•SI•SSUe published bimonthly by the Fihn Society ofLincoln Center Volume 23, Number 6 November-December 1987 White Hunter, Black Heart. ..... 11 PartyPu Yi 31 ,r-: .60 Pity the poor heart that bleeds The first rush of wonder from The Last Emperor came from for black oppression: whites . _ _\"... the rushes and lasted nine min- utes in preview at Cannes. must figure in but had better not Now the path of model man and metaphor, Pu Yi, trans- become the story. That's just fixes the world. Tony Rayns enters the Hall of Supreme what happened in Cry Freedom, Harmony, as will you, and en- counters Bernardo Berto- as Donald Woods (page 13) ran lucci, who found billions of emperors inside (page 34). away with Stephen Biko's bio. Festivaliana .... ArmondWhite, whowon'tbe You think you have it hard- coming to dinner at Sir Dick- how'd you like to have to write something zippy to go in this ie's, sees Attenborough's South space that commences with three files on the 25th New African sojourn as Apartheid York Film Festival, hah? So, Stephen Harvey, Elliott cheek. Stein, and Harlan Jacobson are applying for the Federal Notes on the Blacklist .......... 37 Witness Protection program. Harlan Kennedy decamped It's been 40 years since HUAC's (sort of) to Venice (page 70) Hollywood witch hunt began. and Edinburgh (77), David Here, Pat McGilligan round- Chute and Pat Aufderheide ed up the stories of artists- to Toronto (pages 71, 73). Bessie, Boretz, Dassin, Jaffe, Koch, et alia-who stood in harm's way (page 38), cadged a chapter on Sam Omitz and Jimmy Cagney from John Bright's autobiography (page 49), and coaxed Joan Scott, to recall how she endured writ- ing for Disney, man and mouse lord (page 52). Lest we forget, we will return to the subject. Also in this issue: five minutes. Alex Gibney and Anne Lambert, Sheepish Lion ...... 24 Thompson go to the videotape. What's better than an honorable failure? Journals ................... 2 Why, a dishonorable one, of course. In Trade wares: Godard needs Lear duds, a Siesta, Gavin Smith demonstrates how jeans-maker needs TV spots, they swap. ad-crafter Mary Lambert has a post-mod Party fool H. A. Rodchenko explains it take on designer sex and death. ote! all. Seeing is being, notes Jan Stuart at N.Y's first Lesbian and Gay Experimen- TV: 'Trying Times' ......... 78 tal Film Festival. And Michael Sragow PBS imported the wild and woolly to cre- Tellurides it like it is. ate Trying Times, Tom Carson says. Then muzzled 'em. Which Side Weren't You On? .. 16 Last July, the Directors Guild broughl Back Page: Quiz #28......... 80 Hollywood to its noose-a strike by roy- alty against royalry over royalties lasting Cover plwto: courtesy Columbia Pictures Co-Editors: Harlan Jacobson, Richard Corliss. Assi' ~nt Editor: Marlaine Glicksman. Art Director and Cover Design: Elliot Schulman. Advertising and CIrculation Manager: Tony Impavido. Business Manager: Sayre Maxfield. Production: Deborah Dichter Edmonds. West Coast Editor: Anne Thompson. European Editor: Harlan Kennedy. Research Consultant: Mary Corliss. Circulation Assistant: Deborah Freedman. Controller: Domingo Homilla, Jr. Editorial Intem: Gavin Smith. Executive Director, Film Society of Lincoln Center: Joanne Koch. Copyright © 1987 by the Film Society of Lincoln Center. All rights reserved. The opinions expressed in FILM COMMENT do not represent Film Society of Lincoln Center policy. Publication is made possible in part by support from the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. This publication is fully protected by domestic and intemational copyright. Subscription rates in the United States: $14.95 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 Eastem News Distributors, Sandusky OH 44870. FILM COMMENT (ISSN 0015-119X) is published bi- monthly by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, 140 W. 65th St. , New York NY 10023. Second-class postage paid at New York NY and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: send address changes to FILM COMMENT, 140 W. 65th St., New York NY 10023.
Experiments in Image companiment of the dreamy first lines of Baudelaire's \"L'Invitation au Voyage\": Mon enfant, ma soeur, Songe a la douceur D'aller la-bas vivre ensemble! Aimer a loisir Aimer et mourir Au pays qui te resemble! In a fourth, the poem is recited simulta- neously in several languages [English, French, Italian, Japanese(?)] while a fluid camera pans the blue sky, the bodies of some awkwardly posed models, the blue sky, the blue sky. In a fifth, a young wom- an puts on a red pullover and a pair of jeans. Careful inspection of her move- ments, languid and abrupt, lead to the conclusion that what we're watching is footage of the woman undressing, run backwards for our pleasure by the ever- playful J-LG. The final spot shows a young woman ironing a pair of her boyfriend's jeans- while he's wearing them. Godard's hoarse, urgent voice-over-so familiar frqm his films-whispers repeatedly, \"Travaillez les pantalons\" (Work those jeans!). And then we hear a series of dog- like yips, perhaps pained, perhaps ecstat- ic, as the presumably hot iron nears his crotch . Godard: \"Ifyou can wash out your jeans, I can wash out my images. \" Godard's intimate whisper, the loving pan across the letters of a logo, the BLUEJEAN-Luc television stations TF1, Antenne 2, Canal recitation from Les Fleurs du Mal, recalls Plus, FR3, and M6. nothing so much as his 1966 feature, GODARD Deux ou Trois choses que je sais d' elle- Featuring many familiar Godard trade- the \"elle\" being not so much a particular The front page of Communication, marks-multilayered superimpositions, woman as a quarter of Paris, disfigured be- the Paris-based media and market- rapid-fire editing, lettering-as-graphics, yond recognition by growth, urbanization, ing weekly, was dominated by a literary quotations, disjunctive sound- and the language of publicity. In that film, photo of a smiling(!) Jean-Luc Godard . tracks, underdraped young women-the Godard's melancholy voice pondered the The caption: \"Godard, realisateur de film Girbaud spots have a decidedly nouvelle effect of things, and the words which ad- de pub! C'est fou, non?\" Or, in English: vogue look to them. For his first foray into vertise them, upon ' human life. Panning Godard is making TV commercials. It's the world ofpubIicite, Godard is quoted as across the letters which spell ou~ CAR- crazy, no? saying that he wanted \"to get away from WASH, and MOBIL, a younger Godard the cliches of French jeans commercials: asked , \"Why are all these signs among us Crazy or not, it seems that Jean-Luc James Dean, the USA, Great Spaces, which end up by making me doubt lan- \"Cinema\" Godard , 56-year-old enfant ter- freedom , and sex.\" (He seems to have guage, and submerge me in meanings, rible of the New Wave, a man who spent scored an 80.) drowning the real?\" the Sixti~s revolutionizing the language of cinema, and the Seventies lending his dis- In the first, a breathless woman tums Perhaps now, 21 years later, the rela- tinctive imprint to video, has now turned the pages of an art book, reacting to the tionship between people and things has his hand to the commercial. In a barter ar- images of several classical paintings become, for Godard, less agonized, to the rangement with leading French jeans (Goya, EI Greco), with a petulant \"Non point where he can genially toss off an ad manufacturer Marithe and Fran<;ois Gir- . . . non . . . non ...\" Then she's shown a baud, Girbaud supplied the costumes for photo of a pair of Girbaud CLOSED campaign. Does this mean that Godard is the forthcoming Godard opus King Lear jeans: and cries out a (sultry, orgasmic) now celebrating the kind of advertising and the sponsorship of the Godard TV se- \"Oui! \" In a second, a young woman image that had , from his earliest films (c.f. ries Splendeur et Misere du Cinema- promenades back and forth while the the brassiere ads in Une Femme Mariie) and, in return, Godard made ten IS-sec- word CLOSED, in extreme close-up, been something to quote, to pastiche, to ond video commercials for the Girbaud promenades back and forth in front of her, mock? Or can we speak of a Godard once CLOSED line ofjeans, ofwhich five were and offscreen, someone recites Rimbaud. again deconstructing the language of pub- accepted, and have been aired on French In another, Godard's Betacam prowls a licity, this time from within? Would that sunlit room, taking in the nude body of an be possible, or even, at this date, desir- oriental woman lying on a bed, to the ac- able? In short, is Godard working those 2
At last - the COMPLETE word-and-picture reference on Paramount 2,805 films, 1916-1984 - and MORE THAN ONE THOUSAND photos! Film aficionados have been waiting years for the definitive volume on Paramount. Thanks to John Douglas Eames, it was worth the wait. You get . . . -Every Paramount film - all 2 ,805 , 1916-1984 -Over 1,000 photos - many in rich Duotone , and 15 dramatic full- page spreads -For the major films: wonderfully readable , often droll plot synopses .. . principal casts and credits .. . photos. . . background . .. year -For most other films: quick plot synopses, major casts, director, year -For minor films from 1916 to 1925: major casts, director, type of story - \"The Men Who Made paramount\" -Studio history - Paramount Academy Award winners AND nominees thru 1984 - Attractive endpapers featuring the Paramount logo -HUGE index of some 7,500 names -Index of 2 ,805 films Publisher's price $35 , and well worth it. But you pay ONLY $2 .89 when you join the Movie/Entertainment Book Clubl \\. How to get this essential $35 .,~ !~~1~:; !;\\ -----------------------------------------------volume for ONLY $2.89·------ How the Club Works Every 4 weeks (13 times a year) you get a free copy of the Club bulletin, • •yl~/~.'~.'AI• •~.' PREVIEWS, which offers the Featured Selection plus a nice choice of Alter- ~• •IICL'~ *nates: books on mms, TV, music, occasionally records and videocassettes. If *you want the Featured Selection, do nothing. It will come automatically. If you don't want the Featured Selection or you do want an Alternate, indicate 15 Oakland Avenue· Harrison, N.Y.10528 *your Wishes on the handy card enclosed and return it by the deadline date. *The majority of Club books are offered at 20·30070 discounts, plus a charge for I enclose $2.89. Please accept my membership in the Club and shipping and handling. As soon as you buy and pay for 4 books, records, or send me, postpaid and at no further cost, the monumental $35 Paramount Story by John Douglas Eames. I agree to buy 4 *Videocassettes at regular Club price, your membership may be ended at any time additional books or records at regular Club price over the next 2 years. I also agree to the Club rules spelled out in this coupon. either by you or by the Club. If you ever receive a Featured Selection without F c- 44 *having had JO days to decide if you want it, you may return it at Club expense for full credit. For every book, record or videocassette you buy at regular Club price, you receive one or more Bonus Book Certificates. These entitle you to buy many Club books at deep discounts, usually 6O-SOlJ!o off. These Bonus Name Address _ _ __ __ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ *Books do not count toward fulfilling your Club obligation but do enable you to City_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ State'_ _ _ Zip _ _ _ __ buy fine books at giveaway prices. PREVIEWS also includes news about members and their hobbies. You are welcome to send in similar items. The Club *will publish any such· item it deems suitable, FREE. This is a real CLUB! *Good service. No computers! Only one mem~rship per household.
jeans---or are the jeans, this time, working ment reassertions, for irony, said villain witnessing the dependency of the aged, him? sealed his damnation by blowing his own Jacoby disengages us Clockwork Orange- brains out. style from the possibility of pleasure or The French press seems not to know feeling. Instead of nausea or electric how to regard the Girbaud commercials, For the audience and the filmmakers at shock, we become temporarily visually other than by trotting out one or the other the festival (subtitled \"A Queer Kind of impaired. of the usual personas-Godard as sellout Film\"), both events probably received (dragging poor Rimbaud and Baudelaire passing attention. Papal pap and Holly- A strategy of disorientation is employed with him), Godard as genius. It might be wood homophobia, in the big picture, be- as well in the pendulous camera move- more accurate to say that Godard is doing come non-events-business as usual. ments of Tom Chomont's Epilogue and what he's always done: looking at the Two more pats on the fanny to be filed in Leslie Kossoffs dizzying self-portrait, world around him. To quote the younger the bin ofdaily reproaches and retrieved at Untitled. In all of these films, the intent is Godard, again from the pained voice-over a later date in some form of sublimated to challenge the complacent eye, to cut off of Two or Three Things: \"Objects exist, rage. Rage may not have been evident in the functioning optic nerve which, and if one gives to them a more attentive the substance of the festival films, but it through force of habit, responds to its sur- care than to people, it is precisely because was sputtering all over the form. The ab- roundings with a dulled, sanguine, and they exist more than people. Dead objects berations of traditional technique that thus potentially dangerous vision. Dan- are always alive. Living people are often were aggressively employed in most of the gerous because sanguineness is a luxury in already dead.\" films projected a political subtext even a world where the fact of one's private li- when the films themselves were not overt- bidinous actions makes one an outlaw. As According to Girbaud spokesperson ly political. Where tinkering with fonn can ifspeaking for all of her colleagues, Abigail Michele Montagne, Fran<;ois Girbaud- be seen as a sort of cinematic correlative Child exhorts at the opening of her Covert who gave Godard a free hand in the pro- for an artist's ennui, restlessness, isolation Action, \"We don't want obsessions. What duction, writing, and direction of the and the rest, for the gay and lesbian we want is to be halted in our tracks.\" spots-complained only once: that Go- filmmaker,experimental form becomes a dard's video colors were too desaturated. metaphor for a very particular sense of es- Covert Action, one of the goofiest films Replied the director, a man who always trangement. Taken together, the festival in the festival's doggedly earnest assort- finds a way ofgetting the last aphorism: \"If films became a testimony not only to the ment, halts us in our tracks by exploding you can wash out your jeans, I can wash artists' omnipresent feelings of exclusion narrative in our faces. Looped old home out my images.\" and abandonment, but an expression of movies of two straight couples refract and how those feelings alter how they see the ricochet off a rapid-fire succession ofwink- The commercials, lensed in Switzer- world. ing titles (\"Five years later,\" \"It seems land on a 3-day shoot, feature Girbaud strange to me now\") and a pastiche sound- models Keshi, Suzanne Lanza, Luca, and Not surprisingly, seeing, and the ways track that collides jazz, blues, Fifties Marc Parent. Godard produced for the in- in which one sees, was the predominant spoon-and-croon, and teasing comments house Girbaud agency MFG. The budger theme, if not the issue, of the festival. The (\"the laws of nature were wrong\"). This was 1.5 million francs-the same budget, double entendre implied in the title of frenetic interplay of selective editorial Godard pointed out, as Contempt. Barbara Hammer's Optic Nerve could ap- with shots of the kissing, romping couples ply to any number of the films which asser- cancels out the usual feeling of nostalgia, For the record, these commercials are tively sabotaged our vision, which had the longing, or identification that accompany not quite a first. In 1972, Godard was chutzpah to make us work to see what is watching home movies. By subverting the asked to make a spot for Shick after-shave otherwise right in front of our eyes. In standard iconography evoked by home lotion for the French agency Dupuy Hammer's film, a prismatic trip to her films, Child provokes us into questioning, Compton. Set in a lower-income housing grandmother'S nursing home, the camera among other things, the presumed nature development, the ad began with a man serves as the unseen eye that follows be- of the relationships between these cou- waking up in the morning and muttering hind grandmother'S wheelchair down the ples. Once having seen Covert Action, \"Ah merde!\" It was never aired. nursing home corridors or up the super- one's own 8mm childhood souvenirs be- market aisles as she picks out her grocer- come forever fraught with alanning possi- -H.A. RODCHENKO ies. Hammer's is a nervous optic nerve, al- bilities. A Queer Kind of Film ternately confronting or recoiling from its environment; whenever we begin to get Covel1 Action's use of titles ala silent T he opening night of the First Les- our bearings, Hammer will blur our vision, bian and Gay Experimental Film roll the frame in jagged tempo to Helen films is typical of the self-referential im- Festival at New York's Millenium Thorington's percussive sound score, or pulse pervading the festival. Virtually all overlapped with two related cultural flutter the image with a strobe intensity of the films, for better or for worse, call at- belches. Pope John Paul was winding that is literally painful to watch. In a similar tention to themselves as film. Like Covert down his U.S. public relations tour in San vein, the late Roger Jacoby's L'Amico Action, Larry Brose's haunting short film Francisco of all places, reassuring the gay Fried's Glamorous Friends upends and An Individual Desires Solution uses titles community that, not to worry, God still distorts the images ofhis elegantly dressed whose silent-movie roots are further en- forgives his buggering black sheep. And couples-dancing, romancing or farcically hanced by a saloon piano arrangement of the number one boxoffice hit in America pursuing each other around a bench less \"Dinah\" heard over the soundtrack. The that week, No Way Out, singlehandedly piano-camouflaging them in a blinding piano, as we later see, is being viewed and restored to prominence a long neglected assault of flashing shapes. Whereas Ham- played through the tired eyes of the movie fall guy, the malevolent homosex- mer compels the viewer into a classic parti- filmmaker's dying lover. Brose's nickel- ual villain. Lest anyone have mistaken the cipant/observer stance, forcing one to ex- odeon gesulres, like the strobe flutters in sincerity of the screenwriters' Old Testa- perience something akin to her pain at Optic Nerve, suggest a yearning for a time before aging, disease, and death displaced youth and hope. In this manner, the films' 4
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self-consciousness is more than simply a At the opposite extreme was the didac- style-was British and also one of its old- masturbatory device; it is an evocative ticism of Ann Alter's B& W Colored metaphor that helps us to unveil what the Pictures, a criticism of racism within the est, James Broughton'S Pleasure Garden camera, reacting to the filmmaker's pain, women's movement. Alter's repetition of often obscures. urban images (an all-white feminist gath- (1953). Broughton's enchanted garden is a ering, Tina Turner's face pushing maga- A II too often, the filmmakers' self-con- zines on a phone stall, the pissed-off seedy, weed-strewn park where even the sciousness took the form of film or profile of an Asian woman with hands video-within-film. When used gratuitous- defiantly on hips) produces a strident fric- marble statues seem to be in need of a ly, the device was an irritating example of tion when rubbed against her spoken po- the kind of tunnel vision plaguing today's etic litany (\"White sisters, radical friends, good mowing: the crumbling landscape of cpfnmercial film school babies, whose should think again; When they see us in world seems entirely mediated by movies the flesh, they are not quite sure they like a decomposing moral code. In spite of its or television. us as much\"). In the process, Alter, a self- avowed \"white Jewish sister,\" raises liber- neglect, the park provides a fanciful play- In Su Friedrich's intricate Damned If al guilt and self-flagellation to an art. Or so methin g. ground for a motley collection of grown- You Don't, however, the film-within-the- film becomes inextricable from the narra- It was the rare film in which social criti- ups in search of forbidden pleasures. tive surrounding it: one cleverly illumi- cism transcended the immediate arena of nates the other. Friedrich's erotic tale of sexual politics. You Can't Die from Not They are hampered by the tireless efforts moral inertia plays off the 1946 film Black Sleeping , a tough documentary about Narcissus and the story of a 17th century New York's homeless women shot by a of a town official, a disapproving fussbud- nun jailed for lesbianism with a contempo- collective of women, purportedly prompt- rary story of a Catholic women and a nun ed a gay male journalist to ask the search- get who is busily nailing fig leaves and who are drawn to one another. For the de- ing question, \" Do gay men really want to vout filmgoer, Friedrich's greatest irrever- see a film about homeless women?\" Aside \"Cycling Prohibited\" signs on the statues. ence is the spectacle of seeing Black Nar- from negating any doubts that the gay cissus in black and white, but even this community boasts as many deadbeats as While Broughton's revelers are pre- the heterosexual population , the question audacity is thematically a propos. Strip- also pointed to GEF's relative absence of dominantly heterosexual, save for two social critiques by gay men. It would be a ping the PowelVPressburger film of its moot point to debate the priorities oflesbi- scantily clad male wrestlers, their passion peacock-colored allure results in a pun- ans vs. gay men , particularly when one ning comment on the punitive, black- adds up the boxoffice take from the festi- is inflamed by a tacit pre-Stonewall aware- and-white edlOS of the Catholic order. It val's top two best attended shows, show- also underscores Friedrich's reductive, al- ings of, respectively, lesbian and gay ero- ness of the corrosive effects of externally legorical synopsis of Black Narcissus, in tica. Still, the question disturbs. As a which the individual must choose the friend once offered, perhaps gay men imposed conformity. In Broughton's chi- route of\"good nun\" Deborah Kerror \"bad have lurched so abruptly from the breast- nun\" Jean Simmons. Forty-one years beating days ofThe Boys in the Band to the merical universe, liberation arrives in the post-Black (and white) Narcissus , the devastation wrought by AIDS that there spirit ofJean Simmons prevails: audiences has been little opportunity to differentiate form of a zaftig good witch who transforms heave a major sigh of relief-and perhaps self-criticism from the narcissism of self- a sensual shudder-as Friedrich's nun abuse. the stern authoritarian watchdog with the joins her elusive object of desire in lusty embrace. Breast beating still lingers in the youn- wave of her wand. Thirty-four years later, ger generation of filmmakers , if Todd Friedrich's achievement in combining Haynes Assassins: A Film Concerning a lot of people are still waving fists , if not social criticism and eroticism contrasted Rinibaud is any indication. Surely Haynes with most of the other films, which either is an original: portraying the Rimbaudl wands, trying to transform that perenially managed to avoid both or eschew one in Verlaine relationship, he fashions a slick favor of the other. One ambitious excep- nouvelle vague-meets-Hallmark Hall of disapproving man in the white dress from tion was Jim Hubbard's lfomosexual De- Fame production that is always seductive sire in Minnesota , an omnibus scrapbook to watch. Yet Hayne's Rimbaud is dis- Rome. Regrettably, there are no fat witch- of social protest and voyeurism in Minne- tressingly retrograde-this poet is so apolis, circa 1980-81. Like most scrap- numbed-out, so neurotic, so obsessively es jolly enough or filmmakers persuasive books, Hubbard's was intensely personal self-destructive. Even if viewed within and filled with an admixture of the trivial the more conservative context ofcommer- enough to halt him in his tracks and make and the consequential. Yet for all of its tex- cial filmmaking, this Rimbaud would ture, the film's moments ofjoy, anger and seem more at home in the pathological him see what's in front of him. Perhaps Su arousal were muffled by a certain Mid- company of No W0' Out's heavy than western flatness that failed to be revved up aside the genteel subversiveness of Mer- Friedrich or Todd Haynes could convince by a busy, literal soundtrack of top 40 hits chant and Ivory's Maurice. and classical snippets. The inadvertent him to write the treatment for their next impression which lingered was that gay Ironically, one of the Festival's most men have become anaesthetized by over- subversive film s-in content if not in picture, about an archbishop who flees to a exposure to Bette Midler, Connie Fran- cis, and Philadelphia low rent rock. monastery high in the Himalayas after all of his celibate priests die of AIDS. Is Burt Lancaster available? What a package! Honey, get me Menachem Golan on the phone. -JAN STUART ROCKY MOUNTAIN 'HI' O ld-timers at Telluride found signs of the dread Success everywhere in the festival's 14th year: festival passes were sold out before it began; individual tickets were parcelled out to hordes of patient risk-takers; and Rupert Murdoch's mainstream movie magazine, Pre- miere, which co-sponsored the festi- val, plastered theater walls and fences with its logo. The festival got off to a double-bar- reled bang, first with a suspenseful power failure that delayed opening night programs by an hour, and second with the tribute to that master of bang- bang moviemaking, Don Siegel, hon- ored partly for contributing crucial montages to such all-time favorites as Yankee Doodle Dandy and Casablanca. William K. Everson, who co-directs 6
nf\\<:'.' An Bill Winslow Israel Employment: Copy Editor, NYC Profession: Actor Horovitz Trilogy \"I was tired of auditioning so I decided to help start the Renegade Theatre Company with some friends. Now that I perform 3-4 plays a season, I'm constantly looking for ways to get my hands on new plays!\" Fireside Theatre is your number 1 source for plays! Join now... UTTLIIBOP or HORRORS A NEW MUSICAL WED UPON THE FILM BY ROGER CORMAN BOOKAHDlYRICS BY HOWARO 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 maner or language may be offensive to some. your FREE TOTE BAG when accepted as a member. We reserve the right to reject any application . However, once lr Fir~ide Tb;atreB~kCTu~ - - ,IGarden City, NY 11535 IPlease accept me as amember of the Fireside Theatre Book Club, and send me accepted , If you are not fully satisfied with your Introductory books , return them within 10 days at our expense. the 4 books I've numbered in the boxes below, plus my FREE TOTE BAG . Bill me I Ijust $1 plus shipping and handling for the 4 books. I agree to the Club plan as Your membership Will be cancelled and you Will owe nothing . The FREE TOTE BAG is yours to keep in any case. described,\" this ad , Will take4 more books at regular low Club prices during AHracltve selection : As a Club member, you'll have dozens of titles to choose from : the best of every theatre I the next 2 years, and may resign any time thereafter. The FREE TOTE BAG is season , Broadway and Off-Broadway successes, practical guides to performance and production techniques, I Imine to keep even if I don't remain a member. and other volumes-many not available in any store at any price. 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' HARDCOVER EOITION PRICES. A shipping and handling charge is added to each shipment. II I I IIMMsr.. _ _ _ _ _ _ _---:::;-----,--,---_ _ _ _ _C_T·6_94 Club bulletin: Enjoy the convenience of at-home shopping with your free Club bullelln , Curtam Time. About every 4 weeks (14 t.imes a year) you'll receive the bullelln deSCribing coming SelectlOn(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. # _ _ __ 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 nothing . . I If under 18, parent must sign . I FREE TOTEThe choice Is a.lways yours: Your only obligation is to take just 4 books at regular low Club prices dUring the next 2 years. You may resign any time after purchasing your 4 L M_embe_rs acc_epted _in U.S._A. and_Canad_a only_. Offer_slightl_y diffe_rent in~Cannad.a~, I with membership books , or continue to enjoy Club membership for as long as you like.
