VOLUME 20 - NUMBER 01 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 1984

\"I MIGHT GET WORKED UP. BUT IDON'T GO UP!\" John Madden

•Sl•SSUe published bimonthly by the Film Society of Lincoln Center Volume 20, Number 1 January-February 1984 The 1983 Movie Revue. . . . 18 Her 'Yentl,' and His ...... 49 1983 shuffled into history on anything A little song, a little dance, a lit- but terms of endearment with its tle tightening of the pants. In audience. Moviegoers made their Yentl, Barbra Streisand altered Christmas Day with Clint Eastwood more than the haberdashery of and his oversize Smith & Wesson, and Isaac Bashevis Singer's 20-page precious little else. So David Chute fable; she updated the centu- asks 1984 to give us something more ries-long story ofJewish assimi- than \"pure cinema\" (page 18). lation. Marcia Pally discusses Stephen Harvey casts a severe glance what is gained and lost in Jew- back at 1983's movie news makers ish-American movies (page (page 20; includes six ten-best lists). A 49). And Harlan Jacobson team of industry crystal-bailers tells talks with Singer, who is less Anne Thompson who'll be nomi- than pleased at the uses to nated for Oscars next month (page which his tale has been put 22). And in-we promise-our only (page 53). invocation of George Orwell, Jamie Horwitz scans the software horizon for thi 25). How is it that Faberge never marketed an essence called Inside FILM COMMENT.... 33 \"Cary Grant\"? Hollywood bottled the stufffor 3S years, Seems like only yesterday-if you're Rip Van Winkle- from This Is the Night in 1932 that a buff periodical called Vision hit the stands. In fact, it to Walk Don't Run in 1966, was 1962. Since then, Vision has grown up (or at least grown and its manly romantic scent older) to become FILM COMMENT. This is our 100th issue, and we are celebrating the centenary with a retrospective infused moviegoers and the look at the magazine's politics and policies.CliffFroehlich romantic-comedy movie interviewed founding editor Gordon Hitchens, the current genre with its grace, ele- editor, and publishers Clara Hoover, Austin Lamont, and gance, and buoyancy. David Joanne Koch. He dug up some dirt and sheds a good deal of Thomson pays tribute to light on the struggle to put out a good magazine on a small the real Cary Grant, who budget. No, we did not edit out the warts. Yes, we do thank turns 80 this month. Happy 21 years' worth of readers for their interest and support. birthday, happier memories. Also in this issue: Michael Apted. . .............29 Books: 'Rolling Breaks'........74 He domesticated John Belushi, Aljean Harmetz is The New York Times' J o u r n a l s. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 transformed Sissy Spacek into Loretta diagnostician of the industry. Harlan In Mexico, two maverick directors are Lynn, and now places William Hurt in Jacobson is ours. He reviews her book. tackling two \"unfilmable\" novels. Lloyd the Gorky Park labyrinth. Dan Yakir Independents: Dance Fever..... 76 Rose visits David (Eraser Man) Lynch interviews the British director. Derek Hart's Backstage at the Kirov is on the mammoth Dune set; and Todd a movie love letter to the Soviet ballet McCarthy watches John Huston guide De Palma's 'Scarface'..........66 company. Nancy Vreeland reports on Albert Finney Under the Volcano. This updating of the 1932 gangster this detente documentary. classic is unlikely to be liked by people Back Page: Quiz #5...........80 The Tune Machine.............9 who like Brian De Palma movies. Can you unlock these secrets of those From Citizen Kane to Marienbad and a Explanation within. By David Chute pictures? All you need is a skeleton key. host of zombie movies, the cinema has worked magically to transcend the Television: 'Overnight'. . ....... 72 Cover: MOMA/Film Stills Archive. boundaries of time. A provocative essay NBC's \"news for smart people\" is dead. by Harlan Kennedy. Richard Corliss . . \" usiness Manager: Sayre Maxfield. Advertising and Circulation Manager: Tony Impavido. Art Uns. West Coast Editor: Anne Tho~pson (on leave). European Correspondent: Harlan Kennedy. Elliot Schulman. Cover DeSign: . I{eseanch Consultant: Mary Corliss, ~dltonal ASSistants:. MarCie Bloom! Jack Barth. Circulation ASSistant: Deborah Freedman . Accountant: Domingo lIa, Jr...E.dltonallntern: Chnstlne Walker. Executive Director, Film Society of Lincoln Center:. Joanne Koch. Second class postage paid at New and additional mailing offices. Copynghr © 1984 by the Film Society of Lincoln Center. All nghts reserved. The opinions expressed in FILM MENT do not represent Film Society of Lincoln Center policy. ThiS publication IS fully protected by domestic and international copyright. The pm)llcamJn FILM COMMENT (ISSN001S-119X) IS made pOSSible In part by support from the New York State Council on the Am and the National ent for the Arts. Subscription rates in the United States: $12 for six numbers, $22 for twelve numbers. Elsewhere $18 for six numbers $34 mbers, payable in U.S: funds only. New subscribers should include their occupations and zip codes. Postmaster: send address c'hanges , subscnptlon, and back-Issue correspondence to: FILM COMMENT, 140 West Sixty-fifth Sneet, New York, N .Y. 10023 U.S.A.

Down Mexico Way: Lynch and Huston. Dune Diary Silvana Mangano's head. That's what Razorhead Sian Phillips with director David L'\"ynch. this scene is about, at least to us ob- servers crowded out of the way of the People go to work on this problem. I begin to wonder what David Lynch camera and the lights, flattened up Steps are adjusted. Steps are removed. thinks when he looks at her. They chat against the fake-stone walls of the set for Actors ~nd technicians stand around sometimes, while steps are being built the Hall of Rites of the Freman in Dune, waiting, smoking, reading, gossiping. or torn out or argued about. As a film- the film of the sci-fi classic by Frank But they keep looking at Mangano. maker he isn ' t indifferent to female Herbert. The fake stone is grey, natu- Thoughout all this , she remains beauty; the smokey sexual presence of rally, but with something red and rusty stretched out on the couch, propped on the Beautiful Girl Across The Hall in in it-cinnabar streaks the color of dried an elbow. It seems impossible, but she Eraserhead proved that. But the Dream blood. This isn' t the whole Hall of hardly moves. She is wearing a long Girl in Eraserhead turns out to be a Rites, which is, God knows, how many black dress with very narrow, almost pudgy blond with fist-sized tumors on feet high and is sitting out on the backlot Fortunay-width pleats arranged care- her cheeks that look as if they were of Churubusco Studios in the Mexico fully along her body, and she doesn't made of biscuit dough. Very tactile- City smog. This is the little room at one wrinkle a pleat. She occasionally asks for looking, those tumors, very textured. end of it, and it is about sixteen feet and smokes a cigarette, and she talks Lynch is nuts about textures. They above the floor of Stage 4. Stage 4 is briefly with her daughter, but then she come up in every interview he gives. strictly movie studio-warehouse in de- slips back into immobility, gazing at The day after talking with him, flying sign, except for the pink ladders and nothing in particular. Her eyes are large, back to America, I really noticed the stepladders, and the flower-covered al- with that mysterious lustre dark eyes thready inside of a piece of green pepper tar to the Virgin near the main entrance. sometimes have. Her hair has been in my airplanefood meal. That's the shaved off, and the naked, graceful kind of effect he can have on you. Mangano is playing one of Herbert's curve of her skull is like a Brancusi. All holy virgins, the Reverend Mother Ra- around me, as we wait, people are Lynch comes to Dune with only two mallo. It's a small part; she agreed to do moved to comment: this is a beautiful feature films behind him, The Elephant it as a favor to her daughter, Raffaella de woman , this is a magically beautiful Man (which Freddie Francis also shot) Laurentiis, who is producing the film. woman, this is the most beautiful and Eraserhead, which has midnight- This is the scene in which she first sets woman they've ever seen. No one can movie cult status. Eraserhead is defi- eyes on Paul (Kyle MacLachlen), the believe it. They keep saying, \"Can you nitely the stronger of the two. It has the hero-to-be, and his mother Lady Jessica feeling of having spewed onto the (Francesca Annis). They stand in the believe her?\" screen directly from Lynch's subcon- room respectfully waiting, and she is borne in to them on a couch. This couch is causing the problem. It's carried in by four actors-Mangano gracefully reclining on it-up a few steps to another level and set down. This sounds like a simple maneuver. Probably everyone on the set thought it was a simple maneuver an hour ago. We've all been sitting here learning, along with the director, David L ynch, standing right behind the camera with his cinematographer Freddie Francis, how many things can go wrong with the carrying in and setting down of a couch. This is supposed to be a ceremonial en- trance, and the couch should move as smoothly as if it were set on a track. But it's set on four pairs of actor feet, and they can't quite get it. There's always this undignified little jiggle or jolt. 2

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scious, carrying bits of brain tissue with Lynch \"Guv'nor.\" numbers, busied himself with the per- formers, camera, and blocking, all of it. Its hero, Henry, leads a rather de- I gave in to the cliche. I stared at that which was observed by Huston on a distant video monitor for final aproval. pressed life. Among other things, his bland WASP exterior and wondered what This was a new twist on some of the tales told on Huston: how he would wife gives birth first to something the the hell he was thinking. No, not even often stand some hundred feet from the action with his back turned, selecting doctors \"aren't even sure is a baby,\" that. In more senses than one, Lynch is takes only on the basis of the line read- ings; or how he abandoned several pic- then to a series of sperm-like creatures a visceral director. What is he seeing? tures before they were edited and fin- ished, better to run off to the next which Henry smashes against the wall. Outside, the air is thick with the smog of exotic location or safari. On Annie Hus- ton's prevailing mood was one ofaffable They crack and squash like stepped-on urban nightmares; it could be the atmo- boredom - he might have been a be- nign old man getting through the long cockroaches. Texture. sphere breathed by the characters of afternoon of a grandchild's birthday party. Dune is the story of the rebellion of a Eraserhead in their city wasteland. In- By contrast, Huston seemed per- desert planet against an evil, capitalist side is this tiny room of phony rock that fectly at home in Cuernavaca and was the center of an admiring, loose-knit empire. It contains a savior, several is going to look like-what? \"David \"family\" which, on location, included not only his son Danny and step-daugh- nasty villains, a little mysticism, a lot of wants things to look odd,\" says Francis. ter Allegra but such youngsters as exec- utive producer Michael Fitzgerald and battles and blood, and tons of sand. Ac- \"Strange. Out-of-the-ordinary. And screenwriter Guy Gallo. Arriving each morning in a Winter Kills-type golf cart, cording to Tony Masters, the production dark.\" In the grey set, above her black Huston crouched close to the action, just outside of camera range. Tom designer, he and Lynch worked to- dress, Silvana Mangano's head almost Shaw, his longtime production mana- ger, confided that he had not seen Hus- gether on the film's design concept appears to be a bust, a true icon floating ton this alert and engaged in a project in 20 years; Gabriel Figueroa, the legend- \"quite a lot,\" and one senses Lynch's in this fake temple. What is Lynch see- ary Mexican cinematographer who last worked with Huston on The Night of influence in the way the three planets in ing when he looks at her? The skull The Iguana, observed that his old friend's sharpness had not diminished a the movie might almost have been de- beneath the skin? More likely, the ten- bit in the interim. The consensus on Huston is that, at 77, he has eliminated signed from a sense of touch: the sets for dons. - LLOYD ROSE everything extraneous (booze, cigars, carousing, gambling) to focus more pre- Caladon are all wood, calling up a feel- cisely on the creative process. His only apparent diversion during the shoot was ing of water and the organic; Arrakis a regular Sunday afternoon poker game, at which losses sometimes hit as (\"Dune\") is rock, plastic, metal and tile, much as $1000. the rock always visible; the home of the Huston first read Lowry's feverish tragedy the year it was published but villainous baron is a black oil planet, claims never to have pursued it \"obses- sively\" as a film project. But producers slimy, shining in space. It was the tex- and actors \"seem to have connected me to it somehow,\" and over the years he tures in Dune, Lynch says, that attracted received numerous screenplays and proposals, all of which fell by the way- him to it. side. The atmosphere on a set is no sure indicator of the eventual quality of a Then there are the giant sandworms. film, but from the attitude of the direc- tor and every other member of cast and The rebels of Arrakis ride these worms crew one feels safe in saying Under the Volcano is getting its best shot. which produce a spice that the Guild • Navigators eat to give themselves mysti- Under the Volcano is the story of a cal, navigational abilities. Unfortu- dissipated former English diplomat on November 1, 1938, Mexico's Day of nately, the spice is not only addictive, it turns its users into worms. Lynch liked this so much he borrowed a mutated Guild Navigator from Dune Messiah to put into the movie. Carlo Rambaldi is Albert Finney and John Huston. building it from sketches that look vaguely fetal. One thinks of the baby in Cuernavaca Eraserhead, with its half-formed, flayed- looking head, and of the Cubist sculp- Journal ture of the Elephant Man's skull. Brothers. Triplets. The Lynch kids. Just as Graham Greene has his \"en- The cliche about Lynch is going to be tertainments\" and his serious novels, how \"normal\" he looks. Mr. Cornfed John Huston has his \"larks\" and, rather and his Boiling Id. He is, in fact, good- less frequently, his personal films. A looking in a traditional American way- visit to Mexico confirmed that Huston boyish and blond, with very bright blue had found a personal project in the ad- eyes. On the set he wears loose khaki- aptation of Malcolm Lowry's Under the colored slacks, a black poplin jacket and Volcano - a 1947 novel that had con- a tieless white shirt with the top button founded the attempts of such directors buttoned (\"like a farmer,\" as a friend of as Luis Bunuel, Joseph Losey, Jules mine used to scoff at me when I but- Dassin, Roman Polanski, Stanley Ku- toned mine in junior high school). He's brick, Jerzy Skolimowski, and Ken extremely polite, and this seems to Russell to film it - and that he found spring from an innate sense of courtesy. the personification of Lowry's alcoholic Certainly it pervades the whole set: Consul in Albert Finney. \"Please\" 's and \"porfavor\" 's fill the air; The last time I had visited Huston on and everyone issues orders as questions - \"Would you mind ... ?\", \"Do you a set, during the shooting ofAnnie at the think you could ... ?\" The crew, appar- Burbank Studios, he was actually ently taking their cue from Francis, calls directing from the next room; Joe Lay- ton, director of the picture's musical 4



