd have been only too Being. happy if 1'd chosen another profes- T he highest flier of all among the sion. Very few people who work in the new Brits is Daniel Day Lewis. In view of the comments we've theater or the business actually wish it Having already wowed us with passed thus far on the vagaries of pe- upon their children. Really , the household as I remember it was much more influenced by literature than by theater or film.\" But the acting bug seized him at an early age. What-I was going to insist on the complete Day Lewis dossier- was the first line he ever spoke on- stage? Day Lewis, infectiously good- humored, gives a mock-puzzled frown and examines the ceiling, as if it con- tains his memory. \" 'I bring you frankincense.' I think that was the first line.\" I look my usual blank. 19

\"It was the infant-school nativity dribbling! [Brit for \"raving mad\"].\" so what exactly constitutes this play,\" he explains. \"I played one of §His First International Movie Role: \"sharing of ideas\" he finds with the the Three Wise Men.\" (\"Ah. Oh.\") \"I flew out to Tahiti to do The Bounty. best directors? With Frears, for in- \"The second part I ever played was as It wasn't one of the most successful stance. a little black boy in Cry the Beloved films. \" Country. I had to sort of dance around, §His First Work for a Famous Theater \"Some people make you feel a part blacked up every night. I covered the Company: \"When I came back from of the whole process. I actually sat in sheets in my dormitory with black Tahiti, I joined the Royal Shakespeare the cutting room for three weeks when body paint, which thrilled me enor- Company and did a tour with Romeo we'd finished filming Laundrette, usu- mously [laughter]! and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's ally you just come on, do your bit, and Dream. \" then off you go: it's someone else's job \"When I was eleven or twelve,\" he §His First Major Role to Get His to put the pieces together.\" continues, \"I was of a mind to go into Teeth Into: \"I did Dracula at the Half the theater, but I didn't start doing ser- Moon Theatre.\" Is that how you worked with James ious plays-written plays-until I was §And His First Television Work: Ivory? 13 or 14. Winter's Tale was my first \"Nothing I'd want to talk about.\" proper play. I played Florizel, ironi- No. No. He's not as cynical as that. cally, which my father had played in Oh, go on. But he does employ people because he his youth. Oh, well no. But on the plus side assumes they know what to do. When there was Richard Eyre's The Insur- you move onto a film set, the possibil- \"But really the only difference now ance Man, written by Alan Bennett. I ities are limitless. Some directors have between me and people who don't enjoyed that. But one has to be very already decided what they want for a work in the theater is-I just didn't careful about TV. scene, and they'll say, 'This is where stop. Everyone does it until a certain Why? I want the cameras to be, that's where age, and then they think, or they're \"Because the system doesn't let one I'd like the actors.' Some may pretend encouraged by grownups to believe, work in the way one wants to work. they haven't decided, but they'll ma- that perhaps they should do something Even in Britain, where the BBC and nipulate the discussion so that you do else. But no one ever said to me, 'This Channel 4 give more time and re- what they want you to do anyway. Still is a bad idea.' So I just carried on.\" sources to TV than maybe any other others will come onto the set with no country in the world. But it's still too preconceptions at all. Now obviously, His carrying-on took him to the Bris- rushed, too cost-conscious. There are to me the most attractive of these three tol Old Vic theater school, a famous exceptions-like My Beautiful Laun- possibilities is the last. Because when thespian breeding-ground deep in En- drette, which was made for TV and shot things are going all right, I have an gland's west country. It's also the alma in six weeks-but they're made by ex- imagination, and if I can't use it I mater of Miranda Richardson and Gary ceptional directors. Other people than might as well not be there. Oldman. Stephen [Frears], given that script, that subject, that finance, wouldn't Also, the actor's job is often to con- \"One wasn't allowed near a stage for have managed to make a film anything found the director's idea. It sets up a the first year or so. We were like over- like that. bit of combat, it creates a spark. trained greyhounds straining in the But there are advantages and creative slips. We worked on scenes from The freedoms too, aren't there, in low- I know it sounds as if I'm banging Cherry Orchard or Romeo and Juliet, budget films: ones you could never get on about control. But I'm seeing it but we never did whole plays. Then, with a mega-buster? from an actor's viewpoint. I've never in the second year, a group of eight There's no formula for making good yet worked with a director who's told people would 'devise' plays, and work films, and it's certainly true that ov- me what to do, except when I've ob- on improvisation. It was a time of great erfinanced movies can run into prob- viously needed help. Sometimes the freedom. One could explore in depth lems. Everyone worries, everyone imagination just takes a break, and you areas that had been kept from one in becomes suspicious, people become think 'Christ': you see a table and you the first year. I think probably my love much more isolated. Try and fuse a see chairs, you have a script in your of theater, as distinct from cinema, has group of 150 people together on a unit hand, and you don't know what the very much to do with particular ways as opposed to a group of 30, and it's fuck to do with it at all. It's just a mess, of working with people. Working on very clear why it happens. But again, and you can't stitch it all together. film, you do sometimes achieve a kind it depends on the director. I try to How can a director have the imagina- offusion, but it's much rarer. With the work with directors who share my tion always to see how a scene is struc- theater you have no option but to trust ideas. And in sharing those ideas I feel tured? Everyone-every actor-goes the other actors around you. So for me they can trust me to do the work I want through periods when there's just it was a good time, especially as I'd blackness and that has to be colored in never really liked groups; it was a kind to do. somehow. But all the directors I've of battle I had to fight within myself to \"By the way,\" he leaps in, just as worked with have not just allowed get into working with them.\" one's imagination to work but have I'm consulting my next question, \"it also actively encouraged it. T he spoils of victory for Day Lewis sounds now as if! choose directors. It's soon included: not like that, you know. But at the James Ivory employs actors he be- §His First West End Theater Role: \"I same time I always have the right to lieves have something to offer to those took over from Rupert [Everett] in An- say no, and I've exercised that right parts. If he felt one was stepping too other Country. He'd done his time, six from the day I first signed on the far away from the character as he saw months porridge [Brit for \"jail term\"] it, then of course he'd say something.\" and I did eight and a half. Came out dole. \" Acting-as the whiskery adage goes-has as much to do with reaction 20

as action. And for many the most memorable moment in A Room with a View was the shock-horror come-up- pance of Cecil Vyse: the look of horror, complete with tumbling pince-nez, with which Day Lewis' Cecil greets Lucy's breaking-off of their engage- ment. \"That's a film moment, but I have to say it's also [E.M.] Forster's. It's de- scribed in the book, and part of my love for the character was Forster's vi- sion of the way he coped with that sit- uation. That's very much about a person playing a part all his life and then being forced to look at himself. In a sense, it could apply to anyone: very rarely do we have a perception of ourselves that coincides with other people's perception. And if we're sud- denly forced to see ourselves as others see us, it can be tremendously shock- ing. It can be very funny and very sad-both things. But that was in Forster, as I say, as well as the script. Of course it's true that one has to fill in a lot more with most film scripts-but that's often the beauty of them. They don't tell you what to do. The best screenplays I've read have been the most laconic. It's like poetry: if someone knows how to use very few words, it's far more ef- fective than someone who uses a great many more to say far less. /' m cutting that right out before it gets to my editor and we end up with a haiku. Talking of Cecil's moment of truth- With Deirdre O'Connell in Stars and Bars. and horror-when he sees himseLf through other's eyes, how did you feeL room, that was the moment when I have seen something. about seeing yourself on the screen? thought, 'That's why! That's why!' \" Day Lewis is now hitting the starry zone where films can be made or It's not easy. The reason Laundrette From being part of the jigsaw in broken on his appeal and his perform- ance. He's also someone who's shut- was the least difficult film I've done Frears' and Ivory's films-and playing tled extensively between plays and movies. So which is worse: waiting for was because of working all those a don't-blink cameo in Conny Tem- the verdict to come in on a theater first night or on a movie first night? weeks in the cutting room. By the time pleman's Nanou (\"I didn't stay long, \"Well, the thing about a film first the first rough cut was ready, I was so what quick eyes you have\")-Day night is that it may be painful, but you can afford to be crippled by it. The bored with seeing myself onscreen Lewis moves toward stardom with the thing about a theater first night is that the fear [nervous, self-mocking gig- that I forgot about it. It ceased to be aptly titled Stars and Bars. gle]-the terror! [more nervous, self- mocking giggle]-that inhabits you is painful. And in the end I learned a lot \"I went to do a screen test for Stars there before you walk onstage. It's going to live with you for the next two through watching the editing process. and Bars thinking that I wouldn't get and a half hours, so you'd better use it if you're not going to be crippled by it. About how I might have helped-and the part: that I was too young, that And it .can cripple you. People have likened it to the effect of a major road didn't help [laughs]-in the shooting. there were other people who were accident, in terms of the adrenalin that That was something Stephen was much more appropriate. And that wonderful about. It was virtually my probably brought me a kind of free- first film, and it was frustrating for him dom I wouldn't otherwise have had. A to work with someone who obviously gay abandon! [Laughter.] The guy I wasn't stupid but who couldn't under- play-an Englishman who's deeply stand why he was filming it from this strangulated by life and who goes to or that angle, why he needed an actor America thinking it will somehow lib- to walk this way rather than that. I erate him-is an older character, in the couldn't stand disappointing him, and gradual disintegration of later life. I I wanted to understand all the time. don't know how the hell I ended up And I think when I sat in the cutting doing it. But Pat [O'Connor] must 21

hits you. Clift in style, but I do believe thal pletely knackered. So I probably each had his own way of seeing things. looked 20 years older than I am. And \"You know pretty well in the thea- Clift contained within him, a vision of that was my break. Haggard, wrecked ter by first night whether what you've some kind, which I found absolutely from the night before. done is ready to be seen. If it isn't riveting. It separates him from his con- ready in the cinema, well then you've temporaries. While they were superb Then I read the book before I saw a blown it. It's never going to be differ- in their moods, their changes, their script, thought the book was quite ex- ent. Onstage the worst fear of all is the violence of sensuality, Clift had a spir- traordinary and quite unfilmable. fear that comes from the knowledge itual quality of some kind.\" Then I read the script, and it took me that you haven't done the necessary a long time to adjust in my mind to the work. For whatever reason.\" C lift never played a middle-aged possibility of the film as opposed to the Czech neurosurgeon as in Phil novel. Because they're quite different What about long runs in the theater- Kaufman's The Unbearable Lightness pieces of work. I had to decide that it like your eight-month stint on Another of Being. What kind ofcharacter is this? was something that could be done and Country? Doesn't the adrenalin drop? that I could do it. How do you jack it up? Tomas? It's so difficult. When you describe a character, you tend to re- Although we got on well, Phil Well, that looks after itself. Because strict, constrict the life of that person. [Kaufman] had to discover that I'm not you suddenly walk out onstage after But if I were to give a simple outline, always smiling. And I had to discover four months and realize you don't have I'd say: He's a neurosurgeon living in that during the course of six months, a line in your head. That gets you Prague during the 'Prague spring'. you live in a kind of accelerated time. going like nothing. You live in fear for He's an insatiable womanizer, but he's You live a whole life in miniature: the the next fortnight, craving some de- protected his life against any possible film has a life of its own, and the story gree of certainty about anything. You intrusion of love. And his life is orga- of that film is a life, shared by a group know, one's acquaintance with a par- nized around his work. He has the rule of people brought together specifically ticular chair onstage-anything. And of threes. He either sleeps with a for that experience. In a film that lasts then it all goes back to normal. woman three times in a row and never six to eight weeks, you can pace your- again, or once every three weeks, or self-the end is always in sight. When It's the same as six months on a film. every three years, and so on. you go back, you remember what life Your moods change. People say, 'Use is like, you remember how the oven it, use it.' But you can't always. Some- If the film has a central theme, it's works. But six months is different, and times your mood, your metabolism is about the problem of love. Tomas' life I reached perhaps the lowest ebb I've totally against it. In the theater there is thrown into total disarray when he ever reached. are nights when you just see no reasons involuntarily falls in love. But that's to give that performance. And you go just one of the themes. The book is an It seems to me that the process of on feeling like a fucking hypocrite, be- immensely complicated philosophical making a film is a process that takes cause you're giving it anyway and you novel. It's about love, and it's also away from you all the time. At its best, feel, well, it'd be more honest to stand about the Parmenides paradox: the the theater provides a kind of nourish- and say to the audience, 'I can't do it philosophy of 'lightness' versus ment, and I haven't found that to be tonight.' Because you know you won't 'weight.' Which does one search for, true with filmmaking. I've felt shrun- give them the performance you'd like the lightness of being, or the heaviness ken by th(3 experience. What you give, to give. of being, represented by love, by the constantly, is not returned in any form, emotional commitments that root one not sufficiently anyway. And you have Are some kinds of acting easier to do to earth? And then there is the theory to find some time to yourself, to find than others? Is comedy easier than of eternal return. Human beings are some reason for carrying on. drama? constantly making decisions blindly, making the same mistakes from gen- Obviously the lack of a live audi- I don't think you can separate them, eration to generation, which then af- ence response has an enormous at least as far as the character is con- fect the rest of their lives and ensuing amount to do with it. But it also has to cerned. The audience can afford to history. do with the isolation of filmmaking. make that distinction, the actor can't. You feel involuntarily more isolated Often within the humor of a character How did a new British actor get the working at the center of a film where you find their tragedy, and vice versa. part? you're in if not every scene, then the The two things go hand in hand. The vast majority of them. You know you performances I appreciate most on- Well, Phil Kaufm~m was in England are carrying the burden of that film. It screen are the ones that don't try and looking for actors. He'd been advised may be good despite you, but it still limit human experience to one way of against meeting me. [Laughter.] I needs you at its center, and you have think it was because I'm much to fight the awareness of that all the being. \" younger than the character in the time. If you're conscious of it during Cue for the interviewer to prod him book. Anyway, by coincidence he the working day, it can just pull you to switched on the telly in his hotel, and pieces. By contrast, in the theater, if into naming his favorite actors. I happened to be on breakfast televi- you're at the center of a play, you are \"Montgomery Clift ... , \" Day sion, which is not something I appear nourished by working with those other on regularly. [Laughs.] I was playing people. It's a trust. And it's a very pre- Lewis began. \"Everyone has been in- Mayakovsky in the theater at the time, carious thing: it can be snapped at any fluenced by Brando; fewer people so I had a shaved head, and it was eight moment. But if it survives, it's a won- have been influenced by Clift. But for o'clock in the morning and I was com- derful thing. Wonderful. me he was an extraordinary actor. Not because he covered a big range, but -Harlan Kennedy because he was different. Different in the way Ralph Richardson was differ- ent from John Gielgud. There's no comparison between Richardson and 22