the festival with Bill Pence and Tom would get nervous. The legendary Frears as the suffering straight man Luddy, called Siegel \"almost the per- m~guls weren't \"any smarter than the and Kureishi as the brash young fellow fect Telluride honoree.\" That's not children who run the studios today,\" willing to lead with his chin. Kureishi just because Siegel is too racy a figure Siegel said. said he wanted to obliterate the for an Oscar or the AFI Lifetime \"James Ivory-David Lean-Margaret Achivement Award , but because as a One of Siegel's best cult films is the Thatcher\" view of England, with its montage specialist for Warner Bros., violent 1964 remake of Ernest Hem- \"teacup picture\" of society. Frears, he engineered those rapid-fire, ingen- ingway's The Killers, which starred who was once set to direct John Mas- ious sequences that helped fill story Lee Marvin (audience applauded) and ters' The Deceivers, an old-fashioned gaps in old Hollywood movies-in- Ronald Reagan (audience hissed). But India adventure story, for Merchant- cluding the Paris flashback with Hum- Siegel said he'd rather have made the Ivory, put his face in his hands and phrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman that 1946 version starring Burt Lancaster shook his head. helped put the heart-tug into Casa- and Ava Gardner. \"The producer, blanca. Mark Hellinger, wanted me to direct Louis Malle was more tentative. it. But Jack Warner loathed Hellinger Working with American technicians is The film clip program began with a and hated me. It would have made me enjoyable, Malle said, but American four-minute chunk from a 1941 mus- a well-known director when I was in deal makers are exhausting. Au Revoir ical melodrama, Blues in the Night , my forties. I didn' t become that until Les Enfants stems from his wartime which showed Siegel using a circus I was sixty, \" with Dirty Harry in 1972. childhood, and he went back to France trunkful of camera and editing tricks to recapture his memories. France is to depict a bandleader trying to train \"I don't know what a producer great only in small doses , he said, and an amateurish singer before having a does,\" Siegel contended. He's still he prefers living in America. Spent nervous breakdown. The camera bitter toward Allied Artists for slapping from the effort of his most emotional peers up through the piano's key- a happy ending on his 1956 Invasion film since Lacombe, Lucien, Malle board, the keys turn to goo, and the of the Body Snatchers. \"Nothing they kept talking about retiring. bandleader sees himself as an organ did surprised me. I felt I was working grinder's monkey. Working in mon- for the pods.\" It would make a good O n the documentary front, Tellur- tage sure taught Siegel how to tell a title for his autobiography, which he ide showed Taylor Hackford's story in images, as Leonard Maltin promises to deliver by 2006. Chuck Berry: Hail! Hail! Rock 'n Roll, told the crowd. But when Siegel be- a choppy, alternately enjoyable and came a director, he managed to mod- N ot all the onstage salutes were this frustrating encounter with Chuck ulate all this jumpiness into a lucky. Lindsay Anderson showed Berry. Like it, A Hungry Feeling: Bren- relentlessly nerve-racking yet forth- his plodding adaptation of David Ber- dan Behan is engaging yet superficial, right style. That's because montage ry's play, The Whales of August, with relying heavily on the charm of its rois- got all the flash out of his system , Sie- Lillian Gish and Bette Davis. Because tering, crooning hero. Best of the lot gel cracked. Anderson aimed at \"simplicity\" in this was Antony Thomas' Thy Kingdom slice of fading life , the audience had Come .. .Thy Will Be Done an incisively A compact, wizened man in a to sit through some gas about John drawn and photographed expose of tweedy hunter's jacket and corduroy Ford's influence on Anderson's em- big-time, fundamentalist politician- pants, Siegel took the stage of the balmed movie. He down played it, but preachers. This fair-minded but out- Sheridan Opera House with the later took the stage with Everson and raged film was made for PBS' Frontline aplomb of a seasoned comedy star. Ford star Harry Carey Jr. (also in series, produced by David Fanning, \"I'm appalled by the violence you've Whales) to discuss Ford's work. What who canceled this entry, ostensibly for seen in my films,\" he deadpanned. ensued was a classic case of crossed being dated after Jimmy Bakker dit- \"I'm really not a violent man .\" Re- cultural circuits. When seeing a clip toed Jessica Hahn. calling how then actor Mark Rydell from Rio Grande, some laughed affec- kept begging for more screen time in tionately when John Wayne sweeps This is not to forget Haiti, Dreams Crime in the Streets , Siegel offset a Maureen O'Hara into his arms, twirls of Democracy, Jonathan Demme and Walter Matthau-like scowl with a Jack her around, and kisses her. However, Joe Menell's documentary, which had Benny eye roll, and then did a slow Anderson, who helped gain postwar its world premiere on the Telluride burn. Cagney told him he'd make a acceptance of Ford's westerns in En- Community Cable television station. good director-he didn' t set up his gland, was appalled. He instructed the Demme and Menell don't attempt to shots any worse than the big boys and audience not \"to patronize westerns. \" convey Haiti's social landscape of de- \"you smoke a pipe,\" Siegel recalled Ford, he lectured, was a serious art- spair in concrete terms. With a smat- Cagney saying. ist-something the audience hadn't tering of statistics, they layout the doubted . general conditions of post-Papa and But Siegel ended up toiling at War- -Baby Doc Duvalier: rule by the eNG ner Bros. for 14 years in the Thirties A seminar on national identity in (in effect, a military government), vast and Forties and didn't direct his first films turned out to be more amusing. unemployment, and virtually no avail- feature until 1946. For the most part, Screenwriter Hanif Kureishi , whose able drinking water. But the filmmak- the studio left him alone:-he'd see jumpy, overloaded, death-of-England ers find the resilient Haitian soul in the phrase \"lapse of time\" in a script extravaganza Sammy and Rosie Get rap and calypso rhythms and in voo- and would turn it into six or seven Laid was shown in tribute to director doo. Demme and Menell fear for pages of evocative action. But if his Stephen Frears, said his ambition is Haiti. Me too. But not for Telluride, montages looked too expensive (and \"to make films paid for by the British which dreams of democracy and more sometimes-for instance, the giant government to attack the British gov- often than not achieves it. ticker tape machine in The Roaring ernment.\" Frears and Kureishi came Twenties-they were), Jack Warner off as a political vaudeville act, with -MICHAEL SRAGOW 8
25TH NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL NEW YORK presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center FILM ALICE TULLY HALL FESTIVAL SEPTEMBER 25 - OCTOBER 11, 1987 POSTER The New York Film Festival celebrates its 25th anniversary with astriking black-and-white poster by renowned conceptualist artist, Sol LeWitt. The poster, which measures 441/2\" x 291/2;' is printed on high-quality stock and is suitable for framing . The signed, limited edition poster is $1QO; an unsigned limited edition poster is $30. Prices include postage and handling. Use the coupon below to order your poster now. I enclose $ for -----.1_ _ 25th New York Film Hlstival posters. SIGNED UNSIGNED Name Address Address City/State/Zip Daytime Phone Pleaseallow 6weeks for delivery. DNer good in US only. Mail check or money order payable to: Film Society of Uncoln Center. 140 West 65th St. . New York, NY 10023. You may use postage-paid envelopein this magazine.
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Ie e Denzel washington, Donald Woods and Richard Attenborough: white-dominated narratives. By Annond White Attenborough and fellow Gandhi- graveworshipper, screenwritter John Bri- Kevin Kline's role in Cry Freedom COMMENT ley, neglect the politicization of anger and makes him the biggest token white the black African rise to consciousness. in movie history. The \"logic\" is hannesburg newspaper editor Kline por- Cry Freedom keeps apartheid at a safe dis- that director Richard Attenborough needs tance by showing its greatest horrors hap- him to provide a white point of interest to trays. . pening to insignificant Others, glossing carry this expose ofapartheid. Yet the joke over the black activist agenda. It strokes a is on every liberal filmgoer in the Western Woods' published writings on Biko are white viewer's sentimentality rather than world. Cry Freedom is like a Holocaust inspiring rage or-God forbid-identi- story told from the point of view of an Ary- credited as the film's source. Attenbor- fication with blacks. an conscientious objector who fled to Hol- lywood. Originally conceived as a biogra- ough trumps up suspense in Woods' ef- I don't mean to deny the effective emo- phy of Stephen Biko, the black South tional power of big message movies that African slain by Afrikaner police, Cry forts to smuggle his banned manuscript say the right thing (apartheid is bad), but Freedom becomes another journalist's unfortunately Cry Freedom and Philip Sa- profile in courage (like The Killing Fields out of the country. But deemphasizing the ville's HBOmovieMandela both strike my and The Year ofLiving Dangerously). Bi- awareness of the wrong thing: the white ko's story is now glimpsed as the back- violence and deprivation blacks suffer in domination of film narrative that has been ground to the political enlightenment and going on since before the Union of South courage of Donald Woods, the white Jo- South Africa-the most appalling (and Africa officially instituted its policy of seg- regation and political-economic dramatic) aspects of apartheid-is con- discrimination against blacks. This must spicuous. The determination to create an- other self-flattering white movie hero isn't just insulting; in this context it's insane. 11
all end. South African system's similarities to our ness of apanheid only by demonstrating The only recent American movie refer- own political-economic institutions (the the correct attitude to be taken. trade, history, even the same mix of racial ences to apanheid have been a bumper philosophies we share). They don't regis- A well-intentioned single like \"Sun sticker in LetlUll Weapon; the heroine's ter the familiar racist essence of apanheid City\" doesn't exist as an. It doesn't bring Winnie Mandela book in Something Wild; intensely enough to make a convincing the fight home emotionally like Peter Ga- and a special-effects logo in Under the argument against it-just a historical- briel's \"Biko\" or U2's \"Pride (In the Cherry Moon. British productions like biographical pageant. Name of Love)\"-songs of greater pas- Cry Freedom and Mandela, plus the re- sion than most filmmakers know how to cent briefshowings ofSouth African refor- Cry Freedom announces this formality convey. However, \"Sun City\" does dare mist films A Place for Weeping and Dust, and distance through its first photojour- outright proselytizing-a best second bet. all merely prove a trendy awareness nalist images of a hostile police action on Attenborough and Saville only skim the of apanheid. But between South Africa the black Crossroads shantytown. The surface of apanheid. (We're shown nurs- and Central America liberal loyalties are montage recalls the shrewd counterpoint ery schools for children, not the \"necklac- stretched real thin. Not even Paul Simon's of South Africa/Montgomery, Alabama ing\" freedom fighters use on informers.) hotly debated South Africa-inspired footage that Jonathan Demme, Kevin As dramatized, the courtroom statements Grace/.and album has renewed the liberal Godley, and Lol Creme assembled for the and public speeches by Biko and Mandela fervor that last buzzed in our own civil \"Sun City\" video. But Attenborough is are primers on ethical, racial issues. This rights movement. less savvy about this recent phenomenon politically reticent attitude presumes that of liberalism-by-satellite. Instead, the na- only whites are watching; it accepts a seg- This isn't quite (yet) the cultural ive modernism he affects trivializes the regated pop audience as ideal. These di- groundswell that produced 60s liberal hu- West's anti-apanheid commitment. Like rectors make movies about black people manist movies like One Potato, Two Pota- wearily, as a strange but necessary obliga- to; Nothing But a Man; A Man Called o.w. Griffith's Intolerance (an \"apology\" tion. Adam; Lillies of the Field; To Kill a for racism that conveniently shows no Attenborough relegates the plight of Mockingbird; A Patch of Blue-movies blacks), the impulse here appears facile black South Africans to about one-fifth of and solicitous-revolution without mani- Cry Freedom's running time. Treating that insisted on the aesthetic value of festo. That's the way today's pop human- the issue this way took a sap's courage and black characters. And there won't be good ism works: Paul Simon sings \"Homeless\" a despotic arrogance. It says, \"You think movies about apanheid until contempo- only as a poetic concept, and even \"Sun apanheid is tough on blacks? Here's a nice rary filmmakers force the medium to City\" by Anists United Against ApaItheid white family that got itching powder put reflect egalitarian precepts and ideologies. is hypothetical. These songs, like their on its T-shirts! And they couldn't even The inability to perceive political or psy- film counterparts, employ cant: address- celebrate the New Year together!\" Biko chological nuances in black characters ex- ing the pop audience and raising aware- (played by Denzel Washington) is now tends to how the filmmakers ignore the the shadow cast by Donald Woods' good- heaned incredulity. Even though their conversations are didactic, they become fast friends like Eddie Murphy and Ronny Cox in 8evHillsCopll. This white-flight epic, showing the Woods family's passion to get out of Africa distracts from the real issue. It reassures the white audience that the threat of race war can be avoided with a plane ticket (to the suburbs?). As shown, Woods is easily covened by Biko's alar- ums because he, not the black African, is the film's moral center. He sanctions Western filmmakers' eagerness to judge others more harshly than themselves. This is more than a quibble: Attenbor- ough wags the same comfonable, disap- proving finger that white South African novelist Nadine Gordimer uses as a weather vane of the bestseller charts. These liberals talk a good revolution while fluffing the cushions of their armchair sa- gacity and privilege. They're pop human- ists but crippled by love of the narrative traditions that have long served and but- tressed imperialist societies. That's the real meaning of their faulty screeds. It's not far from Hollywood epics glorifying white manifest destiny, like the 1955 Afri- kaners saga Untamed, starring Susan Hayward and Tyrone Power. Even today, 12
sacre-Pow! That's the theory of it. I do know that in earlier drafts of Briley's ,'fou already did screenplay several people asked why that scene was there, and I remember him say- Gandhi, 1 said. ing, \"I just feel that that is the seminal scene to climax the movie. I feel that is the Let's do Biko.\" one to underscore.\" When they go but of -Donnld Woods the movie, that must be strongly in their consciousness. If you put it chronological- ly, it would have come in the first six min- utes of the movie. The film misses an opportunity for cul~ tural analysis in the scene where your chil- Donald Woods' ancestors settled in dren watch an American western on TV. South Africa (from England) in There's no sense of the relation between the 19th century. At age 53, he re- politics and the culture that reinforces sembles the imperialist genetic arch- politics. What's the truth ofthat scene? type-full-faced, gray-white hair, and a' White Afrikaners relate very strongly to relaxed manner-that one also notices in western movies, also to Jimmy Swaggart, Jerry Falwell, and all that sort of view of the Southern gentleman-editors of the life. And Dallas-Dallas! Partly because Knight-Ridder chain. His voice, though, itdeals with Stetson hats and power, mon- mixes the accents of South Africa and ey, and a basically white world. They love London, where the Woods family have that. Westerns are very popular; cowboy songs are on Afrikan programs-it's a fun- lived since their 1978 exile. ny mixture, cowboy songs and classical These days Woods calls himself a music, Mozart and stuff. counter-propagandist who gives anti- It's Western culture all the way. Don't apartheid lectures. \"I stopped being a He didn't approach me. We both hap- you think the same ethlwcentricity is re- journalist the day Stephen Biko was pened to know a man named Michael sponsiblefor the film playing down Biko's killed.\" He touts Cry Freedom because Stone, who founded the first multiracial \"if we can produce a movie that deals ac- school in Southern Africa called Waterford curately with auth~ntic events that the School. Attenborough had served on the life story? South African government cannot argue, board of trustees for years, and I'd worked Steve's life ended so early. In the movie then that will do more to inform people of with Michael. Michael was the one who we've got highlights using his exact words; the United States and Europe about the said, \"Attenborough's got the first book to go beyond that we would have to invent need for things like sanctions, pressures Biko. Why don't you send your second things or run the risk of ending up with a against the South African government book to him, the two together might make documentary. I may be wrong. But I hear than any number of lectures.\" a movie.\" I said this guy must have 300 what you're saying. It's something that The crossed purposes of art and propa- hundred scripts in his lap already, but was in my mind at the time, and all that ganda came clear in our talk. We were two something made me send it off, and At- makes me easy with it is that the film is not men with overlapping causes: the down- tenborough immediately showed interest. aimed at you. It really isn't. fall of racist government, the eradication What made the difference? /'m aware ofthat and offended by it too. of racist aesthetics. At one point Woods Because you'd have to devote a lot to an I know it is an offensive thing, but for leaned forward and spoke out of the publi- enunciation of the black consciousness myseifI am in the business ofgetting peo- cist's earshot: \"One of the scenes in the philosophy, Attenborough only felt there ple on the side of an issue they're not on movie that the scriptwriter was not initially was a way into the movie when he read my the side of. I think that if they can be keen to incorporate and that [Mrs. Woods] second book, Asking for Trouble. That brought on the side of it, this whole thing and I dug in our heels in order to put it in. seemed to place the thing into a context can be shortened by years, and therefore is the scene when Stephen Biko is being that could relate to a broader audience they're the main targets. held and a police captain hits him across who would not sit through a documentary But we still have the problem ofgetting the face and he hits back. Now the reason on the black struggle in South Africa the mainstream to accept black protago- we insisted on that was, first, Biko did it. alone. I think it was the elements of ad- nists and a black poilit of view. Secondly, it seemed to us a very important venture in that. As he saw it, you could in- I'll tell you something ludicrous. Many clue to his personality and his refusal to form opinion while-it's a horrible word, years ago, just after we got out of South knuckle under. I think the movie would \"entertain\"-but engaging audience in- Africa, Carl Foreman, the producer in have lost a lot without that. I think the terest. Unless they get engaged emotion- L.A., wanted to make this movie. He got filmmakers' point initially is that they ally it's a remote issue. Universal quite interested in 1978. Well, didn't want to show him being too aggres- Why were so many events shown out of Universal had also made The Wiz, and The sive; they wanted him to be a martyr chronology? Wiz did not do well. Foreman came back figure. You already did Gandhi, I said. If you advertised a reenactment of the one day and said, \"These assholes have Let's do Biko. Soweto massacre, 99 percent ofthe people turned our project down because The Wiz -A.W. in the Northern Hemisphere wouldn't go didn't work.\" He said, \"What the hell has to watch that. If you get them involved in The Wiz got to do with black people!\" It H ow did Attenborough approach youfor temlS they can relate to, and then at the meant movies about blacks are out. I the project? end ofthat zap them with the Soweto mas- mean, to me that's just dumb, dumb. 13
Constructive engagement?: Denzel Washington and Kevin Kline. controversial problem. Desperate, the \"serious\" white film press tried to disguise Martin Scorsese extols the racist fun of wood archetypes and proceeded to treat its embarrassment over this breakthrough Zulu. The only American filmmaker to black experience with the same panache using scom and ridicule. The reviewers' question this nostalgie de la boue was Pe- that was customarily the provenance of disdain proved more than their antipathy ter Davis in his 1975 The White Laager, white screen fiction. Though no less real- toward Spielberg's mechanics. It revealed documenting the more fascinating truth of istic than E.T , Reds, Ordinary People, their unease at seeing a completely ro- South Africa's imperialist parallel with the The Deer Hunter, The Godfather, or Gone winning of the American West. The idea with the Wind, Spielberg's movie was as- mantic screen fiction about black peo- eludes Attenborough even when the sailed by some whites and blacks as unre- ple-the shock of the new. Woods children watch cowboys-and-Indi- alistic, lunatic, insidious. Its offense- ans on TV. It's a small gaffe that shows a more exactly, its disturbing difference- Spielberg's images were never off-kil- basic insensitivity to the tenets of racist was putting black characters in the fore- ter; they were startling enough to shatter thought. Cry Freedom and Mandela were ground of a slick, expensive Hollywood A the glass house of the white commercial made because it's easy to scold apartheid movie. Spielberg countered the racist as- cinema. (It's a restricted club to which abroad. Meanwhile, apartheid at home sumptions that blacks must be portrayed black faces are admitted by only a few oth- gets pampered in whites-only movies like as social problems, impoverished, or only er directors: Coppola, Walter Hill, Alan Hannah and Her Sisters, Stand By Me , in relation to white characters. It was an Rudolph, Alex Cox, Altman, Mazursky, Top Gun, Witches of Eastwick, The Be- aesthetically successful risk-truer and Demme). Yet an 80-year-old tradition of lievers, Roxanne, etc. more daring than knocking apartheid- privileged white movie myths strongly and absolutely radical. suggested that the fantasy of The Color Black enfranchisement of movie myth Purple wasn't movie art but was, instead, is the major issue facing film aesthetics For many viewers, The Color Purple unnatural and bad. Call it the aesthetics of this decade. Cry Freedom doesn't chal- did the work of a Marxist critique by ex- apartheid. Critical approval that year went lenge the hegemony that posits a white posing how elite and circumscribed mov- to Prizzi's Honor, John Huston's all-Irish middle class perspective as the norm; ies typically were (made by whites and burlesque of Italian buffoons-a prefer- Mandela only breaks through partially. on ly for whites), and it offered a correc- able (because white?) ethnic fantasy that This insufficiency could be excused- tive. The Color Purple's emotional pi- brought back the stupid black maid. The and accepted-solely on the basis of po- quancyand narrative splendor outclassed Oscars went to Out ofAfrica, an insulated, litical expediency were it not for the mirac- most other recent films. Its cogent femi- nostalgic romance about white colonists ulous effect of Steven Spielberg's 1985 nism (which one would expect white on the \"dark continent\" with an utterly The Color Purple. feminist critics to acclaim); and astute ra- fake scene of Meryl Streep on her knees cial politics, plus the structuralist sophis- for the African natives. Recognizing the artifice contained in all tication of Spielberg's craft, made Hol- movie myth, Spielberg rethought Holly- lywood's ongoing racism an urgent, Out of Africa expressed Hollywood's position on apartheid: none. After The Color Purple, it's impossible to buy the pro-brotherhood, anti-apartheid senti- ments of filmmakers who doubt the dra- matic viability of blacks or who treat tough racial subjects with condescension. It all boils down to race when critics will dismiss the vibrant characters ofThe Color Purple and let their hearts bleed over the dumb, filthy Brazilian peasant ofHour ofthe Star; or give an all-out hagiographic salute to the little brown man of Gandhi. The pre- sumed inaccessibility of black screen char- acters ignores Spielberg's motherlode, taking the racism in our movie culture as an epistemological rule. This approach (which carefully shows the Woods chil- dren happy and safe, eating ice cream after a scare) cannot savage apartheid; it merely pantomimes sympathy with its suffer- ers-that's the film equivalent to Rea- gan's \"constructive engagement.\" Danny Glover's presence in Mandela makes a direct link to The Color Pur- ple. It's obvious that this full-scale black people drama (cable's first) only exists fol- lowing Spielberg's example. Telling the story of Nelson Mandela's incarceration that separated him from his wife, Winnie, and the African National Congress move- ment he spoke for, makes an admirable at- 14