the Dead, when the Consul's estranged with the animal. Andrews, who had pie ascot, and an Oxford tie pulled studied bullfighting religiously for through his belt loops, Finney ran wife returns to observe and, ultimately, some weeks prior to shooting, resisted through his monologue before the first giving way to a double. But a few of this take. \"Not a performance, Albert,\" was to share a descent into hell with her aggressive bull's passes were remark- all that Huston had to suggest. Then ably close to the actor, and finally An- the actor would force his transforma- tormented husband. Dispensing with drews ' double, a young bullfighting tion, retreating behind the massive tree hopeful whose father had been thrown prior to each take, bowing his head in the book's interior monologues and by the same bull , entered to finish the intense concentration, and emerge sequence as well as the bull's life. with fingers trembling and blue eyes flashbacks, as well as with one signifi- glazed in brilliant alcoholic stupor. Be- The following day was largely de- fore one take, he violently shook and cant character (the Frenchman La- voted to the script's penultimate scene, slammed down a chair to work himself in which the Consul oozes alcoholic vi- up for it one more time. His line read- ruelle), Huston and screenwriter Guy triol , accuses his wife and Hugh of ings, at once naturalistic and operatic in carrying on behind his back and la- the service of such remarks as \"Hell is Gallo opted for a straight dramatic line ments the lost opportunity of his mar- my natural habitat,\" appeared to pro- riage. Huston was perched in authorita- voke an awestruck anxiety in Bisset. and emphasis on character study. tive intimacy on a high chair on a After a take Huston would quietly say terrace, dominated by an enormous In- \"Once more,\" or \"Fine, beautiful.\" Gallo allowed that Huston stressed dian Laurel tree, outside the Hacienda With his actors as with his horses, Hus- Vista Hermosa, a sprawling country ton was being gentle but firm. very early on in their discussions the home built for Cortez in the early 16th century. Most of the time, Huston merely sat importance \"that it be very clear that attentively, descending from his direc- Andrews, in his ersatz cowboy outfit, tor's chair only to inspect each camera this is a man who suffers from a dipso- was seated next to Jacqueline Bisset, set-up through the viewfinder. Some- looking primly beautiful with the thing was always ruining the take - a mania of the soul. His drunkenness is streaked, waved hair of Yvonne, the passing train, a fly interrrupting Bisset's Consul's wife. But it was Finney's concentration, a chronic inability on the not simply a response to being betrayed scene, and he who commanded atten- part of the operator to follow the action tion. Richard Burton had long coveted at the climax - and Huston was be- by his wife; it is actually a manner of this role; early last year he called Hus- coming mildly annoyed. The scene's ton to curse the fact that he was stuck conclusion appeared simple enough on perceiving the world, a response to a doing Private Lives onstage and to ask if paper: Finney stalks off, Bisset gets up production could be delayed so he to follow him, pauses to deliver a cou- disappointment in Western civiliza- could appear in it. As for me, it was ple of lines to Andrews, then leaves, Peter O'Toole's worldly-wise voice and pursued by him. But the blocking and tion.\" ravaged beauty that had seemed ideal timing didn't seem right, Bisset ap- for the wasted, charismatic Consul. peared slightly off and perhaps even Huston, whose longtime penchant miffed at Huston's constant calling her I was quickly won over by Finney. A \"honey\" and \"dear.\" for alcoholic nourishment is one reason bit plump, physically powerful (as Lowry described the Consul), a wig After a few attempts, Huston mut- others frequently \"connected\" him to covering his shaved head (he had ar- tered, \"There's something wrong rived in Mexico fresh from playing the here,\" shook his head and, unsure of Under the Volcano, explains the Con- Pope) , his flushed complexion making the solution, encouraged the actors to him look both baby-faced and pickled , work it out. Finally, in a very unusual sul's drinking in grandiose terms: \"God Finney showed an unnerving ability to move, Huston jumped from his chair summon up the twilight of a man's life and physically instructed Bisset how to Almighty, having looked at what's been at ten o'clock on a given morning. The depart, stop, pause, speak her lines and role requires that the Consul proceed exit. The result, which suddenly going on here for the last generation or seemed so right and simple that it could through the final day of his life in an never have been otherwise, prompted so, must surely have turned to the bot- increasing state of inebriation, and Fin- applause from the large gathering of ney, through will and skill, was pitching extras - a wide, childlike grin from this tle - and He's obviously away on an his performance, and degree of drunk- ancient Irishman having fun being se- enness, with extraordinary precision in rious under the Cuernavaca sky. ~ extended bat in another constellation. each take. - TODD MCCARTHY That's the Consul. It's a divine at- Dressed in a cream white. suit, matching Panama, light blue shirt, pur- tribute. The Consul is a hero. His reac- tion to life is to get drunk, and he gets drunk in an heroic way. His very talk is heroic , his words in his mouth are the words of heroes. I prefer to think that God is away on a bat. Not dead, just drunk. \" • Arriving in Cuernavaca one evening several weeks into the shoot, I was ush- ered in to a sizable room off the lobby of the posh Racquet Club, which had been taken over by the production for the duration of filming. The room was dominated by a large, unpainted pine box which housed a single 3Smm movie projector, and it seemed as though half the local population was crammed into the room to watch the dailies. As it hap- pened, Huston had opened dailies to drivers, gardeners, hotel staff and any- one else who might wander in. In the footage on view, Anthony An- drews, as the Consul's half-brother Hugh, jumps down into a bull ring and displays some pretty decent cape work MotIon PIct\\n and TelevIsion 'M1ting ConsuHanls ALBUMSSOUNDTRACK Pin-Ups • Portraits • Posters • Physique Poses • Pressbooks • Western • Horror • Detailed . professional evaluation of your script for AND SHOW Science Fiction • Musicals • Color Photos • a fee by ex-studio development executives . 80 Years of Scenes From Motion Pictures (Zoetrope Studios and United Artists) Qualifying RARE . OUT-Of-PRINT lP's. screenplays will be forwarded to bona fide liter- Rush $1.00 FOR OUR ILLUSTRATED BROCHURE ary agents with our recommendation. For free in- 64 Page List ... $1.00 formation Motion Picture and Television Writing 134 WEST 18th STREET, DEPT. FC Cansultants. 1523 N La Brea #210 . HollywoodCA. BROADWAY/HOllYWOOD RECORDINGS NEW YORK, N.Y. 10011 90028 (213) 876-9415 . ext 210 Dept. FC, Georgetown, Conn. 06829 (212) 620-8160-61

SAVE - and bring back the best from $28 Hollywood's golden studio James Robert Parish and Gregory Mank are too sophisticated to pretend that every MGM picture belongs in the Hall of Fame.. Some of them were n~ar­ mBuistsees~esnomtheefrcalninkklyersmohdaevset (though many a B hves on as a small claSSIC). that Metro sheen, and yield their quota of pleasure. When Leo roars out at us, we know we're in for something special. So are you, with this book. Parish and Mank range across th~ Golden Ye~rs from the first talkies thru the Fifties. They comb the MGM library to brIng back the 160 pictures most worth remembering. And how lovingly they remember! Look at these features ... v Filmographies: cast and characters, credits, year, running time, plot synopsis, Academy Award nominations and awards v Extensive background data on each film : anecdotes, casting, production notes, public reception v Critical comments and reviews v 213 photos and ads . If the book were nothing else, these would give you a wonderful scrapbook history of MGM v Capsule history of Metro by screenwriter DeWitt Bodeen v 9-page index of names v 285 MGM-size 8Yz x 11 pages v A nice extra feature: the pictures are all in alphabetical order, so you can find whatever you're looking for right away How to get this $29.95 beauty for ONLY ~-------_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ______ I 15 Oakland Avenu e · Harri son . N.V. 10528 I enclose $1.95. Please send me the $29.95 Best of MGM, postpaid and at no additional charge . At the same time please accept my membership in the Movie/ Entertainment Book Club. I agree to buy 4 books over the next 2 years at regular Club prices plus shipping and handling . After I buy and pay for 4 books at regular Club prices , my membership may be ended either by me or by the Club. I will be offered some 200 books on movies and entertain- ment, the majority at 20-33070 discounts plus shipping and handling. For every book I buy at the regular Club price, I receive one or more FREE Bonus Book Certificates which entitle me to buy many books at far below regular Club price, usually at 60-80070 discounts . I'll be offered a new Club Selection plus Alternates every 4 weeks (13 times a year) in the Club bulletin, PREVIEWS. If I want the Selection, I will do nothing and it will come automatically. If I want an Alternate or no book at all, I'll notify you on the handy card by the deadline date specified. If I should ever receive a Selection without having had 10 days to decide if I want it, I may return it at Club expense for full credit. PREVIEWS also includes news about my fellow members and their hobbies. I am welcome to send in similar items about myself and my interests. PREVIEWS will publish every such item it deems suitable, FREE. FC- 27 NAME ADDRESS ______________________________________________________________ CITY ___________________________,STATE ___________________ ZIP ____________ ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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TheTimeMachine Robert Taylor and Greta Garbo in George Cukor's Camille. by Harlan Kennedy see on screen) over the realities of crea- most obsessive love affairs the cinema tion (the then of the production process). has had have not been with Time's con- Movies make an almighty boast of Books are a continuous present but of querers but with its victims. Movies di- transcending Time. We've grown up our own imagination, clothing a seman- rect their passions not to Utopian cele- with appraisals of cinema that paean its tic notation in fresh subjective detail. brations of immutability but to the ability to be a magical continuum, to Music is ever changeable, differently horror, pathos, or comedy resulting from defy age and decay, to catapult the past alive with each performance or interpre- human pretenses of immutability. into the present. Timeless! Ageless! Im- tation. Theater (and opera, ballet) is mortal!-read most thumbnail gushes self-proclaimed, evanescent, physically From Citizen Kane to I Walked With A to famous films or famous film stars and circumscribed artifice. Poetry, sculp- Zombie, from Last Year at Marienbad to these are the top honorifics. Garbo is ture, and still photography are pieces of The Nutty Professor, age and change and ever young and beautiful in Camille, Ga- moment-in-time immobility, deep-fro- the folly of trying to cheat them are ever- ble ever macho and gallant in Gone With zen art to be thawed out imaginatively present themes. It's as if the cosmetic The Wind, etc. by each new spectator's response. denial of Time in movie making has merely consigned the reality of Time to No other art flaunts such a seeming Films alone-being at once animate, a feverish subconscious that has an- triumph of the final effect (the now we graphic, realistic, and unchanging- nexed whole territories ofcinema. Film, seem to have Time conquered. Yet the the art that \"transcends\" time, is also the 9