Continuedfrom page 18. line in Gosh-I'm-Ieaping-from-the- toff in A Room with a View . screen-with-rough -h e w n - b o u n c e - a n d - All this , as well as being a b.acklash try? Surely this youngster who's a dead radiance. In short, these performers ringer for Joe Orton can't be the same became stars, dishing out the same against the condemned-to-stardom who was a dead ringer for Sid Vicious? short-order charisma from movie to fate of the Finney-O'Toole genera- And what about Miranda Richard- movie. tion, is in the best time-honored tra- son--can the careworn woman in Em- dition of British theatrical upbringing. pire olthe Sun be the same actress who T oday's young actors in Britain, by The part comes first, the actor's per- incarnated the hard-bitten blonde with contrast, don't have to pay the sonality second. And here national a murder talent in Dance with a price for being class and culture heroes character reinforces professional integ- in an acting revolution. They're not rity. The British , reticent by nature, Stranger? front-page events or chat-show-des- love disguises. That's why they make This new generation of actors is a tined icons of a swinging decade. And the best spies and the best c'haracter in terms of class and background, the actors. Even apparently flamboyant startling contrast, in more ways than mold has already been broken for personality-performers like Olivier re- one, to the last major wave of British them, the revolution already won. joice in the self-annihilation of the thesps: the ones who emerged in the They don't all have to come from the false nose, the limp, or the wig. And Sixties and grew out of what the regions, though many do. And they publicity-shy actors like Guinness or United Kingdom quaintly calls its \"re- don't all have to come from private Scofield like nothing more than to hide gions.\" This can mean anywhere out- schools, Oxbridge or RADA, like the behind a faceful of beard and makeup side London, but it usually refers to British acting generations before, or, failing that, beh.nd a persona of far-flung places with funny accents though again many do. Britty stoicism (A Man for All Seasons) like Manchester and Liverpool, or or mandarin impenetrability (Guin- even Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. Al- They neither have a common pe- ness' Smiley). bert Finney, Peter O'Toole, Julie digree nor a common style. They don't Christie, Richard Harris, Tom Cour- even have a common lifestyle. In this When Britain does occasionally tenay, and the like were the first to last respect, the Brit Pack bears no re- spew forth a movie star-Richard Bur- break the mold of approved acting lationship at all to America's Brat ton, Dirk Bogarde, Julie Christie, Mi- provenanct:, whereby you' had to come Pack: their un-clannishness is daz- chael Caine, or Sean Connery-they from the south-or appear to-and zling. They aren't seen together at tend to come from way outside the speak with a posh accent if you were parties or in restaurants or in gossip charmed pentacle of West End thea- to make it big on stage and screen. columns. And since British cinema has terland or the well-bred Southern Tearing up the rule-book, this mob had no equivalent to Hollywood's counties. The Welsh Burton , the broke not only into films, where the Eighties conveyor-belt youth mov- Dutch-fathered Bogarde, the Cockney kitchen-sink mood of the day (This ies-Weird Science, About Last Caine, and the Scottish Connery- Sporting Life, Saturday Night and Sun- Night . .. , St. Elmo's Fire, etal.-they and, for that matter, the North country day Morning, et al.) suited their re- don't keep re-meeting each other on- Finney and the Irish O'Toole-had to gional brogues; they also invaded the screen either. This produces the re- hew careers for themselves from un- theater, happily annexing everything freshing feeling that the Western promising backgrounds and thus from Shakespeare and Shaw to Pinter world's late-teen generation isn't learned how to megaphone rather than and Osborne. made up entirely of the same six or moderate their egos and personalities. seven people. It also means that, like But perversely this triumph against jokers in the pack, the young Brits can The less embattled acting times in the stereotype of pedigree produced turn up as surprise wild cards from which modern British players live and another one in its place. Finney, O'- movie to movie, rather than be con- work means that few have had the mo- Toole, and the rest became tarred with demned to play with each other for- mentum of adversity that can help their own high-profile iconoclasm. ever in some sectioned-off cinematic project an actor-voluntarily or invo- The Sixties heroes, born of a class rev- playpen called the \"teen pic.\" luntarily-toward stardom. Hard- olution in acting, became fashion working professionalism has replaced plates for a new kind of British acting In such an acting climate, the film- loud-hailing ambition. And chameleon that repeated itself just as much as the goer has an exciting time. He walks versatility, such as most of the Brit old. Its keynote was a hell-raising-ham unarmed and compassless through a Pack boast, is the truest enemy of star- style. landscape of guerrilla acting feats. dom. When the public elects a star, Young British actors today specialize they want to see him or her go on play- O'Toole-after brave early self-sub- in camouflage, disguise, and surprise. ing himself or herself from film to film. duing work on Lawrence-gradually Actors you've seen before but can't The iconography of individualism became a florid, silver-ranting playboy quite recognize suddenly jump out of must scream off the screen: Dustin from movie to movie, whether playing a movie's undergrowth and turn out to Hoffman's bird-beak nose and aden- Henry II, Lord Jim, or Don Quixote. be, say, Gabriel Byrne with an Italian oidal voice, Jane Fonda's violin-string Finney, despite a seemingly desperate accent (Julia and Julia), or Jonathan tautness, De Niro's gunpowder search for the widest variety of parts- Pryce as a two-minute deus-ex-machina pauses, Keaton's gosh -golly gauch- from Scrooge to Hercule Poirot to romantic lead (Jumping Jack Flash), or erie. And even when a star rings Oscar- Daddy Warbucks-began to seem bi- Daniel Day Lewis, who we thought winning changes with wigs or accents, zarrely identical from role to role: a was that peroxide-quiffed punk in My like Meryl Streep, the star-quality core stocky, pugilistic drawler finally apoth- Beautiful Laundrette, turning out to of idiosyncrasy-in Streep's case, the eosized, with full ham trimmings, in have a double life as a bespectacled tendency to sign-write entire subtexts The Dresser. And Christie plied from to each performance with her little film to film-whether in Hardy's Wes- sex or Pasternak's Russia-the same 23

Rupert Everett in Chronicle of aDeath Foretold. Miranda Richardson in Empire of the Sun. Gary Oldman in Prick Up Your Ears. shrugs, sighs, murmurs, and mannerist glitz-and-glamour Hollywood field. T oday, the young actor can find asides---<:an be strong enough to avoid Not for her Camelot and its ilk when himself flung like a pinball all any threat of ego meltdown. she could, later, don the rough fa- around the map of histrionic possibil- tigues of martyrdom, acting her tor- ity. In one year, he or she can careen T he British acting personality, by tured heart out in Julia or Playing for from a James Ivory period pic to a contrast, seldom rises or wants to Time or Wetherby. rough-trade Derek Jarman fantasy, to rise above the changing characteristics a gnomic Peter Greenaway fable, to a of each role. The key interim actor be- Heirs to two such giddily contrast- dour state-of-Britain Channel 4 docu- tween the Finney-O'Toole era and the ing movements-Sixties self-promo- drama. Between movies, he or she will Brit Pack era is probably John Hurt. tion and post-Sixties self-flagella- fill in time with a quick stage role at For years, in the early Eighties, he tion-it's no surprise that the Brit Pack the National or the Royal Court, a pop seemed the lone leading man of Brit- actors sometimes seem to spend their video or two, and a lightning cameo in ish cinema: suffering for art in movies lives tumbling around in a historico- a TV sitcom. No wonder the new Brit- like The Elephant Man, Champions (as cultural blender with no idea in what ish actor is a moving target, one whom a jockey with cancer), and 1984. Hurt forin they're going to pour out in each critics find hard to define and evaluate turned the craft of British screen acting new role. Traditions in British acting and filmgoers find hard even to iden- away from its hiccup era of glamour have been so shaken up over the last tify. The current pack-leaders are un- and self-promotion in the Sixties back 30 years that there's no longer any terra doubtedly Rupert Everett, Gary into an arena for monastic self-abne- firma for the aspiring thespian. And Oldman, Miranda Richardson, and gation. Hurt by name, crucifixion- combined with that lacuna-the lack Daniel Day Lewis. prone by nature. of a reigning orthodoxy in style, back- §Everett has been a fancied horse ever ground, or training-is the lack of any since he shook his Byronic fetlocks in Hurt in turn handed on the baton of coherent \"movement\" in modern Brit- Another Country (the play, then the high-minded masochism to Ben King- ish cinema. For all their richness and film). Defiantly weird-looking, his sley, and to Jeremy Irons, the latter prolixity, UK movies today tend to be lanky physique, his stoop, and his suffering consecutively for love (The a bunch of lively one-offs rather than gaunt, pale, aquiline head seemed to French Lieutenant's Woman), exile a cogent school or tradition. In the condemn him to a lifetime of playing (Moonlighting), and God (The Mis- past, actors could go through periods cloistered aesthetes or sickly aristos. sion). The patron saint of this hairshirt of honing their craft from movie to But hardly had the moviegoer dropped acting movement was probably the movie by sharpening it on much the him into his Filmofax (under E for Blessed Vanessa. Born as a screen star same whetstone: whether Ealing com- English and Effete) than Everett reap- in the Sixties, La Redgrave has been edy, or Hammer horror, or \"Carry- peared, mutated beyond recognition, far more at home in the dourer late ons,\" or the kitchen-sink wave of the in other roles at other ends of the Seventies and early Eighties. She Sixties. never really seemed happy playing the 24

movie compass. He was a sleazy , TISCH womanizing racing driver in Dance with a Stranger, a boorish violin prod- NYU Film Program igy in Duet for One, and a loud- Alumni mouthed, foul-mouthed rock star in Hearts of Fire. Currently he is a (partial listing) macho-mysterious Spaniard in Rosi's Chronicle of a Death Foretold. There Martin Scorsese were even rumors that he was going to director don three tons and play Orson Welles in a movie about the Mercury Thea- The Color ofMoney ter's heyday. Oliver Stone §GaFy Oldman emerged from a copi- director ous apprenticeship in the London theater and British TV to win , in suc- Platoon cessive movie years , both the Sid Vi- cious and the Joe Orton look-alike Joel Coen contests. Since he also bears a stun- director ning similitude to the young John Os- borne, British author of Look Back in Raising Arizona Anger, his career as a showbiz spitting image could be only just beginning. Marty Brest To the natural advantage of physically director resembling everyone you can think of, Oldman adds a rare plasticity of speech Beverly Hills Cop and mannerism. The hunched and grungy yobbishness of Sid Vicious is Susan Seidelman light years away from the preening director cockiness of J. Orton, and yet Oldman played both-indeed made a meal of Making M r. Right both-as to the mannerisms born. They learnedfilmmaking §Miranda Richardson-insanely making films at NYU underused by filmmakers so far-is the most talented British actress since You could too. the Blessed Vanessa. Her biggest role to date-as murderess Ruth Ellis in NBVYORK -~~e~e~d~:~U:-orm:~~:---------- Dance with a Stranger-had a psy- ~ chotic gentility that summed up for the Department of Film and Television. eternity the British way of killing. Arkr ·1ATl l ' NIVU..mY l lIo nlt ru ILIi H. • VII t (Mind the blood doesn't get on the 0 undergraduate 0 graduate chintz curtains, dearie). The won- drous thing about Richardson is that o summer sessions she can scoot about between totally different roles-as a wacky-infantile Tisch School of the Nrune _______________________________ lecturer's wife in Simon Gray's black Arts Admissions Address ______________________________ comedy for TV After Pilkington, as a New York University CityIState/ Zip Code ______________________ young farming girl in John Macken- ' 721 Broadway, 7th Floor zie's The Innocent, as an imperiously New York, NY. 10003 prankish Elizabeth I in the BBC sitcom Blackadder and as a ghost-like pow in Attn.: Dr. Roberta Cooper Empire ofthe Sun-lending as common denominator only a pale beauty and a L New York University is an affirmative action / equal opportunity institution. Fe Jan/Feb 88 I piercing intelligence. Once she's off -----------------------------------~ the screen-as with most Brit Pack ac- tors-you'd have a hard time giving the police a description of her. In the best actors , though, this elusiveness of personality goes hand-in-mitt with a startling talent for Protean change. To a generation looking for ways to out- wrestle the predictability of simple heroism, the Brit pack keeps changing the shape of things to come. ® 25