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Cry Freedom: Black Consciousness as b~ckground to white conscience-wringing. tempt at dramatizing the black vi(fw of Denzel Washington and Juanita Water- about how bigotry manifests itself, judg- apartheid. Mandela never loses faith in man's portrayals: no actors have moved ing by the way they cast the evil Afrikaners the powerofits black protagonists to move across the screen this gracefully outside of as blotchy, grimacing monsters and the an audIence or hold mterest. Attenbor- Satyajit Ray movies. The dignity is in black natives as sanctified, heroic victims. ough-Briley ceremoniously discard Biko's character, but it also comes from the ac- wife (played by Juanita Waterman), but tors' discovery of a kind of passion and Cry Freedom and Mandela each depict Alfre Woodard as Winnie tandems the home truth they were never asked to play their firebrand black subjects as the sweet narrative of Mandela. Her politicization before. The athletic swing in Washing- patient descendants ofGandhi who admit and toughening after a brutal, groundless ton's shoulders as he walks proves he is no anger and preach peace. This deifica- arrest varies the depiction of black South free of the psychic restrictions that some- tion is dubious and boring to watch. It's African experience. This covers up the times stiffened Poitier. Washington works not the goodness ofsaints or martyrs that's filmmakers' banal dramaturgy, which too against the condescending ennoblement interesting, but their tension and ambiva- often converts flesh and blood struggle of third world characters. His ethnic sim- lence. Instead, our first sight of Biko is a into sententious editorial cartoon pos- plicity (a given in well-written films like haloed visitation, our last sight of Mandela tures. Standing outside, looking on at the Sounder and The Color Purple) is hard is an accusing stare. This tells more about Mandelas' hardship this way, may be won and to be valued above the concep- the filmmakers' need to mythologize than \"diplomatic\"-like Paul Simon in his tion ofBiko as an effigy of the human spir- about the emotionallintellectuallives, and Graceland concert leaving the political it. This condescension ruined Victor subsequent politics, of these heroes. That statements to Miriam Makeba and Hugh Love's debut last year in Native Son and it insight would require mainstream ac- Masekela-but it can feel remote, non- frustrates one's enjoyment of Washing- knowledgment of the ideas commonly committal. ton's ascent to stardom. It cuts short this found in black literature, music, and dra- beautifully supple performance: he is sac- ma or else the zeal of a Costa-Gavras, the Good Brits, Saville and his screenwriter rificed to the pomposity of white liberal- vision of a Pontecorvo. Ultimately it calls Ronald Harwood know how to kowtow to ism, which demands Kevin Kline (less for an anti-racist commitment-an artistic royal personages, but as artists they don't smug than usual) to nourish its self-image. leap offaith by white filmmakers-to give animate the Mandelas quite the way they more and richer screen time to people of did the characters of Shadey and The At best Cry Freedom and Mandela Dresser. If this idealism is the only way m~ght enlighten the politically ignorant or color. they understand black people, then they indifferent, but then only through an ap- When Biko is killed off after the first don't understand them at all; there seems peal to their basic emotions, their abhor- a conscious refusal to imagine black char- rence of brutality and injustice in gener- half hour of Cry Freedom (he's meant to acters as varied, as human as any. It's only ai-not necessarily in principle. Both be a structuring absence like Anna Mag- the luck of casting that Stephen Biko, his films envision a pacifist struggle against nani in Open City), the loss is doubly ob- wife, and Nelson and Winnie Mandela apartheid as the only conscionable route. scene: he leaves behind a dull group of emerge with any distinctive profile. Dan- But that's disingenuous because the characters, thus ending our one chance to ny Glover and Alfre Woodard's stylized methods ofthese films continue the deep- leam what the struggle truly means. At- rectitude and verbal precision is the 80s seated, institutionalized (aesthetic) racism tenborough tries to redeem this blunder black American actor's expansion on the they mean to attack. Only once-an over- with measly flashbacks of Biko and two convention of African stoicism (epito- long scene of the Woods family saying final cou ps: the 1976 Soweto massacre and mized in Brock Peters' towering perfor- goodbye to their maid-do they risk the a list of persons killed by the South African mance as Stephen Kumalo in Lost in the complexity ofgiving racism a civilized face govemment that rolls against an empty Stars, the 1973 film musical version ofCry (which is key to understanding its pres- sky, wafted by the majestic chanting of an the Beloved Country). ence in the modem world, here or African chorus. This crude, tear-jerking ef- abroad). The filmmakers know nothing fect makes you think: These people died But there are awesome surprises in so Attenborough could win more Acad- emy Awards. What about their stories? ® 16
Make Money,Not~.r by Alex Gibney and Anne tral issue in the talks-reflect five years of dends to stockholders. The DGA blamed Thompson these seismic shifts. rising production costs on inflated execu- tive salaries and the astronomical fees paid On July 15, 1987, the Directors The royalty concept arose in an era to superstars like Dustin Hoffman ($6 mil- Guild of America launched the when producers could recover costs from lion for Rain Man) and Sylvester Stallone shortest strike in Hollywood histo- theatrical boxoffice revenues, which used ($12 million for Over the Top). ry: five minutes. The only strike in its SO to contribute up to 90 percent of income. year history, it was a dud end to what had Supplemental revenue from TV reruns or But when a strike seemed imminent, been billed as a time bomb confrontation network feature showings was \"just an ex- the producers collapsed. The settle- between the DGA-which includes 30 di- tra windfall ,\" says film industry analyst A. ment-a five percent hike in wage mini- rectors eaming $1 million per picture as D. Murphy. Today, the inaptly named mums and the concession of a sliding scale well as its quasi-managerial rank and file ancillaries-videocassettes, free, pay and formula for one-hour TV residual pay- production managers-and the Alliance syndicated TV-generate almost one-half ments, which both sides would have of Motion Picture and Television Produc- of all revenues. termed disastrous at the start of talks-es- ers (AMPTP). sentially reasserted the status quo. The AMPTP (i.e., the studios and net- The producers-many of whom are works) claimed that they could no longer Ultimately, the directors united front among the best-paid men in the U.S.- afford to pay residuals because their most had more economic clout than the faction- maintained, ofcourse, they were one step lucrative source of revenue, theatrical box- alized producers. Led by Fox chairman away from the breadline. But more to the office, had flattened out. They demanded Barry Dillerand MeA bosses Lew Wasser- point, they also have upcoming negotia- \"rollbacks\" in directors' residuals (about man and Sidney j. Sheinberg, several stu- tions with the writers, actors and craft un- one percent of gross income). Why should dios were willing to fight, but networks ions, who work less, and are thus much we, they argued, pay directors royalties and TV producers like Lorimar-Telepic- more likely to strike. Hanging tough with even on boxoffice disasters? After all, pro- tures and Aaron Spelling were more con- the DGA in July seemed in order. duction costs-largely due to skyrocket- cerned about their fall seasons than the fu- ing labor costs (lucrative directors' fees ture of the industry. Producer-director Although the issues raised by the strike among them)-are outstripping rev- Terry Carr says the producers picked a are still unresolved, they are vital to the enues. fight with the wrong union. \"It was like continued health of the industry. And the doctors striking in the hospital.\" they aptly demonstrate that the movie The directors' counterargument was business is changing as dramatically as the clear: positively no rollbacks in a booming The producers however, have good steel , automobile, or semiconductor in- economy where last year studio revenues reasons to worry about the future. Ancil- dustries. Residuals payments-the cen- climbed nine percent and Wamer Bros., lary markets are now driving the business. Paramount and Disney are declaring rec- The burgeoning independents-who ord profits and paying handsome divi- produce and distribute movies more 17
cheaply--are making significant inroads projectionist strikes and production shut- their \"real business\" as making movies for I theatrical release. Each new market on the smdios' market shares. Mean- downs. It was a cozy bed: MGM executive seemed little more than an unexpected \"bonus,\" says Murphy, \"like a maiden while, production <:osts are rising faster Nicholas Schenck was caught paying a aunt leaving you $5,000.\" Up-front costs than revenues (from an $8 million average bribe to Bioff for keeping union wages rose with the anticipation of these mar- kets. So did residuals participation. As per smdio picmre in 1980 to the current down. long as the producers could afford to, they paid. It was just the icing on the cake. $17.5 million). The DGAIAMPTP settle- The other unions shared one of the lA's But in the last three years (since the last ment only underscores that the industry basic principles: let the smdios carry the DGA contract talks) the market has shifted radically. Only ten years ago, theatrical isn't ready to scrap the tacit deals in place financial risks, and reap the rewards as boxoffice chipped in 80 percent of film revenues to 20 percent from TV sources. since 1930s; both labor and management long as their members were well paid and In 1986, moviegoers spent $4 billion on movie tickets-and $3.5 billion on video- are now too comfortable with the stams had job security. While the producers cassettes. In the television industry, pay- TV has eroded the networks' audiences, quo to confront the complexities of funda- didn't mind-a writer or director's fee- slashing advertising revenues, while VCR sales undercut pay-TV's potential. mental change. per-movie was under control when it was REVENUES VS. COSTS spread out over a great number of movies Revenues stopped growing, costs con- per year-this didn't stop management tinued to escalate. Entertainment at- tomey Peter Dekom notes that the num- from squeezing labor, or the unions from ber of people buying tickets has \"remained flat for 25 years,\" while average AN INDUSTRY TURNS INTO extorting high wages from the smdios. production costs have increased twenty- fold. Smdios must either cut costs or lace A BUSINESS The smdios reaped the profits and paid the popcom with heroin to produce prof- talent big bucks to stay out of smdio busi- its. To the AMPTP, cutting costs usually meant cutting wages. ness. It was a perfect world as long as the- Today Hollywood's labor and execu- atrical revenues kept growing. tive force is still paid handsomely though smdios are no longer the production fac- While the new Hollywood is a \"busi- tories of the 1930s. And even television is ness\" concemed with merely making starting to change: the local stations are money, economist Thorsten Veblen unwilling to pay the webs' high licensing fees, and high-volume independent TV would describe the old Hollywood of the MIRACLE MARKETS smdios as economically immamre, an \"in- producers like Stephen J. Cannell are dustry\" that manufacmred products. mming to low cost runaway productions from Vancouver and Toronto. The sm- Though Hollywood has always valued dios have mutated into financing, market- ing, and distribution corporations, having Bcommerce over art. The early smdios oom times blew in through American long since shut down the assembly-lines industry in the post-war-era, leading in favor of a contract system, where each were organized like automobile factories, project is independently put together with huge vertically integrated and compart- labor and management to believe, says freelance writers, directors, actors and pro- duction crews. mentalized production systems designed Reckoning author David Halberstam, that The new system rewards its brightest to get the \"metal out the door.\" They every year there would be \"a ten percent stars and talents with the most money- just like baseball's free agency, wherein manufacmred movies from story outline increase in everyone's standard of living, the highest salaries also inflate the mini- mum wages. But peculiar to the movie to release print. Writers wrote in writers' as ifwon in some marathon bargaining ses- business, the dissolution of the smdio sys- tem leaves most of its well-paid middle buildings, cameramen reported to the sion with God.\" In the movie industry, tier talent and craftspeople without job se- curity; paychecks have to be high enough camera department, and art directors adds Murphy, \"Labor negotiations were to tide people over from one job to the found props in the prop house on the lot. like a fertility rite. Management would say These craftspeople didn't work on par- 'Never,' there would be a strike-just ticular movies: they belonged to the sm- long enough for labor's catharsis-both dio. Industrial work rules were instimted sides would settle, and prices would be by management, refined, and expanded raised to cover the wage increases. \" by the unions to safeguard job security. Times changed for most of the coun- The result today is featherbedding: grips try-particularly the automobile and elec- and best boys on movie sets whose only tronics industries-in the Seventies, job is to stick electrical plugs into sockets; when low-priced, high-quality foreign im- highly paid apprentice editors who schlep ports started flooding American markets. for coffee. So long as most films made a In the movie business, the day of reckon- profit, there was no problem. Like the ing was postponed, until very recently, auto industry, as long ~s the market was because everytime it seemed that labor protected, who cared about waste? costs were going to rise faster than . rev- From the early Thirties, labor relations enues, a new market miraculously ap- in the movie industry were bitter. Thal- peared. berg, Mayer, and Harry Cohn were ruth- In 1960, NBC's Monday Night at the less employers. The Academy of Motion Movies opened network TV as a new mar- Picmre Arts and Sciences was originally ket for Hollywood features. Then, in the formed as a \"company union\" that pro- mid-Seventies, Home Box Office-aided ducers could control. by the growth of cable TV and satellite The labor unions, on the other hand, transmission-ushered in the era of pay- were hardly pure. The Intemational Alli- TV. The VCR sales boom in 1982 cleared ance of Theatrical Stage Employees the way for the video cassette market. An- (IATSE) was run by mobster Willie Biof( alysts now predict that pay-per-view will A close friend ofAI Capone hit man Frank be the next ancillary blockbuster. Nitti, Bioff extorted payments from mov- Despite these new markets, Holly- ie executives with threatened nationwide wood labor and management perceived 18
Feature Films from Direct Cinema Limited 1Srolcen Rainbow ACADEMY AWARD Navajo who have already \"A powerful , eloquent , BEST DOCUMENTARY been relocateq into tract devastating documentary.\" houses off the reservation , San Francisco Chronicle FEATURI;: 1986 we explore the tragic and far- reaching effects of this ill- Produced by Maria Florio BROKEN RAINBOW is about conceived program and Victo ria Mudd the Navajo Indians of Arizona , Narrated by Martin Sheen 10,000 of whom are being \"BROKEN RAINBOW speaks 69 minutes relocated by the Federal eloquently for a silent minority Government. Through inter- and .. could lead to reason .\" views with traditional Hopi and Variety Navajo leaders, and with Huey long Hero , populist , dictator , on a platfom of social reform. His portrait of the man and the era, demagogue . HUEY LONG , from programs provided highways, politics and power . Extensive Half life: the makers of the Academy bridges and free schoolbooks at arch ival footag e and A Parable for Award nominatecj films , THE the same time that graft and rec ollections by Louisianans who the Nuclear Age BROOKLYN BRIDGE and THE corruption became an accepted knew Long are juxtaposed wi th STATUE of LIBERTY, captures part of life. Long 's aSI'irations candid contemporary interviews. the rise and fall of one of we re high and his sp~ 'binding America 's most controversial and personality and political machine Flo rent ine Films charismatic political figures . might have taken him to the Whi te Prod uced by Ken Burn s and Hailed as a champion of House had he not been Richard Kilberg Louisiana 's neglected during the assassinated in 1935. Directed by Ken Bu rns Great Depression , Long built hi s Th e deftly crafted film re veals a 88 minutes Color 1985 career as governor and senator complex and comprehensive \"Shocking and powerful. ..a First Peace Prize Isla nds, tiny atolls in the mid- memo rable fi lm .\" David Stratton , Winner 1986 Pac ific . With declassified Variety Berlin Film Festival government archival film and \"A devastating investigation .. con temporary interviews , HALF astonishing contempora ry record Director's Award LIFE pre sen ts a re st rained but film .\" David Robinson , for Extraordinary ch illi ng picture of a cynical London Times Achievement 1986 radiati on ex perime nt on human U.S. Film Festival populations . Its parable is a true Written and Directed by one that haunts our past, present Dennis O'Rou rke 'This compelling and beautifully and future . What ATOM IC CAFE 86 minutes crafted film re veals the effe cts of does for laug hs, HALF LIFE does U.S. nuclea r testing on the for politics and morality. inhabitants of the Marshall las Madres: The Academy Award Aire s, in the Plaza de Mayo. and the painful search to They demanded to know where discover their fates . The Mothers of Plaza de Nomination their missing children were . struggle described in LAS Best Documentary These middle-aged and elderly MADRES contin ues to this day :Mayo Feature 1986 women sparked an international in many countries. The fi lm goes campaign for the release of all beyond nat ional borders to .~ gtSAt:,.·,~\",,:-S Th e year was 1977, the darkest politically \"disappeared \" rem ind everyone of the pl ig ht of persons . LAS MADRES DE LA d isappeared persons hour of military dictatorship in PLAZA DE MAYO now number everyw here . in the thousand s. In th is moving A film by Susana Munoz and Argentina . Fourteen ordinary docu mentary, the Mothers te ll of Lou rd es Portillo their children 's disappearances 64 minutes women began to meet publicly every Thu rsday , risking their lives by marching before the presidential palace in Buenos Isaac in America: A Academy Award past through one of his hig hly The Cafeteria Journey with 'saac Nomination autobiog raph ical short stories. Sashevis Singer Best Documentary It is a film for everyone who THE CAFETERIA is a movin g Feature 1987 ca re s about lite rature , Jewish film based on Isaac Singer's J life and culture, the immigrant story about Jewish refugees ISAAC IN AMER ICA is an experience and maintaining an trying to escape their past in intensely cinematic , penetrat ing exube rant approach to life at post World War II New Yo rk City . and honest portrayal of one of eve ry age . America 's most remarkable Starring Bob Di shy and writers. The fil m offers a rare Directed by Amram Nowak Zorah Lampert opportunity to take a trip with the Produceo by Kirk Simon Directed by Am ram Nowak Nobel-Prize laureate into hi s Executive Producer Mqnya Starr Produced by Kirk Simon 58 minutes Executive Prod ucer Manya Starr 58 minutes For Information contact : ~, ~ Direct Cinema Limited cmema 0 P,O . Box 69799 limited Los Angeles , CA 90069-9976 19 (213) 652-8000 '