an most obsessed with it. to a sequence of awed and vulnerable tagonists, lacking the wit, suavity, and visitors (the movie audience). And often dress sense of the vampire, and there- HorrorScope there is a butler (the usherette) to open fore best rendered interesting by to- the door and show the visitor to his temic multiplication. The zombie is of- The most stand-up-and-beg-to-be- room. ten not his own master, funhermore, but noticed examples of this obsession are in in the far-off grip of some greater cosmic the horror and fantasy genres. In grand But the main link to cinema is in the or earthly force. guignoL tales that play with the themes vampire story's overriding fascination of immortality and immutability, the au- with age and time. The Hubris of age- As with vampires, the manner of de- dience lives out its own anxiety re- less ness is invariably linked to evil, of struction for these creatures often sponses to the faked time conquest of course; otherwise we might all begin to changes from film to film, but the reason movies as an an. Zombies and vampires like the idea too much. And it is also never changes. Like cinema itself, they purpon to transcend time, but their con- linked to the vampire's own tragic last- flaunt the sinister, overweening pre- dition is gnawed at by sickness and evil. act Nemesis, which often takes the su- tense of eternal life and must receive Zombies walk with a metronome au- premely apt form of a sudden acceler- due corrections-from voodoo exorcism tomatism that is the badge of their inhu- ated aging process. (Or rapid-reverse in White Zombie, 1932, to a bullet in the manity. It's like a slow-motion flicker- face-lift.) This is most memorably in- head in George Romero's 1979 Dawn of the Undead's equivalent of 24 stanced in Terence Fisher's 1959 Ham- the Dead. frames-per-second. Vampires, like mer DracuLa, where, thanks to trick movies , thrive in the dark and are put to photography, Christopher Lee estab- With zombies belong another pictur- flight or oblivion by daylight. Though lishes the world speed record for becom- esque manifestation of the undead pop- folklore and literature invented these ing a pile of ashes; and in Tony Scott's ular in movies. Egyptian mummies are picturesque examples of the undead, it 1982 The Hunger where, thanks to elabo- risen corpses who walk again in a hostile took the movies to give them mass expo- rate makeup ingenuity, David Bowie world. And they carry twined about sure and popularity. Why? Because they ages by the second in a hospital waiting them the very insignia of artifical preser- were a mirror held up to the nature of room. vations: the embalming bandages wrap- CInema. ping them from top to toe. They are as In vampire films the punishment for inscrutable, macabre, and charismatic as The vampire lives in a dwelling as time-cheating fits the presumptuous a movie star under her face-pack. And oversized and fantasticated as the earli- crime. In zombie films the iconography fittingly, mummies didn't come from lit- est movie theaters (and sometimes with of L'immortaLite maudite changes. Zom- erature, they jumped almost straight a Mighty Wurlitzer to boot). He plays bies, unlike vampires, \"come not single into movies from the springboard of real looming, luminous host (like the movie) spies but in battalions.\" This is chiefly life: the discovery of Tutankhamun's because they are less charismatic as pro- tomb in 1920 and the subsequent mys- terious loss of life among the discov- - erers. Christine Gordon, Frances Dee, & Darby Jones in I Walked With a Zombie. The message of mummy movies, again thundering darkly against the hor- rors of immortality is: Respect death, all you living humans, and do not disturb its peaceful finality. They wag a blanched and bandaged finger at cinema's pre- sumptuous exhumations of the past, and at filmmakers taking a rash and arrogant spade to the inviolability of time. The zombie and mummy figure are potently combined, though without the gift of immortality, in a figure from the Gothic nursery cupboard who pre-dates both: Frankenstein's monster. Inelucta- bility; ghastly pallor; cocooning ban- dages; enslavement to a hubristic crea- ter; rolling, stiff-jointed walk; the sense of a clockwork power that won't stop coming on. This image of a pale and potent automatism, with a hint of pon- derous flicker in its gait, is so close to the character and aesthetic impact of early movies themselves that it's hard not to detect a rhyme between the oneiric, mechanistic stridings of these Gothic creatures and the macabre-and-magical rhythms of film as a form. Remember: Electricity is the power that made possi- ble both Frankenstein's monster and the CInema. 10 s

Frankenstein's monster was also the Baroque Around the Clock his response to cinema as it is about the most notable forebear in a line of semi- apparent real-life territory he has indestructible hulks, stretching right No American filmmaker has plugged marked off. In Kane the kaleidoscopic down to our age, culminating in Darth into the theme of time more obsessively narrative is inspired by the instant-mem- Vader and his cohorts and the faceless than Orson Welles; and no European ory impact of newsreels-a uniquely killer in the Halloween films. The latter, filmmakers more than Jean Cocteau, 20th-century phenomenon whereby bits though apparently gifted with a supra- Alain Resnais, and Nicolas Roeg. of a man's youth or middle age can sud- human immunity to most known denly rear up at him in ellipses and weapons, boasts the eerie attribute of Welles' protagonists are distantly re- eclats as quick and bright as lightning walking everyday streets in everyday lated to the Gothic indestructibles lined clothes and seeming (almost) like one of up above. They tend to live their whole flashes. us. lives like the last seconds of the Nem- Unlike the horror-fantasy movie axis, esis-visited vampire: in a surreally accel- In the 1980s we don't need folkloric erated spurt through the stations of age where immortality is presented in the seals of approval from the official Union and aging. changeless-continuous mode, immortal- of Non-Humans and Immortals (vam- ity in Kane is a hall of mirrors where one pires, zombies, and mummies being Kane's aging process is on the face of catches sudden glimpses of oneself at chief members) to quake at the notion of it preposterous: not as representing a indestructability. It's horrific enough- real life-span but seen as a spectacle con- ferent points in one's life. Kane's trag- it's more horrific-when the death-defy- tained within a two-hour movie. It's vir- edy is not that he grows old, a loveless, ing creature who won't lie down appears tually a time-lapse guide to senescence disillusioned, and tyrannic egotist, but to be a normal homo sapiens. -almost each scene adds a new that-thanks to the black magic of cin- wrinkle, a new white hair. But these ema-he lives with the half-dozen other Androids, for example, have been surreal telescopings of time, this very Kanes he was. eating up the screen in recent years, in preposterousness, becomes part of the movies like Alien, Blade Runner, and An- film's tragic thrust. In The Magnificent In The Magnificent Ambersons the droid itself. The sinister thing about this Ambersons, the story's single giant newsreel is discarded in favor of a tech- line in superhuman non-humans is that mythic given is age. Anything can hap- nique that's almost equally lethal: the we can't tell them from the real thing. In pen to anyone, but the one thing you family-album-cum-home-movie view of the old days you didn't need a diploma can't stop is the onward stomp of aging. time. Scenes unfreeze from photo-al- in sleuthing to identify a vampire. He And in The Immortal Story, every charac- bum still pictures (like cinema being (or she) could be reliably expected to ter is-physically, metaphysically, or vi- bom from still photography), and the sport formal evening wear, look some- cariously-clutching at youth. narrative has a juggernaut linearity that what pale around the gills, and be ex- hangs the cyclical beauty of changing tremely long in the incisors. Zombies Again, Welles' work is as much about seasons on ever more forlorn and uncy- were equally upfront about their iden- clical human faces. The time-lapse ef- tity: the deathly pale, the limbs akimbo, the staring eyes, The Walk. Welles' family-album-cum-home-movie, The Magnificent Ambersons. But today, how could you know that David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve were vampires in The Hunger, unless you had been formally introduced to them as such? Or that the townspeople of Santa Mira in Halloween 3 were an- droids? Or that Ian Holm in Alien or Joanna Cassidy in Blade Runner were androids? The reason for the change is clear. In the early decades of cinema the theatri- cal, high-contrast primitivism of the movie form was matched by an equally high-contrast, theatrical, and primitive line in grand guignol indestructibles. To- day, when movie resources can create an image virtually flush with real life, the new immortals and meta-humans have adapted their colors to the new cine- matic environment. You can't pick them out. But though styles have changed, what hasn't changed is the continuous interactivity between the immortality theme in cinema fiction and the nature of cinema itself; and the darkly urgent waming that no dream changes more swiftly into a nightmare than the dream of cheating time and death. 11

fect on Kane is slowed down, but like iola. They can keep diving into them- tragedy in the face of the finite (as Kane, the film says that every fluid or selves to find the past and out of that Welles and Cocteau differently were), frozen memory we preserve from the another world. Time isn't so much ex- but with free-form flights of conceptual past becomes something to mock us in tended (as with Gothic) or baroquely fancy-showing how movie poetry the present. Photography and cinema- re-rhythmed (as with Welles), as sud- starts where time's petty tyrannies end. tography make us live with every one of denly open to the possibility of fur- Marienbad is life seen as a series of our former selves-an immortality we loughs from mortality. Once again cin- wildly formal games, maneuverings, can carry all the way to the grave. ema's own ability to escape from time is postures, and assignations, none of Welles' brand of time-exploring Ba- translated into the blueprint for a human which has any traditional cause-and-ef- roque finds an echo in two French film- escape from time. fect narrative suspense but instead are makers: Cocteau and Resnais. For Coc- Arid once again this presumptive gratuitous acts set in a giant eternity. teau the mirror is the time-lapse symbol flight of fantasy cannot finally go unpun- Here Time has been pulled like a rug for human life. In Orpheus he takes the ished. Before the audience is released from under everyone's feet. What is the proverb \"The eyes are the mirror of the into the daylight, the filmmaker must point of starting to seduce a woman if in soul\" and rewrites it into \"The mirror is show the dream of timelessness crum- the next few seconds you will find your- the eyes of the soul. \" Through that re- bling. So Orpheus is sent back to the real self warped back into a state of never- flective surface we see first ourselves world, and the poet's Nemesis for the having-met-her? The exaggerated for- and then into ourselves-first the older Hubris of falling in love with Death is mality of the proceedings is not just be- outward appearance we present; then, the full restoration of prosaic reality. cause surrealists love formality (as mus- through the eyes (the one part of the Resnais' films put Cocteau and tache painters love the Mona Lisa), but face that doesn't change), we see into Welles in a blender, playing on Coc- because formality leaps into the giant our timeless self and selves. Cocteau's teau's elegantly fantasticated time dives vacuum left by Time. Underworld, visited through mirrors, as they personalize and poeticize the In Resnais-as in Welles, Cocteau, stands not for a specific Hell or Heaven, Wellesian kaleidoscope of time. Time in and the horror genre-what is in theory but for whatever within us is beyond the Marienbad, or MurieL, or La Vie est un a Utopian world of Time denied can reach ofobsolescence and the tyranny of Roman is shredded into a rainbow of quickly turn into a nightmare. But in time. bons that we can arrange in any order Resnais it's a near-comic nightmare in Where the Gothic immutables were that seems most meaningful or flamboy- which you still have to dress for dinner locked into a tragic continuity and the antly dreamlike. There's often a reck- even though by the time you reach the Wellesian heroes into time-lapse con- less arbitrariness in the result which sug- table it may be breakfast. Life without tractions, Cocteau's time warriors have gests that Resnais isn't concerned with time is content wihout form. So Resnais found the reverse button on the mov- grandstanding about human hope and and Alain Robbe-Grillet (who wrote Ma- -~~~~ rienbad) mischievously and deliberately stuff in the substitute form of manners, evening wear, gallantry, protocol. And , the absurd social rituals and auto-pilot deportment continue, just as the hu- mans in Man OncLe d' Amerique carry on business as usual even when wearing rat-heads and inhabiting a giant cage. The idea is that, just like good suits and social decorum, Time is an exchangea- ble formality. Resnais has discovered the surreal philosopher's stone offered by the moviC'Z editing process. If you take time apart, who says you have to put it to- gether again? ... and in the same order? Resnais' characters thus become, in the best sense, weightless people enjoying their existential zero-gravity. For a while, at least. Resnais knows that though the cinema has made non- sense of Time and we live with this platonic model for a timeless world right in our hands, we are no nearer to being able to live without time in the reaL world. So eventually disillusionment or punishment must catch up with us. In Providence a sour and tyrannical master puppeteer (author and father John Gielgud) is revealed presiding over all the apparently free-form choppings. Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad . And in La Vie est un Roman a pair of 12