by Gavin Smith Ed Pressman is a pleasant, soft-spok- en guy who thinks carefully be- fore he speaks and often replies ... very ... slowly .. . with long gaps ... be- tween each . . . word. He is tentative, dip- lomatic even, but you sense a certain edge to his carefully expressed thoughts and opinions. When I stan out by asking him how he feels about New York Newsday ap- pointing him one of the new breed of pro- ducers changing the face of Hollywood, or words to that effect, he shifts in his seat. \"I'm just carrying on doing what I've al- ways done. I think the fact that ... the film industry has changed ... over the last few years ... It's become son offractional- ized, so that it's not such a clear monopoly by the major studios, and that has allowed me and a number of people to gain some prominence that would not otherwise have been allowed. It's really a reflection of the change in the industry itself.\" No one sets out to transform Holly- wood, ala Luther and the Church,-ask David Puttnam-and Pressman declines any such motive. He doesn't subscribe to the Great Man theory of historical change. If he Ieamed one thing at Harvard, where he took a B.A. in philosophy, and having spent the mid-Sixties in that hotbed of po- litical radicalism the London School of Economics-ask Mick Jagger-Press- man knows that the Hollywood dinosaur we all love (you know-huge body, tiny brain, eats everything in sight, that son of thing) will become extinct due to timidity, inbreeding, and blindness, not due to one anarchist producer. One man can only do so much, Newsday. In other words, not in your, my, or Ed's lifetime. When I arrive at the production offices of Oliver Stone's just-wrapped WaLL Street, I take in the threadbare, makeshift surroundings and wonder whether Press- man gets depressed moving his operation from one temporary office space to the next, year in, year out. (Wish I'd asked him that one.) He thinks he can only spare halfan hour to talk, immediately has to take one offour or five calls, and ends up giving me 90 minutes of his time. By the second call, this shy, mild-mannered character, who looks more like Clark Kent than Superpro- ducer, looms as something larger than his list of credits: Badlonds, Sisters, Heart- beat, Das Boot, True Stories, Plenty, and Good Morning, Babylon. Professionally he's a tiger-the guy I'd want on my side in a tight spot, panicularly ifl were a mov- ie director. You instinctively trust him. He 26

Wall Street- lse On location for wall Street with director Oliver Stone. clearly doesn't overestimate his power know him that well. I was an outsider. I reputable as movies) has a taste for the within, or independence from, Holly- was happy to observe. \" edge. He derives gratification from en- wood, although essentially he's an inde- abling subversive filmmakers to smack pendent operator. He picks the projects There's clearly a double aspect to the the donkey of complacency on the nose. he wants to do, and he gets them made way Pressman operates. He quite clearly Mainstream cinema is inherently \"apoliti- with or without studio backing (preferably loves movies and the business, yet he con- cal\" and aesthetically conformist at best, with, bu t not if it means a downward spiral sistently makes films that take chances and antediluvian at worst. \"It's funny. In of creative compromises). with subject matter-and then believes retrospect I think of myself as attracted to strongly enough in the worth of the project film-not by politics-and yet so often \"I've always really pursued doing the not to hedge his bet with a safe cast, which the filmmakers I'm drawn to are political films I've wanted to do and not design ironically would mean a higher budget. in nature.\" Aha. Talking about Badlands, films to suit other people's framework. So Pressman's gamble is on leading the pub- Terrence Malick's romantic ride with by doing that I have no essential conflict lic. \"I mean, is Marty Scorsese the estab- crazy, murderous Charlie Starkweather, with the major studios. I think there's an lishment? What's interesting to observe is who cut a hole through the Plains States in assumption on the studios' part that I like to see one's peers become in effect a sort the Fifties, and one of Pressman's earliest doing things the way I've been doing ofestablishment in themselves. I think it's and most enduring achievements, he them. I think that there's a more cordial a very different sensibility, a new genera- says, \"It's an existential factor that in this rapport.\" Pressman doesn't want to be the world of chaos and apocalypse, nothing Dennis Hopper of producers----{;ult pariah ation. ...There's a common appreciation seems on one level to matter, really. Yet to with first a cause and then an image to live have filmed something that still seems sig- up to. Not to say that he isn't drawn to that of film in different way that perhaps is nificant is very important.\" Not too many lifestyle. For such a quiet, thoughtful guy, the film school generation. The group of producers talk like this. it's revealing that he is as much drawn to filmmakers I've grown up with and the the cultural renegades and provocateurs- people that I'm working with today are Pressman looks as if he'd be more at Alex Cox, John Milius, Rainer Wemer people often with different backgrounds home in a weight training class for ac- Fassbinder, and Brian De Palma-as to and objectives than some of the people countants than on a movie set. But he more soft-treading talents such as the Ta- who were established when we started, speaks of his first unpaid job as an assistant vianis, Oliver Stone, and Tertence Ma- and I think that becomes a more dominat- to a Wardour Street film executive in Lon- lick. On Fassbinder, whose Despair ing factor as this generation replaces the don where he was \"intoxicated with the Pressman produced in 1978: \" He was a last.\" most superficial connection with the mov- wild man, yeah. I was very infatuated by ies.\" At the same time, he keeps Holly- his whole way of being. He could crank In the 20-odd years that he's been wood at arm's length. \"I don't feel part of out movies very easily. I didn't get to Ieaming his craft, this wayward child of Wall Street (his stepfather is a stock ex- change specialist; only a wayward child would choose a career in something as dis- 27

the social scene that Hollywood em- make Conan toys, and then when they didn't do it they made their own characters bodies. The more I've observed Holly- inspired by Conan and Star Wars, kind of hi-tech and sword and sorcery. And these wood, the more I see there is really no toys did a billion dollars in sales (my fam- ily's in the toy business, so I was aware of center. It's not a geographical or sociologi- this phenomenon) and so I sought a pop adventure property that could do for my cal point-it's a constellation. It's like any company what Conan did-only to find there was nothing as famous as Masters of other social system.\" the Universe. The problem is that it was popular with five-year-olds. So we had to How does he reconcile his star in the find, or create, a mythology and overcome the stigma of it being for very little kids. New Hollywood universe that includes Casting Dolph Lundgren was an attempt to identify the character. The whole film is the Simpson/Bruckheimer packagers? the opposite of the emotional rapport one has working with an individual filmmaker. \"I've found it congenial and satisfying per- This is totally an intellectual exercise.\" sonally to align myself with an individ- What about the \"realer stuff,\" though? There's Paris by Night, English writ- ual-normally the filmmaker-and that er-director David Hare's latest, a suspense thriller with the socio-political concems is a different sensibility, or point of view, typical of the writer of Plenty and director of Wetherby, one of the most acute and than ·the one Simpson and Bruckheimer purely cinematic British films to see the light of day since the heydayofNic Roeg. take. They very openly take the point of Briefly explained, Paris by Night is the story of a Conservative woman Euro MP view of producers in charge, and the direc- in the Common Market Parliament in Brussels, (encouragingly, to be played by tor is expendable. They take a very hands- Charlotte Rampling), who leads a double life, and after committing murder, en- on attitude, and that's their prerogative, deavors to cover things up. Pressman agrees that Hare is shaping up as one ofthe and they willingly accept what may seem best directors of his generation and ex- plains what drew him to Plenty, such a like a callous position. specifically Engfish film about English conditions. \"In Plenty the attitude of the \"In the old days, the studio bosses had With Ed Harris on Walker. second World War for the English is simi- lar to my generation's response to the Six- directors under contract; they could come Byrne, who welcomed it and was open ties-a kind of time when things were somehow glorious. So it was very relevant up with a great idea and choose Howard and was learning film as we were going. and I felt very moved by the character and the subject. There's been a lot of resis- Hawks or whoever to direct. That gave Less with Oliver (Stone) now than when tance to financing this film and that doesn't bother me at all; I'm very confi- the producer the kind of dominance that we did The Hand. I think generally the is- dent. Wetherby was sort of like early Hitchcock, the English years. Paris by doesn't exist today. To hire the star direc- sues are what we' re going to do. The key Night is more like the Rebecca middle years of Hitchcock. He's just finished a tors today is very, very rare. You can't just technical functions have to be filled right; screenplay called \"Strapless.\" Paris By Night and particularly \"Strapless\" are, I hire Martin Scorsese or Stanley Kubrick. some directors know exactly who they think, a real evolution in David. In a cer- tain W3)j there's a happier tone to \"Strapless\" They are independent in a way that re- want and some directors want to be pro- in a W3)j that his other work hasn't shown, and even Paris by Night is, by comparison quires a common point of view. If you duced.\" to Wetherby, which is oppressing and very abstract. So I think he's moving on, as Oli- want to hire Marty Brest to do Beverly This sort of thinking has led a number ver did after Platoon. He sort of got it out of his system. By comparison Wall Street is Hills Cop you can, because he's starting of the feistier and more unorthodox a comedy. I think making Salvador and Platoon, he's grown, and watching him out, he's not a star yet. I don't think they filmmaking talents to beat a path to Press- could hire Marty Brest right now to do Be- man's door. Right now he's producing verly Hills Cop 3. So it's a different time, films for three overtly politically oriented and they are approaching it with remark- filmmakers: Oliver Stone (Wall Street), able success in a much more traditional Alex Cox (Walker), and David Hare (Par- way-which I think is outmoded but ob- is by Night). But just to keep you off bal- viously not totally. I think there are differ- ance, he also produced the high-budget ent motives and different types ofsatisfac- fantasy epic Masters ofthe Universe, and tion.\" To put it mildly. will soon go into production with Tim Expanding on his own methodology, Hunter on an adaptation of an English sci- he uses a recurrent word in the Pressman fi comic strip character, Judge Dredd. lexicon: sensibility. \"I'm trying not to Pressman also gave the world Conan the sound presumptuous here, but what's ex- Barbarian back in '82, courtesy of Stone citing is discovering cinematic sensibilities and Milius. and ways of looking at the world. I find Pressman is not so easily pigeonholed as True Stories totally exciting, because it the radical producer-saint as some would was really original. The rapport with inter- have it. \"I obviously have an interest in esting directors comes from a mutual ap- pop fantasy subjects for some reason. In preciation of cinema. It's an unspoken terms of fitting in to the work I do, it cer- kind of thing; it's a common purpose that tainly has provided the financial means to sets you on the same side as them; the ob- do the other, realer stuff.\" In other words, jectives are mutual; there is no division be- he's the reverse of the Monroe Stahr tween producer and director.\" myth, the producer who does one for art's The amount of input Pressman has in sake. Pressman does one for commerce's the director's work varies. \"I developed a sake once in a while and happily reaches kind of rule of thumb. I give myselfsix op- for the popcorn. portunities to really fight for issues. Not to And Pressman can package, too, if nec- do it every day, not to do it over every little essary. Masters of the Universe, he says, thing, because then it loses its impact. I \"came out ofopportunity. It had the chal- think each film, each director, is a differ- lenge of an intellectual solution to a prob- ent situation. There's no systematic ap- lem that hadn't been tried or attempted proach. I had a lot more to do with David before. Matell had licensed the rights to 28