Clint Eastwood and Martin Scorsese: back end percentages and defeffed salaries. next. At the same time, above-the-line tal- lion , and the movie itself comes in at the nam, also embarked on a program to keep ent (actors, writers and directors) who, un- industry average of $17.5 million. That's budgets down. And last year, Goldwyn, like their studio predecessors, live in con- $35 million, before marketing and distri- Island and Crown tumed a profit on every stant fear that one flop will kill their bution costs, meaning the movie would film (although not through theatrical box- careers, demand exorbitant fees. have to gross at least $75 million at theaters office alone). before the film 's costs were equalized. If CUTrING COSTS theaters were the only income source, Similarly, one of the toughest deal mak- think of it as 20 million tickets. ers, Disney, under Michael Eisner, guar- A re labor costs really the problem in the anteed an investment group, Silver movie industry? Arcane work rules The blockbuster complex holds that Screen Partners, that all their joint films and staffing requirements certainly inflate the more you load up the cost the safer would cost less than $13.1 million. On The movie costs. But below-the-line union sal- your inflated investment; it ignores the Color of Money, a Silver Screen invest- aries usually account for only 15 percent of possibility of a series of small profits on lit- ment, director Martin Scorsese and star the average movie budget. The rest tle films in favor of betting on big-budget Paul Newman had to defer half of their comes from above-the-line costs which extravaganzas. One reason for this is the salaries. The result? In 1986 the house stock market-which is keyed to short that Disney built eamed record profits. have been driven up by the post-Jaws and profits, not long range retums. A block- Star Wars blockbuster complex. buster for Universal can mean a rapid rise Both Clint Eastwood and Woody Allen in MeA stock. And it doesn't take a math willingly sacrifice high upfront fees in ex- Look at a star package like United Art- genius to figure out that more big-budget change for creative freedom and participa- ists' upcoming Rain Man: Dustin Hoff- behemoths mean higher average produc- tion in undiluted back end percentages of man costs $6.5 million; Tom Cruise, $3 tion costs. Paul Kagan and Associates their movies' revenues. Eastwood's films million; Steven Spielberg, $5 million; $2 notes that 68 percent of the films budget- only cost an average $6 million. Malpaso, million for recently departed director Mar- ed at $5 million or less were profitable, Eastwood's company, only charges the tin Brest, who was pay-or-play; approxi- while only 40 percent of the more expen- guild minimums for his acting and direct- mately $1 million in development costs, sive movies broke even, and only 45 per- ing duties, in exchange for a later 10 per- including at least four (expensive) writers; cent of studio films are profitable. cent ofevery revenue dollar the films gen- and an estimated $750,000 producer's fee erate. for Peter Guber-Jon Peters. Say the On the other hand, small, independent above-the-line costs amount to $17.5 mil- distributors like the Samuel Goldwyn But this approach works because Company who work conscientiously to Eastwood and Allen effectively produce keep production and acquisition costs their own movies, and always make them down, average an 83 percent rate. Colum- with the same studio (Wamer Bros. and bia Pictures' (ex-)chairman, David Putt- Orion, respectively), and Eastwood and Allen are crucial to their studios' longterm 20
V(ROWNERS: YOUR BIBLE IS BIGGER AND BETTER! Whether you just got your first VCR, or you're a bleary- eyed veteran of movies on videocassette, Roger Ebert '5 M(JlJie Home Companion is as important to your VCR as the \"play\" button. The addition of recent videocassette releases brings the total of entertaining, in-depth, full-length movie reviews to 775! In addition, the 1988 Edition also introduces something new: fascinating sidebar essays on the movie industry and movie personalities, written with the wit and style that earned Roger Ebert a Pulitzer Prize. This winter, before you venture into the video store, check with Roger Ebert. $10.95 at your bookstore. Two Weeks in the Midday Sun A Cannes Notebook Full-Length Reviews of 700 Films on Cassette \"SOMETIMES IT CAN BE REALLY EXHAUSTING HAVINGA GOOD TIME.\" - Billy (Silver Dollar) Baxter Film fans will be delighted with this book! Roger Ebert shares his insider's look at the spring movie ritual that is the Cannes Film Festival. And this time he's taken his sketch pad along as . well as his reporter's notebook. Naked starlets splash in fountains while tycoons sign contracts on table napkins. From the newest work by Fellini to Attack of the Killer Bimbos, Ebert captures with charm and insight the wonder and madness of film's most glamorous festival. Two Weeks in the Midday Sun: A Cannes Notebook $8.95 at your bookstore. ANDREWS and McMEEL A Universal Press Syndicate Company America's Most Surprising Publisher Is in Kansas City.
might become something less of a joke, 1 and marketing costs could be held down, if both labor and management could agree on a similar, hard and fast formula for defining breakeven. O ne union that may be crippled in up- coming contract talks is the IA craft guild , which has already suffer~d H ollywood's labor cost-cutting and runaway produc- tion. These runaways don' t hurt the high- paid key personnel-the art director, cine matographe r, or editor-but they take jobs away from the N. Y and L. A. support troops. The AMPT P is using runaway production to force the IA to re- trench on minimums and work rules. And because the IA has so alienated the young but highly skilled non-union tale nt (who te nd to be college educated, non-rank- 20th Century Fox's Less Than Zero: an attempt to carry on Murdoch's union breaking tradition. and-file types) by refusing their cards, the producers have an easy pool of replace- well-being. The inte rnal accounting on M urphy, \"is that the products of the mov- ments. Increasingly, the studios are doing their fi lms stays above-board and frees ie business are all experiments.\" \" negative pick-up deals\" with indepen- the m fro m a take-the-money-and-run Though it's difficult to feel sorry for the dent producers filmin g low-budget, non- posture. And they can afford the financial studios. Businessweek recently noted that IA movies; a producer can simply take a risk of the deal because they get some- six of the country's ten top earning execu- distribution contract to any bank and thing only the biggest stars can get: a per- tives were from the motion picture indus- fin ance his movie. 20th-Centu ry fox even centage of the gross. try. Aaron Spel ling at $25.9 million, was tried to make Less Than Zero as a non-IA More often than not, the stud ios prefer last year's highest paid U.S. executive. film , before the union got wind of it and to grant profit-sharing, or a percentage of The runne r-up, Lee Iacocca, weighed in organized the shoot. \" net\" revenues after costs and distribution with $23 million. T he L.A. T imes' Mi- IA chief AI DiTolla is trying to better fees have been deducted. To industry chael Ciepley reported that Spelling Pro- organize Hollywood's huge craft pool, but veterans however, trad ing pay for profit ductions' total revenues are only $22 1 mil- is meeting resistance within the IA from participation, is like paying you r dope lion, barely one percent of C hryslds. senior members of the union locals who dealer on his assurance that he' ll be \" right Were Iacocca to have taken the same pe r- don' t work enough as it is. Non-union back.\" centage of the corporate take as Spelling, property master Trish Gallagher says the T he industry maxi m today is that a fi lm he would have made $2.562 billion. IA was told by the AFL-CIO two years ago must gross twice its production costs to to organize Hollywood, \"or they' ll let break even. (And even the n there may not someone else do it. Despite DiTolla's be profi ts. Witness, a typical example, cost claims, it hasn't happened,\" she says. $ 14.4 million, earned Paramount more TH E S AC RIFI CE \"There are only two full-time organizers. than $50 million, and still hasn' t shown a T hey have to organize pe r film . Why not profi t.) In addition to 15 percent overhead open up the unions? Why not let anyone charges, the majors take 30 pe rcent of all in who has 60- 90 days oflegitimate job ex- Wfilm rentals as a distribution fee and the n hat's the solution, ifcos ts must be cut perie nce?\" But rank and file are resisting and no one wants to cut them? One Di Tollo's attempts to forge more elastic subtract the cost of prin ts and advertising offth e top. Factor in inte rest and you have possibili ty favo red by some industry ex- contracts-whe re wages and benefi ts rise a recipe fo r profitless movies, no matter ecutives is to establish union wage maxi- and fall with film budgets-needed to what its revenues. For who moni tors these mums as well as minimums. T he C lint make the plan work. marketing costs? Why the studios, of EastwoodlWoody Allen and Disney strat- Hollywood's survival now de pe nds course. egies bear i!11i tation, if above-the-line tal- upon its ability to be flexi ble, to adapt to O n the othe r hand , marketing costs are ent-egged on by agents who make their new economic conditions, and to spend its hard to control. TV time and newspaper livings from escalating fees- sacrificed capital more wisely. That will inevitably space fees have risen at warp speed. the securi ty of upfront payme nts in return call for a more cooperative relationship be- F urthermore, argues Murphy, distribu- for management's concession to share rev- tween labor and manageme nt, like the tion fees are what allow the movie busi- enues and nOt simply profi ts. \"collective entrepreneurship\" called for ness to survive as an ind ustry. If compa- The new low-budget director's pact es- by Harvard political economist and de mo- nies had to survive on the un predictable tablished a provocative salary formula: for cratic advisor Robe rt Reich. Perhaps. But pe rformance of movies, they would be film s unde r $4 million, the DGA agreed to it won' t be until Hollywood gets beat so flu sh one year and broke the next, unable 50 percent salary deferrals to be repaid , badly at its own game-the way Honda et to subsidize the developme nt of new plus a 15 percent pre mium , whe n the e m- <JI. rolled over a fat, inefficient Detroit- movies. \"The diffe re nce between Uni- ployer's total gross receipts eq ual 200 per- that any serious structural changes are versal and Procter and Gamble,\" says cent of production costs. Profit sharing likely to take place. ~ 22
The Encyclopedia of TV Game Shows INTERNATIONAL FILM GUIDE 1987. The Screenwriter's Guide (Updated David Schwartz, Steve Ryan , Fred Peter Cowie , ed . Now in its 24th edition , Edition). Joseph Gillis. For current Wostbrock . This entertaining and fact- the world 's most respected film annual and would-be screenwriters, here is filled reference features over 550 rare now includes a special \"Dossier\" on an up-to-date guide to film and televi- photographs and covers more than 450 Canada, tributes to the Locarno and sion sales with valuable tips on how shows . Each listing includes a brief San Francisco Festivals , plus the usual to present, market, and protect your history, hosts , announcers , celebrities , medley of reports from 59 countries. work. With an annotated list of over show descriptions , chronology and lots 504 pp. Illustrated Paper $14 .95 . 2100 producers, agents, distributors, of amusing anecdotes and trivia. and industry contacts in NY, Hol- Introduction by Mark Goodson . MOVIES lywood, Canada, and Europe. Fea- 600 pp . Cloth $39 .95 tures a new section listing screenwrit- MTARDEE FaOnR ing software plus an interview with a LOUISE BROOKS: PORTRAIT OF AN prominent screenwriter. ANTI-STAR. Roland Jaccard, ed . TELEFEATURE 160 pp. Paper. $9.95. Translated by Gideon Y. Schein . Louise Brooks - the legendary actress who ~~MIN~SERIES Who's Who in American Film Now rebelled against the idolatry of Holly- [Updated Edition] wood to preserve her independence [J~:~ James Monaco, ed . Who did what, and and individuality. Illustrated with ovef when, in recent American cinema. This 90 photographs, this is a tribute to a Movies Made For Television: The Tele- updated and revised edition lists the woman, Louise Brooks; a film, Lulu; a feature and the Mini-Series, 1964-1986 key people who make movies today. It director, G.w. Pabst; and to an era of [Updated Edition] Alvin H. Marill. Up- features thousands of cast and crew German Expressionism . Brooks' own dated to include entries from the '84-'85 members from the past decade in 13 lucid reflections give new insight to the and '85-'86 seasons, this giant volume separate categories - each an al- woman behind the myth . lists over 2000 telefeatures and mini- phabeticallist of names with the title Illustrated. Paper, 160 pp . $19 .95 . series. Titles are listed in alphabetical and date of their film credits . A running and chronological order, each including commentary on today's movies, this cast, production credits , plot synopsis , guide is an invaluable resource for release dates , and notes by the author. libraries , professionals, film historians A comprehensive companion to television and fans alike . viewing. Illustrated . c600 pp . Cloth . $39.95 . Illustrated. 500 pp. Cloth $39.95 Paper $19.95 . WERNER HERZOG. Images at the Horizon. A provocative interview with this important contemporary filmmaker , con- ducted by critic Roger Ebert . - - - - - ---- - - -- - -Filmography. Illustrated. Paper $4.50. - - - - - -- - - - - - - --,.. -- --- -- Hello Zoetrope: o Also please send me your free o Send me the following books . I've catalogue . enclosed the proper amount plus NAME ____________________ $1.50 for postage and handling ($2 .00 for cloth & orders of 5 or ADDRESS ___________________ more books.) Or call1-800-CHAP- LIN (in NY 212-420-0590) . Visa & Mastercard accepted. Thanks . Please allow 4-6 weeks for delivery. _______________ ZIP_______ NY residents must add 8'14% sales tax . New York Zoetrope 838 Broadway Dept. CC New York , NY 10003
Post- odSquad Mary Lambert on the set ofSiesta: arresting images. by Gavin Smith into gifted storytellers and directors of from the excesses and provocations actors). And , they' are all men, and that it sets out to explore and enact- W hat happens when Mary moviemaking remains boystown. the Ken Russell syndrome, bless him. Lambert, a smart commer- It's an exercise in enigma posing that cials and music video direc- Now, if you take a look at the Scott becomes boring because, rather than tor with lots of style and a fe w good brothers' first films-The Duellists and constructing a narrative, it often pre- ideas, gets the chance to make a fea- The Hunger-and Parker's first , Bugsy fers to dissolve into static tableaux and ture film? Would her knack for assem- Malone , what you notice is their lit- stylistic figures . It is, however, also a bling images that arrrest our attention eracy and style . But they are also de- milestone of sorts in the shifting play for three minutes max be equal to the void of emotional con viction or of aesthetics and meaning in Eighties labors of telling a story, working with dramatic impact. They leave you with cinematic hyper-realism. actors, and holding us for 90 minutes nothing. Hugh Hudson 's Chariots of plus? Fire leaves you with something, but it Ellen Barkin plays Claire, a profes- may be a sour taste in the mouth . Ask sional stuntwoman who should be in These questions could have been Hanif Kureishi. Arizona preparing for a skydiving asked of fellow music video director stunt, but finds herself at the foot of Russell Mulcahy (Razorback, Highlan- Mary Lambert is what they call a an airport runway in Spain covered in der , and Rambo III currentl y). They cutting edge talent, and her first film , blood. She's Eve Knieval crossed with weren't because his particular brand of Siesta , is what they call high concept an existential amnesaic, and what fol - epic excess fed straight back into the and avant garde. But don't let that put lows is her attempt to piece together genre movies that spawned it. They you off. If Siesta manages to negotiate the preceeding few days- disclosed to could have been asked of the not-so the Scylla and Charybdis of cult hype us in fragmentary Nic Roeg-style young guns of Brit commercials-Alan and ambition-without-talent dis- flashes, and limned by bursts of brood- Parker, Ridley and Tony Scott, Hugh missals, it may be possible to see it in ing compositions by Miles Davis. Hudson, and Adrian L yne-but perspective: as a small film cleverly weren't because all have kept one foot masquerading as a Big Film about Big In the next ten minutes , which in- in a European aesthetic, albeit an Ideas, gone out of control due to cre- cludes a lengthy expositional prologue often faked one. (Parker and Ridley ative anarchy. disclosing Claire's stunt preparation, Scott have blossomed subsequently overseen by manager-husband Martin It is not, by any stretch of the imag- Sheen, Lambert establishes a very un- ination , a successful outing, as defined Hollywood pace, tone, and rhythm for an Eighties audience. It suffers 24
but loses the audience. Her commer- WE'RE THE MOVIEST!,M cials and promo videos have taught her all about the Incredibly Shrinking At- You're ,!he winner when 'you order the No membership fee, no minimum, tention Span, and she valiantly at- tempts an entirely subtler and more world-famous Mavles Unlimited Cotalog, our no obligation to buy. Just pure entertainment. nuanced visual tempo. The audience biggest and best ever. It gives you unlimited And great value. might stay with it, as they did with Blue Velvet, where they sensed some- access to video entertainment -over 600 Don't settle for runner-ups. Order the world's thing worth waiting for. Unpromis- pages packed wtth fully described tiHes In movies! video catalog today! ingly, Lambert propels her protagonist every category: The Classics (and Not-So- through a series of inconclusive epi- sodic encounters with a circus of un- Onl,$7.95Classics). foreign Alms • family Fare • real Euro-decadent characters, among others, played with particularly man- Incredible Rarities • New Releases • 1000's nerist self-indulgence by Julian Sands. and 1000's of titles available. Nobody has Gabriel Byrne as Barkin's smoldering Spanish former lover is an honorable more- nobody else even comes close! plUS $2 shipping & handling exception, as is Jody Foster, with her glazed weariness, destined for greater Movies Unlimited service Is a winner, too- Catalall Fee. Refunded With 1st Orderl things, who here plays a rich, jaded Brit Brat to a T. But the acting ticks order with confidence from one of America's Like adult movies? Enclose an additional and stylistic clashes effectively disrupt the viewer's ability to connect with the -----------------------------oldest and most reliable videoservices. material-too much indiscipline and self consciousness. Meanwhile, the o Enclosed Is $9.95 ($7.95 +$2 shipping) caSh, central event that the film perpetually $3.50 for our spicy Adult Video Catalog. postpones and withholds is Barkin's si- esta rendezvous with the aforemen- check or money order-North America, APO and MOVIES UNLIMITED tioned Byrne, now a happily married FPO only. Send your new VIdea Catalog. plus man. Unhappily, though, the wife is played by an uncertain Isabella Ros- periodiC updates. NOTE: foreign orders send sellini (inexperienced directors + in- $29.95 ($7.95 + $22 shipping/handling). 6736 Castor Avenue experienced ex-model actors = Big PhiladelphIa, PA 19149 o Enclosed Is $3.50 additional. $13.45 total. Include Cringes). Last Year in Madrid it ain't, but it's your Adult Videa catalog. I am over 18 years Old. the same general bullring. And with foreign orders send $33.45. 215/722-8398 this kind of film, the audience waits for the final payoff, and it better be Name ____________________~~___________________________ worth it. Siesta's payoff is mixed: at once predictable and acutely emo- Address ________________________________________________ tional; in fact, the film's only emo- tional moment. Silly beyond belief Citv____________________________ Stole_________ Zip________ often, and frequently misjudged in terms of dramatic intent and mood, Phone ( S,iesta is periodically redeemed by Lambert's peculiarly arresting images and acute semi-dramatic moments. A product of pop sensibility, Siesta is subject to literally dozens of cheer- fully incompatible and contradictory influences, and Lambert is often only the channel through which those forces reach the screen. She studied at Rhode Island School of Design, grad- uating in 1974, then eventually made commercials for Pan Am and Ford, and later, music videos for Madonna and Janet Jackson. The key here is in the easy passage back and forth between \"commercial\" and \"artistic\" discourses. In music video, these two discourses-advertis- ing and movies-intersect in an effer- vescent display of contradictions. For 25
instance working with Madonna, tion and dime-novel pseudo-decon- that some artists are good at riding the (whom she originally offered the role struction: a meeting of the academic wave or participating in the process. that became Barkin's), Lambert spe- and the hip in a DayGlo Polyester But where does it all lead-to cultural cifically focused on a movies advertis- post-Mod culture. A primary accom- nihilism and philistinism , or cultural ing primary discourse of sexual plishment of this phenomenon (not liberation? The fact is that there's no valorization and power relations that movement) has been the rehabilitation going back. Siesta' s sexual-emotional violence and glorification of corporate culture takes off from; a glance at Like a Virgin and consumerism. Eventually this tric- Siesta, from a certain vantage point, and Material Girl is instructive. The kles down and seeps into every com- used to be the shape of things to problematic of female sexuality and its partment of cultural discourse, so that come-until the future became obso- multiple aspects posed in the former everything that has half a stake or half lete. It (as much as Top Gun or Maur- is then scrutinized, ironized , and my- an investment in culture experiences ice, in fact) is impenetrable because it thologized in the latter. It was never a displacement. The result is cultural was constructed under conditions that just a Monroe pastiche, or even, God meltdown (not melting pot, nothing promote incoherence. It's not that it's forbid, a regular plain promo clip. could be less appropriate a metaphor a great work of intellect. It's just that for cultural misappropriation) . Notions everything is de facto impenetrable and L ambert does not come from the of meaning, significance, organic un- disfunctional , simultaneously with our movie brat generation of filmmak- ity, etc., disappear in the white heat finding it meaningful. The forces act- ers, whose preferred di scourse or in- of mass culture on overdrive. And one ing upon Western culture in the post- stinctive impulse is the quote/ thing's for sure: there's no one at the Mod Eighties call into question our hommage. She comes from the per- wheel--or, if there is , they're totally and the text' s ability to attribute or formance artsy David Byrne-Laurie asleep. \" recognize\" such old-fashioned and Anderson generation, which prefers a terminally unhip, unsexy things as discourse grounded in the ironic ges- No genius is controlling or even meaning, significance, and intention. ture and the intellectualizing of keeping track of this endless sequence trivia-a discourse , in fact, of disfunc- of exchanges, displacements , and dis- In the shifting sands of multiple so- functions : the best that can be said is cial contexts and multiple readings, Julian Sands in Siesta: a case of excess. even the most ostensibly lucid and ar- ticulate (if you like, well-meaning) texts are ultimately capable of render- ing themselves unintelligible. And Si- esta doesn' t even comprehend that. No radical deconstructed text (a totally misused term, deconstruction), it's rather a symptom of a whole series of interpenetrating aesthetic, political, and cultural discourses that perpet- ually subvert or interrupt one an- other. ( And it doesn' t even have Dennis Hopper in it-although we get Grace Jones as a consolation prize.) These symptoms develop whenever a movie gets overloaded and overdriven-here we might mention genres-until it splits at the seams. Siesta isn't over- driven in narrative terms , but it defi- nitely has too much going on and lacks the cohesion to deal with its own se- mantic excesses. There's a perfectly conventional , straightforward story going on in Si- esta, but blink and you miss it. Lam- bert almost manages not to tell it, and does so with lots of style and intelli- gence. This is because she is more in- terested in , for instance, questions of identity and consciousness: how to de- velop a film language that can make narrative an extension or enactment of the protagonist's consciousness. This is not all point of view shots, subjective camera, etc. It's something altogether more provisional and elu- sive that becomes apparent only through an accumulation of effects and a certain heightened style that inform 26