Mephistopelean look-alikes (Vittorio Gassman and Ruggero Raimondi) pre- side royally over the slipstreams of spon- taneity going on in separate stories in 1914 and 1980s France. Elsewhere in Europe Robbe-Grillet in his own movies as director (from L'lmmortelle to La Belle Captive), Raul Ruiz in L'Hypothese du Tableau Vole or La Ville des Pirates, Jo- seph Losey in Accident or Monsieur Klein, all suggest the metaphysical earth tremors that can happen when Time's plates are allowed-or encouraged-to slip deep beneath the ground. Nicolas Roeg gives us even stronger, more continuous tremors, and occa- sional outright quakes. Roeg's movies are fiercely undecorative. There is none of the parlor-game aestheticism em- braced by French or Latin directors like Cocteau, Resnais, Ruiz. If Roeg is ba- roque in his treatment of time, he's at the hard end of baroque, where muscu- lar expressionism hasn't yet leaned to- ward swoony rococco. Yet the message of Roeg's films is close kin to theirs. Every Roeg character swarms with different selves, like a dia- mond flashing in a beam of light. Cin- ema has to find a way to show all these different one-character selves in symbi- otic existence. This is something the novel can do by patient exposition, the painting by an accumulation of expres- sive detail which the viewer can pore over at leisure. Roeg insists always that cinema must find its own way. So imitat- ing a novel or a painting, as many film- makers do by piling on verbal exposition in the one case, or in the other by hold- ing c10seups until the face has registered every nuance required-won't do. Roeg prefers to take the instrument unique to cinema, the editing machine, and exploit its ability to tell a story by darting about through space and time. So a character or a relationship always exists in simultaneous triplicate with Roeg: as what has been; what is; and what will be. An initial trauma or cata- clysm (a father's self-immolation in Walkabout, a daughter'S drowning in Don't Look Now, the discovery of gold in Eureka) creates a splintered, kaleido- scopic compound-time that simultane- ously holds the longed-for past, the painful present, and the feared but mys- tically alluring future. All these directors-Welles, Cocteau, Resnais, Roeg-have created an art of spider's-web intricacy spun out of the 13

material of cinema. Cinema's technical of cinema, and it is intricately bound up time can result in a fixed totemized possibilities have given us the vision of a with the tensions between real time and identity that takes on a zombie-like poetic world where time can be stopped, cinematic time. Camp is about posture quality (as with Joan Crawford or reversed, cut up, accelerated, slowed, and fa~ade. It feeds on dated ness, it Marlene Dietrich). It is the rictus of high scrambled, and denied or defied ad libi- loves flamboyant obsolescence, and it is glamour. It's camp because concen- tum. Bu~ the real world doesn't accom- predicated on a wild disproportion be- trated Style-the fortifications of modate these flexible variants on Time. tween resilient style and perishable con- makeup, of exaggerated elan or lumi- So the filmmaker is left dangling be- tent. It is what remains behind on the nosity-have had to replace what was tween Heaven and Earth: trying to find cultural seashore when a new move- formerly natural personality, beauty, sense and meaning in the tension be- ment of New Wave has ebbed right back youth. Because cinema lasts forever, tween the fantasic possibilities of movie and left idiosyncratic deposits no one and because a star's youthful presence is time and the intractable reality ofworldy perceived at the full flood: aesthetic al- always available to the spectator, on film time. gae, stranded starfish, baroque and dry- or on cassette, cinema's creatures have a docked flotsam. special imperative not to be seen to And here again , as in the horror genre, change and decay. This is the Sunset the pattern forms itself into one of Hu- Camp is created by cinema's unique Boulevard syndrome. The zombie or bris and Nemesis. The pretense of im- power as ,a recording machine. Unlike vampire-and Norma Desmond was a perishability, or the artful dodging of other \"live\" art (play productions or con- conflation of both-is alive and well and time, nearly always meets it'scomeup- certs or opera performance) which be- living in Beverly Hills. pance: in Welles with the grim march of fore the cinema only survived in report ineluctable decay; in Cocteau with and legend (Edmund Kean's Hamlet, or Camp is the tragicomic punishment Orpheus' doomed rescue attempts from Mrs. Siddons as Lady Macbeth), cin- that swoops down upon the crime of a Death; in Resnais with the macabre ema has always survived as both text and pretense of agelessness. The \"poign- puppet master figure who hides behind performance. The core of camp is florid ancy\" of a figure like Judy Garland is the veils of time; in Roeg with the no- gestures and emotionalism built around based on the viewer's sympathetic shud- tion that time's disequilibrium is the re- themes people do not take seriously, or der at the merciless dictates ofcinematic sult of trauma, a chaos of the mind and have stopped taking seriously. And it timelessness (and its zombie-masters, spirit that must eventually seek a recon- depends for its finest flowerings on the the producers), which tries to turn hu- ciliation with reality. survival of all the evidence: hence on man beings into obsolescence-proof arti- cinema as a medium . facts, with the inevitable emotional Camp havoc wrought upon the human being. In movies the pretense of timeless- When the attempt to preserve the star in Camp was born, at least as an articu- ness makes the datedness of a star or a all his or her pristine charisma starts to lated and celebrated concept, in the age style or a story especially poignant or crack ot fissure, the cinema finds its real- comical. A star's efforts to hold back life equivalent of the Frankenstein fa- ble. Dona Drake and Bette Davis in Beyond The Forest. Movies themselves are seen as vul- nerable to this process as their individual stars. When we giggle at Plan 9 From Outer Space or luxuriate in the wackier sentimentalities of a Douglas Sirk movie, it's because one age's portentous sincerity-made, like all cinema, for time-is coming humanly apart at the seams, creating exactly the capricious serendipity of response that cinema, the dream machine, often tries to deny or transcend. In themselves, vitality and passion, talent and personality are timeless. But the particular works of art into which these energies may be channeled are all too timeful. Camp movies happen when passion gets out of synch with fashion. When Bette Davis in Beyond The Forest ejaculates \"What a dump!\", we see a whirring machinery of mannerism and histrionic elan working full out on a line of idiot banality. Of course the lines weren't intended to be banal; it was once a cry of Hollywood Bovaryism, the en- nui-eaten heroine spitting out her hatred of domesticity. But time has washed all that apres-Flaubert pretension away, leaving the style high and dry without 14

the content. The passion remains after as it was in Cocteau; it's also an analogue pening before our eyes. When Jerry the fashion has changed. In Camp, flam- for the movie screen. It combines the Lewis is flattened by a collapsing door or boyance and vivacity and charisma all twin lures of narcissism and nostalgia. a stampede of students in The Nutty Pro- work in time-defying harmony; it's only The characters in Jimmy Dean aren't fessor, we' re not at all surprized to see the kitschy message that's gotten out of looking back to the youth and beauty of him walking about hale and hearty and synch. Thus, Time once more wreaks Dean but to their own youth and sound of limb in the next scene. its vengeance on the \"timeless\" art. beauty: and hope. In the very same breath that cinema eternalizes our idols Time isn' t being reshuffled here; it's The Kingdom (with the paradoxical help of a well- being given an indefinite license for re- ofthe Genres timed death) it gives us a thumping, newal. Each crisis moment that crowns a graphic reminder of our own age and comic crescendo in cartoons or slapstick To die beautifully. In the genre of the decay. The grapes of timelessness are movies (say, the Coyote's boomeranging love story, early deaths are much prized. flourished Tantalus-like before us, but ing murder attempts on the Road Run- This is the gift-wrapped obeisance of we' re grimly, salutarily reminded that ner) marks a cut-off point. Then we sim- romantic fiction to the proverb \"Quit we can never partake of them. ply go back, or forward, and pick up while you 're ahead.\" It's also the cin- Time at a point where what has just ema's riposte to the campy dangers of The only genre in which death (alias happened never happened. aging. The bloom still hangs on the Time) seems to have no place in the cheeks of Ali McGraw in Love Story or cinema is in the cartoon-and in the At first this looks like the Utopia Margaret Sullavan in Three Comrades or more fantastical outposts of slapstick we've been searching for-where the Garbo in Camille or Debra Winger in comedy (Frank Tashlin, Jerry Lewis, cinema can happily represent a world Terms of Endearment. The cinema has 1941). Cartoon animals and slapstick he- totally independent of real time, and go power not only to prolong life's sen- roes bounce back from destruction more unpunished for this presumption by any tences but to shorten them, to find the often and more successfully even than last-minute Nemesis. But the Catch-22 perfect romantic period. And stars who the resurrected bodies reverse-mo- of these films is that just as physical die young in real life, like Valentino or tioned into life in Cocteau's Orpheus. renewal is on indefinite license, so is Dean or Monroe (or even who exit physical injury and punishment. Each young from the limelight like Garbo) , Only the cinema can show a cat being time Bugs Bunny or Sylvester the Cat or preserve their legends forever in amber. flattened like a pancake by a ten-ton Julius Kelp (Jerry Lewis) bounces back garbage truck and then in the next shot from the dead it is to meet another mael- This particular form of apotheosis- show the same cat restored to unscathed strom of insult and injury. This isn't self-enhancement by destruction or self- life and charging full-throttle after the Utopia, Hollywood: it's catastrophic exile-has been with us in art and myth mouse of the day; all as if it were hap- frustration on a 24 fps treadmill. at least since Sophocles' Antigone. But it's especially germane to cinema, since Jerry Lewis as Professor Julius Kelp in The Nutty Professor. it says two things about the art. First, it proclaims that, despite the magical con- tinuity of the movies and their power to synthesize youthfulness or to keep a young image before us in the aspic ofold films, Nothing Is Forever. Secondly, it says that beauty that trusts itself to the Pygmalion of the picture business is of- fering itself up as a human sacrifice. Cin- ema has a tendency to keep stars looking as young as possible as long as possible, and when it can no longer do that, their wrecked charisma is cut up and thrown into whatever gruesome casserole the industry thinks fits. Sometimes, as in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, the very attempt to pre- serve youth is gleefully parodied. At others, a star will play an over-the-hill mirror image of his or her younger self, as Vivien Leigh did in Gone With The Wind and A Streetcar Named Desire. So to die young and beautiful is to pick the moment, not to have it picked for one. Robert Altman's Come Back To The Five And Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean explores with a cunningly curdled romanticism the time-slips of cinema and the time-denials of movie fans. The mirror is the way back to the past here, 15

Where Sequels Dare semi-reluctant comeback, the big-brute on to encompass Airports, Rockys, antagonist, the sweetly keening wife Jawses, and Star Warses, plus Burt Rey- On the battlefields of Time, and the pulverising prize fight. In Star nolds chain-Smokeying in redneck filmgoers will probably never give up Wars we must have the scattered forces America, a brace of Godfathers, a heca- the quest, through the magic of movies, of Good brought slowly together from tomb of Dirty Harrys and a tandem of to find eternity in a finite world. The picturesque trouble spots so that they Travoltas dancing the neon night away modern-day manifestation of this urge is can be flung at the villains in an explo- as Tony Manero. the epidemic of sequelitis. sive last-reel team effort. The biggest non-stop saga is Star Wars The distinctive feature of Star Wars In the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties -a series devised with a built-in reverse and Rocky sagas, for example, is that the filmgoer's appetite for continuity button. Recall that, before decay can despite token bows to chronological pro- was satisfied chiefly by the star system. possibly affect the characters or the plot, gression there is virtually no sense of It was enough to see the same beloved after parts IV, V, and VI (ending with development in the characters or story star return in film after film, and most Return ofthe Jedi) , we will whizz back to from film to film. Not only do the pro- other kinds of series were otiose (or else Part I and begin again pre-natally. tagonists refuse visibly to age, but each relegated to Saturday matinee fare). But Meanwhile, though they have been story is almost nakedly a rerun of the last when the star system began to crumble, subjected to every danger and injury one. The individual details may change another form of continuity was needed from lightswords to giant walking tanks, but the main stations of the narrative are and it became the continuity of the se- not a single one of the leading human identical. In Rocky we must have the ries. Beginning with the unstoppable characters has lost his or her life; even Sir Bond (born to movies in 1962), it went Alec Wan Kenobi is on permanent con- sultative recall. A memorial to Mr. T's Nemesis in the town ofDr. J. In the cinema of wish-fulfillment, death has no dominion. Yet human be- ings cannot sit idly by and watch these celebrations of immortality go un- checked and uncounterbalanced. The flipside to Star Wars is the relentless and prolific wave of horror sagas (the Hallow- eens, Friday the J3ths, and their ilk) which hoist high the spectacle of death. Here the mantle of immortality, or at least superhuman resilience, is con- ferred on only one character: the killer, Death itself. And who could deny that Death is the only immortal? Popular taste in movies, though many critics would have you believe other- wise, is never in the last analysis arbi- trary or meaningless. Star Wars is a Uto- pian fantasy ofwhat we would like life to be: a saga of endless renewal in which wounds magically re-heal, knowledge and wisdom are on permanent tap, evil is always defeatable, and Death can somehow always be postponed. Friday the 13th, Halloween and com- pany are what adult filmgoers have de- manded as a counterweight: Death is the only \"force\" that keeps coming back for more. By the unlikeliest and shlock- ie.st of back roads, the low-budget horror movie, cinema has found a way to recon- cile its own miraculous imperishability with a statement of our own perishabil- ity. Which is where, in an appropriately timeless loop, we came in. The crea- tures of the horror film-from zombies and vampires and the rest of the gang to the never-say-die killers of Camp Crys- tal Lake and elsewhere-are embodi- ments of our refusal to allow the immor- tality machine, the cinema, to pretend to us that we ourselves can transcend Time. ® 16