now on Wall Street compared to how he Exclusively From Cinevista Video managed the set on The Hand [Stone's 1981 horror movie produced by Pressman AVAILABLE SOON and agreed by both to have been a bad ex- Patrice Chereau's Legendary Film l'Homme Blesse (The Wounded Man) perience1was like an amazing growth and starring Jean Hughes Anglade (\"Betty Blue\") very exciting as a friend to observe.\" and Radu Gabrea's A Man like Eva starring Eva Mattes as Fassbinder Will Wall Street and Walker be the po- Check or money order only payable to Cinevista, Inc. NY residents must litical haymakers they are billed as? Press- add sales tax. Specify VHS or BETA. Allow 4-6 weeks for delivery. man is typically cautious. \"I think Alex and Oliver are very different individuals. CINEVISTA,NC Walker is very much a political film , and it's overt. 1 think Wall Street is much more 353 WEST 39TH STREET, NEW YORK, N.Y. 10018 TEL. (212) 947-4373 objective, and 1 don't think you can sepa- 29 rate art and politics anyway. 1can't say I'm sorry there's a lot of anticipation or atten- tion for the film . The original impulse was Dostoyevsky, kind of Crime and Punish- ment on Wall Street. Oliver and 1 have a fondness for some films, like Alexander Mackendrick's Sweet Smell of Success, which captured the darkness in New York in a way that 1 can't remember any other film doing. There had been films about big business years ago, but things have changed so much, and there hasn't been anything that had captured that whole world. Oliver and 1 both grew up in that- Oliver's father was a broker, and my step- father is, and it's a whole new world that objectively hasn't been explored in all its aspects-which are not all negative.\" By contrast, Pressman participated less in the creative thinking behind Walker, Alex Cox's mock-epic of nascent U.S. im- perialism in Nicaragua. \"I think the scale of the film is very ambitious; it's a very large production that people may not an- ticipate. What the film will actually look like in the end, what the experience of seeing it will be, is something 1have a hard time imagining. 1 really can't wait to see it. I've seen rushes, and 1 think there are a couple of movies that could be made out of what we have.\" 1 wish I'd had the presence of mind to ask Pressman if he broke out in a cold sweat after seeing Cox's schoolboy Straight to Hell. Would you buy a used spaghetti westem from this director? \"I think that Walker is the film that he's wanted to do for such a long time, and un- like Sid and Nancy, which was to be an art film, Walker is a film that he's making for a very wide audience.\" It may be Cox's last chance to deliver on his promise. It's indicative of Pressman's style that he's letting Cox make his film and trusting him to come through . Maybe Walker will score points for him for making the gesture in the first place, but 1 don' t think Press- man is in the business of making worthy gestures. What makes Ed Pressman run is to see others rock the boat he has a first- class room on, while he signs the checks. ®

Feature Films from Direct Cinema Limited Anne of Green Gables THE MOST HONORED the world , for over half a cen- Starring: Megan Follows as Anne FILM FOR CHILDREN tury in Lucy Maud Mont- Shirley Also featuring Colleen Based on the novels of gomery's classic novel , Anne of Dewhurst, Richard Farnsworth & Lucy Maud Montgomery Emmy Award 1986 Green Gables. Anne of Green Jonathan Crombie Outstanding Children's Gables and Anne of Green Program Gables-the Sequel recreate Produced by Sullivan Films, Inc. Peabody Award 1986 the story's fairytale charm and Directed by Kevin Sullivan Best Film capture the essence of life at 1986 American Film Festival the turn-of-the-century with ex- Anne of Green Gables quisite detail. It is a delicate 192 minutes Color 1986 Delightful , unpredictable Anne epic full of wit, adventure and Anne of Green Gables- Shirley has been charm ing emotional power. the Sequel readers of all ages throughout 235 minutes Color 1987 \"Cannibal Tours\" Selected for Screening at When tourists today journey and New Guinean people The Hawaii International to the farthest reaches of meet within the context of Film Festival Papua New Guinea, is it the organized \"travel adventure The U.S. Film Festival indigenous tribespeople or tours\". The San Francisco the white visitors who are International Film Festival the cultural odd ity? This A film by Dennis O'Rourke unusual documentary ex- 70 minutes Color 1987 \"There is nothing so strange in plores the differences and a strange land as the stranger the surprising similarities who comes to visit it.\" that emerge when Western The Hero's Journey: The Hero's Journey intro- of modern culture. introduction to his spirit, his humor duces the life and work of and his wisdom. \" The LA Weekly The World of Joseph Campbell : author, phi- \"...Ought to be required losopher, academic and hero. viewing for critics , students Directed by Stuart Brown Campbell 's theories on and would-be makers of 60 minutes Color 1987 mythology, which inspired the film .. .Campbell is one of the creation of popular cultural few crucial American thinkers \"A searing but sensitive investiga- cornerstones like Star Wars of the last half-century.. .The tion of the times. \" and The Road Warrior , are Hero's Journey is a thor- The Christian Science Monitor perhaps the best kept secrets ough and entertaining Produced and Directed by Legacy of the Legacy of the Hollywood emotional and psychological Judy Chaikin Hollywood Blacklist Blacklist examines the long- impact that the Committee's Narrated by Burt Lancaster term effects of one of investigation had on the lives 60 minutes Color 1987 America's most infamous of five women , wives of suc- events-the investigation of cessful film figures who were \"An inspired salute to the glory alleged Communist activities blacklisted in the 1940's and days of bon mots and barbed wit. \" in Hollywood by the House 1950's. Vogue UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) . This clique and the range of Produced and Directed by documentary details the American culture in the Aviva Siesin 1920's. 60 minutes Color 1987 The Ten Year Lunch: From 1919 to 1929 in New York City's Algonquin Hotel , For information contact: ~'Icinema Q The Wit and Legend of a group of poets , novelists, Direct Cinema Limited the Algonquin Round Table playwrights, critics, humorists Post Office Box 69799 limited and editors met each day for Los Angeles, CA 90069-9976 lunch to exchange opinions , Phone (213) 652-8000 gossip and the most cutting wit of the day. The Ten Year Lunch illuminates both the work of this extraordinary

· ection 31

by David Thomson soar into craziness on all the riffs and real- being the handsome, inert filling of a role. Iys of his set speeches. He plays the cli- By the end of the movie and now sena- \"/ admire what you standfor. ... Do you ches fast and slow. The homilies congeal like yogurt?\" - Natalie Wood as herself to as humbug. And then his exhausted face tor-elect, he is asked again , \"What's on gives way to a helpless siren mantra, Bart- your mind , Senator?\" And the answer is Robe rt Redford's le by going into bop-\"Walawalawala- still , \"I don' t know,\" but now doubt has Bill McKay in The Candidate wala ...\" Ditto to the e nd of the cam- given way to vacancy. The real man has paign, the e nd of the end . succumbed to the shine of the actor play- T here's no need for anything in ing the part: not dead, but still , numb, poor taste , for him to burst, like The Candidate isn' t just an important empty, and available-the living photo- John Cassavetes' characte r at the film in this story; it's one of the best Red- graph. When McKay cannot film a routine e nd of The Fury. This could be ford has been involved in-and he was its television spot without exploding into the handled without damage or disturbance to production base, as well as its star. It's a laughte r of disbelief, \" Relax,\" says his the golden integu me nt that presents Rob- movie about a young, energetic idealist, a campaign manager (Peter Boyle). \"T ake e rt Redford to the world . T he re's no rea- loose-tie lawyer working for community it easy. G rim up. \" son for that fruit to split, or for Redford to legal services, tempted in to and con- be revealed , shot up in a pool, as Redl or founded by the larger political enterprise. Something like that has happened to Re tz. Nothing is more devastating than his vic- Redford : Legal Eagles seemed to be tory-being elected senator from Califor- taking it easy, playing a would-be romp for I'd be satisfied with talk and action fro m nia- when he had counted on losing. For $S\"\"{) million , \" being Robert Redford ,\" him , some thing like that mome nt in The the liberal activist had entered the contest and having Winger and Hannah serve as Candidate when his Bill McKay, in the (he told himself) only to air worthwhile surrogate tissy-and-crush bearers for the back of a car, being driven from one opinions and honest doubts: at an early millions. But you can see the grimming, photo-opportunity to another, begins to press conference he says, \"I don' t know\" too, as he midges through that movie, the to one question, and it causes a stir. Politi- growing realization that it is dreadful but cians are not that candid or genuine; the that somehow he must fini sh the damn novel naturalness helps launch McKay; thing. but then the honesty becomes a line to be repeated, and as the lines mount up, so \"Why make film s like this?\" you can McKay slips from be ing his own man to see the eyes asking. And much of Red- ford's career has hovered over the ques- tion of what a decent-minded star should do. He has had unimpeachable Holly- wood hits-The Sting , Butch Cassidy and 32

the Sundance Kid, The Way We Were, All the President's Men. There are also proj- ects that seem to say, \"This is not the kind of thing Hollywood does, but it deseIVes to be done, and Ame rica needs to see it\"-The Candidate, Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here, OrdinQ/Y People, The Milagro Beanfield War. .. and All the President's Men. People were not invited-they went there. The Sundance Kid on location with Beanfield War. They got into automobiles which bore them out to Long Island, and somehow re mains between an institute named afte r that Washington is a game under Con- they ended up at Gatsby's door. Once Redford's career-making hit, with all its trol-the N ixon people ran it crooked , there they were introduced by somebody flash and genre-stroking, and the intent to and the Post the n corrected it. T he syste m who knew Gatsby, and after that they con- sponsor films that show a new respect for was vindicated. No message was more re- ducted themselves according to the rules of the West, for narure, for minorities, and assuring in 1976, and that's how the movie behavior associated with an amusement fo r ordinary individuals. Sundance hasn't was a hit. Of course, Washington went on park. Sometimes they came and went with- exploded: no one who deseIVes to be has its way, and the ordinary Washingtonian is out having met Gatsby at all, came for the been threatened or offended by it. still lost in the conflicts between duty and party with a simplicity of heart that was its self-interest, the language of 1776 and own ticket of admission. In the same way, All the President's post-modernist jargon. It is still inhabited -F. Scott Fitzgerald , The Great Gatsby Men has always been an intrigu ing cross- by the supporting characters who are the over, a \"dangerous\" movie that ended up film 's treasure, the Sloans, Segre tti , the It suits Denys so well to fly. I have always as safe as the bank, more wood than wild. secretaries and bookkeepers, the world in felt that he had so much ofthe air's element It's pretty to think that magic lies in Holly- which Jane Alexande r is led into providing in him. .. and was a kind of Ariel. But wood's power, that intransigent difficulty confirmation th rough a loophole sin of there is always a good measure of heart- of subject matte r can be made viable with- procedure . lessness in such a temperament, and Ariel out dilution or distortion. But difficul ty is was also in fact rather heartless, as you its own reward-in art as in politics. T here Ronald Reagan has only added laziness are some who argued , when it came out, of mind and ease of manner to that shall see ifyou reread The Tempest, but that All the President's Men was nothing moral confusion. But if All the President's more nor less than a riveting film noir in Men was as good, as brave, or as intelligent so pure, compared to the earthly beings on which Alan Pakula's command of menace as The Candidate, it might have reversed the island, clear, honest, without reserve, was transcended by the ultimate jaunti- its balance and made Hugh Sloan its lead transparent-like the air, in brief ness of two reporte rs saving the nation. No character in a study of how the truly weary, one was challenged in the movie who had empty \"I don' t know\" comes to fill a once- - Isak Dinesen, on De nys Finch H at- not been trashed in public already. Those fine head. It would have been bette r off ton , Lettersfrom Africa: 1914-193J who had voted for N ixon, and those who casting Redford as Sloan, with handsome- never quite understood what had hap- ness on the rocks, the proper WASP grim- T he Sundance Instirute is Robert Red- pened with Wate rgate, were free to enjoy ness opened up like the head in a John ford's deliberate and principled at- the e ntertainme nt. Yet celebri ty gods H ea rtfie ld photomo ntage-d issecte d , te mpt to provide alternatives to H olly- were made of two reporte rs who, in the and only kept from exploding by Valium. wood, set up in the pristine ecology of years since, have had time and scope to high-mountain Utah , as opposed to the show their own ordinary incl ination for The Candidate's daring is in stripping smoggy L. A. where he was actually born . compromise and looking after them- an Ame rican hero down to the identi ty Sundance is movie production for bald ea- selves. , level of a photograph. We sense this possi- gles, liberals, and independents, and bili ty from the outset: Bill McKay's wife is there is no Redford more earnestly in pur- President's Men was old-fashioned and less a real, warm woman than a gravure suit of integrity than the one who speaks tidy-minded, despite its insane determi- model, a candidate for some magazine's for the Instirute. The films that have been nation to reproduce the exact untidiness of \" People Who Have ClasslWe LikelWho launched there, or gene rally aided , in- the Washington Post offices. Like any Do Photograph C ute.\" McKay is a sort of clude El Norte, Belizaire the Cajun, film hooked on the idea of conspiracy, it zombie, waiting to find a kingdom where Smooth Talk, and Desert Bloom. Over the paid steady tribute to orde r, design, and don' t-know vote rs meet their match in his years, Redford has backed down, under maste r-plotting. Indeed, its message is industry pressure, from the early hope of producing films out of Sundance. In Octo- be r 1987, however, he announced a com- promise: his Northfork Productions would make a series oflow-budget features-the fi rst with a fly-fishing background-to be financed and released by C ineplex Odeon, the Canada-based theate r chain. Sundance has not been a new version of the law; rathe r, it is a kind of community legal seIVice to indies. The contradiction 33