the viewer that what is happening, VIDEO MOVIE how it is experienced, and how reality FINDERS is constructed are only possible be- STAR cause the events are being generated We iocate and obtain any obscure or within the mind of the protagonist- hard-to-find films on video tape. PHOTOS and yet are not answerable to it. A bit like dreams, but only a bit, because We're expensive, but we're very good. One of the world 's largest collections of film it's actually a way of showing how personality photOg raphs, with emphas is on Claire (the perceiving subject) con- 5 Searches $5 & SASE rare candids and European material. Send a structs and is constructed by her own S.A.S.E. with wa nt-list to: reality. Her attempt to re-order past . VIDEO FINDERS reality, amidst a bewildering, surreal P.O. Box4351 , Dept. FC MiltOn T. Moore, Jr. sequnce of present events, is the Los Angeles, CA 90078 Dept. Fe struggle of the mind to differentiate memory from imagination, fact from P.O. Box 140280 fiction. Menaced by Alexei Sayle's D!!.1las, Texas 75214-0280 moronic cab driver, or moving through landscapes of increasing artifice, Claire T·Samuel French's seems entirely the subject of external, HEATRE & FILM unreal presures. But: She is at the BOOKSHOPS same time the producer of these PLAYS and BOOKS on the events and so they refer inwards rather MOTION PICTURE INDUSTRY than outwards. The experiential be- comes solipsistic in a neat folding-in sendfor a copy ofour of the text. FILM BOOK CATALOGUE containing Business ofFiim • Directories • Screenwriting There have been many such con- Screenplays • Directing • Cinematography sciousness-narrative films: Kubrick Biographies & Studies ofDirectors • Editing has made a career out of them, espe- Lighting • Animation • Special Effects cially with Lolita and The Shining; so has Terrence Malick with Badlands Makeup • Acting • more and Days ofHeaven; Alan Pakula's So- phie's Choice was another notable ex- Order by ample of a movie going on inside PHONE: someone's head (Stingo's-the narra- tor). But in most of these cases this (800) 8-ACT NOW (DS) construction occurs within a classical (800) 7-ACT NOW (Calif) narrative framework and doesn't sig- nificantly threaten the Hollywood dis- MAIL: course's status. But it is an order of discourse (prevalent in Fifties Holly- 7623 Sunset Blvd. wood melodrama) absolutely distinct Hollywood, California from the realist point of view film or the documentary objective film, where 90046 the aesthetic is \"passive\" to the point VISA • Me • AMEX of indifference (i.e., the camera doesn' t narrate, it traps). The discourse going When in Los Angeles visit our on in Siesta is, by contrast, as incoh- 2 locations erent as subjectivity: the freeplay-fo- replay of thought-emotion-memory 7623 Sunset Blvd. in human consciousness. Hollywood,California 90046 For all the failings of Siesta, Lam- (213) 876-0570 bert proves that promos are not so much a training ground for producing Mon.-Fri. 10:00-6:00 Sat.11:00-5:00 video drones, adept at slick chewing gum assemblages, as they are a breed- 11963 Ventura Blvd ing ground for post-mod aesthetics and Studio City, California 91604 dangerous intellectual ideas-essen- tially alien or, at any rate safely mar- (818) 762-0535 ginalized in Hollywood grammar and protocol. The drawback is that com- Mon. -Fri. 11:00-10:00 mercials and promos will never in a Sat. 11 :00-5:00 Sun.12:00-5:00 thousand years train people about how to tell a story or work with actors, so that what's on screen doesn't merely 27
T he form that most usually deals with images and events in this manner is of course the music video: a stylized, contrived fantasy, or rather an exploration and meditation upon fantasy. Parasites of pop, music videos are absorbed with questions of repre- sentation and form, and with images of sexuality, glamour, and violence- cultural iconography: they distill, con- dense, and overheat many of the con- cerns of both mainstream and marginal culture in the interests of promotion- selling a record by associative tech- niques. A video doesn' t enhance a song, it problematizes it; and that's half the fun. Music video is the bastard offspring of movies and commercials---':' frivolous, adolescent, provocative. Sie~~a: Ellen Barkin and Gabriel Byrne. What happens increasingly in films, look good but also lives and is dra- and which Siesta fully enacts, is that matically satisfying. Not what post- mod aesthetics value, to be sure, but be articulated. Style, ironized glam- narrative becomes the site for an aes- worth knowing. Sadly, the question isn't that simple. Movies haven't ab- our, subversive self-reference and all thetic contest in which commercials, sorbed commercials; commercials have absorbed movies. And nobody the rest are just as integral to the se- promos, and movies themselves vy for noticed or cared. It's the Eighties. Get hip. mantic problem: style eclipsing mean- meaning, probably. The result of this I n their own inimitable way, the Brit ing, actually becoming a new order of absorption in formal experimentation commercials gang has been a critical factor in the transformation of main- meanmg. and conflict is a postponement of co- stream Hollywood from the fast and loose quasi-experimentalism of the We do things with style in the herence, and therefore unified signif- Seventies (with its aesthetic of the hand-held camera, justified lighting, Eighties: we have designer violence a icance. Form ceases to be utilitarian, low-key style, and naturalism) to the hyper-realism and razor sharp \"so- la Scarface, Miami Vice, and Arnie ceases to be instrumental in fixing phistication\" of the Eighties-where the steadycam, the long lens, and a Schwarzenegger; we have designer meaning. Instead it releases it. Siesta heightened, more-real-than-real styli- zation predominate: constructing real- acting ala Mickey Rourke, the best of will be labeled a pretentious mess, and ity as something to be packaged, styled, and consumed . That is the a whole generation of actors who worry I can see why. But there's lasting aes- thrill of recognition in Flashdance , which was a milestone in the year about how they look instead of about thetic value here because Lambert, when everyone was talking about MTV. That aesthetic ' has conquered what they're doing in a way that the unlike Russell Mulcahy, doesn ' t aban- movies and established a stylistic he- gemony. Nothing can step outside of stars of Hollywood's Golden Era never don or modify her music video sensi- that. Your favorite film from last year was almost certainly made under this did . Looks great, but not much to .do bility and go for the big score. regime. If, say, Ridley Scott uses a hand-held camera and talks about real- with how people really behave. It's not Instead, rather like Julian Temple, ism, as he does in Someone to Watch Over Me, or Jonathan Demme makes a question of covering up for a lack of whose Absolute Beginners was an hon- Something Wild in an eclectic, idiosyn- cratic style-or, better still, David anything to say so much as a glitch orable, flawed , Quixotic enterprise, Lynch makes Blue Velvet-they are not radical, they cannot extract them- caused by ideas and language now ap- she chooses to playoff the different selves from the prevailing filmmaking ethos-whil::h has never been and can' t pearing to us in their true light; i.e., formal demands and conventions of vi- as not comprehensive or adequate to deos and films . Music video can and dealing with experience. So best to often does dismiss continuity of space stick with the mainly aesthetic or fan- and time; it arrests movement with tastic-get the style right, and what slow motion and freeze frame; it you're saying will take care of itself. shrugs at the question of dramatic or Siesta is about someone trying to lo- intellectual justification for camera cate meaning through reconstructing movement, lighting design , and cov- the reality of presence and absence. erage; and it liberates itself from a pri- It's about the recovery of significance mary pillar of realism, the through a return to its (in this case, synchronization of picture and sound . physical) origin. The irony is that it's Siesta partakes of this flamboyant de- an interior, self-generated quest. It familiarisation of film grammar with its derives from a consciousness that can't fragmentary style and use of the strong totalize, can't see the outside because image as a device for arresting narra- it's inside. It's unable to realize its true tive rather than advancing it-tech- circumstances , an affliction we all niques that have been around for a share. The final twist provides a much while, to be sure, but that seem to be needed ending (i.e., the illusion of making a return to mainstream aes- closure)-but it isn't much of a sur- thetics. prise, given the film's 90-very odd Ironically, the cutting edge com- minutes worth of surrealist interven- mercials directors are busy divesting tions and logical non sequiturs. themselves of the more alienating de- 28
familiarizing effects of their commer- they were responding to only passes SC'lifJ~ - F~ cials-bred style (just as Laurie for realism. Realistic compared to BOOK CLUB Anderson is making her first commer- cial, finally conferring hip artsy legit- what? How to Write/Type/Sell/Protect imacy upon the oldest media It's a hyper-realism , something Your FilmlTV Script! profession). Adrian Lyne has said, in fact, that he is quite consciously trying more stylish and more pleasurably Scriptwriting & Filmmaking books and reference to overcome the numbing of narrative consumed, but heightened and aesth- works for the Entertainment Industry Professional by style that notably afflicted his eticized--constructed. The surface in- 9112 Weeks. Unfortunately, he still has dications of meaning-story, message, FREE INFORMATION storytelling plus ideological problems cultural relevance-are there, but not in the sexual politics department: really here. They're amorphous, in- Write: SFBC, 8033 Sunset Blvd ., #306C what else would you say about Flash- tangible, ideological things: phantoms West Hollywood, CA 90046 dance, 9 112 Weeks , and Fatal Attrac- inhabiting the haunted house of cul- tion? Ridley Scott's Someone to Watch tural discourse. Siesta's ghost dance Over Me is probably the first thing he's makes more (or less) sense all the done from the heart that hasn't had storytelling problems, and it is living time. ® proof that the hyper-realist aesthetic does not have to undermine narrative: EYE it mainly does so when the filmmaker gets lazy. So come on down, brother POPPING Tony (Scott), still out there in the long-lens DMZ, moving from the sty- 1:at's The Perfect Vision @ -the High· End video journal for discrimi- listic excesses of your Top Gun to the nating viewers. We understand what video is about-creating the theatrical Fun, Love, and Money ethics of Bev- film experience in your home. Our goal is to drive forward the state of the erly Hills Cop-outs . Yes, the Eighties video art. have finally proven that it really is pos- sible to make films about making We'll tell you why James Dean doesn't translate well to video. It's pan-and- money, with every thing else subor- scan, the process used to cut his Cinemascope films to fit the TV screen. In dinated. When we _pay to see Beverly Issue 3, John Belton's Pan-and-Scan Scandals explains how this process can Hills Cop II, meaning has been re- destroy the director's intentions and the actors' performance. Why have so duced to participation in boxoffice rec- many wide-screen epics of the fifties made it to tape or disc without their ord-breaking: we sense it and embrace original stereo soundtracks? Ron Haver tells you, in his Saga of Stereo, how the glamour. It is the glamour of a style Warner Brothers' destroyed many of its original stereo tracks. And Fox Film that derives from the aesthetics of fanatic Joe Caporiccio describes how he lobbied CBS I Fox for stereo on the commercials, which are all about mak- South Pacific laser disc-and won. ing money and so it displaces \"the story\" to an over-determined and un- In our section called Pure Television, Part Two of Dan Sweeney's surround- der-valued aesthetic/ideological site. sound roundup examines the Aphex and Shure decoders; and Proton's 625 This is radically different from any- High End monitor is in review. High Definition television is defined for you thing that went on in the Forties, or at last, but when will it become a marketplace reality? Software reviews even the Seventies. Something similar include laser discs of Ruthless People, Room With A View, et.al.; and Alice did take place in the Sixties, but not Artzt tells videotape prospectors which version of Chaplin's Gold Rush is so systematically. And it is far more worth digging for. significant and far-reaching say, than when films turn to directly addressing All this and more in Issue 3 of The Perfect Vision @ _ Just $22 for four the corporatization of society and so- quarterly issues ($35 US outside NA)_ Order by credit card at 1-800-222- cial ethics (Robocop is the obvious ex- 3201 or 516-671-6342_ Or send check or money order to: ample). These films may well think they're about that subject, but narra- V~~1'.:)=lf-\\!rJ~ @> Box 357, Dept_ F, Sea Cliff. NY 11579 tive and thematic discourse, our much-treasured primary-meaning car- riers, do not transmit meaning in a way that makes sense anymore. Think of Pee Wee Herman and everything will become clear. Internalization of meaning comes through a visceral, intangible consti- tution of the viewer by aesthetic means. Think of all the people who said Platoon was great because it was so realistic: the film made them buy the idea that it was realistic, but what 29
KENNEDY Hollywood on overdrive, you awake should we run it? Cannon Films has midst a seminar on Scottish TV or a bankrolled two first-time director (Continued from page 77) films, Harry Hook's The Kitchen Toto and Lezli-An Barrett's Business As the flimsy suspicion of anti-party ac- workshop on anything from apartheid Usual. The first is a capably-told yarn of a young black boy's divided loyal- tivities. The cast immediately divides to animation. This year Edinburgh ties during the Mau-Mau uprisings in 1950 Kenya. Should he pledge himself into Those Against Him-led by the also introduced \"case studies\" on in- to his countrymen's cause or stick by the white family that employs him? stern party secretary (\"People call me dividual movies (like Peter Greena- The story thumps along, but the pol- itics are a mite muddled and the char- a Marxist granny,\" she says, sur- way's The Belly ofan Architect and Alan acters more than a mite stereotyped. Must colonial wives always be throt- prised)-and Those For Him-in- Clarke's Rita, Sue and Bob Too); these tled with repression as they sit taut over their knitting? Barrett's film, alas, cluding the German boss. The witch looked at script genesis and produc- is nearly all stereotype. Glenda Jack- son dons a Scouse accent as a Liver- hunt proves entirely baseless, but tion history, and then for discussion's pool clothes shop assistant who gets the sack and then brings the pickets proves handy as a catalyst for political sake threw them to the lions. The out, claiming sexual discrimination. Result: not so much a movie; more a satire and a prescription for China to lions gratefully tucked their napkins 90-minute soap box address. slough off a few tough old grannies of in and set to. Some movies were more The best two British films from non- the old guard. like lions thrown to the Christians: the TV sources were Clive Barker's Hell- raiser, from New World Pictures, and Across the way, Taiwanese director sound of Calvinist self-rigJ:1teousness Joan Ashworth's 18-minute The Web, from the National Film School. Hell- Edward Yang has made, in The Ter- getting its teeth into permissive he- raiser is a purulently enjoyable romp about an unhappily married housewife rorizers, a kind of free-form fiction donism was especially loud in discus- (Clare Higgins) who takes her gentle- men pick-ups up to the attic to murder film. He interweaves the lives of three sions of Clarke's film. them. Each corpse, and its refreshing eight pints of red stuff, then helps to different couples, strangers to each The wonder of British cinema today reconstitute her dead lover, who dwells in the attic and wanders around other at the outset, in a mixture of is that for once there are enough films in a cadaverous state howling for rein- carnation. Each victim and his nutri- accident and accidie. Anonymous around worth discussing. Three ents further restore him to recognizable human shape. The phone calls, unhappy marriages, months after Channel4's film supremo movie is red in tooth, claw, and imag- ination, and as hermetically frighten- veiled emotional blackmail, and ter- David Rose got guerdoned at Cannes ing as any film since Psycho. rorism (political and domestic) are for his part in transforming U. K. mov- Joan Ashworth's brilliant short from the NFS is a piece of miniaturist Gothic symptoms of a big-city anguish that ies-a jury of Godard, Fellini, Berto- drawn from the world of Mervyn Peake. Gaunt-featured animated almost, but not quite, forms itself into lucci, and others awarding him the models-who look like cabbage-patch dolls from your worst nightmare- the hard lines of a thriller. Yang's fans newly struck Rossellini prize-good prowl through dark alleys and cob- webbed castle corridors. En route they try to hoist him high with comparisons British films are still coming out of the do unspeakable things to each other with knives, machetes, or looks. The to Antonioni: the same eerie trompe factory. And Channel 4 is still the main faces and movements have a staccato, deadpan hilarity. The sound effects- l' oeil cityscapes, the same drifting an- conveyor belt. Greenaway's film and groaning doors, clumping or susurrat- ing feet-have an echoey, Beckettian omie. The analogy'S deserved, but Clarke's, and Robert Smith's new The menace. And the whole film is like watching an army of homunculi Yang is also an original, especially in Love Child, were all funded or part- emerging from your deepest id and capering a dance to your destruction. a national cinema that apart from him funded by Britain's most cine-literate A tough act to follow--even for and Hou Hsiao Hsien (of A Time to TV network. Edinburgh. Love and a Time to Die), has been Smith's film shows the best and -HARLAN KENNEDY chiefly notable for the potboiling worst of this new Tv-generated cin- squawks and flourishes of the martial ema. It is \"free-form\" in just the way arts film. the choice Oriental pics above are, Japan is also melting down conven- leaving the audience to draw the lines tional narrative to produce films that between the scattered narrative dots. are freer, weirder, and ,more unpre- This time they form a Bill Forsythian dictable. A savant at Edinburgh said pattern of non sequitur and melismatic that the theme of Masas hi Yamamoto's wit: as a young accounts clerk (Peter Robinson's Garden was the color Capaldi, of Local hero) goes about green. Certainly trying to pip down its dole-age Britain wondering if there is fugitive plot and purpose is like trying more to life than his 9-to-5 job, his to sculpt with water. And what genre, troublesome live-in grahny (Sheila pray, does Juzo Itami's Tampopo be- Hancock), his girlfriend, and his un- long to? Comedy? Cookery? Quest realized dreams. The characters are movie? Edinburgh aud'iences came out pungently likable or wittily dislikable, visibly salivating, with steaming noo- like Capaldi's archly supercilious boss, dles printed on their retinas, suspect- who is full of career advice like \"You ing they had seen the first film to need a bijou little killer streakette.\" pioneer a new pornography--eating But The Love Child also evinces the (Andrea Dworkin: Stop reading cook- worst of the new telly-powered pics: books!). In the age of AIDS, will food their visual undernourishment. It movies now start replacing blue mov- clumps from one cramped character ies? grouping to another. And whenever the camera does pull back to show us T alking of free for.rh, unde.r director panoramic Britain, all we see is poor Jim Hickley, EdlOburgh IS fast be- lighting and grainy texture. coming a free-form festival. If you Meanwhile, the jury is still out on stumble into the wrong cinema, in- the question \"Is there movie life in stead of your planned session watching Britain beyond Channel4?\" And if so, 30
ee Itlzen Bernardo Bertolucci on location in China The Last Emperor: coronation in the Forbidden City, before the revolution. by Tony Rayns arrived. Some of them are playfully prac- Am I allowed to have more than one child? ticing kung-fu kicks, just to stay awake. But every time we'reon the verge ofa new T he trouble with spending an entire Many of them are dying for a smoke. breakthrough in Anglo-Chinese under- day in and around the Hall of Su- standing, an angry assistant director pokes preme Harmony is that you're not There's a lot of backsliding by lunch- his head over the balustrade and threatens allowed to smoke. It's no real problem for time. The extras start playing hide-and- them with court-martial if they aren't back me, since I have the option ofslipping out seek with the assistant directors, finding in position in ten seconds. to another section of the Forbidden Ci ty, secluded corners of the vast courtyard outside the Palace Museum area, but it's a where they can furtively light up. I keep Bernardo Bertolucci, meanwhile, does real strain on the ZO()() young members of running into small groups of them and indeed have his camera pointing the other the People's Liberation Army. They have striking up conversations over shared ciga- way. He and his cinematographer, Vit- been co-opted as extras for the second day rettes. I try explaining in my faltering torio Storaro, have spent all morning work- running. They've had their heads shaved Mandarin that filmmaking is always like ing out a difficult Steadicam shot, and and fake pigtails glued to the backs of their this: nothing happens for 95 percent of the they're still not quite happy with it. The skulls. They've been there since 6:30 in time. And when it does, the chances are scene is the biggest in the entire movie: the morning. They have to wear the heavy that the director will have his camera the coronation of the infant Pu Yi as em- robes and uniforms of Manchu courtiers turned away from you. Once they have peror. The script calls for the three-year- and soldiers, which means that they're uflburdened themselves of their com- old child to first wet his pants, then scamp- baking alive in the September sun. They plaints about the heat, the boredom, and er through the ranks of courtier~ on the haven~t been needed for a shot since they the shaving oftheir heads, these guys have Upper Terrace outside the Hall of Su- all the usual questions that Chinese put to preme Harmony, lured by the tantalizing foreigners: How old am I? Am I married? sound of a chirping cricket. The extras in 31