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by David Chute lames L. Brooks . doesn't write his own material. But lonathan Kaplan. Dante's stunning third segment of Twi- In the post-Lucas period, \"pure cin- loeDante. light Zone: The Movie bristles with visual ema\" is synonymous with sensational- ideas-maybe too many for a single ism. Today, even a legendary triumph of twenty-minute episode. So it isn't just pure cinema like Rear Window seems the way he does things, it's the things he most impressive as a complex narrative. does. Alfred Hitchcock's deftness at convey- ing information visually is indeed star- Dante's work demonstrates that ap- tling. Even more amazing is that he had plied intelligence in movies needn't be so much information to convey. The literary; there are other kinds ofcontent. richness of content in major revivals like I still prefer The Road Warrior to Heat Rear Window or The Leopard points up and Dust, and visually inexpressive mes- how thin and flat most current movies sage films like Silkwood or Testament are are-how uninteresting they are. It not the answer either. Good movies are doesn't much matter how \"well made\" the answer. Risky Business is, because it wasn't worth making in the first place. Compare, for example, the two major Stephen King adaptations of the season, The handful of films in 1983 that en- John Carpenter's cinema-intensive couraged optimism about the future of Christine and David Cronenberg's narra- the movies came, more often than not, tive-intensive Dead Zone. Carpenter's from authentic writer-directors; from film is a compendium of all the flashiest narrative filmakers who know what in- \"visual\" sequences in King's source telligence and craftsmanship can accom- novel. But so much of the \"literary\" con- plish. They are: nective tissue has been sliced away that the result is both jumpy and inert. § Bill Forsythe as the screen equiva- There is no real narrative momentum, lent of a wry British novelist of manners just galvanic \"visceral\" energy. Cronen- in Local Hero. berg's approach is more like Brooks' in Terms. He begins with an empathetic § James L. Brooks, \"collaborating\" grasp of the material, and then employs with Larry McMurtry on Terms of En- his expressive visual skills to convey dearment - one fine writerly sensibility what he has understood. honoring another. A terrific film style is a thing of § Lawrence Kasdan's demonstra- beauty, but I'm sick to death of all this tion that structural elegance alone can be empty style. Isn'tRumble Fish just about an uplifting source of pleasure in The Big the last straw? It's a feast with no main Chill -for its crucial virtues, the most course; an endless series of cloying des- underrated big movie of the year. serts. § Jonathan Kaplan's special flair for In today's Hollywood, \"stylistics\" are framing his characters in their environ- not in short supply. Any clod can have a ment, so that place and time become a style now, and ifhe doesn't he can pur- palpable dramatic force in Heart Like a chase a facsimile-technology. Stylish- Wheel. ness as a production value is not what is needed to counter the sterility of most And yet ... commercial product; it's an embellish- Joe Dante is the one new American ment. What could be more stylish than filmmaker whose work promises out- right brilliance, on a par (if we're lucky) The Hunger? with the best of Francis Coppola, Brian The industry is already overstocked De Palma, Sam Peckinpah and Steven Spielberg. He's a film-buff director who with guys who can dream up terrific crane shots. Now it needs a few more 18

people who have some sense of what a Like a Wheel) won't just fall between the be quite New (yet), but it's the next best crane shot means. cracks; it will be shoved between the thing. Likewise Eddie Murphy and Ja- cracks. mie Lee Curtis, who should have It needs men like James Brooks and shared more scenes in Trading Places. Joe Dante and Bill Forsythe and David That's why I'm particularly encour- Cronenberg and George Miller and aged when a film contrives to smuggle in If you really stick to it, of course, this Lawrence Kasdan and Carroll Ballard some New wine cleverly disguised in extended notion of the New Face be- and Jonathan Kaplan. New Faces that dusty Old bottles-Body Heat last year, comes as schematic as anything else. are really new. People with a fresh, start- Rick Rosenthal's Bad Boys this year- And hard-and-fast doesn't apply where from-scratch attitude. Who take it for harmless-looking genre films whose movies are concerned. granted they can see things in a new hearts are in the wrong place. What you way. Who don't assume that every story see in Sean Penn's face is a degree of Here's a terrific Hollywood quotation, has been told a hundred times. skepticism that the script's built-in variously attributed, but it's definitely a generic complacency cannot explain production executive talking: \"If we • away. said yes to all the prqjects we say no to, and said no to all the projects we say yes The best of them, of course, will al- New faces? to, the final ratio of hits to flops would be ways be New Faces in this sense. Sean Penn's gets Newer all the time. just about the same. \" Steven Spielberg will never be an Old Sandra Bernhard's is so old that we Face. In his case, newness is not an How much is he being paid to act accident of timing. It's an intrinsic qual- ity. upon this wisdom? ® You see it in certain actors, too. Mi- Clockwise, from top left: chael Caine hasn't given a second- Tom Cruise, Sandra Bernhard, hand, old-hat performance in his life. Sean Penn , Jamie Lee Curtis, He starts from scratch every time and, watching him, so do we. Perhaps that's Eddie Murph y. why Caine is so often re-discovered as first-rate. Jeff Daniels has a similar cus- tom-made quality as Flap Horton in Terms o/Endearment. He shows us some- thing we have never seen before-the complications of a shallow man. Fred Ward has it In The Right Stuff, in Silk- wood, and in the overlooked, enjoyable action picture TIme Rider. He can tell an old joke for the umpteenth time and make you laugh as if it's brand new. As, of course, it is. Tom Cruise is New this year, but will he still be New five years from now? For some, Cruise is the one authentic big-star discovery of 1983. But a star grows Old faster than anybody, and the public apparently wants him that way, like a favorite comfy chair. Burt and Clint have been elderly for years, and Richard Pryor's on his way-the glim- mers of greatness in the concert films are sad snapshots from his lost youth. Occa- sionally, of course, a star manages to get Newer as the years go by. Look at Paul Newman. Even Streisand can be reju- venated. Miracles can happen. • You begin to see the difficulty. The current basic Hollywood strategy is to decorate familiarity (some tired old genre-movie storyline) with a judicious pinch of novelty (the latest hot star-dis- covery or special-effects device). Any- thing really New is weeded out by the Story Department. \"It's too soft.\" Or: \"We don't know how to sell it.\" Or: \"The target audience won't know what it is.\" A movie that is neither one thing nor the other (Heart 19

THE RETURN OF WILLIE BEST Eddie Murphy in Trading PLaces Richard Pryor in Superman III half the cast of D. C. Cab SOON TO BE A MINOR MOTION PICTURE STUDIO Stephen King: Cujo, Dead Zone Christine WE KNOW HE CAN DON'T LET YOUR READ ENGLISH, AUTEURS NEAR THE STAGE, BUT CAN HE SPEAK IT? Matt Dillon MRS. WORTHINGTON Robert Altman: Streamers Peter Yates: The Dresser Lewis Gilbert: Educating Rita LADD,ADOG ~ SOME SAY IT'S KOSHER, The Ladd Co. 's Star 80 BUT WE SAY IT'S TREF :\" 'i'l} and The Right Stuff Daniel, Hanna K., YentL RICHARD CORLISS STEPHEN HARVEY ELLIOTT STEIN 1. BerUn ALexanderpLatz (alphabetically) 2. The Night ofthe Shooting Stars (alphabetical listing:) L'Argent (Bresson) EL Crimen de Cuenca (Pilar Miro) 3. The Big Chill Baby It's You The Dead Zone (Cronenberg) 4. The Right Stuff Danton The Fourth Man (Paul Verhoeven) S. Terms ofEndearment LocaL Hero Matinee (Jaime Humbeno Hermosillo) 6. Heart Like a WheeL The Night ofthe Shooting Stars Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (Oshima) 7. Boat PeopLe La Nuit de Varennes Edogawa Rampo ryokikan: Yaneura sampo-sha 8. Christine Pauline at the Beach 9. Yentl The Return ofMartin Guerre (Noboru Tanaka) 10. TotaL Eclipse ofthe Heart TIger ofEschnapurlThe Indian Tomb (Lang) Silkwood Trobriander Cricket (J. Leach & G. Kildea) (\"video\" by Russell Mulcahy) Terms ofEndearment Under Fire (Spottiswoode) Under Fire 20

THE MICHELIN AWARD FOR BEST NEW PECS (ex aequo) John Travolta, for Staying Alive Mariel Hemingway, for Star 80 THE RETURN OF FRANKLIN PANGBORN Mitchell Lichtenstein in Streamers Tom Courtenay in The Dresser VOX POP OPINES NOPE TO CRIX PICKS OF HIX PIX THE COMPUTER TOLD THEM Cannon Films THEY'D MAKE MONEY WITH FILMS ABOUT 'LET'S GIVE THE KIDS Boys in the Military: A DECENT ROLE MODEL, The Lords ofDiscipline, Streamers FOR PETE'S SAKE' Headline Hotspots: The Pimp Hanna K., Under Fire, Beyond the Dan Aykroyd in Doctor Detroit Nuclear Gamesmanship: Henry Winkler in Night Shift Tom Cruise in Risky Business Deal ofthe Century, The Final Option FROM THE ZOETROPE SCTV Characters: JUNIOR H.S. YEARBOOK Francis Coppola RICHARD T. JAMESON -STEPHEN HARVEY Activities: Camera Club, Skull & alphabetical as of 10:27 P.M., 12/21183 HARLAN JACOBSON Bones Cycle Gang, NAMBLA Berlin Alexanderplatz (the best) \"Stay gold\" Coup de Torchon The Worst Films I Heard About 1983 : Entre Nous DAVID CHUTE The Eyes, the Mouth 1. Scarface 1. The Leopard Fanny and Alexander 2. for: Hunter from the Future 2. Rear Window Local Hero 3. Two ofa Kind 3. The Night ofthe Shooting Stars Parsifal 4. Moon in the Gutter 4. DeadZone Pauline at the Beach The Right Stuff S. Exposed S. BadBoys Tender Mercies 6. Stayin' Alive (see #3) 6. \"It's a Good Life\" episode of 7. Stroker Ace Twilight Zone: The Movie (Joe 8. Hanna K. Dante) 9. Max Dugan Returns 7. Local Hero 8. Evil Dead The Worse Than All Reports Film of 1983: 9. Heart Like a Wheel 10. Terms ofEndearment 10. Life Is A Bed of Roses 21

\"And theNominees (Possibly) Are...' there are so few satisfying movies.\" nations: James L. Brooks's Terms ofEn- by Anne Thompson Marketing expert Marvin Levy says, dearment and Philip Kaufman's The The Generation Gap has never been \"Normally by late November at least Right Stuff. The rest of the nominations wider in Hollywood. For the first time in a long ti'me, it seems entirely possible three or four films have received unani- are hard to handicap, because \"everything that none of 1983's ten top-grossing releases-in alphabetical order, Flash- mous acclaim. There are no guarantees depends on everything else,\" says Har- dance , Mr. Mom, National Lampoon's Va- cation, Octopussy, Return of the Jedi, about anything this year. The ensemble metz. \"It's like a set of dominoes.\" Risky Business, Staying Alive, Superman III, Trading Places, and WarGames-will casts of The Right Stuff and The Big Chill Our panel gave Mike Nichols's Silk- receive Oscar nominations in any major category. The 4034 voting members of make it hard to predict what the Acad- wood, Lawrence Kasdan's The Big the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences seem graybeards indeed , emy will do.\" Year-end movies domi- Chill, and Barbra Streisand's Yentl seven choosing nice movies over naughty ones, middling craft over high concept, nate our panel's selections. \"Not one votes apiece. Ingmar Bergman's elegiac politics (usually of the center-left stripe) over social anarchy. movie released before Labor Day will be Fanny and Alexander is in fighting posi- Look at the last half-dozen winners of nominated for Best Picture,\" opines tion for the fifth slot, with six of our the Oscar for Best Picture: Gandhi, Chariots of Fire, Ordinary People , Kra- Dale Pollock of the Los Angeles Times. voters giving it a real shot. 20th Cen- mer vs. Kramer, The Deer Hunter, Annie Hall . Now check out the biggest com- \"There are no shoo-in wmners this tury-Fox Publicity Director Lee Beau- mercial hits from each of those years: E. T. The Extra-Terrestrial, Raiders of the year,\" says former Rastar production ex- pre thinks that Fanny and Alexander's Lost Ark, The Empire Strikes Back, Kra- mer vs. Kramer, Grease, Star Wars. With ecutive Stuart Byron, \"but there are chances are improving as its competi- one exception, it's kids over adults. So it's tough to pick Oscar nominations: plenty of sure nominees.\" And press tors weaken. you need a crystal ball that sees into the past. agent Ed Margulies reminds us of the Described by Peter Rainer as \"the We asked eleven Los Angeles movie surprises the Academy always has in feel-good, feel-bad movie of 1983,\" mavens from the rank of the industry, publicity, and journalism, to vote in our store: \"Every year in one category in- Terms of Endearment is building a deci- 1983 Oscar poll. In this very uncertain year, many were unable to come up with cluding Best Picture there's a wild card sive lead for the big win in April. \"It has a sure five in each category, so only real votes (not splits) are counted. They you can never anticipate; you never the big momentum in most catego- gave their best guesses on what would eventually rate a 'nomination in Febru- know. There's always one nomination ries,\" says Pollock. Harmetz compares ary, without having scanned the reviews for Silkwood, Scarface , and The Dresser; that no one thought of.\" it to On Golden Pond, adding, \"but it's a and without benefit of the year-end vot- ing results from the film critics' groups, And there are plenty of \"obvious\" better movie.\" But Variety's Todd Mc- which often have influence with the Academy. It's quite possible that the candidates that don't get nominated. Carthy warns: \"Everyone will love it critics' fuss over such films as Local Hero , Tender Mercies , Heart Like a This year, for example, Zelig is likely to initially, but there may be a backlash, as Wheel, and Fanny and Alexander could improve these movies' chances with the be ignored in the major categories. there was on The Big Chill.\" Academy. Woody Allen's film, says one industry The Right Stuff is a sure-fire nomina- Everyone agrees that 1983 was a strange year. \"It's the widest field in exec, \"is too New York artsy-craftsy. tion but has been losing thrust since its years,\" exclaims New York Times corre- spondent Aljean Harmetz, \"because The Academy likes successful pictures. October takeoff. \"It was once viewed The only time unsuccessful pictures as a cinch to sweep the Awards and now make it is when they're platformed in is perceived as not performing well at December and their ultimate success is the box office,\" says McCarthy. \"It unknown at nomination time. Films isn't boffo enough to win.\" One studio that failed in March, April, or Septem- executive thinks Terms of Endearment ber don't make it. \" Harmetz think Allen will win over The Right Stuffbecause \"it will turn up in whichever slot-acting, is a reflection of society, while The Right writing, directing-has room for him: Stuff is a broad entertainment without \"If they had a Best Individual Artist focus or point-of-view.\" Working Within the Film Industry cate- The Big Chill is another entertaining gory, they'd give it to him.\" movie that may not be taken seriously The Academy will also ignore the enough by the Academy. Gregg Kilday, most successful filmmaker of the year, who was West Coast editor of The George Lucas. Return of the Jedi was far Movies, thinks that the younger Acad- and away 1983's highest grossing film, emy members 'will vote it in, while clocking $245 million in domestic coin. press agent Michael Maslansky insists \"Sequels are rarely nominated,\" says the membership will find it \"too hip, Pollock. \"The Empire Strikes Back wasn't too New York.\" Byron suggests that nominated either. The Academy will \"the brilliant marketing campaign to give it lots of technical nominations and make it a younger Four Seasons has say 'Screw you' to George Lucas.\" ironically made the film seem less se- rious to Academy members. \" The only reason The Big Chill will get a nomina- Best Picture tion, says Harmetz, \"is because of the weakness of most of the year-end Only two films are shoo-ins for nomi- movi.es .\" 22