Redford with Hoffman in President's Men. did. Welles did explode; he burst-but vate timing that will not yield to others' satirists do. clocks, the bristling \"casualness\" of man- sweet and increasingly self-pitying \"I ner-are helpless attributes of style, as don't know.\" \"Our lives are more and Redford asked me to write an original limited and reproducible as the slick ways more determined by forces that over- script about \"a politician who sells he learns on the campaign trail. For what whelm the individual,\" he says, and as he out.\"He wanted to show the price we pay The Candidate knows, and all superstars says it the sentiment dissolves into instant- for winning. I said it doesn't usually hap- must wrestle with, is that anyone photo- quote. pen by selling out. Whal happens, I think, graphed begins to go fake. Thus, as the is that the forces that play upon a public movie starts, it draws away from the \"de- McKay loses his charm because he has figure are much stronger than the person's cent\" and \"individual\" life that Bill no irony: there is only that flicker of get- ideas of who he is and what he's doing. I McKay will sell through Califomia. me-out in the back of the car and the mer- said it's like what happens to movie stars. riment in the TV studio. Then he does as It's an old American story that every ''I'm happy,\" he tells the Peter Boyle he's told : he grims up. There is nothing American thinks he's the sole exception to. character, as a way of refusing a life in poli- like the enveloping, merciless satire in There are many buyers for the fantasy of tics. Charles Foster Kane's gaze, which keeps suirdom, few who can handle the surreal him charming and begins to see America impact ofcelebrity. ... \"You're happy?\" says Boyle. \"Clams as just a stooge back-projection where the are happy.\" And neither McKay nor the media shoots pool. By the end of The That's what we tried to create for the movie makes any rebuttal. It does not Candidate, McKay is one of the body- character Bill McKay. .. . McKay's weak- honestly believe in that happiness. snatched, whereas Charlie Kane is the ness is the other side ofhis appeal-a sim- zesty spirit of mocking communication, ple beliefthat he is and can remain a \" nat- \"Ordinariness\" and \"naturalness\" are saying \" Rosebud\" with Madison Avenue ural man. \" Some of McKay's experience already slogans or gestures, like a man go- sincerity but cackling like the old man in is drawn from what happened to politi- ing every day from a hotel in a limo to play The Treasure ofthe Sierra Madre. cians I' ve known; some is takenfrom what Jeremiah Johnson. That is not a sneer at happens eve,y day with Redford. Redford; it's a comment on how movies The Candidate is still lethal in its co- are made. And the clash always shows on opting of Robert Redford. For just as the -Jeremy Lamer in Close-Ups, edited the screen in subtle things, such as John- movie \" uses\" the imagery of Hubert by Danny Peary son's sleekness. The outcast has seen Humphrey, Howard K. Smith, and Nat- dentists too recently; his eyes have faced alie Wood to concoct its own \"authentic- Bill McKay does develop a wistful look; the actor's impossible engagements book; ity,\" so it juggles the persona of McKay his pretty face searches for a natural- his timeless life has a Redford who is often and the presence of Redford. This is very ness nothing can bring back. But, in truth, like Kane's artful confusion of its tycoon the film never establishes that real and au- late. Actors are as forlom in their longing character and Mercury's boy genius. In thentic man who is led astray. The way for naturalness or wi ldness as Bill McKay hindsight, one has to wonder whether Redford acts in the first ten minutes ofThe is in his wish to be a common man. Redford quite knew what was going on- Candidate-the rugged staring, the pri- after all , no one now eX'pects him to give What is Ordinary People meant to up mainstream movies in the way Welles mean as a title? I think it suggests that we shou ld mistrust most other films, in that they have not presented life as we live it. They have been all action, romance, melodrama, and good casting-all mov- ies, with stars and actors instead of people. Yet Ordinary People has Mary Tyler Moore, Donald Sutherland, and Timothy Hutton, none of whom strikes ordinary people as ordinary. And even if those ac- tors have been encouraged to underplay in a family scheme where too many feelings have been smothered, still there are c1ose- ups, John Bailey's tasteful, enhancing job with the lights, and the grease with which the Pachebel Canon in D is Hamlisched into mood music. There may not be many movies that ex- amine \"mere\" family problems in the way of Ordinary People, or that adopt the psy- chiatrist's pained objectivity as its narra- tive basis. But television is loaded up with such movies, and with the picture's posi- tive approach to problem-solving. Ordi- nary People is better than most of those TV movies: it has more craft and care, and it surely has those because it had more time and money. But it has the same opin- ion of problems: that if they are brought out in the open, exposed to honesty, talk, sharing, and good professional counsel, 34

they can be met, eased, and even solved. as a national monument, Mt. Redford , Torrance, T ravis Bickle, or John Q. It has far from a happy e nding; still , we do whe re eagles may dare. T he re's just a hint McCabe. Imagine The Candidate with feel the storm has passed. T imothy Hut- in The Sting that he might e njoy double- ton-the focus for treatment- has come double-cross for its own sake; that he McKay reveling in the image-making and through, and his father has also be nefited might be selling Newman, and us, out. becoming as boisterous, big, and hollow as from the flux and catharsis. Mary Tyle r Twenty years ago, in The Chase, when he C harlie Kane. I suspect Redford imagines Moore's mother goes away, implacable was reunited with his wife and his best such th ings. Maybe he wants to be swept against be ing opened up, the one charac- frie nd in the junkyard , and realized the off his feet, but then maybe the next mo- ter who will not explode or try the treat- othe r two had been lovers while he was in ment he re minds himself, \"No, I' ve got to me nt. jail , the re was a dutiful sadness in his eyes. keep in controL\" I wish he'd play the fa- But there was also a ghost of a smile, as if the r in The Duke of Deception- and But the mothe r's nature is felt very he saw an absurdi ty in life. change the son to a daughte r so that strongly in the mise-en-scene. She is the Winger could be the re to laugh at his grim sort of quiet fa natic for order and tidiness I'd love to see him play crazies, con- look when he thinks, at last, he is going to who would appreciate the symbolism fid ence tricksters, and thoroughly unreli- tell the truth . If you don' t like that, how when she has to hold up the two halves of a able men who have rid the mselves of or- about the two of them in a re make of broke n plate and say, \"You know, I think der. Imagine him touched by Jack Bringing Up Baby? this can be saved; it's a nice clean break\" - and nothing in the Illinois winter THE even shivers with irony. She is not just a mother, but a rather anally simple-minded ACADEMY OF MOTION PICTURE ARTS AND SCIENCES performe r fixing on lines like \" I don' t want any surprises\" and ''This is my fam- AND THE ily.\" She might sigh with discreet rapture to see the cross-cutting that goes from ACADEMY FOUNDATION hands reaching out in rescue in the storm to Hutton's scar-laced wrists in the wash ANNOUNCE THE 1988 basin. Everything fi ts in Ordilwry People: it is all like a test case that Judd Hirsch's NICHOLL FELLOWSHIPS psychiatrist could present at his next con- IN SCREENWRITING fe re nce. ~ OrdilWry People won Oscars as Best Picture and for Best D irector. It was a tri- umph for Robert Redford , and even if the audience esteemed it as a departure from Hollywood ways, the business loved it. Hollywood has always appreciated reas- surance, tidiness, and tip-top production values, and is as committed to psychiatry as it is to shopping with plastic. Q: But at least you got to be Robert Red- ford's leading lady. How was it? A: Everybody was waitingfor total disas- jiil. ter, but we got along great. We' re so dif- ferent. I think he was intrigued, and I liked UTO FIVE fellowships of $20,000 each will be awarded to eligible the fact that he was older and set in his ways so I could rouse him up a little bit. I graduating seniors and graduate students of U. S. colleges and universities. called him the Unnatural, which got him upset [laughs], although the people who For details, see appropriate department chairs or write: workfor him call him God. When we were shooting, there were times he was a bit diplomatic for my taste, but he was defin- itely a gentleman. -Debra Winger, interview in Esquire, December 1986 I hope The Mil,agro Beanfield War is a lit- The Nicholl Fellowship Committee-Department B tle roused up. Could it be sunny, dirty, dusty, funny, casual, loose, messy? There Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have been mome nts in Redford's movies 8949 Wilshire Boulevard when you could wonder whethe r Mr. Marvelous wasn't really (or also) a clown, a Beverly Hills, California 90211-1972 fraud , a wicked joke r who had elected in- stead to compose his face and lead his life 35

Boredw-ith HisName Robert Redford interviewed Wearing shades and his standard outfit just written another scene where the pig's by Stephen Schaefer of 501 Levi jeans, Tony Lama boots, and petted!\" marvels James Parks, the latest denim shirt, Redford ignores the crowd writer to do a polish on the screenplay. Al- He's never on time. Hell, they don't get and concentrates on an elaborate outdoor ready, over the past three years, Nichols theirfirst shot 'til 10:30 and have to stop at scene in the mock town square built for and then David S. Ward (who also gets 7. But that's nothing new-he was never the movie. Today, the locals have assem- credit) have struggled to condense the on time when I worked with him on Butch bled to watch Redford direct a scene with novel into a two-hour movie. and Sundance. Christopher Walken and Ruben Blades -a Milagro Beanfield War crew member for the movie ofJohn Nichols' 1974 novel, Redford invites joumalists to watch The Milagro Beanfield War. Truchas is nearly two hours ofassembled footage on a There's nobody on this set who's got a big- less awed by the cast-John Heard, Sonia Beta cassette and then attend the dailies, ger dick than he does. Whatever he wants, Braga, Daniel Stern, and Melanie flown in from Los Angeles. Dede Allen, he gets. Griffith-than it is by the director. Isn't who worked with him on Ordinary Peo- -a Milagro production assistant. that Robert Redford? It's a miracle he's ple, huddles with him at these sessions, here. but she must leave soon for hospitalization Even in this remote location, Robert Redford can't escape the glare of Milagro, which means \"miracle\" in in Manhattan. the curious, the blaze of the spot- Spanish, is already overbudget and be- For the interview, Redford proved light. Truchas, New Mexico, has the odd- hind schedule, a combination of weather est looking bunch of tourists and locals- and directorial temperament. Redford re- himself true to form by running late, arriv- retirees in biking suits, ladies in furs, and vises the script as he films, and takes his ing in a last-minute rush on a bicycle. At 50 run-of-the-hill sightseers-lined up along time to get it right. (In fact, since principal he is thin, with ramrod-straight posture the one main road that runs through this photography wrapped in October '86, and sunlit blond hair. His face, neck, and small town 40 miles northeast ofSanta Fe. Redford has reshot material, including the hands are weathered and heavily lined. title sequence.) He is parchment. He speaks in measured, clear sentences, as if he can visualize what ''I'm told we need to cut pages, and I've he's saying in print. Occasionally, he thrusts his hand through his open shirt col- lar and scratches his shoulder. Seldom does he flash that distinctively dazzling smile. Gamely affable and courteous while hungrily devouring cold chicken and salad, Redford is alone, without press agent or entourage in attendance, in his private trailer before retuming to the set. -S.S. I t's been six years since you directed Ordinary People. Why haven't you di- rected since then?