More history lessons than tutor (Peter OToole) and pupil (John Lone) bargain for. the shot are ready, the lights are ready, the way he's pacing aro und that be trays a cer- working d irector, he needs a hit. Steadicam operator is ready, the cricke t- tain impatie nce and anxiety. T he ques- It's a sign of the times that the E nglish wrangle r is ready. T he re's a steady stream tion on everyone's mind is the same : Can of grum bles from the kneeling actor who Storaro shoot it to match the othe r shots in inde pe nde nt producer Je re my Thomas has the cricket concealed in his robe (he is the scene, take n in bright sunlight? Be rto- Victor Wong, best loved as Uncle Tam in lucci asks for a couple of takes, the n calls it (The Shout; The Great Rock'n'Roll Swin- dle; Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence and Wayne Wang's Dim Sum, but also promi- a day. T he re is roar of del ight fro m the nent in Year of the Dragon and Big Trou- extras, followed by a stampede to be first in three N ic Roeg movies) could raise $23 ble in Little China), but he gets it right ev- million for Be rtolucci to make an e pic in the line to turn in wigs and costumes to the C hina, while Be rtolucci's two othe r proj- ery take. Everything hinges on the ward ro be de partme nt. A man fro m British ects of the past fi ve years- adaptations of cooperation of the ew York C hinese brat television buttonholes the fil m's produc- who is playing the infa nt e mperor, and on tion designer, Ferdinando Scarnotti , and Dashiell Hamme tt's Red Harvest and Al- the ability of the Stead icam operator to fol- low hi m smoothly as he darts through the asks if he thinks they got the shot. \" It berto Moravia's J934-had proved un- ranks and picks out M r. Wong as the bankable . Thomas raised the cash from a sou rce of the wonderful chi rping. All of looked pre tty dark to me,\" says Sca rnotti consortium of banks headed by the U. K. Storaro's came ras are wired fo r video, and d a rkl y. me rchant bank Hill-Samuel, set the film so key personnel cl uste r around video up as an Anglo-C hinese co-prod uction, mon ito rs to check the shot afte r every What is Bertolucci doing in C hina? and the n offse t as much of the de bt as pos- take. It is well afte r three in the afte rnoon Watching him ride Storaro's camera sible by pre-selling to distributors in the before Be rtolucci is satisfied that he has crane in the middle of the Forbidde n C ity major markets. It's probably the only way the shot he wants. (so-called because it was a closed world for that such a movie could eve rget made. If a the many centuries that it served as the \" major\" had been producing, the negotia- By this time the light is beginning to go, seat of C hina's e mpe rors), you feel that tions with the C hinese would have take n and so the re's a frantic rush to get the sec- may be he's simply getti ng off on playing three times longer and the cost could easi- ond (and last) shot of the day: a wide-angle DeM ille for once in his life. But the truth ly have been th ree times highe r. T his of the whole scene from the back of the is almost certainly more prosaic. It has way, too, Be rtolucci can give the fi lm the vast courtya rd. T he 2000 extras and horses F re udian eleme nts he wants (wait till you on the Lower Terrace will at last be seen been five years since his last movie (The see what he makes of Pu Yi's toile t train- on came ra, even if the fin e r poin ts of their TragedY,ofa Ridiculous Man)and 15 since ing); it would never have been possible wigs and costumes are not. P roducer Je r- without an e nlighte ned and intelligent e my T homas main tains his usual eq ua- he last had a palpable inte rnational success prod ucer. But the pre-sales do impose two nimi ty, but the re is some thi ng about the important limitations: a running time of with Last Tango in Paris. And so The Last twO and a half hours and a delivery date by Emperor, his film about Pu Yi, comes at a this past Septe mbe r. crucial point in his career. H e has won his place in film history, but, like any othe r 32
Billions of Emperors by Bernardo Bertolucci Ea~h time ~ woul~ go inside the For- Aman of the people: John Lone listens to the party line from Bertolucci. bIdden CIty dunng the shooting of my film, The Last Emperor, I had mous literary scholar, snobby and conde- his own survival. That Behr well demon- the feeling I was witnessi,ng the miracle of scending, who deemed Pu Yi uncultured strates; but he takes it further. the taking ofyet another palace, the Win- because he had only read Dickens and AL- ter Palace. ice in Wonderland, I sensed across the re- The elective affinity between his book sponses that most people held him im- and my film exists in our mutual under- I looked at the faces of Chinese tourists mensely sympathetic. In their eyes, he standing of this character as a hinge. who by the thousands were contemplating was not only the Emperor, he had been- There is in both works a kind of point of this architecture, this silence, these empty above all, in his final incarnation-the no retum between history and fiction. spaces. Huns, Manchus, Hakkas, Mon- very link between the image they held of gols had come from every comer of this gi- an emperor and the Emperor himself. Cocteau once said: \"I've always pre- gantic country and bore the stare of inno- ferred mythology to history. History is cent curiosity in their eyes. What were What I liked in the book by Edward truth that becomes an illusion; mythology they after? I know what they found: noth- Behr is that he understood and was able to is an illusion that becomes reality.\" ing more than the emptiness of the Em- show this sensibility, this complexity that peror. existed between Pu Yi and the Chinese Conceming Pu Vi, the last Emperor, people. Objectively, of course, one can one cannot ignore the mythology. Because the image of China has say that Pu Yi was a coward, an opportun- weighed heavily on its destiny, it is not ist, a vacillator terribly preoccupied with Originally in French, this passage is taken from the in- an image that can evaporate ovemight. troduction 10 Edward Behr's The Last Emperor, (to The Emperor himselfwas a model image. be published by Balllam, November 1987) alld was Year after year, the supreme peasant trallSlated by Laurelll Bozereau. would symbolically plow the earth, har- vest, and also be admitted to the inside of Pu Yifor Beginners sians at the end of World War II and hand- the Forbidden City, into this temple of the sky, into this place still known today as Aisin-Gioro Pu Vi, the last emperor of ed over to Mao's Communist government \"the center of the Universe,\" taking upon the Qing Dynasty, came to the throne in 1949. After ten years of imprisonment himself the burden of the entire Chinese in 1908 at the age of three. He was the and \"re-education,\" he was given a hum- people. youngest son of the Manchu nobleman ble job in Beijing's Botanical Gardens and I posed the question: Who was respon- sible for this architecture, these sculp- Prince Chun, and was chosen as emperor pushed into marrying a nurse. When the tures, these frescoes? I had to find the aes- thetic key to this sacred place, where I had by the Empress Dowager Cixi on her Party demanded an exemplary autobiog- been given the privilege to film. People responded merely with dates-Ching deathbed. He was deposed in the 1911 raphy from him , he worked with a team of Dynasty: 1644-1911. At last I understood why the artists behind those marvels had revolmion, but remained confined to the political ghomvriters to produce the two- remained anonymous. The artist, with acrobatics utterly Chinese, was the Em- Forbidden City (in the heart of Beijing) volume From Emperor to Citizen, pub- peror himself. That is, everything gravi- tated around him, everything flowed back until 1924, oblivious to everything hap- lished in 1964. He died of cancer in Octo- to him, to his empty throne. Thus, every- thing had already been absorbed within pening in the outside world. Finallyevict- ber 1967, while China was in the throes of the collective consciousness long before the coming ofcommunism. ed by the warlord Feng Yuxiang, he, two the Cultural Revolution. The Emperor is the total expression of wives, and a large entourage took refuge in From Emperor to Citizen closes with the collective: incapable of being an ex- ample, Pu Yi never was able to become the Japanese legation in Tianjin. He be- these words: \"'Man' was the very first the Emperor. It is a paradox that only emerges toward the end of his life, when came a Westemized playboy and toyed word I learnt to read in my first reader, bm as the model citizen, after years of \"re- education,\" he had somewhat regained with the idea of emigrating; his first wife, I had never understood its meaning be- his image as emperor-the invention now of Mao, who intended to multiply this Wan Rong, became an opium addict. fore. Only today, with the Communist model citizen by millions and, thereby, to create billions of \"emperors.\" In 1931 the Japanese invaded Manchu- Party and the policy of remoulding crimi- I wanted to discover-for me itwas like ria, proclaimed it the \"independent\" state nals, have I learnt the significance of this a game-what the Chinese people, of all sorts, thought of Pu Vi. Apart from a fa- Manchukuo, and installed him as its pup- magnificent word and become a real pet emperor. He was arrested by the Rus- man.\" 34
Whv China? Be rtolucci hesitates, as if that the subject is \" in synch\" with what he plan was to make a mini-series for T V, but takes to be momentous changes in C hina. this was dropped when co-write r E nzo he ne~er confronted the q uestion so di- Ungari died sudde nly), the n the re were \" I've been lucky to be here at th is pre- more trips, more meetings, more scripting rectly in all the months of preparation fo r cise time,\" he says. \" In the two years since sessions until we finally had a screenplay. I fi rst came he re, I've seen the faces of the It took a year to write. It had to be ap- the shoot. people changing. Faces were the fi rst proved by the C hinese, but they passed it \"A couple of years ago it was the Far things that fasci nated me in C hina. I went with no alterations except for a few small to the Forbidden C ity on my fi rst or sec- factual poin ts. T hey provided Pu Jie (pu West, because I wanted to do Red Har- ond day here, and what struck me most Vi's brothe r) and Li We nda(ghostwrite r of vest. All I've done is switch from the Far was not the place (although it is extraordi- the \"autobiography\") as advisers. T he nary) but the faces of the C hinese tourists communication proble m was daunting, West to the Far East. 'Why C hina?' Be- from the countryside-the farmers, the cause it's not Italy. I find it difficult to be in peasants- staring at the home of the em- but I'd overcome it on Merry Christmas, love with the present situation in Italy. perors. I felt it must have been like this Mr. Lawrence, and so I knew it could be The Italian present doesn' t need-or whe n the Winte r Palace was stormed. done . It would have been impossible if doesn't want-to be re presented on Now, in 1986, I see a kind of relaxation screen at the mome nt, at least not by me . writte n on people's faces. T hey know the C hinese themselves hadn' t wanted to Because back in '68 I was fascinated by they won' t go back to the nightmare ofthe the theatricalelement of the C ultu ral Rev- C ultural Revolution. My worry now is that do it. But they did want to do it, and so olution ... by that idea of Utopia. I was they' re walking toward something that none of the difficulties was insupe rable. It never involved with the pro-C hinese looks like the American Dream. The moveme nts in E urope, although all my whole question now is: Will Deng Xiao- just took a long time to plan it. frie nds were, starting with Godard and ping and his people be able to stop consu- \"Everything had to be brought in , and Bellocchio. In fact, I think I joined the merism from inte rrupting an otherwise Italian Communist Party specifically to be unbroke n cultural tradition? I don't know, it's hard to even bring a videotape into maybe they' ll be able to invent a kind of China. It was hard to get permission to use against the pro-China people.. . . Any- third way, something between socialism non-native C hinese for the main roles, but and capitalism. \" it was finally accepted because the film how, all I can remembe r knowing about had to be in E nglish. The major hurdle C hina at the time was that it was a nation y ou can tell from the way Be rtolucci was getting permission to use the loca- where revolution started in the country- talks about it that this movie is not go- tions. I was particularly nervous about the side and spread to the cities. And I can re- ing to be a searching political analysis of Forbidden C ity; I knew that it was the member being struck whe n I heard that C hina in the 20th centu ry, although it's heart of the movie from the production the last C hinese emperor hadn' t been ex- obviously going to have a strong undertow standpoint. We finally cleared it, and ecuted but was working as a gardene r. of revolutionary romanticism. The more we' re the first fore igne rs who have been That's all , just a flashback. he says about C hina, the clearer it be- allowed to shoot the re. \" comes that Bertolucci turned to C hina to \"I didn' t come across Pu Vi's book until keep alive a faith in old Left-humanist T he C hinese view of the negotiations, id ea ls. leaked to me by a fri end in the upper 1983, and I reread Andre Malraux's Man' s echelons of the film industry who must Fate [La Condition Humaine]around the Je remy Thomas e nte red the picture sadly remain anonymous, is that Je remy right after Be rtolucci's first visit to C hina. Thomas is the smartest overseas producer same time. I came to China with both He sits in his makeshift office in Be ijing that they have so far had to deal with , and books in my head , accompanied by two Film Studio (it's Tuesday, and he must be that he drives a hard bargain. The heads of write r friends. It took less than one month the only person in C hina with copies of the C hina F ilm Co-Production Corpora- London's Sunday pape rs) and remembers tion are appare ntly still kicking the m- to get the basic agreement to do The Last how he got involved. selves foragreeing to accept one important Emperor. The C hinese refused to do payme nt in C hinese currency rathe r than Man's Fate. At first, they said they didn' t \"The directors I want to work with are people whose work I admire. Bertolucci is dollars just a few months before the Ren- know the book, that the re was no transla- high up on that list, and I' ve been trying to minbi was devalued by 20 percent. Thom- tion. F inally they admitted that the mate- work with him for a number of years. H e rial was still too touchy. For them, the came to me after anothe r project fe ll as is right, of course, that the project quarrel between real-life leade rs in the th rough, handed me the two volumes of pushed th rough because the C hinese side strike was still sensitive, and it was a story Pu Vi's autobiography, and asked: \" Do wanted it to. China wanted the hard cur- of the defeat of communism. I tried to ex- you want to ride this tiger?\" It was appar- re ncy, the prestige of the director, and the plain that all workers in the West fa ll in ent that the re was a film to be made as high international profile the film would love with C hinese communism because of soon as I looked at the photographs in the bring them. It he lped , too, that the sub- this book, because it's such a romantic sto- books. An emperor crowned at the age of ject was politically acceptable . Around the ry of revolution. They smiled at me and three, who died as a gardener during the same time, the Co-Production Corpora- C ultural Revolution! Whatever else the re tion made one of its wisest decisions whe n said they really thought I should do The was in the books, I knew that this was Last Emperor. . .. \" some thing incredible to film. it turned down Tai-Pan on grounds of politics and taste. It never does to unde r- And so he re he is, doing it. In one \"There were va rious trips to C hina to sense, Bertolucci has covered this ground get the pe rmi ssions. I raised some money estimate the continuing importance of before. His movie 1900 also spans 50-odd to sta rt writing the screenplay (the initial politics in China. For instance, every time years of 20th-centu ry history and charts that Be rtolucci's name comes up in the co- the decadence of the ruling class and the rise of the workers. That movie was re- production contract for The Last Emperor, leased in an e lection year in Italy, at a time whe n it seemed that the Italian CP might, it reads: \" Bernardo Be rtolucci, me mbe r of for the first time , win power. But Bertoluc- the Italian Communist Party. .. .\" Even ci's days of militancy are probably over. the C hinese think it's funn y, but it helps He sees this as a movie about an individ- to have it there in black and white. ual's potential for fundaine ntal change, and he's making it now because he senses 35
,• become an extre mely unfashionable word in De ng Xiaoping's pragmatic new C hina, 8ertolucci and OToole: bringing illumination to the Forbidden City. and the C hinese haven' t yet come up with a viable alte rnative. In Hong Kong or During the long process of scripting the est colors, because it was both a protecti ve Taiwan you'd call a waitress \"Xiao jie\" film , the biggest challe nge facing Be rto- womb fo r him and a kind of prison. The n, (miss), but that still seems a little too bold lucci and his eventual co-write r, Mark the more we go into his story, the more we for C hina. For the mome nt, the working Peploe (who also happe ns to be his broth- discover new colors, new chro matics. compromise is \"Shifu\" (lite rally \" maste r,\" e r-in-Iaw), was deciding how to structure a word respectfully used to address a the film . T hey settled on a flashback \"On top of that, the re's a lighting con- teache r or spiritual guide). It's no less ab- structure, using Pu Yi's years in the \" re- cept. I tried to compare knowledge with surd in C hinese than it sounds in E nglish, education\" prison as a framing device. light. In the Forbidde n C ity, he is never but the C hinese use it anyway. Such are T his allows the m to dip into Pu Yi's earlie r exposed to di rect sunlight, he is always in the strains of change and mode rnization in life selectively; it also gives Be rtolucci the pe numb ra. At this point in his life, he is C hina. advantage of being able to shoot the movie still shie lded me nta lly fro m the outside more or less in seq ue nce. \"Whe n you do a world. L ate r, the more he lea rns fro m his T he re's no doubt that the surface of ev- movie about a man's whole life,\" he ex- tutor RJ [Pete r O 'Toole ], the more we eryday life is going through inte resting plains, \"you have to see and feel him grow- sho uld feel the rays of the sun reaching changes as C hina drags itself into the late ing up. I'm using four actors to play Pu Yi him . G radu ally, a fight develops be tween 20th centu ry. The re are new fashions in at diffe re nt ages, and I have to shoot in se- light and shade, just as yo u have a fight speech, dress, and le isure activities, and q ue nce to get the overall deve lopme nt of within you between con cious and uncon- the re's a feeling of growing prospe rity in the characte r right. We shoot 15 weeks scious. In the Manchukuo part of the sto- the air. It's even possible to hail cabs in the he re in C hina, with one week of travel , ry, whe n he's set up as a pu ppe t of the Jap- street in Beijing these days, although and the n we do the pri son inte rio rs last, in anese and drea ms of re building his the re's still not much chance of getting a the studio in Rome. We have 120 people e mpire, the shadows almost overwhe lm dri ver who knows the street names. But in the crew, so doing the inte riors in E u- the picture. It almost goes back to whe n C hina doesn' t really move at any funda- rope re presents a huge saving.\" he was very young. The n, whe n he's in me ntal level. Any realistic, informed ap- prison, he thinks back over his life. And praisal of the culture can only conclude Be rtolucci proves reluctant to discuss the more he unde rsta nds, the more the that it re mains in large part as monolithic his conceptio n of Pu Yi's developme nt in light and shadows come into balance. He and unchanging as it was 2000 years ago. detail , and it's d ifficult to glean much fro m should e nd up in pe rfect balance be tween The one incontrove rtible change this cen- watching hi m direct e ithe r three-year-old light and shade and in a balanced colo r tu ry is that the C hinese no longer defe r Richard W u (who plays the infant Pu Yi) or spectrum . I only hope we ca n achieve it! \" apologetically to fore igne rs. In that sense, coy-about-his-age John Lone (who gets the radicals of the Twenties and their the lion's share of the role: Pu Yi fro m 18 to Is C hina changing, as Be rtolucci likes to Maoist successors were right: C hina has 62). And I didn' t try asking Lone about think? The question comes back to mind stood up. the challe nges of the role, since I'd had a as I sit in a hotel coffee shop with C he n taste of his Kidsfrom Fame ego in H ong This view of C hinese culture as essen- Ko ng a few months before. The person Kaige, the young director of Yellow Earth, tially unchanging, needless to say, contra- most willing to discuss the film 's aesthe tic dicts Communist Party orthodoxy, which strategies turns out be the cine matogra- the film that launched the \" new wave\" in holds that the e ntire country made a deci- phe r, Vittorio Sto raro. C hinese cine ma. Be rtolucci has cast him sive break with the past in 1949. Be rtoluc- in the film as an acto r, partly to express his ci's film is rooted in the Party version: it's \"T he main idea he re is that a man takes solidari ty with C he n's gene ration of film- drawn from a book ghosted by Party a kind of journey th rough his me m- make rs and partl y, he says, because \" he is hacks, and it hinges on a pe rsonal faith in ory, re-examining every mome nt of his very handsome, he has the face of the the poss ibili ty of real change. But much of life. I tried to visualize that in te rms of the e te rnal C hinese warrior\". what I watched be ing shot for the film has color spectrum . I thought that each part of a very diffe re nt thru st. Whatever else, the his sto ry should be symbolized by one We' re talking about C he n's past and fu- movie is in love with the mystique of C hi- ture projects whe n it becomes necessary na, is suffused with the textures, rh ythms, type of colo r. Fo r example, his years in the to attract the atte ntion of the waitress. colors, and sounds of a very ancie nt cul- palace are in 'forbidde n' colo rs, the warm- This would have been simple a few years ture-everything, in fact, except the lan- guage. And the film confirms that Be rto- ago; you would simply call \"Tongzhi!\" lucci is still as romantically attached to Fre udian conundrums and existe ntial rid- (comrade), the all-purpose word for ad- dles as he is to dreams of revolution. This is an inte rpretation of Pu Yi's life, not a dressing anyone in C hina. But tongzhi has me re illustration. Be rtolucci's film aims to strike a balance be tween his faith in pe rsonal and social revolution (which happe ns to coincide neatly with the Party line) and his first- hand response to what he calls the \" mys- te ry\" of C hina. The re may be more peo- ple in China rooting for him to strike that balance than pe rhaps he suspects. ® 36
ection Notes on the . ..