Silkwood may squeak through for the Bergman's Fanny and ALexander would and Mike Nichols follow with nine same reason. Silkwood's political en- be a Best Picture entry, but Sweden des- vo tes apiece. Lawrence Kasdan and gagement is clearly a plus with the ignated the film as its entrant in the Best Barbra Streisand with six. Long shots Academy membership, which has been Foreign Film race. That left Embassy include Bob Fosse, Lawrence Kasdan, described as comprising \"the last four Pictures with the option of declining Bruce Beresfo rd, Woody Allen, and thousand liberals in America\"; remem- the honor and pressing on for higher John Badham , for WarGames or BLue ber nominations for Gandhi, The China stakes. There are precedents, says Har- Thunder. \"It wouldn't surprise me,\" Syndrome , Norma Rae, All the Presi- metz. \"Foreign films were nominated as says press agent Bruce Feldman, \"if dent's Men, and Absence ofMalice. Kil- Best Picture three times: Grand illusion Lewis Gilbert got a nomination for Edu- day thinks the film is dated and will in 1938; Z in 1969; and The Emigrants in cating Rita, because every year there suffer in comparison to the more timely 1972. \" Embassy did not decline, though are always one or two unlikely candi- nuclear-holocaust film Testament; the film was touted as Bergman's last dates who hold some mystical appeal Rainer guesses that Testament, a weaker film and the Academy has voted him for Academy members. \" film, will help SiLkwood gain a Top Five more nominations than any other for- berth. eign Director and given him a Thalberg Best Actress award to boot. F&A faces Entre Nous, YentL is another kettle of gefilte fish . And the Ship SaiLs On, Carmen , Erendira, The easiest category to pr~dict: Shir- No film has been more hotly debated , and the Czech-designated IncompLete ley MacLaine, Debra Winger, Barbra but the dust has settled; with YentL both Eclipse, among others, but win or not, Streisand, Meryl Streep in Silkwood, a critical and popular hit, its chances of \" I'm convinced,\" says Pollock , and Jane Alexander. Seven of our a Best Picture nomination are excel- \" Bergman will get Best Director. \" voters think that the Best Actress nomi- lent. Streisand, who is eligible for nom- nation for Alexander is the one nomina- inations as producer, director, writer, Best Director tion Testament will get. A minority sub- and actress, may get hurt in some cate- mitted votes for Julie Walters gories: Rainer says displeasure with Traditionally four of the top five di- (Educating Rita) and Bonnie Bedelia Streisand may \"translate into her not rectors correspond to the Best Picture (Heart Like a WheeL); MacLaine is given getting a best picture nomination. Dif- nominations. Our eleven panelists the edge to win over Winger, her Terms ficult women are even more of an unanimously select Philip Kaufman of Endearment co-star. Streep, always a anathema in Hollywood than difficult and Ingmar Bergman. James L. Brooks contender, was last year's winner; our men.\" Some panelists think that the savants don't think she will join the directors or the writers may deprive her of a nomination, while others predict Seven with The Right Stuff and The Big Chill Eight. that Yentl will glean many nominations but no wins The British film industry, which won Best Picture two years in a row with Chariots ofFire and Gandhi, can't hope to beat an American film this year but is certainly trying to score some nomina- tions with two Columbia films, The Dresser and Educating Rita, both based on popular London stage plays. (A third Brit-legit adaptation, BetrayaL, looks to have been too stiff-upper-Iibido for the Academy.) The Dresser has won some raves, as well as accusations of the ham- miest acting in years. \"The Dresser is perfectly geared to the Academy's taste,\" says Pollock. Educating Rita is also given long-shot status; Columbia has launched this heart-warming com- edy in the Neil Simon mold with con- siderable marketing muscle. Three American long shots are popu- lar but either haven't been seen by enough people, opened too early in the year, or haven' t made enough money. Bruce Beresford's critical hit Tender Mercies and Woody Allen's ZeLig fulfill all three categories; Lynn Littman's Testament, with its anti-nuke message dear to the Academy heart, is viewed as too small an effort to gain a nomination. For awhile, it appeared that Ingmar 23

exclusive company of actors who have As McCarthy notes, \"the writers al- won't help them in January if the Acad- won two years in a row (Katharine Hep- most always chose at least one foreign emy does the same.) Nicholson and burn, Spencer Tracy, Jason Robards, film.\" Besides Fanny and Alexander, Goldblum lead the pack with eleven Luise Rainer). popular foreign films this year include and nine votes, respectively; Harris got Danton, The Return of Martin Guerre, six, Shepard five, and Hurt four. Best Actor Pauline at the Beach, and The Draughts- man's Contract. The stragglers include YentZ's Mandy \"It is the worst year for leading ac- Patinkin (whose votes were also split tors,\" complains Beaupre. \"It's usually In the Adapted Screenplay sweep- with the Best Actors); Dennis Quaid, hard to whittle it down to seven.\" Ro- stakes, writer-directors James L . Fred Ward, and Scott Glenn (The Right bert Duvall is the only shoo-in, with ten Brooks and Phil Kaufman again receive Stuff>; and Beau Bridges (Heart Like a votes for his reformed drifter in Tender unanimous acclaim. Ron Harwood and Wheel). John Lithgow's crazed airline Mercies. Michael Caine garnered nine Willy Russell are given five and nine passenger in Twilight Zone: The Movie for his drunken professor in Educating votes, respectively, for their adapta- inspired raves, but the film is likely to Rita; Albert Finney beat out his Dresser tions of The Dresser and Educating Rita; be shut out due to its helicopter trag- co-star Tom Courtenay, seven votes to only four panelists think that Streisand edy. (The scandal may also freeze out four; Eric Roberts earns six votes for his and Yentl co-author Jack Rosenthal will John Landis' other entries: Trading portrait of a sleaze in Star 80; and AI rate a nomination, partly due to Isaac Places and the Michael Jackson short Pacino gets six votes for Scarface . All of Bashevis Singer's disavowal of the ad- Thriller.) Perhaps Lithgow will get the these actors belong in the Best Actor aptation; four think Bob Fosse will re- nod for Terms of Endearment. Of the category, but one-Courtenay, Ro- ceive recognition for his adaptation of a stragglers, Patinkin is the most likely to berts, or Pacino-won' t make it. Teresa Carpenter Village Voice article break into the Top Five because, as on Dorothy Stratten's life and death; Rainer points out, \"The Academy Robert Duvall seems to be the five think the writers will vote for wants Streisand to know she had some heavyweight in this category, with a Harold Pinter's Betrayal. John Sacret help.\" performance that Rainer describes as Young's adaptation of a Ms . magazine \"the apotheosis of the accent factor. He story by Carol Amen rates a possibility. Best Supporting Actress is the American Olivier; Hollywood loves it when an actor completely Best Supporting Actor Questions of sexuality will not be left makes himself over.\" Michael Caine, out of this year's Oscar race: besides previously overlooked by the Academy, Each member of the Academy's Streisand's Yentl masquerade, the Sup- is also a popular favorite. \"Besides,\" twelve voting branches submits up to porting category-another wide open says Rainer, \"drunks have an edge over five votes for each category, weighted field-includes Cher's lesbian in Silk- the competition, and he played two this in order of preference. They receive wood and Linda Hunt's diminutive year\" (the other was in Beyond the reminder lists with film titles and ac- man in The Year of Living Dangerously. Limit). Finney will be nominated, says tors' names only. The individual studio Cher is our only shoo-in, with ten votes, Silverman , because actors like to see is responsible, via their trade ads, for while The Big Chill's Glenn Close fol- other actors do what they dream of do- steering voters to the right category. lows with eight; her co-star Mary Kay ing: eat up the scenery.\" Place is tied with Hunt with five votes; This year, Warner Bros. is position- Tender Mercies' Tess Harper and The Best Screenplays ing its Right Stuff actors Ed Harris, Sam Right Stuffs Mary Jo Deschanel earned Shepard, Dennis Quaid, and Scott four votes apiece; while JoBeth Wil- Often the writing categories are the Glenn as Best Actors, while Veronica liams, the third Big Chill actress, ties strongest, if only because the writers Camight, Mary Jo Deschanel, Pamela with Alfre Woodard (Cross Creek) with award their nominations on merit. Reed, and Fred Ward are Supporting. two votes. \"The writers are progressive,\" says Mc- If the Academy does what our panelists Carthy. \"They look around and don't did, some actors positioned in the Best Many of our panelists missed a sure- limit themselves to popular movies.\" Actor category will also receive votes in fire emotive performance from an older Supporting, which is where The Right actress-\"the Beatrice Straight slot\" There may be debate over the fate of Stuff astronauts probably belong. The Silkwood's Sudie Bond might qualify but The Big Chill in other categories , but it Big Chill's entire cast, Silkwood's Kurt will be aced out by Cher; Louise wins hands down for Original Screen- Russell, and YentZ's Mandy Patinkin are Fletcher might rate, but Brainstorm will play; Kasdan rates a unanimous vote in Supporting. The Columbia brass probably be overlooked. Dale Pollock and a probable win. Kasdan is joined by would disagree, but several panelists thinks Carroll Baker might win the fellow writer-director Ingmar Bergman thought Courtenay should be in the N ostalgia-for-a-Faded-Star-Making- with a unanimous vote; Horton Foote supporting category. Kilday says, \"Tom Her-Comeback-Playing-the-Mother- (an Oscar winner for To Kill a Mocking- Courtenay playing Roddy McDowall of-a-Doomed-Blonde-Actress Award. bird) gets ten votes for Tender Mercies. should be Supporting.\" Kim Stanley got it last year for Frances. Nora Ephron and Alice Arlen received Producer Myron Meisel suggests a eight votes for their Silkwood screen- Astronauts dominate this tough call long-shot contender from Sweden: play, while Paul Brickman, the Kasdan category: Jack Nicholson in Terms of \"Gunn Wallgren from Fanny and Alex- of teensploitation, got six votes for Endearment (the only shoo-in) and Ed ander is a possibility, if the Academy is Risky Business. Woody Allen's Zelig got Harris and Sam Shepard, both for The reminded of who she is with a decent two votes; and Bill Forsythe's Local Right Stuff. Jeff Goldblum and Bill Hurt campaign. [She played the grand- Hero garnered three. are the strong contenders from The Big mother.] Remember Ida Kaminska in Chill. (Both Hurt and Shepard received votes in the Best Actor category, which The Shop on Main Street.\" ® 24

Edmond O'Brien and Jan Sterling in the canteen ofthe Ministry ofTruth in 1984. by Jamie Horwitz of the dangers of living in a massively \"telescreens\" and couldn't escape computer-equipped world. The image knowing that it was the source of gov- There's a \"telescreen\" in every of the threat technology poses to secu- ernmental surveillance in their homes, it household in George Orwell's 1984. rity has largely been presented as one in can be difficult to escape using com- The screen's two-way capability re- which governmental, corporate, and in- puters today and nearly impossible to ceives all the ambient information in its stitutional computers are trespassed by learn about domestic electronic surveil- viewing field, which is virtually total, at smirking, bright-eyed teenagers who lance. What little is known after a dec- the same time that it provides a contin- cause adventuristic mayhem from their ade of development of computer-en- uous stream of Big Brother's broadcast. electronics-filled bedrooms. hanced surveillance is generally told However, its two-way channel can be outside of mainstream channels. mediated from only one side, Big Real fears are being addressed in Brother's. The \"telescreen\" doesn't these stories, but only by replacing one A spotty picture emerges. A few dots turn off, much less double as a calcula- threat with another, or in this case, Big are connected when Federal prosecutors tor, teach French, or play video games. Brother was Little Brother. Sibling ri- submit (as legal evidence) information taken from telephone monitoring sys- All through 1983, mainstream media valry may be a good metaphor for com- tems. A new dot is provided every time devoted increasingly more space and peting social interests, but only in the investigative research is published (for a time to both fictional and news accounts media is Little Brother watching you. good summarysee/nfoWorld, vol.s #14) about the top-secret military installation While the inhabitants of Orwell's Oceania never had a chance to use their 25