Redford with the \"Senile Brigade\" cast members on Milagro. One of the reasons is I purposefully would move the story along and keep the discriminate development-in time all took two years off-I'd planned to do dramatic and humorous content. David that space will be gone, converted to some that. I don' t have any timetable career- Ward got that, and the rest I thought I other use. Which means we will lose a lot wise. I had reached a point in my life with would work on myself-I was looking for- of our tradition , and therefore a lot of our that film, a lot of things were culminating, ward to that. cululral roots. And therefore it will be our and it felt like a very right time to take off fault and our choice. We won't be able to from the business fora while. I came back, The script fuls been constantly revised tum around and say it was taken from us , and the three or four things I had in devel- while filming ? from the outside. We can't say there we opment to direct didn't come to fruition , were, they bombed us from a foreign including this. Three years ago I tried Yes, I think the script was a little more country or they sailed from across the seas three drafts with John Nichols, the author, in place in Ordinary People, but I always and took our lands from us. It means we and they weren't right. I wanted to work. do that; even the ones I produced--con- took the land and made the choice to con- And it was a question of what was going to stantly work every scene. I believe in leav- vert it to some other use. be ready first, so I took a job as an actor. ing it loose until all the elements are in place-the actors, the location, the set- In that sense, whatever gai n is made in Wfult was the problem? ting, the weather. The weather's another this film, or this story, is a battle being The chief problem with Milagro was character in the piece.-it's like a ghost won. Maybe not the war But that's what I one that faces any film that was made from that hangs over the production, like Amar- would like to focus on: the value of battles a book. Film is not a literary medium. It ante's ghost. being won. And if it's just a brief moment was compounded by trying to take 680 of joy, of the human side of things to say, [actually 630] pages of a rather meander- Were you attracted to the plot because it then I think it's worth it. But no one's disil- ing narrative that has the luxury of being has a land developer in conflict with local lusioning themselves into thinking they' re able to kind of drift and float and bob and residents? making a big political statement out of this weave and stall and then go forward, thing. Many who sympathize with the charging ahead like lightning. You're con- Now you're moving into the political, plight of these people would be the first to densing a 680-page book into a 120-page philosophical arena. sell their house to a developer if they had screenplay. That transference was obvi- the money. ously difficult, all those characters. Chances are more than likely that the You say David S. Ward, who wrote West as we know it, vast parts of this coun- Is tfult it? The Sting, found the structure to \"lick try that have been left undisturbed, are I like people in a dilemma. I like people the book. \" Wfult does tfult mean? doomed. They're not doomed to a future; faced with a question that requires action, To reduce the number of characters they' re doomed to the life they've had that requires commitment and conviction, and not lose the weight or the depth of the to date. Meaning, they'll be developed. people that are hit with a hard choice. To piece, orthe humor and the color, became It's in our nature. We're a development- me that's the stuff of dramatic content. a real task. I was having trouble getting a oriented society, we're profit-oriented. It What's happening in Milagro is a micro- comedic structure that I could build on. I just stands to reason that finally, in time, cosm of what's happening all through the knew what I wanted to do with the piece, despite the toxic substance scare, despite West and around the country. People but I wanted a structure in place-which the air pollution problem, despite over- make their choice: Do they want to pre- characters would be left in, which charac- population, that we will still find some way serve the culture or give it up for a higher ters taken out, which sequences would be to continue to build. Which means we will profit gain? Which is what usually hap- lifted out, what would be kept in , how it go to places where there are places to de- pens. It's creating a lot of paranoia, schizo- velop, which is mostly the West. phrenia, and depression. So I'm assuming that despite all the bat- tles-and I count myself among some of the warriors that go against excessive or in- 37

It's fulppening all over the Midwest- to back. There were the conventional axi- signed. Does tfult worry you? small towns being deserted, farmers oms that were thrown my way: Who wants It's kinda like people playing the game bankrupt. to see a bunch of Mexicans running around the hills of New Mexico? The musical chairs but also adding to the mix a We have Fann Aid-the liberal parts of more dignified responses were: \"It's a hot potato: while you're playing musical our country are very generous about the marvelous story, but it seems a bit diffuse\" chairs, here's the potato you have to keep underprivileged parts. We gather together and \"Why would you want to do some- flipping back and forth. Hollywood cer- to help the poor and feed them if they' re thing like that?\" No, it was not easy, but tainly has become musical chairs. It's in- hungry. We gather to help the fanners and neither was Ordinary People. teresting that the business would get to a the dying industry, which is a radical point where they make their severance change from the past. Yet there is this in- Did you fulve to signfor another picture deals as they go into something. And they exorable push to give up those things for to do this? Agree to cast a star? make better exit deals than entrance profit, and I just find that interesting to tell deals. Which tells you how long they ex- stories about. I didn't have to give up something; it pect to be around, so we shouldn't be sur- didn't get that bad. prised that nobody is around very long. Did you fulve to give up anything to get this ,node? You're now in the position of making The shifting sands of major studio lead- this just as Frank Price, who fuls worked ership, which seem to be moving more It wasn' t an easy project to get a studio with you on this and Out of Africa, re- and more toward lawyers and accountants and people of a different trade, raise a IN 1916 COLUMBIA BECAME THE great voice for independent film. Which is FIRST UNIVERSITY TO GIVE A one of the reasons that five or six years ago COURSE IN FILM we were talking about the business mov- ing more in this direction as the product Seventy·two years later, the Film Division is flourishing as a two- became more centralized and real knowl- year, full-time professional graduate program leading to the M.F.A. edge about the art of film became more degree. Our focus is the narrative theatrical film. The program's foreign to the leadership. Those two emphasis is on screenwriting, directing, producing, film history and things running concurrently, it seemed to technical skills. me a good time to start looking for alterna- tives. Pretty soon it would be such a costly Co·Chairmen: Richard Brick and Milos Forman. Faculty inclu~es: business. John Avildsen Carlin Glynn Sidney Lumet You're referring , ofcourse, to the Sun- Geof Bartz Roger Greenspun Danny Lyon dance Institute you founded. What else Laslo Benedek Michael Hausman David Mamet about Milagro interests you? Marshall Brickman Annette Insdorf Marcia Nasatir Lewis Cole Corinne Jacker Ralph Rosenblum Stories about this country, characters on Brian DePalma Vojtech Jasny David Shaber this landscape, are what interest me the Ira Deutchman Milena Jelinek Martin Scorsese most. Our own history interests. So if Guy Gallo Romulus Linney Stefan Sharff those stories are to be told, we need more diversity. Maybe that will happen with Courses for 1966·69 include History of American Cinema; History this current trend. I like Frank Price and of World Cinema; Auteur Study; the Major Traditions; Seminars in think he has a good gut, a good sensibility, International Cinema; Screenwriting Workshops; Directing Work- and he's one of the few people in this in- shops; Acting-Directing Workshops; Script Analysis; Film Language; dustry who had any experience in film. He Film Aesthetics; Production Management; Producing; Entertainment was a writer. Law; Financing, Distribution, Marketing and Exhibition; Cinema- What's your reaction to all ofthis studio tography and Editing. shuffling then? Application Review commences February 1 and continues until It's a great time to put your head down, March 15, 1988. For Application and Bulletin, please call or write: get a bead on what you want to do, cover yourself with thick annor, and do it. And The Film Division 212-280-2815 don't be dependent on anybody in that School of the Arts Columbia University shifting atmosphere [of studio politicsJ. 513 Dodge Hall You'vejust begun with John Heard, New York, NY 10027 the last ofthe eleven major rolesfilled in this ensemble. Yet beyond Christopher Walken, it's hardly a boxoffice cast. I really like this cast. It feels very good to me. It's risky, I won't doubt that. When you look at it as a whole, it's got an odd chemical composition, but it feels totally right. Julie Carmen, who plays the wife of Joe , the beanfield grower, said she was cast without meeting you in person-she just sent her video clip in as an audition. And Chick Vennera, who hasn't been seen 38

much since Schlesinger's Yanks, has the This is what's great about film . I have system in the body, just rejected it. Fi nal- pivotal role of Joe. an idea in my mind about what I'd like to ly I just said, \"Gee, this is a lovely scene, A gu t thing with Julie. C hick came in at see-in the landscape and the visual look but it belongs somewhe re e lse. It does not the very end. We'd gone through an enor- of the film and the behavior of the people . belong in this fi lm.\" It's just miraculous to mous spectrum of possibil ities, and C hick But I have no idea what's going to take me. I love it. I love it because of the un pre- came in at the eleventh hour, and it was place. And to me that's one of the most dictabil ity. It's a chancy business, and the desperate zone at that time . exciting ideas about film , that film really that's why nobody's ever been able to pre- The cast said you like lots oftakes. And does have a life of its own, which is one of dict success in it. I thin k that's great, be- although it's only one film , you' re being the reasons I've never really subscribed to cause film has a life of its own. called \"an actor's director.\" the auteur theory. You find that out in the Would you ever choose directing over I will tell you why I think that may be. editing room. acting? I' ve worked with directors who do a lot It just takes its own life. I remembe r If I we re faced wi th the choice, I'd more takes. Sydney [Pollack], for exam- there were several scenes in Ordinmy probably direct. ple . It isn't as much that, as I think a lot of People that I wanted to keep in desperate- T he re's a lot I'd like to do as an actor. actors these days are used to working slam- ly. I hung on and on, and finally the film Unfortunate ly, my career as an actor has bang, out of te levision, where they don' t itself kicked them out, like the immu ne been somewhat weighted by that movie takea lot ofrim~ ~ so, I think ourbu s~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ness has moved away from the actor and toward the personali ty. And the directors have moved more toward the special ef- Samuel French's fects and the craft and the skill of celluloid came rawork, rather than com munication with the humanistic side of it, which is the T HEATRE & FILM actor's role. T hose things I think have pro- BOOKSHOPS duced a condition where people think it's PLAYS and BOOKS on the rare to have so many takes. I don' t think MOTION PICTURE INDUSTRY there are so many takes. There are some scenes whe re I'll take a lot of takes be- cause I know we can get more or because there's a special composition of the scene, sendfor a copy ofour you know, where the re are three or four FILM BOOK CATALOGUE containing things happening at once and you have to Business ofFilm • Directories • Screenwriting get it timed right. Othe rwise the re are Screenplays • Directing • Cinematography scenes whe re it's one take and we' re Biographies & Studies ofDirectors • Editing out of there. Lighting • Animation • Special Effects On the dailies I saw with H eard and Makeup • Acting • more Sonia Braga, he began with one mood and by the fourth take had altered that com- Order by pletely. PHONE: We try a lot of things. I think (since it was his fi rst day) it's only fair to le t an actor (800) 8-ACT NOW (US) go and build up steam and put it all out (800) 7-ACT NOW (Calif) there . You changed the name of the VISTA MAIL: worker that Dan Stern plays from Gold- farb to Plan. 7623 Sunset Blvd. I don' t like toke n characters, and I felt Hollywood, California that was a bit of a token Jew. I d id n' t care 90046 for that and didn' t feel it made any diffe r- VISA • Me • AMEX e nce . You dropped a lot ofthe Chihuahua ex- clamations from the book to avoid stereo- When in Los Angeles visit our typing, but I understand there's Spanish. 2 locations We have a lot of Spanish spoke n but 7623 Sunset Blvd. spoken in a way and coupled with a phys- Hollywood,California 90046 ical gesture that you know what's being said. I'm not too big on stereotypes. I (213) 876-0570 think the re are such things as types-and Mon.- Fri. 10:00-6:00 Sat. 11 :00-5:00 they' re very clear types. T hey hit a certain 11963 Ventura Blvd way. But to caricature? I like characters, Studio City, California 91604 not caricatures. I like to think that all the characters-not caricatures- are in this (818) 762-0535 pl ace . Mon. -Fri. 11 :00-10:00 Do you arrive with a vision ofa film ? Sat. 11 :00-5:00 Sun.12:00-5:00 39

think he is, Cary Grant?\" Yeah, [a laugh] exactly. Since that wasn't the point, I think most critics miss the point of it. What is the point of this? If you're being faithful to Isak Dinesen, you're being faithful to a myth anyway be- cause a lot of what she said wasn't true; It was myth to begin with, and on top of that, you have a mythical character. So where are you? What difference does it make? It's what you feel about one human being engaged to another. Rueben Blades listens; Redford talks. Why is \"Bonifacio the Bandit\" written on the clapboard? star category. With that, some options for it.\" That was very sad. Because, of I was just having fun. I'm bored with were reduced so that you were not allowed my name. I don' t like seeing it in print. some flexibility you might have been able course, he was right. Because we were I've used this for a long time just for the to keep when you were just an actor. Sud- hell of it. I put it on my dressing room be- denly when you were considered a star, playing around with something that might cause I hated the ToonervilleTrolley that you started feeling like a type, an object, came by at Universal Studios. I find that a rather than just an actor. Somehow your have been destructive or distracting. Since particularly loathsome, brave new world. options started to diminish , just the way You hear the reverberations starting be- you' re judged by both critics and the pub- it was not the accent bu t the essence of the fore it even comes around the comer. lic. Well, he's this and he can't do that. character, we decided to go the other This was when you were filming Legal But Jack Nicholson did O'Neill in Eagles? Reds- way.... I went with it. This was during The Sting, when they Jack I really admire. I think Jack's a per- I I remember before we satawrtoemd atnheaftiltmh~ first started all that shit. Now they come sonality. But he is so fierce about not being had been in Africa, and every five minutes. [Gloomily] You can' t labeled a star that he takes small partS and escape the tour. big partS. It's more like European or Eng- party I was at in Nairobi said, \"Are you go- lish classical actors, who take big and small Several years ago I was in Gallup, New partS and go back and forth on the stage. ing to do this Out ofAfrica?\" And I said, \"I Mexico, on the street in a festival. Every- thing was crazy. Crazy times. Stuck in Speaking ofwhich, on Ou t ofAfrica you don't know.\" And she said, \"You traffic in my car and I was with my family. were chidedfor a \"lazy\" interpretation of And a guy across the way leans out of his Denys Finch Hatton. You began that film cou.tdn't.\" I said, \"Well , who was I going car and yells \"Bonifacio!\" It means \"good using an English accent . ... face\" or \"good faith ,\" but I didn't know to play-Karen Blixen?\" And she said, what it meant. [Ruben Blades had said it That's a good example. Sydney and 1 means \"pretty face. \"] I looked over my were first talking about it and I said, \"You couldn't play Denys Hatton because shoulder thinking he was relating to some- \"Sydney, let's go for this one-let's go all body behind me and it was me. I had no the way out and have fun .\" Because he was bald!\" idea what he was doing. And he got out of there's so little part there. It was a symbol- his car and he came across to me, and he ic character, a point of view that said sim- \" By God, I'm so glad you told mel\" I was yelling and he just kept saying, \"Boni- ply: I want to be free. facio\" and looking up to the heavens and told her. I was kidding. It's that mindset looking at me and smiling and tuming I thought the least that we could do was around going like this. [Gestures] I think an accent, and we started to do it. And that so many critics have. I really believe the guy was drunk, insane, mad, or what- then Sydney and I, well mostly Sydney, ever it was, but it sure had an impact on said, \"I don't think anyone's going to go that's the attitude that some critics have, me. I never found out what he meant, never found out what was going on. that you can't even attempt some classics. After winning the Directors' Guild Gatsby was doomed . So many critics like Award and then the Oscar for People, do you feel pressure now to try and repeat to think that's a special area that they in- that ? habit, the literary piece. They can't face I don' t feel that way about those things, so therefore it doesn' t have the ... the idea that this bastard child called \"Hol- I was really honored by the DGA- lywood\" could do it justice. So you're just that's very special stuff. And to get the Academy Award, of course, that's very a sitting duck. Unless you have a lot of in- special. Also, [it] has a liability attached to it, too. Suddenly, there's all this pressure tegrity and intelligence and big vista shots on you-everyone wants to know what you're going to do next. Other people say and a lot of big stuff going on, chances are you'll be widely criticized. If I'd been right on with the accent, a lot of people would've been disturbed. Yeah, people would say \"Who does he 40