lender Sam Ornitz. During the heyday of the Popular Front in Hollywood , it seemed as if everyone was left-leaning-and Bright tells the story of a visit to free jailed labor Comrades agitator, Tom Mooney, and of a dinner in San Francisco with Ornitz, Lincoln Stef- fens, Theodore Dreiser, and James Cag- ney. The transcribed passages come from an unfinished documentary called Tender by Pat McGilligan women victimized by it, will be screened Comrades, culled from 50 hours of inter- repeatedly on national public television. views with 20 blacklisted movie people. Portraits by Alison Morley Already, that film, shown in Los Angeles The highlight of the documentary is foot- T his year marks the 40th anniversary at Tony Bill's, at the AFI, and at the Writ- age from a dinner party reuniting Holly- of the blacklist-or, more speci- ers Guild, has audiences on their feet wood progressives of that era at a hilltop fically, four decades since 1947, the cheering and weeping. Frank Lloyd Wright structure in Los An- geles five .years ago. From all over the There seems to be a bottomless desire year of the secret sessions of the House to reconcile the facts, the context, the world these old friends came-from Eu- Un-American Activities Committee ramifications of this dark-and shining, rope and Mexico, from New York City (HlJAC) that led to to an industry-wide for there were heroes as well as villains of and the East Coast, from (it must be add- purge of motion picture progressives, the the blacklist-hour. For many, it is a sub- ed) reclusive Southern California obscur- gifted and ordinary of Hollywood alike. ject that has never gone away, or grown ity and nursing homes-to a dinner host- The Hollywood Ten and those who stale, or been adequately documented. It ed by veteran character actor Lionel clawed their way back to prominence are is important to understand this history- Stander and director Martin Ritt, and the famous names. But many others never not just for the old cliche of learning histo- filmed for posterity. recovered their lives or careers. Literally, ry in order not to repeat its mistakes Having spent two years working on thousands of people suffered in privacy (though that is certainly part of it); not just Tender Comrades, locating, persuading from stress'and broken families, reduced to understand the decade of the Fifties, and filming the interviews with blacklist- income and job harassment; many left McCarthyism, the Rosenbergs, and Ike; scarred and blacklist-proud survivors, I Hollywood, and many more left the Unit- but as a window onto the present-day. can say that the film's producer, Ken ed States, never to return. How did the nation ever end up cradled Mate, and I were amazed at how many The anniversary will be rnarked by in the arms of Ronald Reagan, a bad actor people there are who were blacklisted. news stories, special events, and testi- and, as the Screen Actors Guild president, And we realize that we only scratched the monials, as well as the usual controversy a cheerleader of the blacklist 40 years ago? tip of the iceberg. Many names fell over a richly-com plicated turning point in How did the unholy alliance of those through the cracks and are not mentioned our cultural history. times-the mob, the union bosses, and in the histories; many people were not The \"name-namers\" will have an ar- the Republican Party-carry over into the mentioned in public testimony, but were ticulate spokesman in director Elia Kazan, Eighties? How did the guts get ripped out damned by the lists or by word-of-mouth. who as Group Theatre guru befriended of the subject matter of movies, and how And we leamed what a wonderfully comic and professionally nurtured many people did that foster the vapid and violent film story the blacklist is, as well as an ultimate- later doomed by his testimony (among climate of today? What is the legacy of this ly tragic one. Each person's story is indi- others') to the living death ofthe blacklist, particular holocaust of the intelligentsia? vidual-they may not have ever even His long-awaited autobiography is due to This special section features first-per- met the person who fingered them-and be published soon. Perhaps the most illus- son reminiscences. There have been sur- yet the sum of the parts is this terrible trious/ignominious of the \"friendly\" wit- prisingly few memoirs to come from the tapestry. nesses, Kazan has never been loquacious blacklisted generation, and few published Many of those photographed and inter- or patient with inquiries about this epi- oral histories. This situation may be reme- viewed even five years ago are dead sode. died, sometime soon, by two \"I-was- now-actor Sam Jaffe, actress Karen Mor- UC LA in Los Angeles and other film ar- there\" accounts that are excerpted here for ley's husband Lloyd Gough, Hollywood chives will be hosting retrospectives of the first time. len members Lester Cole and Alvah Bes- motion pictures written, directed , pro- Joan SCOtt, the widow of Adrian Scott, sie, John Wexley (a Warners screenwriter duced , or acted in by blacklisted film art- one of the Hollywood Ten, writes from a and Brecht's collaborator in Hollywood) ists. These will provide an opportunity to woman's vantage about living pseudony- and Allen Boretz (co-writer of Room Ser- ponder whether the best of these creaky mously under the blacklist and in the vice), producer Hannah Weinstein. Many classics are still \"subversive\"-and of shadow of her husband-while working, others have died in recent years, including course they are, especially if your idea of ironically, for one of the kingpins of the Albert Maltz, Lillian Hellman, Joseph subversive is being pro-labor, internation- right-wing cabal, that avuncular anti- Losey, Waldo Salt, and Carl Foreman. alist, pro-civil rights (or civil liberties), or Communist, Walt Disney. Nowadays, the Old Left of Hollywood just plain intelligent and humanist. (P.S.: John Bright, one of the secret founders only meets at funerals. Blacklistees also wrote the best Abbott of the Communist Party in Hollywood But in the coming months they will and Costello comedies.) and an Oscar-nominated screenwriter in meet again on these pages as, beginning A new documentary, Legacy ofthe Hol- the Thirties, contributes an excerpt from with this issue, FILM COMMENT pre- lywood Blacklist, which examines the his memoir about the relatively unsung sents a series of articles on the people and blacklist through the experiences of four paterfamilias and mensch of the Old Left, the issues of the Hollywood blacklist. 38
deposited twice in two different prisons, one in Virginia and one in Tennessee, 1 think it was. We were sitting in the back seat, and Herbe rt, all the way from Wash- ington to Texas (laughing), was giving a lecture to the two gentlemen in the front seat about what our case was all about, about what the American Civil War was all about, about what the Russian Revolution was all about, the American Revolution , the French Revolution, and so on. And I was lying in the back trying to go to sleep. Anyhow, we get booked into the pris- on. At least fifty wetbacks were also being booked in that night. The place was al- ways full of them because they preferred Alvah Bessie to be arrested in the United States rather The only one ofthe Ten to have served as a than live in Mexico where they couldn't volunteer in the International Brigades in make a living for their families. Then we the Civil War in Spain. (Ring Lardner 1r.'s came up before a prisoner who's taking t brother died there.) Oscar-nomineefor his stuff onto a typewriter and asking name, Ben Barzman and Nonna story contribution to Objective-Burma address, age ... religion. I came first. I Barzman in 1945, Bessie, a novelist before his so- said, none. When Herbert came up and journ in Hollywood, moved to San Fran- they asked about religion , he stood up Husband-wife screenwriter-novelists. Ex- cisco after being released from jail, straight, straighter than usual, as straight as iled to France by HUAC in 1949, they lived , worked lights for the Hungry \" i\" night- a soldier-he was in the National Guard in in Paris and Nicefor 27 years. Ben Barz- club in San Francisco, wrote The Symbol, Califomia-and said, \"I AM A JEW!\" 1 man had collaborated with director 10- afictionalized life of a Marilyn Monroe- thought, oh Christ. The next day we both seph Losey on the thoughtful anti-racistfa- type actress, as well one ofthe best mem- got Hebrew Bibles in our prison cell. ble The Boy With the Green Hair in the oirs of the blacklist period, Inquisition in At any rate, Herbert was put in the cell U.S., and abroad he continued working Eden. next to me, and we had a lot of opportuni- with Losey, 1ules Dassin andfellow black- Bessie: I first got to know Herbert Bi- ty to talk. At one point he said to me, \"You listees. Returning to the U.S. after 1976; berman in New York when we were both know, 1 think you behaved very badly on the Barzmans wrote apopular novel with a in the Theater Guild play Faust by Mr. the way here from Washington ... \" I said, Hollywood backdrop, Rich Dreams. Goethe. His wife Gale [Sondergaard]-I \"What do you mean?\" He said, \"You re- Ben Barzman: It's more important don't know if he was married or not at the fused to talk to the two officers who were for a writer than, I think, for almost any time-was in it; she was the Queen of the bringing us here.\" 1 said, \"Every time other creative person, to be where he feels Witches in the Walpurgis Nacht scene. I they asked, 'How are you, Bessie?' 1 re- himself at home, and understands the thought she was gorgeous, and I knew 1 plied, 'I'm alive.' \" I said, \"Look Herbert, people completely. French was not a lan- didn' t stand a chance with her because she in my opinion, on this trip 1 was in the guage that 1spoke, and although 1became was going around with him. hands of the enemy, and my only obliga- very fluent in speaking it, we were never At any rate, I didn' t like him on sight. tion was to be a gentleman and to say 'yes able to really penetrate French life in a He always wore Ed Pino's Lilac Vegetal sir, no sir, and thank you sir.' \" Then he way in which I felt I could then write about after-shave lotion. My father had had this. would say, \"Well, look at you now, you're it. I therefore disliked the odor of it im- standing against the wall of the cell now Nonna Barzman: Even so, I feel the mensely. Herbert was always a pompous here, leaning against it, slouching. You exiles were very fortunate in that the ass, and we used to say in Hollywood, don' t even stand up straight.\" 1would say, blacklist and the McCarthy period was de- \"Herbert is an ass, but he is our pain in the \"I never was in the National Guard, but 1 structive for many careers, families, lives. ass.\" But Herbert, as I said in my book was in the war in Spain. We didn't stand If we hadn't gone abroad, we'd have [Inquisition in Eden], would die in pieces up straight there either. The Germans stayed provincial screenwriters on Sunset for what he believed in. The man was were very good at standing up straight. \" Plaza Drive, and what it really meant was enormously self-sacrificing. He went out But I want to tell you one more story. the world opened up to us and we met the on a limb and did a great job of organizing He and Edward Dmytryk were tried be- most wonderful people and were involved the whole defense of the Ten, up until we fore a judge who took a much less impor- in the most exciting ideas of our time, 1 all went to jail. And 1grew to like him basi- tant view of the case and gave them six guess. We met Sean O'Casey, Joliot-Cu- cally because he was a man of principle, a months and a $500 fine instead of a year rie, and Picasso-who embraced, who man of great courage, a man of enormous and a thousand . So he was let out at the kissed us, who greeted us as long lost ingenuity and imagination. end of five months for good behavior. We brothers .. . But I had the misfortune of being in the were sitting in the [prison] yard before he BB: . .. as fellow exiles ... same jail with him. We left Washington was going to take a bus into Dallas and NB: ... and said, \"I am just like you. handcuffed to each other in the back seat then fly home. You are just like me.\" It was very moving. of a car driven by a Texas marshall and a He said to me, \"Alvah, if there was any Everywhere we went, we were welcomed detective. All the way from Washington to way I could do half of the rest of your sen- as the best of America. Texarcana, Texas; on the way, we were tence , 1 would like to do it ... but 1 39
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can't. I asked.\" I said, \"Who did you before I did, established a little house in so delighted-she was only seven years ask?\" He sa id, \"M r. Hubert, the parole the valley, and had a walnut farm. When I old-her father was famous, on televi- officer.\" I said, \"Did you really?\" He said, came out, he looked me up again and he sion, which was her goddess. I said, \"Oh \"Yes.\" I said , \"Well, thanks Herbert ... I was my buddy. He wrote a couple of thank you, that's wonderful.\" Then, believe you would.\" Yet I found that pret- plays; I read them , criticized them, ad- within a few minutes of that I got a phone ty hard to believe so, when I saw the pa- vised him on them. Actually, I advised call from a prominent attomey, Martin role officer, I asked him if Herbert Biber- him not to get them put on. He did, they Gang, saying, \"I can get you outofthis, all man actually offered to serve three were flops and they hurt him a lot. This you have to do is listen to me,\" and so on. I months of the rest of my sentence, and he back-and-forth went on for a great many said , \"No thank you, not ifit has anything said , \"Yes, but I had to tell him he to do with naming anybody or taking an couldn't do that. \" years, though Berkeley was not in the oath of any kind, forget it. Not me.\" group ofpeople that used to come to Com- Allen Boretz munist meetings in my section. I never The next day I went to work. But be- saw him at a meeting. fore I did I went down and bought myself Broadway playwright of the classic com- one of those black tin lunchpails and I edy Room Service, which Boretz always Anyhow, in Hollywood they recog- painted on it \"8-0-M-B\" in very big, insisted was unrecognizable as trans- nized the fact that Berkeley was a man of thick letters. I walked in the gate and up formed into a motion picture vehicle for no great talent. He had some talent ... but the main drag and everybody started run- the Marx Brothers. In Hollywood, Bor- ning away from me. This nut is coming in etz, supremely witty and intellectual, was a , .. no Trumbo, let us say. He was not with a thing called BOMB! Maybe he's much-in-demand gagsmithfor the likes of :ven a me, come to think of it. really got one! I'd been named and they Bob Hope , Groucho Marx, Abbott-Cos- were off me, anyway. The only guy that tello, even, for The Girl From Jones He had been employed at Metro-Gold- came to shake my hand was a prominent Beach, for that unlikelyJunnyman Ronald wyn-Mayer, and in an economy drive they Hollywood director, Richard Brooks, God Reagan. Offered a half-million-dollar wanted to get rid ofthe lesser writers. One bless him. He shook my hand right out in contract at MGM to make aJuLl confession day he came walking into my office with front of everybody. ofhis political past, he refused. \"I spent a this memo in his hand , crying! \"What's wlwle night thinking about it and trying wrong, Martin?\" \"They want to get rid of That night we went to Chasen's and with my clever Jewish brain to find a way me. \" I said, \"How do you know?\" He nobody would talk to me. They ran away out of this impasse,\" he recalled. \"I felt said, \"They gave me a Laurel and Hardy from me. We sat at our table, my wife and like a rat running around in some kind of picture to write. They know I can't write I, all alone. enclosure-no exit, no entrance, nothing. comedy. What atn I going to do about it? I As idealistic as I am, money has a great can't just walk in and say I don't want to do John Bright power-but finally, I had to give it up. \" . this picture. It will give them an excuse to His last film credit was in 1949. get rid of me.\" I said, \"Martin, I'll tell you Novelist-playwright-screenwriter, in Hol- what I'll do. I'll write the script for you.\" lywood since 1930. Co-wrote five seminal Boretz: When I was the hot kid on He said, \"What do you mean ... ?\" I said, filmsfor actor James Cagney, among them Broadway, I had a number of toadies. \"I'll write the whole script. It'll take me, The Public Enemy, and many others, in- Martin Berkeley was a man who was rath- maybe, ten days. You'll walk in and hand cluding She Done Him Wrongfor Mae er weakly handsome, I would say, tall, them the script. I want to treat those lousy West. A founding member of the Writers blond, with a kind of Teutonic face, blue bastards to a little medicine of their own. Guild, Bright was also one ofthe original eyes. And he had the same agent I did in It' ll bea lotoffun forme to do it. \" He said, \"secret four\" members of the Hollywood New York, so we met in my agent's office. \"Okay.\" So I did write the script and he section ofthe Communist Party. To avoid When he found out who I was, he hastily took it in to his producer-a guy named a HUAC subpoena, Bright emigrated to gathered up my plays and read them and Bob Sisko Now Sisk knew me from the Mexico and worked under the pseudonym became my toady. He followed me wher- Theater Guild in New York, and he said \"Hal Croves.\" Today, he resides in HOL- ever I went. He wanted to understand to Martin, \"You didn't write this. This is lywood, where he is completing his auto- who I was and what I was and how I came not your style. Tell me the truth about biography. to write like that because, even though he this. \" And finally pinned him. Martin was an actor, he had ambitions to write. gave him my name. Bright: When I arrived in Hollywood, there was no left-wing movement at all Now, Berkeley went out to Hollywood Bob sent for me. He was very compli- that I was aware of. It was a bland climate mentary. He said, \"I have never heard of a of largely not caring about anything but man doing a thing like this before. Why making money and buttering up one's did you do it?\" I couldn't tell him why I did it ... that Martin was a buddy, a com- rade, a Party member. I couldn't do that. So I told him that I didn' t have a good feel- ing about Louis B. and I just wanted to have a little fun, see. I had little use for the number ofwriters who gOt screen credit on pictures. Martin Berkeley repaid me very nicely by naming me to the Committee as a Communist. I was in my apartment in Hollywood .. . I was working for 20th Century-Fox ... and my daughter came running in and said, \"Oh Daddy, I just heard your name on television!\" She was 42
ego. Jean Butler, the writer ofmany prime-time Chodorov: Radicalized is a big word The Communist Party attracted me, television episodes and daytime soaps, is (laughing) ... I can't pretend I was ever the widow of Hugo Butler, former MCM radicalized, but I was ... like everybody originally, because it was the only organi- screenwriter (A Christmas Carol, Huckle- else, angry and frustrated at the helpless- zation in the country that cared and did berry Finn, Edison the Man, etc.), who ness that we all felt we were in [in Holly- something about what I believe is the also collaborated with Jean Renoir in H01- wood in the 30s]. I became angry at my great cancer in the country-racial preju- lywood, and as a blacklisted exile in Mexi- studio [MGM] and at all the sUldios who dice. The Socialists didn't do anything co, wrotefilmsfor Luis Bunuel. Joan Scott kept on insisting that business as usual about it, certainly the Democrats and Re- (on the right) , the widow ofAdrian Scott, must go on in Europe and that it was none publicans didn't do anything about it. But a writer-producer (Murder, My Sweet, of our business. It was unthinkable to me the Communist Party did. Comered, etc.) who was one ofthe Holly- that Louis B. Mayer, who was a Jew, wood Ten, has also written prolifically for knew what was happening in Germany By 1934 I was pretty well established as daytime and nighttime serials. with the Jews-especially after Crystal Nacht-after that terrible night that sig- a writer in Hollywood, and I was also look- Joan Scott: One of the often repeated naled the smashing of all Jewish shops and assertions about the left, on the televised so forth throughout Germany. And the ing for a political home. I had worked in hearings, was that in meetings of the concentration camps . .. Unthinkable to the campaign of Upton Sinclair [who was] Screen Writers Guild, or the actor's union , me that he would still insist nothing was running for Govemor [of California], but I or whatever, that the Communist mem- wrong, everything was OK. Well, I and was unfulfilled and unhappy. Then a man bers would be instructed to seat them- many other people just looked around for appeared on the horizon named Stanley selves in the hall in the shape of a dia- things ... I joined the Anti-Nazi League, Lawrence, with credentials from the gen- mond. This was always being put forward the Spanish Refugee Committee, every- eral headquarters of the Communist Party by right-wing people. The purpose of it thing that held out ... some promise of in New York. He told me and my partner, was supposedly, if the Communists yelled action. Bob Tasker, that the national Party had against somebody speaking or if they decided on the organization of a Holly- wanted to applaud somebody, apparently Actually, I don't know whether I joined wood studio section which would not be the diamond formation made it sound and the Party or not, because later on when I answerable to the state or the county, but look as though there were many more peo- went to get my passport back after it was only to headquarters in New York. I, ple for or against a certain issue. The same taken away, the man said to me, \"Do you Tasker and two other people became the people would claim that the way the Com- deny being a member of the Communist first four members of the Hollywood stu- munists got control of an organization was Party?\" I said, \"Well, what is a member of dio section. We established a direct link- to outwait the rest ofthe good citizens who the Communist Party?\" And he said, were getting tired at night; the Commu- \"You belong to this thing and that thing age with New York, and Commissar V. J. nists would hang on doggedly until one in and this thing and that thing and this thing the moming, then all the left-wing mo- and that thing.\" I said, \"Well, I guess I'm Jerome, the cultural head of the [U.S.] tions would be put up and passed. Most of a member of the Communist Party.\" I Party, came out to advise us. And John this, I think, is stuff and nonsense. mean, I don't know, it was very loose. But Howard Lawson took his position as the I tell you that I think there were very few indigenous Hollywood person that was The concept of cells, for example, was diehard Communists [in Hollywood]. the head of the studio section. very striking and new to any left-wing peo- ple I knew. They didn't know they were Lester Cole In that sense the Hollywood studio sec- in cells. Where this term came from tion had a kind of privileged status, be- ... possibly the Soviet Union? It was not a Prolific \" B\" scriptwriter and outspoken cause we had the potential ofcontributing Hollywood concept, the word cells. It was political activist, Cole was a founding a great deal of money to Party coffers on something very European. When people member of the Writers Guild. Along with the one hand, and of possibly influencing first heard a witness say on television that Ring Lardner Jr. ofthe Hollywood Ten, he the political flavor of motion pictures on he was in this or that cell with so-and-so, suffered the irony of serving his prison the other. As a matter of fact, the Holly- the people I was watching with would tum term in the samefederal correctional insti- wood studio section was ofvery real mone- and say, \"Were you in a cell? No ... \" This tution in Danbury, Connecticut as former tary value to the Party nationally, because was apparently a kind of romantic notion Chairman ofHUAC, Parnell Thomas, who it contributed more money in actual dol- that people were somewhere in a base- lars than any other section of the country ment lighting bombs. except for Washington D .C. Edward Chodorov Jean Butler and Joan Scott Playwright (sometimes in collaboration with his brother, Jerome Chodorov) and Warner's screenwriter (The Mayor of Hell, etc.), Chodorov became a quality producer at MCM. Typical of the many ''fellow travellers\" ensnared by the black- list, he was an active progressive who nei- ther joined the Communist Party, nor as willing to condemn it for the titillation of HUAC. After 1951, he worked exclusively in the theater. 43