The Whiz Kids and the screen-within-the-screen. safely in a bank, but experience a vicar- ious thrill when Fort Knox gets robbed. in Fort Meade, Maryland, which houses of households. In particular, the FBI's Banked information is now accessible to the National Security Agency. While no decision to prosecute brought public at- people more dangerous than kids. declassified jobs or information exists tention for the first time to both the there, reports are that the NSA's com- currently unregulated quality of the te- Media have sidestepped the political puter operation involves \"word-spot- lecommunications frontier and the po- dynamics of unauthorized entry by de- ting\" all international telephone and tel- tential menace of home computers con- touring into more familiar terrain: those egraph traffic. Like Nelson Rockefeller nected through telephone lines to pesky kids are at it again, bringing down said, \"If you don't want to be heard, distant, larger computer terminals. the house-whether it's the small A- don't use the telephone.\" frame of Rebel Without A Cause or the While not all versions of the trespas- entire planet in WarGames. Themati- Knowing which words are considered sers stories bring the U.S. to the brink of cally, it's just good kids-ultimately em- national security risks probably wouldn't nuclear war as does WarGames, all reveal ployable, by the way-getting in over protect anyone. This form of linguistic rarely heard perspectives on the inside their heads. Yet, outside the theater, surveillance is said to be coordinated track of telecommunications channels. Little Brother is taking the rap for the with digitalized voice prints of \"condi- Teenagers-unlike NASA's astronauts- unregulated status of the computer- tional targets,\" which can be both per- are unauthorized scouts, providing us communications system. And the anti- sons and points of communication. It's with the only publicity about the bor- hero image is quickly being mediated, if also known that computers are capable ders of the shifting configurations of not eliminated. of detecting dialects, stress in the voice, government, communications, and cap- and unusual non-aural telephone pat- ital. Self-named, hackers probe these Early in September, the New York terns (for instance, leaving the phone off borders , report where the checkpoints Times detailed the pressure on CBS to the hook or dialing incorrectly), any are, who controls them, the degree of revise a script for Whiz Kids, its prime- combination of which could red flag the difficulty in slipping past the sentries, time program with a computer-savant interest of human analysts for further and finally reveal the nature of the in- hero. Advertisers and local affiliates investigation. What is certain is that formation held. were worried that the show would fur- when powerful computers are hooked ther induce kids to computer-tamper. into communications lines, they provide The media have been quicker to rec- The precise cuts are unknown, but CBS \"clean\" methods of improving anyone's ognize the danger posed by kids rather kept the baby, kept the tub, and drained intelligence work. than corporations, because of the outlaw the bathwater: we get moralizing adults, nature of the former (and the in-law na- dull-witted cops, and young and old New communications technologies ture of the latter?). The media have trespassers being hauled off to jail. The are portrayed in the media today as a tempered the threat of trespassing by show is fresh, but it is meant as a compli- means to amplify the intensions of their fitting it into a predictable stereotype: ment to the middle class: smart kids, not users. The range of applications grows white, vaguely anti-authoritarian, adults, or computers, are the stars. more diverse everyday, and since no sin- youthful, hormonally driven. Even the gle purpose controls their varied uses, language appears sexually substitutive: Richie Adler (Matthew Laborteaux), the power to manipulate any channel of the \"boys\" have a passion \"to get in,\" or Whiz Kids' leading man, lives in a subdi- communication is currently dispersed, as one hacker told National Public Ra- vision like E. T. 's. and is similarly sur- shifting and competitive. Yet, while the dio, \"When I crack into a system, I feel rounded with every luxury except a live- use of computers and the global net- like a coyote popping up in holes in the at-home Dad. But rather than works which link them are unregulated, desert.\" It isn't simply that the hackers threatening national security or adult ways of seeing domestic access to and have demonstrated where the systems equilibrium, as does the star of War- security from telecommunications sys- are vulnerable; it is that WarGames, Whiz Games, Richie responds to the anxieties tems are being framed in film, televi- Kids, and all the news reports have used of the less computer-literate adults in his sion, and print. the offending kids to alert the public to neighborhood, particularly the sympa- the various dangers of accessible com- thetic newspaper reporter, Farley: In fictional and non-fictional sce- munications systems, and in so doing narios, from WarGames to CBS' Whiz have circumscribed the posture of Farley: Do you think computers are Kids to the cover of Newsweek or the vested interests as only defensive and going to take over the world? front pages of the New York Times, it was not offensive. Information is like cur- teenagers who brought the concept of rency-basically we want ours kept Richie: No, Farley, computers are computer trespassing home to millions only machines. Farley: Yeah, but do they know that? In a real case of screens talking to each other, the Nov. 9 episode proves it learned its lessons from WarGames when a less affluent classmate of Richie's con- fesses to pilfering money through an electronic funds transfer via the high- school computer in order to buy his own terminal. He tells the police he figured out how to enter the bank's computer by using the same technique that he saw carried out in WarGames. What continues to surface in TV shows, editorial cartoons, and national periodicals is always the part of War- 26

Games in which nuclear war is nearly cur in a social context in which there has through computer data banks and net- triggered by a 1S-year-old who figured been little information and less public works makes them the first choice for out how to sneak onto the North Ameri- debate about the importance of public anyone (with access to the resource) who can Air Defense (NORAD) computer access to telecommunications systems is under pressure. Whether or not the and unknowingly throw the system into or about the extent of governmental or channel contains all that is known, its highest state of alert/attack. Passed corporate trespassing into household ter- whether its selectivity is more or less over is the depiction of the military offi- minals or telephone lines. biased, bleaches out when time is cers (including Barry Corbin) who de- Back in 1971, Ralph Nader wrote that thought to be the greatest cost. The cide in the moment ofcrisis not to follow governmental agencies were using com- tendency to believe the screen could computer-generated commands in the puters to develop \"electronic dossiers\" shrink the dimensions of knowledge absence of other confirmation. The no- on individuals which increased the se- simply out of expedience. The end of ble and unexpected line is given to a crecy of information and decreased indi- cross sourcing may be the true hob- Norad officer in the first half hour of the vidual control over governmental sur- goblin of computer culture. film: \"I'm not willing to blow up forty veillance and record keeping. Nader's • million people until I can get someone call for increased information privacy On Jan. 22, PBS broadcasts the first of on the telephone. \" was addressed by Susan Krieger, a soci- a twelve part series to educate people Granted there are problems in por- ologist, in an as-yet-unpublished paper about computers. Bits and Bytes suc- traying the military as the repository of titled \"Privacy Is Not Enough\" (also ceeds in introducing many of the exist- trust. But this film puts the only brakes 1971) that pointed out that individual ing, and not yet marketed, applications on computer benefits seen recently in lines of defense are of little help if it is of micro-computers and delights in a mainstream media. The beauty of War- the misuse of information, not how it is range of screen-within-screen anima- Games is that it updates and amends the stored, that consistently defines the tions to do the explaining. But com- adolescent ritual of music lessons with problem. Any attempt to increase secu- puters are the only ones with any smarts computer practicing. The kid (Matthew rity in a computerized society, Krieger in this story. When Billy Van, the All- Broderick) moves toward his terminal argued, is tantamount to relying on a American, youthful and silver- haired, with the grace of his tenth piano recital, fallout shelter in an atomic attack-the audience surrogate in the \"Academy on and goes on to play an aria about the folly of which is obvious even if it was Computers,\" first learns about the ca- limits of computerization that any child only recently observed in ABC's Earth pacity of computers to \"talk\" to each understands: there is no logic that re- zap-fry film , The Day After. other, it worries him that they can also places the certainty of voice, eye, and When all the files as well as the deci- \"listen\" to each other. Billy asks surro- hand contact. sion-making authority have been depos- gate teacher Luba Goy (who explained The threat in WarGames is at the plot ited in computers, the potential misuse earlier that she is the \"presenter\" of in- level-a kid, or a maniac, can destroy of information can be deadly, a la War- formation supplied by the \"experts\") if life on Earth. But the threat posed by Games. A military computer and global someone couldn't tamper with his com- the film is subtle: civilians just can't be network can deliver and analyze almost puterized financial records· while he is trusted with accessible telecommunica- instantaneously the quantity of informa- sleeping. She informs him: tions. tion that would fill long corridors of the Goy: Oh, don't worry Billy. If you Two months after WarGames and real- Pentagon. But it is still only one single just think about it for a minute you'll life Milwaukee teenagers broke into channel of information, subject to the realize that there is nothing to fear. governmental computers and the me- manipulations of an individual with ac- Billy: Oh , I guess it really couldn' t dia, the U.S. Defense Department an- cess to its core system, and vulnerable to happen 'cause I'd have to leave the com- nounced that it was further securing it- its own electronic malfunctions, and to puter on when I went to bed. self and us from computer tampering by the categories and organization of the Goy: And you'd have to leave your splitting their oldest and largest com- original program in which all new infor- financial records in the computer- puter network, ARPAnet, named for the mation is situated. The accelerating something you'd never do. Advance Research Projects Agency, into speed of information retrieval possible separate parts for military and civilian Goy doesn't tell Billy (or us) that use users. The New York Times reported Oct. Luba Goy admires Billy Van's software in Bits and Bytes. S that this split is a method for \"limiting access by university based researchers, trespassers and spies\" from military communications channels. However, the issue of other's restric- tion is not so neat. Sloan Kettering Hos- pital (another victim of teenage trespass- ing) in New York said that only by having a highly accessible system could physicians and hospitals all over the country enter its computers' calculations about the amount of radiation to give cancer patients. Media portraits of a U.S. threatened by its own (or its children's) adventuris- tic use of computer accessibility now oc-

of telelphone lines to transmit or receive out your permission. munications systems has been portrayed information is interceptable and remains Bits and Bytes richly displays com- as either a threat to national security or in other computers' memories. While socio-economic stability, or as a non-is- Billy's information won't be \"stolen\" puter hardware and software, but in so sue. Bits and Bytes' skirting of the serious (since it isn't considered to be property), doing it trivializes the dense social di- questions of computerization and its it could easily be sold for targeted adver- mensions of computer home-use. At th~ focus on our psychological adjustment tising, direct mail campaigns, or (de- end of the show, Luba Goy pops the may render it in a few years like the pending on who you are) sought by any question: \"Are you less afraid of com- 1950's film clips ofstudents being taught other interested parties able to access puters now?\" Neither Billy nor anyone to \"duck and cover\" in Atomic Cafe. your profile: height, weight, financial else is being told very much about why means, political contributions, etc. As there is so much soothing going down if Since Spencer Tracy and Katharine interactive home computer services there is nothing to fear. Hepbum did Desk Set in 1957, adults grow, the amount of information any have been seriously missing from any household will leave about itself through While the introduction of micro-com- high-spirited accounts of the computer electronic transactions, including elec- puters into American households has \"revolution.\" Adults now appear as ei- tronic mail, paints a portrait of you with- been presented in an almost uniformly ther preoccupied or structurally unem- desirable context in mainstream media, ployable clods when it comes to images household interaction with telecom- of computer users. They are, at best, . people who lost something in the BASIC FILM FASHION process of becoming computer literates; FOR some look bio-energetically destroyed by long hours at the computer. When ~-----S Time ostensibly heralded the computer as the most significant actor in public life The human beings' most basic body covering is now available i~ a very a year ago, by turning its \"Man of the limited long sleeve (for maximum winter wind protection) versIOn. Year\" into \"Machine of the Year,\" its cover depicted dazed, white plaster In addition to keeping your back, chest and arms warm and attractive, adults sitting on a darkened stage in front of video display terminals. our terrific T-Shirt will help you join in our celebration \" There is still more promise than (in 100% cotton comfort) of the \"FILM COMMENT 100th ISSUE. threat in the presentation of computers in mainstream channels. The big prom- Only 100 of these $10 beauties remain in perfect purple with wonderful ise is not just that they bring men (and boys) home, but that they propel social white and robust red lettering to flashdance across your chest. mobility. Getting ahead has always meant escaping limits and it is exactly When the lights in the theatre go up in 1984, don't be the body without this escape that is perceived every time someone in computer culture crosses so- th-is \"-FI-LM-C-O-M-ME-N-T 1-00-th -ISS-U-E\"-T--Sh-irt.- - - - - - - - cial boundaries of age and rank, as well as the physical boundaries of space and 1 NAME: T-SHIRTS, $10 EACH 1 time. 1 ADDRESS: Evening Extra-Small - - @ $ - - 1 Advertisers learned long ago that it's the context in which a product (soap, 1 CITY: Modern Medium -- @ $-- 1 candidates, war) is introduced that makes it more or less desirable to con- 1 STATE: ZIP: - - Elegant Extra-Large - - @ $-- 1 sumers. Detergent commercials have al- ways understood that women didn't 1 My favorite movie: 1 need another brand to wash the floor with, they needed a new world in which 1 Mail coupon and check (payable [0 FILM COMMENT) [0: 1 to wash. 1 FILM COMMENT 1 The control of communications tech- nology was the lever in Orwell's 1984 by 1 140 West 65th Street 1 which totalitarianism tried to control rit- uals and thought right down to the bed- 1_ _ _ ~~ Yor~ NY 2.9023 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ I room walls. Whether the \"telescreens\" in our future will collect more informa- tion than they deliver rests with whose access and whose security will be pro- tected. Just because your next \"big ticket\" purchase may bear the name Ap- ple or Peanut does not mean that it will not devour you. None of the computers on the market are named Voyager or Explorer or Telescoper for a reason. It's 1984, remember? ~ 28