it, not you. I don't feel any pressure at all Our scheme there is to have proper land Created by .fLD to duplicate, because you just move on use, because you spare the land and create SYD f reenwriting and do other things as you see them. You something that's in harmony with the don' t try to repeat. I think it's a mistake to landscape rather than against it. \"TtTehhaecehleebg~Ibeanleudtahforoythrs~.CffiSlmCr RinEdEuNstPryL\"A-Y try to repeat yourself. So there's no feeling like that, since I don' t like the idea of do- Sundance supports movies. Was Mila- LA Herald· ExamIne ing it anyway. And every experience I like gro developed there at all? to think ofas new, because that keeps you ·1 fscreenwriting going stronger. So I never had any prob- Yes, just a little bit. But by me alone. • Master the skll sa ht-atter lem going on to the next thing. But I also Will Sundance ever produce? ·th \"the most tseoaucgher I.n the had a pretty squinty eye about the whole No. I think that would defeat the pur- thing in the sense of \"Oh, Jesus\" about pose. The point of Sundance is develop- WI •. the stuff that comes with it. A real shroud. ment and experimentation. You have to screenwrrtmg dReporter It can be a liability. keep free to do that. Once you get into world'!..-HollywoO production, you're competing with stu- Like a weight? dios; that brings money into the picture • Receive:t~ ~:tnesrltagteuiydoaunrce A weight, absolutely. So I don't feel and that changes the whole ... One of the anything about Ordinary People other things you feel when you come to Sun- you ne~idea into asalable than that it represents something in the dance is this wonderful spirit. I believe past that I was honored for, and that was that because there's no money, there's not ~~~T:rfn the privacy of your the end of that. that pressure that comes with money. Ac- Do you have any directors, any films, tors and filmmakers all feel wild. own home. that are an influence? You've said you're not interested in One of the nice things about directing is political office- nusc credit that there's no foregone thing. There's no Particularly these days. prototype other than films I've enjoyed Why particularly these days? • Choose to eteayrour screenplay. through the years, which have ranged I think it's a very tough time for national as you crea from Singin' in the Rain, which is hardly a figures, and it's mostly due to the press. model for this, to Treasure of the Sierra And the way they're- Ever since Water- fSyd Field's Madre, which might be. There are films gate, I think the press has kind of taken a I've admired in the past, but none of them tum. It's become fashionable to overscru- • sBuecccoemssefuolnsetuade\"nTtsh'elikTehornbird~; \" have been held as models. tinize public figures on the assumption It's the same as an actor. There are per- that something is wrong. And the loss of Carmen Culver, helan \"Mask; formances I've enjoyed, but no actor I've privacy is enormous. And for a public Anna Haml/ton.p \"so'uthem needed to emulate or look up to in any par- figure who had any sense of integrity for ticular way. Just performances I enjoyed. his family-to put them through that! I acnodmMfoicrth.\"ael Kane, The nice thing about directing is that suspect a lot ofthe good people don' t want there's nothing out there in front. I don't to get into it because of that reason. Why • tBheropuergsho.neavllYe~goU~i·dets~dsgebyofStyhde .see many movies-and that's a detri- should I subject myself to this kind of ex- ment, by the way. I don't say that as a posure and treatment constantly? I think screenwnt/ng Pt ff of industry boast but as a liability. Because it leaves too much of my life and my family, so I Field and hIS sa me not aware enough of what is going on. won't do it. Besides, I can make more Except for actors-I like to be kept money elsewhere. So a combination of a professionals. abreast of actors' work. On the good side, chance to make money these days and the there's nothing out there. And that feels fact I've just mentioned. I don't think un- . ation contact really good. der the present scheme of things we en- courage much bravery in politics. We PSfoOcrreBmeonx,wo6nr9mte7r9s~IAnc9o0r0po6r9ated Y our own position as a developer with don't seem to elect people who are brave Sundance is in contradiction to your or courageous or speak independently or Los Angeles, movie? truthfully. First, I don' t think the public 213 659·3811 wants to he(lr bad things. So we elect peo- Have you ever seen it? ple who tell liS good things about our- No. selves, even though they might not be It's a place you'd have to see, Stephen. true. Stephen's your name? So much of what we're living in, in I understand you can't stay there. terms of what we're told by the Adminis- There's no lodging. You'd have to see tration, is fantasy. !t's dream talk. And it's it. To see exactly what it is. It's accepting dream talk aimed at creating the illusion that there is development, but trying to that we' re this perfect country, strong, put land use to a different order. courageous, and bold. The country at How do you enhance this environment large obviously doesn't want to hear we're by keeping it? How do I keep this place not. So we support people who feed that the way it is? Obviously I can't keep it un- fantasy. less I put something on it to create some revenue. What is that going to be? I don't I don't like that. I don' t want to be a part want a resort. There's great skiing there. ofthat. And I don't think it's a negative to not want to be part of bullshit. ® 41

Chez lafemme Cher interviewed She sits in the fading sun of her aerie. Reach the top, Number One by Harlan Jacobson She has on a gray sweater, black pants Perfection. tucked pirate-style into black moccasin Oh, perfection W hen I go up to her duplex in boots draped in diamonds. Her jet You drive me crazy with perfection the Morgans on Madison Av- black hair is wild and frozen : it is Cher I've worn my pride as protection enue, where she is staying Medusa. She is, as each David Watkin Perfection . ... until her New York co-op is renovated , shot in Norman lewison's Moonstruck I enter and gasp at the subdued decor. glories, drop dead gorgeous. And so on. But it half reveals why she Everything here exudes boardroom rivets attention when she's onscreen. conservatism: gray, black, white, more I f you want to understand what has Unlike singing, she hasn't got the busi- gray, and wood. \" I thought you had happened to her since Sonny, you ness by the throat. The camera loves trashy tastes, \" escapes my mouth. I have only to understand who preceded her, and somewhere inside there-the was expecting pink Lava-lites and a her and didn ' t make it. Remember person who is Cherilyn Sarkisian of gold bust of Elvis in the hallway. Keely Smith? Who back in the Fifties rootless California-she may know the rolled her eyes and made a point of fear of wanting to trade up and being \"Nope,\" says Cher, the Vamp of boredom while her bantamweight unmasked. She responds to her small Nirvana, as I trail her up , up, up a cir- cockatiel, Louis Prima, went bats on potato characters with the emotional cular staircase with an ash bannister to the horn? In retrospect, the Sonny & resonance she learned in the-you the second floor. Blink. There's a black Cher Act is so close that were it not guessed it-School of Hard Knocks. couch grouping, a black shiny cube for for the statute of limitations Sonny No theory here. a coffee table. The room opens to a so- could get indicted for grand theft. larium with a running track and a kind Well, imagine lightning having struck You couldn't miss her return to the of satellite dish on a pole. The skyline Keely Smith, and you understand high school reunion in RobertAltman's twinkles. Cher. Come Back to the Five & Dime, Jimmy Dean; or as the lesbian friend of Karen \"You want anything?,\" she offers. I She is not analytical. She does not Silkwood in Mike Nichols' Silkwood; ask for scotch, and a guy-I swear he depend upon those tools . She did not the biker mom with a bad drug habit had wings-appears, pooj1, with a bot- go to Bryn Mawr and get a masters in who never runs out of the milk of hu- tle. This makes me nervous-the last Art History. Instead, she became Cleo- man kindness for a deformed son in Pe- thing anyone who spends time with her patra-much to her surprise-and ter Bogdanovich's Mask; the lusty need be. Ironically, while she has had Cleopatra knows how the world works, wench Alexandra Medford opposite everything known to woman done to and how to work the world. She has that old devil Jack Nicholson in George her-nose bobbed, teeth capped, taken charge of the barge. Miller's workup of John Updike's The back tattooed, Mack the Knife knows Witches ofEastwick; the mousey lawyer what else-the thing you notice up Where she is least in control and at in Peter Yates' forgettable Suspect; or close, or even in performance from the her best is in her acting. Her first rec- especially as Loretta Castorini , the 37 back row, is how Uust exactly like ord in years, with the exception of the year-old Brooklyn accountant who Dolly Parton under all that powder and reworked cut of Sonny's \"Bang slips her ledger to become a lover at last ice) absolutely real she seems. Bang,\" seems overwrought, over-pro- in Norman Jewison's Moonstruck. duced , and mostly at the same gym- We go into her kitchen to talk while nasium workout pitch. The titles of lewison, unfortunately, italicizes she makes spaghetti. She boils up the the cuts tell the trite story: \"I Found every little joke or nuance of character pasta, then takes out a carton of sauce Someone,\" \"We All Sleep Alone,\" or with a soundtrack that tells the audi- she's had sent up from Umberto's \"Perfection.\" And if the titles don't, ence what it's supposed to feel: Clam House downtown and dumps it the lyrics written for her insist upon it: whimsy for an old Italian man, pathos on. Tastes. Grimaces: something's for an abandoned wife, and so on. But missing. She goes back into the fridge, Hush little baby, gotta be strong whatever else it isn't, Moonstruck may pulls out a bottle of Prego and dumps 'Cause in this world we are born to be a meltdown for all the men dragged it on. Tastes: that's better. We suck fight out to see Cher at the Sixplex. The noodles. Be the best, prove them wrong eyes drink her in. You want to be the A winner's work is never done guy with the wooden hand who gets to 42

take off her glasses. And so it is now that all the would-be Arthur Millers of the press have found their dream of the new Marilyn: a Val- kyrie who can let the wind blow up from the grate of Hell to snatch their at- tention, but is down to earth. Like re- venge, she eats Prego spaghetti sauce cold. The difference is, of course, 20 years of feminism have given her the arsenal Marilyn never had, have taught her that helplessness is not as wise a po- litical position as \"I'll just help myself, pal. \" Inevitably, Cher has some canned responses. She mostly delivers on the dime, but remembers that I am press (\"Honey,\" she warns Main Man Rob Camilletti, downstairs, \"don't say any- thing. The press is here.\" \"Yeah, don't say anything either,\" he calls back). She has been burned before- that very day, she feels, by a Newsweek cover story, and previously by a New York Times Magazine piece. The odd- est thing is that throughout-as the sun goes down around us and the apart- ment gets dark-she responds wi th her hand over her mouth. Why, I wonder, but fail to ask. Bobby Camilletti, look around. It may be gray, it may be temporary, but judging by the company alone (if not by the way the scotch showed up), you are in heaven now, buddy. -H.J. Somebody said that they felt that I did lot of things that I do because I don't want people to know who I am; and in a way, it's true. You can't trust people with your feelings, you can't trust total strangers with your emotions; you can hardly trust people you love, so I don' t want everybody knowing every vulnerable part about me. You say you don't like interviews like Newsweek. What do you get asked? First of all people don't ask much . You sit with someone for hours and what they get out of it is that I spend a lot of money on clothes, and my boy- friends are young, and I changed ca- reers, and I dress weird. Well, if that's all you want I could give you that in five minutes, and we don't have to waste each other's time. But you do it all the time . I'll tell you something, if I had the luxury of not doing it, I would never talk to another reporter, journalist, whatever for the rest of my life. You can't know me. I mean people that I've lived with can't know me; my mother