was convicted oftaking kickbacksfrom his ed man, he managed to get a peek at a dos- staff. Cole worked as a short order cook in sier they had of me in the offices of the at- the 1950s, later wrote Born Free and other torneys for the major movie producers. I movies pseudonymously, and lectured at waited for him in an outer office while he colleges. An unregenerate member of the examined the dossier. Finally he reap- Communist Party (perhaps the only one of peared ... pale and shaken ... and he his Hollywood generation to remain so), said, \"I'm going to tell you something, but Cole was the film critic for The People's this is absolutely confidential.\" I said, World at the time of his death. \"Well, what is it?\" Then he acquainted me with the serious charges against me. Cole: Back in the 30s and the 4Os, we nesses] placed career before honor. I think The first was that I had made speeches to it's that simple. The need to work is very recruit members of the Screen Writers believed, we people, I say, of conscience, strong. And particularly in the arts, you Guild. The second charge was that I at- and I believe mostly of talent too, writers know, it's your oxygen, it's your life. And tended foreign films regularly. They had particularly-we felt we had something to they suffered. I know they suffered. taken down the license number [of my say which was important to people. Some- That's a continuing pain because these are car], just as they had taken down every thing about life, something about the so- guys you loved. Lee Cobb was one of my word of the speeches I made. The third cial organization of life. We believed that closest friends. I loved [Elia] Kazan. I serious charge was that I had been seen in film is a wonderful way to say something loved [Clifford] Odets. And this ... it a Hollywood Boulevard bookshop buying that would help the lives of people. Cer- hurts. a copy of The Nation. That was 1936, and tainly I felt that. And although there were that was just the beginning. Them were many defeats, I kept fighting for that. I Edward Eliscu and Jay eleven of us who were blacklisted then, wrote-in collaboration or alone-36 to Gorney mostly people in the Screen Writers 38 stories which were credited. Probably, Guild, and that blacklisting, ofcourse, was among blacklisted people, only Trumbo Screenwriter-songwriter Eliscu was, just a bucket-dousing compared with the equaled me. Some of them, three or four along with Ben Barzman and Jay Gorney, tidal wave of hundreds of more people en- pictures were, I felt, of social value, of im- one ofthe movingforces behind the ' 'Meet gulfed later during the McCarthy Era. portance. the People\" political revue that galva- nizedHollywood in the early 1940s. Song- Sam Jaffe Being cut off from my craft was more writer-producer Gorney wrote the music than a financial loss. I loved movies. I to the Depression anthem \"Brother, Can The stage and screen character actor who loved seeing agood motion picture, and if You Spare A Dime?\" and, among other so memorably portrayed the ancient Lama I wrote it, I loved it even more. I wanted things in Hollywood, produced early Shir- in Lost Horizon, the title role of Gunga the work... but more than that, I always ley Temple vehicles. When Gorney was Din, and the Oscar-nominated criminal felt that if! could write what I wanted to summoned before HUAC, he regaled them mastermind of The Asphalt Jungle, Jaffe write, I could get to more people through with a song set to \" The Bill ofRights.\" He was reduced to teaching math and board- the screen than in any other medium. was blacklisted and never worked in mo- ing with his sisters during the blacklisted tion pictures again. Fifties. A lifelong non-Communist pro- Jules Dassin gressive who refused to cooperate with Eliscu: In 1936, I was working as a HUAC, Jaffe survived to make a comeback After a promising start as a dynamic, screenwriter, and working quite steadily. on television as Dr. Zorba in the ''Ben Ca- slice-of-life director (Brute Force, Naked Suddenly, I found that I couldn't get ajob; sey\" series. City, etc.), Dassin was forced abroad by no one would hire me at any of the studios. HUAC testimony. A shoestring periodfol- My agent suspected there was something Jaffe: There were signs in the casting lowed, with suspense gems Rififi and He odd about this, and being a well-connect- rooms that anybody who was on any of the Who Must Die, followed by Never On lists need not apply. In movies, agents Sunday, Topkapi, and many others, all were told not to present your name if you European productions. Still active, he re- were on a list. The agents wouldn't come sides in Greece with his wife, the Minister right out and say so because it would im- of Culture and former actress, Melina pair their own relationship with the Com- Mercouri. mittee. It was a most unfortunate peri- Dassin: I think they [cooperative wit- 44
od ... a witch-hunt period. What we underestimated was the direct Fellowships You see, in our country a label changes connection between the Cold War abroad available and repression at home. Looking back on to study everything. You take a bottle of cham- it now, it just seems very obvious. Ifyou're film at pagne and instead put \"piss\" on it, and going to call on people to give their lives in New York people won't drink it. Labels are a terrible a fight against Communism international- thing, and they tried to smear me with the ly, you can certainly raise logically the University's label of \"Communist,\" which I never was. question of why we should allow Commu- Tisch School Not that I had anything against Commu- nists or Communist sympathizers to ex- of the Arts nism or Communists ... I couldn't care press themselves domestically. There was what anybody else was. You did what you a logic to the reactionary position that we Each year the Willard T. C. thought was the right thing. Some people underestimated. Johnson Foundation considers were joiners and others weren't. I was not applications from emerging a joiner or a Jonah. I believed in doing I do think there was a fundamental mis- filmmakers for two $10,000 what I felt would help the advancement of take made in the defense of the Ten. fellowships for study at New good in this world, and I hoped I did what Their stand that they were defending the York University's Tisch School was right. Constitution was justified. But their fail- of the Arts. One is available to ure to identify themselves as Commu- undergraduate students; the nists-those of them who were---certain- other to graduate students. Iy let the liberals who had been led to believe that they would identify them- We are now conducting a selves if they were Communists, off the national search for filmmaking hook. It gave them a rationale for desert- students of exceptional talent ing the ship. But it was a ship they were and promise. Candidates will be sailing on too . .. not just the Reds. In de- judged on the basis of creative serting the ship, they really allowed them- work, academic standing, and selves to drown. You know, the liberals leadership potential. suffered as much under McCarthyism as the Communists did, in that they lost their For more infonnation and an freedom to write liberal scripts, even application, contact Dean Elena though they themselves were not black- Pinto Simon, Tisch School of listed. the Arts, New York University, 721 Broadway, 7th Aoor, Paul Jarrico -\\ ( New York, NY 10003; (212) 998-1900. Reputedly second-in-command (to John \\ ,..-:;l. (Be sure to indicate undergradu- Howard Lawson) of the Hollywood sec- ate or graduate level.) tion ofthe Communist Party, screenwriter Sol Kaplan and Lee Grant Jarrico has artistic credentials as well as Applications must be received no later tireless radical zeal. Oscar-nominee (jor Composer-arranger Kaplan scored Salt of than January 15, 1988. the Ginger Rogers trifle Tom, Dick and the Earth during the blacklist era (his son Harry), Jarrico also wrote the much-ma- is director Jonathan Kaplan); and actress- New York University is an affirmative ligned Song of Russia, a fact on his vitae director Lee Grant, who was Iwminated action /equal opportunity institution. that is perhaps balanced by the more en- for an Oscarjor her role in Detective Sto- during Salt of the Earth, a militant verite ry in 1951, was blacklistedfor a decadefor labor film which he produced. The latter, refusing to testify against her first hus- brought forth in the midst of the band, screenwriter Arnold Manoff. Since McCarthy era by the collective effort of returning to regular work in the early blacklistedfilm personnel, remains a testa- Sixties, Grant has won fH/O Oscars, in- ment to the faith ofthese privileged Holly- cluding a best supporting actress nod for wood' 'comrades\" in the grit of ordinary Shampoo, and a directing award for a people. documentary. Jarrico: We underestimated the Howard Koch amount of fear and the quickness with which it [the blacklist] spread. Once the Playwright and radio scriptwriter, Koch leaders of the producers' association got together at the Waldorf Astoria and de- clared that they were going to blacklist the Ten-who, by that time, had refused to cooperate wtih the Committee and had been indicted for contempt of Congress- the defenses just collapsed. The liberal defenses collapsed. Even though the tar- get of the Committee, it seemed to me then and it still seems to me, was less the radical minority than the liberal center. 4S
wrote the Orson Welles broadcast ofH. G . fore\" credits include This Gun For Hire, Wells's War of the Worlds before shifting Destination Tokyo, and The Naked to Hollywood and writing literate screen- City: afterwards, among other things, he plays for directors William Wyler, Mi- wrote Clint Eastwood vehicles. In between chael Curtiz, John Huston, Howard there were plays and severalfine novels- Hawks and Max Ophuls. He shared an which Maltz, a literatur, always consid- Academy Award for co-writing Casab- ered his foremost work. lanca. One of the \"Hollywood 19\" (the Ten plus nine other individuals originally actor Lloyd Gough, was also blacklisted. subpoenaed in 1947), Koch, knowntobea progressive independent ofthe Communist Morley's last screen appearance was in Party, was under tremendous pressure to compromise with the Committee, but he 1951. resisted, and moved abroad. A decade passed before films such as The Fox bore Morley: Well, I just think movies got his credit once again. worse [as a result of the blacklist]. The sto- Koch: I think that our Hollywood peri- od was a very high point in our lives, my ries had always been fairly violent, but in wife's and my own, because at that time we had a feeling that almost anything was the old days writers had tried to show why possible ... that nothing could stop the progress of the country in all the good people were violent-because they had a Lionel Stander ways. We had the umbrella of the Roose- cruel father, or they were poor, and so on. velt administration over us, and we had Violence became an art, a cult, and with Gravel-voiced character actor memorably the Depression in back of us, which made that came the passive women. The beau- glimpsed in comedies directed by Hecht- people all the more conscious of the things tiful, strong women went, and they were MacArthur, Frank Capra and Preston we could now do. There was a feeling, replaced by other beautiful ladies, but la- Sturges. A stalwart activist involved in the you know, that you were really part of the dies chosen more for their figures than for Salinas Valley lettuce strike, the Tom people that owned the country. It wasn' t their faces and for their characters. The Mooney case, the Scottsboro Boys defense owned by somebody sitting up there in passivity is what I found distressing. Soon committee, the guild campaigns and other the White House, or in the Morgan bank, not only was there passivity, bu t there was left-wing causes, Stander always claimed or in the oil fields ... it was us. We owned cruelty toward women, brutality, ugli- he did not belong to the Party because he the country at that time. This is unbelie- ness, and rape. was to the left ofthe Party. Something ofa veable today, isn't it? Maybe we'll have legend among his fellow blacklistees, that feeling again. I hope so. The treatment of minorities simply dis- Stander was first interrogated by the Dies appeared [for a decade], I would say. After Committee, predecessor to HUAC, in the Karen Morley Gentlemen's Agreement and the few late 1930s. Afterwards, he said, he was se- things that had been done during the War cretly blackballed by studio reactionaries The spunky leading lady ofsuch early 30s and at the very end of the War, Hollywood \"offand onfor 24 years,\" even before the films as Scarface, Dinner at Eightand Our simply didn't treat the subject at all. It was McCarthy era. Recalled by the Committee Daily Bread. Morley was in the forefront better to have blacks and chicanos in very in the mid-50s, he lectured the members of the struggle to launch the Actors Guild small parts, uninteresting parts, stereo- about the Constitution, defied them to in Hollywood. She invoked the Fifth typed parts. prove he was a Communist and offered to Amendment before the House Un-Ameri- can Activities Committee, and later, in name names ·of the real subversives: ie., 1954, thefonner MGM ingenue ran unsuc- cessfully for lieutenant governor of New the Committee members. Blacklisted York State on the American Labor Party ticket. Her husband, versatile character anew, he prospered as a Wall Street broker and later became a cult figure in Europe with roles in spaghetti Westerns and films such as Roman Polanski's Cul- De-Sac. Stander persevered to have the last laugh with a continuing role in a Top Ten-rated TV series, as the chauffeur in Hart to Hart. Stander: I'm the same schmuck I was when I was 30, believe in the same things. I believe in liberty, equality, fratemity, justice . . . and real, economic, political de- Albert Maltz mocracy. I believe in the right of dissi- dence. I believe in all the things I believed Novelist-screenwriter Albert Maltz, one of in then, even more firmly. the Ten, had little trouble finding work in films, even under a pseudonym and living John Wexley in Mexico, during the blacklist. His \"be- Broadway playwright ofthe prison drama 46
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by John Bright The Last Mile and others, in Hollywood and jailings and so on into charges of con- I n my 23-year-old eyes he was an elder Wexley wrote with excellence for James spiracy against the Rosenbergs-actual statesman of the Left, although he Cagney (Angels With Dirty Faces) and charges of conspiracy to commit espio- was not yet 40. He knew all the gods Warners (Confessions of a Nazi Spy), and nage. They couldn't prove a case of espio- of my rebellious nonage: Lincoln Stef- collaborated with Bertolt Brecht on his nage; that is the actual act-it had to be fens, Theodore Dreiser, Mike Gold, Dos only Americanfilm (Hangmen Also Die). hearsay, \"conspiracy.\" Some of the worst Passos, Emma Goldman, Mother Bloor, Named by HUAC \"friendlies\" perhaps aspects of hooliganism, anti-Commu- Jack Conroy, Meridel Leseur, Scott Near- only second in frequency to John Howard nism, came out during their trial and the ing, Edna Millay and many more. He had Lawson, Wexley liked to say in private that three years of their appeal. \"Fry them! written and been acclaimed for Haunch, he never joined the Communist Party be- Sizzle them!\" Paunch and Jowl, the nation's best novel cause he didn't care for the dues-paying . about big city political corruption. When I Nevertheless, the staunchly radical Wex- But those who followed the case, who met him in 1932, he had just retumed ley refused to deal with the Committee, left were knowledgeable, were not taken in from Harlan County, Kentucky, where he Hollywood, and distinguished himself by by the tremendous propaganda daily in had been investigating and publicizing writing, in 1955, the first detailed attack the press. I followed the case from head- with Theodore Dreiser the brutal coal on the Rosenbergs' trial, The Judgement strike situation there, \"in the pocket of na- ofjulius and Ethel Rosenberg, still a ref- lines in Mexico City where I was when the tive fascism.\" erencefor historians ofthe case. case was taking place. When I retumed to the U.S. during the appeal, I read facsim- I was flattered to become part of what Wexley: Oh, the climate offear[in the iles of the actual court record and grew Sam called \"Monsieur De Stad's salon,\" Fifties]! It was endless. It wasn't only ac- more and more fascinated with the case his comic designation for the group which tors and writers and directors, it was teach- and the evidence. I began to say to myself, often came together at his unpretentious ers all over America, union leaders kicked .the story is full of holes, it doesn't jell, big little Hollywood apartment. Writers in the out of plants ... holes and little holes. I was reminded of main, including, consistently or occasion- story conferences we'd have at different ally, Guy Endore, John Wexley, Nathan I think anybody who cooperated-they studios [in Hollywood] when we'd kick Asch, Lester Cohen, Vera Caspary, Bob used this word, cooperative-with the around a story ... and I had always prided Tasker and myself; plus Lincoln Steffens, Committee, extended its life, gave it rea- myself on not having; these ... bloopers Ella Winter and Langston Hughes when son for being. Had everyone refused to ... where a thing couldn't take place be- they came south from Carmel. The bull deal with them , they wouldn't have last- cause it was on the wrong day or whatever. sessions were spiritedly political and not at ed, they wouldn't have gotten the appro- It had the elements of a bad 'B' picture, all doctrinaire, laced with scepticism and priation. But they had enough people to not even a good one. So I took it upon my- healthy dubiety. (It is significant that none weaken and fall apart ... for many rea- self to retrace the steps of the principal wit- of us were CP members at the time.) Blue sons ... wanting to work, because they nesses [against the Rosenbergs], chief eyes larger and more luminous through had tasted power as directors and so forth among them this weird character called thick glasses, Ornitz presided with a hu- and saw a lost world for themselves if they Harry Gold, and since he was the strong- morous pomposity that was never pomp- didn't work. est link in the chain of evidence, to prove ous: \"I'd like to say in my Proustian man- his entire story was very suspect. ~ ner, with many parentheses.... \" It was The Committee moved from arrests stimulating fun. We tolerated two interruptions in the often stormy evenings, one early, one late. At eight o'clock, by ritual , Sam would re- tire to the bedroom of his two little boys, to adlib, to their writhing delight, episodes in an endless serial he called \"Around the World With Jocko the Great,\" the adven- tures of an all-wise, incredible (and Marx- ist) monkey. After overhearing several of these picaresque tales, we tried to prevail upon Sadie, Sam's wife, that he write them as a children's book. She was reluc- tant. With an understanding deeper than ours, she knew that her husband, despite his politics and devotion, was chauvinistic about women, and prevailed upon us to persuade him. We did. The yam was eventually written and became a juvenile bestseller. ... The other imperative hi- atus was likewise ritualistic, a trip to the comer for the early morning newspaper, without which Sam's insatiable curiosity 48
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