Sonny &Cher =Louis Prima &Keely Smith? doesn't know me, you know? I didn't think that what people said pings-says they're things she's totally Especially her. about Robert as applying to me in an opposed to. And yet she wants our Well, not especially my mother. My earlier stage. You know, it's been such maid to come to her at NYU and wash a long time since I was anything other her clothes and all that. So, she's got a mother knows one side of me, my chil- than what I am that I don't think about lot to learn about the real deal. dren know one side of me. Boyfriends it that way. know one side of you. The boy that I But she's not superficial-she's just live with now knows me better than I go out of my way to try and do young, just sorting herself out. She's a anybody that I've ever been with. It's women who are heroic people that lot cooler at her age than I was . She because I trust him more than anyone would never make the cover of any knows that the work is interesting and I've ever been with. magazine. You might find them in Peo- the business is shit. ple, or somebody might know about Why? them. Like the woman I played in Tell me. Because he's trustworthy and his Mask was just a total loser, and yet she I have a friend who's an actress, a morals are just impeccable. That's an- did one thing perfectly, and that was really fine actress, and we were talking other thing that pisses me off, when she mothered this child that a lot of the other day. And she said, \"I love my people just dismiss him as a bagel Betty Crocker-Betty Furness mothers work and I hate this business.\" And maker-what's wrong with that? The might never have had the guts to do. I she says it's so difficult; but we all know press likes captions to fit under a pic- don't find playing people like myself what it is. It's not like it takes getting ture, or snappy little one-liners in bold that interesting. That's why I don't into it to know what it is; and some peo- type. I've been doing it long enough it hang out too much with the A-crowd or ple are luckier. Like Jessica Lange. shouldn't bother me, and yet somehow whatever. No one's going to fuck with her be- it still does. I don't care if people like cause she doesn't really give them a or dislike my views on things, if they Do you think of yourself as working chance and she's quiet in her rebellious could just get it accurately, that would class? nature. I'm much more obvious about be a bonus. it. She's gotten so far away from King Do youfeel insulted when they call him Absolutely. My children are rich Kong, and somehow my King Kong is a bagel maker? children. I'm not. always right behind my shoulder. No, not at all, because he was a great What do you mean? bagel maker. Do I feel insulted when When you say that they're rich, does I mean my trashy part. I continue to they dismiss everything about him and that mean they think that stuff is just sup- do really stupid things-like dress the boil it down to that, without a mo- posed to come? way I dressed at the Academy ment's thought to what kind of a hu- Awards . . . . man being he is? Yes. I lived with him My son has a little bit of that atti- Do you think that was stupid? when he was a doorman, when he was tude, but we're trying to break hiJTl of No, I thought it was great. a bartender. I don't really care what he it. He's only eleven, so maybe he'll Me too. is. have a lot more going for him soon. But as far as winning friends and in- /'m not asking about him, /'m asking Right now he's a little superficial. fluencing people, it's stupid. But that's about you. just always going to be me, it's going to My daughter is very Anti. It's really weird. She dresses like a bum. Doesn't want new clothes, goes around real piggy, doesn't care about my trap- 44

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be the way I do stuffbecause Ijust have they look right. It's the problem with getting control. . . . a hard time with authority. our whole fucking society. Nixon looks Yeah. Because, you know what? right, you know? That guy, Bakker, he If it costs you an Oscar, are you pre- looked right. Ronald Reagan looks gave it up to Sonny when I met him. I pared to live with it? right, but what has that got to do with was 16 years old and I really didn't anything? I could look right if that's all know my ass from first base, and he Yes. I don ' t think I could have said it was about. I know how to dress, you really took care of me. I was real sick that before but I can truly say it now. know? Like a Mom, if I want to; but I when I met him; I'd had hepatitis for a It's not the most meaningful thing in don't know what it has to do with who long time. I was floundering. I'd the world. It would be nice; itwould be I am, or what my acting skills are, or moved out; I thought I could take care a bonus; and if not, as long as I can keep whether I can sing or not, or. ... of myself. I couldn't. And then when I doing the work, that's what's impor- left him-I was with him from 16 to tant. But your image is pretty edgy and edge 27-1 didn't have the skills that a per- reminds people how tightly they're hold- son needed, really, to take care of And also, I know that the people ing on. themselves in any fashion, careerwise, who vote on the best actors and ac- any kind of way, you know. I think I tresses never even have to go and see I think that it's a little bit nerve- learned how to make out a check when the movie. A lot of it's about a popu- wracking for me in a way. In Mask there I was 27. I never travelled alone, all larity contest. was lots of innuendo-it was more kinds of weird things. I had to start about a way that she walked or stood, from scratch and I made lots and lots of Is that what you were afraid of that or how she presented herself. There mistakes. night? was one bedroom scene that got cut out. And I remember having to kiss And I think mistakes are as good as You know what I really thought? I Dennis in Suspect, because they felt successes, we just don't see it that way. didn't want to go; I was really hurt. I that the audience would feel cheated if felt [the Academy] pulled a woman out I didn't. Were you scared offailure during the of another category, and didn't recog- period before you went into acting? nize me, I can't believe that. And I was And in Moonstruck, the sex is more really hurt, and I know all the talk: they like a caricature, so it wasn't hard to do. How do you mean? don't like the way I dress, they don't The scene [when Cage beds her] was That you'd get lost? That you'd even- like my choice in men, they think I'm so funny that it wasn't really about sex. tually be the opening night lounge act in too flamboyant, they don't think I'm When I was doing it, I just thought, Atlantic City in ten years . ... serious. So then I decided I could go in \"How'm I going to remember all these Yeah, that's why I just had to stop a little black dress. And then I thought, words?\" what I was doing and go do this. I well, fuck it, let me go and remind mean, you can call yourself a brain sur- them what it was that they truly don't In Silkwood there was nothing. In geon but unless you're doing surgery it like about me. Jimmy Dean there was nothing. I al- doesn't mean shit. Staying in Vegas ways admire people like Kathleen was very easy because there was so I thought, well, fuck it, I'll go this Turner who can just kind of kiss or take much money involved, and you didn't way. I was really scared too, to go, and her clothes off or whatever. I have a need a brain to do the work-and it Stanley [Donen, the Awards' pro- problem with that. It just doesn't seem wasn't horrible. But I didn't make that ducer] said, \"Cher, come on do it, you to come as easily to me as other things much money.... belong here as much as anybody else.\" do in acting. $350 thousand a week. ... And in the middle of the ceremonies, I made a huge gross but I needed a I just said to Joshua [Donen], ''I'm hav- H er roles onscreen are about sex. whole bunch of people around me on- ing such a great time; I don't care if I Your roles onscreen actually are not stage because I didn't really like what wasn't nominated; I'm having a fabu- about sex . Your persona offscreen is I was doing. lous time.\" But it was only that I could abQut sex. It's about being a bad girl . And I thought, if I don't change go, and be who I was, and let them do And that becomes threatening. It says: now, it's always going to be this way. whatever they want to do with who I Hey, I'm taking over here. This is going to be it for me; this is was. going to be it. I'm just going to end up Yeah. It's strange though that it has like ah-I don't even know. I've said E ventually things come around your to come down to that. I read a lot of Dinah Shore, but I think it's unkind, way. Suddenly, you've got the press scripts that don't do anything for me at you know? Because Dinah Shore was saying, \"She's really serious after all, all, period. But it's not like there's a popular for something before I was this isn't just a trashy vamp . ... \" formula and if all these things add up, grown up, but I never really knew what well, then I'll do it. I guess if there was she did; and I was afraid that was going There've been lots of trashy vamps a real love story.... 1 just don't want to happen to me. who've been really good actresses. I to do movies about sex, though. So I just said, \"Oh, fuck it, if I can't mean there's been lots of trashy peo- be an actress because I'm a singer, I ple. Marilyn Monroe was a great ac- You know, I'm serious when I work. just won't be a singer. And we'll see tress; she was a real trashy I'm not a \"serious actress.\" I think \"se- what happens.\" woman.... How about Mae West? rious actress\" is a real stupid term. I Are you nervous acting, when you're How about Heddy Lamar? How about mean, how can you not be serious trying to be somebody you're not? Ava Gardner? How about all kinds of about what you're doing when you're Well, like in Moonstruck I was a little actresses who lived a life that makes doing it? I'm not going to be pigeon- bit nervous because I thought this me look like fucking Mary Poppins, holed. You know, I waited too long to woman accountant has to be really pre- you know? get here. I'm dead serious about my cise and if she's not, it's just going to be work. a joke. There was no risk in Witches, Or women today who are much more trashy, whatever that means: they go Okay. A lot of your career-not just with more men, or do drugs, or drink a your career-your life has been about lot, or live really in the fast lane, but

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\"With Sonny I hid everything I felt, because none ofit was what he wanted to hear.\" because it wasn't much of a part. And Like what? something more than that. I loved doing Mask so much that it Like when she's trying to talk to him My son was born tongue-tied and I didn't make any difference, I just [Liam], and he's scratching something knew I was right for it. And nobody else into the table and not paying that much watched them give him this operation. wanted it. attention to her. And then she sits And they asked me to leave the room, down, and she's really frustrated, and and I said, \"You haven't got a snow- How about Suspect? sees he's scratched her name into the flake's chance in hell. Ifyou're going to Well, I thought it was going to be table. And when I read that I cried be- cut his tongue apart, I'm going to stand something that it didn't turn out to cause I thought this guy, who was bit- there and watch it.\" And I remem- be.... ing everybody's hand, is now reaching bered thinking while I was watching, It wasn't you . out to this woman because he knows \"Oh, I wish this didn't have to happen There was definitely me in there but she cares. I spent time with these to him.\" And I know that that's what you never got a chance to see it. women, they don't have a fucking life. Ricky's mother [in Mask] thought Where was you? They kill themselves doing this, and I about her child: Oh, I wish this didn't Well, me was in some close-ups and felt that we didn't show any of that. have to happen to him. And yet she me was in some scenes that never came But it was a good working experi- made the best out of it and she made about. ence. I liked everybody I worked with, him a great human being. You mean the sex scene. you know , you've got to learn from No. I took that out because I really everything you do. It can't all be per- So, we should all have control over felt that it was inappropriate. I didn't fect. Life isn't about perfection.... what we can, because there's so little like it in Jagged Edge and I didn't want Well, okay, after Suspect. you said control to be had. If you can control to be a part of it in this movie. And also that everyone in the picture was home- something, why not? I don't think it's after I met these women [lawyers], I re- less. And that's the definition of having a nasty thing. I don't think it's a bad alized how inappropriate it would be. no control. ... thing. It's like the Church on being sel- There was so much more to this movie I don't know why this whole thing fish: they're against it because then it's than what we got out of it. It was a about control. I mean, I don't have that easier for them to control you. really beautiful script. much control over anything. How did you feel about the Quaid I don't think it's a bad thing either. character coming up with key things that And I'm not striving to control every- And, understand, I'm not trying to get you had overlooked that were crucial to thing. I try and control the things that you. the homeless man's [Liam Neeson] fate? I can control. I'm working in a busi- In other words, giving you legs and him ness-in Hollywood, you know, and No, I don't care. I mean, I'm going a brain. there's not that much control to be had, to tell you what I feel, no matter what Well, unfortunately in the original truthfully. I can only control what I can you're going to do with the informa- script, this woman had a case load that control. tion. But you know, everything makes would choke a fucking horse and no me seem like the fucking control freak. support. She's up to her ass in not just Do you want to be like Streisand and It's not about that. I've been told \"No\" Liam but 40 other people. But Peter Lange, who try to get hold of a produc- so much-truly-that if I didn't say [Yates] decided not to leave this in the tion? \"No way,\" I'd still be doing nothing. I beginning, and we had the hugest would still be in Las Vegas. I won't be- fight . I begged him to at least leave a I have a production company. And lieve that no is a no. scene with this guy who had raped a I'm trying to do good work with it, you woman-and it was a great scene-so know , trying to find projects that I Okay, for women now it's almost a po- you see that she's overwhelmed. think are really good. But I have to be litical necessity. And your roles are Because then the tilt becomes some- able to control my own work, as much about that, and your clothes are about body who's overworked instead of inad- as I can control it. Look I controlled my that-although in a very traditional way: equate. own work as much as I could in Suspect, it's only the first tool. It's' 'I can get your Yes . How about that one? That's and when itcame out it wasn't very rep- attention .' , what the whole movie was about, not resentative. So there's not a lot of con- about a woman who was stupid but who trol to be had . But if you ask my mother, I started was so over her head with work that she doing that when I was about four years was fucking up. Let me harp some more on control. I old. Is that the part that you thought was want to keep beating on it. Okay ? you? But that's what we teach little girls Well, I thought that I did a good job I don't care. Fine. showing a woman who could have done real early: ifyou want power, become an a good job but had everything working I n Mask you take care ofand give tools against her. But what Peter decided to a damaged kid, but more to the object. was important really wasn't that im- point, who is different than we are. True. portant to me. So what your clothes are saying is, I think that's something that all women fear. But I don't know how far 'Okay, I'll play the object game-now, to go with that. You know how difficult fuck you, because I can go beyond that. ' life is, anyway, and you don ' t want your children to have to go through I believe that. But you certainly can't say fuck you unless you can back it up with something. Barbra Streisand certainly can't say fuck you with her face or her body. she's got to say fuck you with her voice and her talent. Mar- 48