• Michael Apted Essex and Adam Faith, was British-fi- interviewed by Dan Yakir nanced. The Squeeze (1976), which he \"I don't see myself as an auteur, but terms \"an informed look at the British as a commercial director who takes dif- ferent subjects and makes them as ac- underworld,\" was canned by Warner cessible as possible,\" says Michael Apted. \"I don't have the intelligence to Bros ., which considered it \"too indige- make 'art' films. Much as I adore them, I could never have made BreathLess or nous.\" It starred Stephen Boyd, Carol Mon OncLe d'Amerique. I'm in awe of people like John Sayles, who can write White and Stacy Keach, and was, in and direct their own material. I know what I can do well: I can cast well and many ways, a precursor of The Long sort of make things look believable, which I learned in television. I've al- Good Friday. ways made 'street' films, shot on loca- tion, about people. I've always been inter- Stronger than the Sun (1979), which ested in exploring societies that I don't know much about. I don't make films Apted shot in 16mm for the BBC, is about myself, but about other people.\" something of a precursor to Mike At 41, with seven feature films to his credit on both sides of the Atlantic, Nichols' current nuclear power film, Apted has secured a room at the top as a brilliant craftsman. If he is no auteur, Silkwood. \"We took Silkwood's story his work manifests recognizable trade- marks and persistent concerns. He is and adapted it to England,\" Apted ex- fascinated by off-beat relationships, mismatched couples who give commu- plains. \"We shot it as a thriller, without nication a brave try, be it a slovenly Chicago muckraking journalist (John getting anywhere near a nuclear plant.\" Belushi) and a reclusive ornithologist (Blair Brown) in Continental Divide Perhaps Kipperbang (originally titled (1981); a painfully shy mystery writer (Vanessa Redgrave) and a pompous Hurt and PacuLa in Gorky Park. P'Tang, Yang, Kipperbang), about the dandy (Dustin Hoffman) in Agatha (1979); or a Russian cop (William and gave even the most elaborate con- bittersweet disillusionment of a clumsy Hurt) and a Siberian dissident (Joanna ceits in Agatha a touch of their own Pacula) in his new Gorky Park. special reality. Visually, he has created English schoolboy with a romantic vi- consistently innovative expressions of As Arkady, an unorthodox detective, his thematic statements. In Agatha the sion not only about the anticipated first Hurt is ice to Pacula's fire . But instead heroine's misery in London is con- ofcancelling each other out, they create veyed via a bleak, harsh light, while her kiss, but of the nature of utopia as well, sparks. Apted has lovingly detailed the refuge in a health spa evokes a dreamy battle of the sexes, often reversing roles atmosphere rich with deep browns and and Gorky Park, a moody thriller with a and subversively destroying stereo- muted golds. In CoaL Miner's Daughter types by presenting leading men (1980), the plight of Loretta Lynn and meaty core, will firmly establish Apted shorter than their ladies (Hoffman vs. her husband (Sissy Spacek and Tommy Redgrave), or corpulent (Belushi), or Lee Jones) is depicted in images that as one of the industry's most versatile effeminate (Brian Deacon in TripLe echo Walker Evans' Depression-era Echo, Apted's 1972 debut.) photographs. While their harsh sur- talents. -D.Y. roundings are gritty and drizzly-gray, He made his protagonists thrive in the inside of their house is flooded by What attracted you to Gorky Park? locations as different as rural England, the deep-gold light of down-home Moscow, the Rockies or Appalachians love. I felt the book by Martin Cruz Smith Apted, who was originally invited to was a fresh territory-it offered me the Hollywood by Ray Stark to direct a Fame-like project entitled BAM, on the opportunity to create a gallery of Rus- strength of his British hit, Stardust (1975), ended up with CoaL Miner's sian characters that haven't been seen Daughter. He has since proved that he is as adept at handling small, intimate on the screen before. It's a familiar story films with modest budgets (TripLe Echo cost $250,000) as he is with ambitious, set against an alien background, but costly projects. Gorky Park cost $13.4 million, but the director reminds that this background and the choice of char- the above-the-line was heavy (includ- ing book rights and $1.5 million for the acters produce an end result that is orig- script). Stardust, about the rise and fall of a Beatles-like group, starring David inal. I wasn't attempting to do First Circle or Cancer Ward, which nobody would go see. If I succeeded in making it accessible, in making the thriller work, then people could take some- thing from the background as well. How wouLd you characterize the me- chanics ofsuspense in the fiLm? It's an odd story, because I suppose that from the beginning you know who did it but not why it was done and exactly what part the KGB had in it. It's not a film with shock effects, but there are plenty of twists and turns. I wanted to give the feeling of a watchful society, where everybody was keeping an eye on each other all the time, where no one was safe, and in which you could 29

never identify who the enemy was. I by its government or corporations. The rapher), as I did in Coal Miner's Daugh- wanted to blur the demarcation be- film takes a stand against the Russian ter. In a way, they're both street tween cops and robbers, between the system, not the Russian people. It movies. In both, as in Continental Di- KGB and the secret police. would have been pointless to make it vide, I went for real clarity and crisp- Mood and political comment coincide the other way around. Why bother? ness. I like that. It lends credence to here. In the film, the KGB is often compared what you're showing. I like Ralf's work It was impossible not to be political to the CIA . because it doesn't call attention to it- in a film like this, but I tried to reduce it What's interesting is that the KGB is self. I dislike flashy stuff that gets in the as much as possible. I like the fact that the best job you can get in Russia-the way. in the book, the villain is American and brightest and the best. Casting those In your films, one senses an affection- the hero is Russian. I felt that if I parts was interesting, because I wanted ate, warm attitude toward your charac- wanted to make the characters credible to avoid the cliches of the big, thick ters. You don't judge. Some critics and not to have contempt for the mate- necks and the ugly faces. I thought it complained that in Coal Miner's Daugh- rial, I couldn't force a social or political would be more threatening if the KGB ter you were excessively warm. comment on them. I had to avoid it at people were portrayed as very smart, as Part of Loretta's life was tough, but all cost. If I had taken an \"attitude,\" all the American government attracts very the fact is that she had a warm, friendly would have been lost. I had to focus on smart people. background, which is why she and her the story-telling. The rest is there if you But, as the character of Irina mani- sister Crystal Gayle did what they did, want it- details of Russian society, fests, there's no question that the film is in spite of their poverty. Of course, it such as the bread shop with its long about getting out, about being free. It's was slightly romanticized, but I didn't lines .... a film about people who eat, drink and betray the truth. I felt that the way Arkady is por- love, just as they try to shed off repres- I'll tell you where this attitude comes trayed in the book-he has a major po- sion. The shedding of the sable furs is a from. I made a serious mistake in Star- lice function, but doesn't pay party and metaphor for that. For many Russians, dust, which I regret: I learned a tough union dues-wasn' t believable. I elimi- the system is the best there is-that's lesson that I carried with me all the way nated that. He is in the mainstream of what they're told-but you have to con- to Gorky Park. I love that period and Russian society, although there is a hint front the fact that they never see any- that music: I grew up with the Beatles of confrontation with the system, a dis- thing else. and the Stones and I loved them-mu- affection that's not very overt. His I went to Russia as a tourist in Sep- sic was the most important thing to me. sense of humor discloses that he tember, 1982 for a few days to do re- I felt these groups made a great contri- doesn't necessarily go along with things search. My production designer, Paul bution to English society by trying to as they stand. In the book, he was Sylbert, went there too, as a guest of break it down. There was a lack of love much more of an outsider. Mosfilm. They didn't know what he in Stardust, a cynicism and bitterness I wanted to avoid the cliches of the was doing, but he could only do so that didn't occur to me when I was wisecracking American cop, which the much, because they never left his side. making it. I ended up not saying what I book sometimes succumbed to--and But I went as a normal tourist and took intended to say. I wanted there to be an casting Hurt certainly helped me in pictures at places where he couldn't go. affection behind the description of the that. He's not a wisecracking kind of I couldn't have done the movie without showbiz hardship-and there wasn't. It actor. The pay-off in the film is that he it. I needed all this to recreate the place isn't interesting to see a film where ev- goes back to Russia-you have to be- and the atmosphere. This was the big- erything is negative, where nobody is lieve there's enough love of country in gest frustration I'd ever had, because I dignified and they're all out for them- him to make sure he doesn't take the didn't have the terms of reference in selves. I don't intend to be soft and first plane to New York when he gets front of me when I was doing the film. mushy. The opposite is true: I'm rather the chance. He's not looking for a way It's a strange environment, not at all tough and uncompromising, but I'd out. In the book, you didn't really buy what American audiences may remem- like my work to have warmth. why he'd go back since he seemed to be ber from Dr. Zhivago or Reds: it's gray, In Coal Miner's Daughter, I was very so out of sync with the system anyway. disturbing. We shot it all on location in conscious that there was a terrific resil- The climax ofthe book is played out in Finland, where both the architecture ience about Loretta and that she and New York, where Arkady is sent to follow and the atmosphere are pretty much her husband had survived together- IriTUl and Osborne . Why did you elimi- the same as in Russia. Helsinki is the because they were together. There was TUlte it? East while Stockholm is the West. I like a very depressing draft before I came in Finland a lot-it seemed very much on the project: it featured her charity A Russian in New York was really like Russia in spirit, but in the best concert for a mining disaster and how another movie. We played out the end possible way. Not at all in the military, the money was ripped off. . .. 1t was all 'in Stockholm, which enabled us to run down, secretive sense that you get true, but despairing. She was careless; have Irina at a halfway house, and we in Moscow-but there's something she also did commercials for a company kept the narrative and shootout exactly spare about it, which appeals to me . that did strip mining. There was resent- as they are in the book, but in a differ- ment about it. The draft was very bit- ent environment. In Gorky Park, as in Coal Miner's ter. But she is much loved and Daughter and Continental Divide, somehow I don't think it's worth mak- The corruption comes from within the there is a certain hard edge . ing films about things you hate. Even if system, from the powers-that-be. It's in- you're going to annihilate something, stitutioTUlI rather than individual, which Yes, it's hard-edged and brittle. I deep down you have to like what you're reminds ofthe conspiracy movie. didn't set out to make an elegant film at all. I wanted a strong street look, which doing. Yes, but I think it's also a fair com- is why I used Ralf Bode (cinematog- ment. You can't judge a whole society 30

All ofwhich perhaps helps explain why You seem to like strong-minded USC CRITICAL STUDIES - AMERICA'S you seem more interested in relationships women: Irina, Loretta, the Blair Brown OLDEST UNIVERSITY than in action. character... FILM SCHOOL As I grow older, that's what I realize. Yes. I hate women's lib, because it's Arthur Knight & A Ifred Hitchcock at USC It's the best material for drama-a man patronizing to men. What I do like- and a woman or two men. I'm not inter- and, in a sense, it crept up on me and B.A., M.A. & Ph.D. ested in \"hardware\" movies or \"story\" my generation-is women as indepen- Degree Programs in movies in the strict sense of the word. dent, powerful, working, intelligent, HISTORY, CRITICISM & In Continental Divide, the fun is in the sexual beings. I like my feminine char- THEORY OF FILM relationship: it's so unlikely but it's tak- acters to be no less complicated than ing place anyway. In Coal Miner's the men. I never use them as romantic Located near Hollywood, the film Daughter, they were two people not in or sexual objects. In my films, women making capital of the world, with conflict as in Continental Divide, but in have balls. I access to all of L.A.'s remarkable unison with each other. The only way film archives and resources. they can find the strength to survive is Sometimes, there's even a role rever- in each other. I was fascinated by the sal: in Coal Miner's Daughter, she goes -Internships at Studios, Film Lib- strength of their roots, especially since I out and makes money and he stays raries, Film Journals and News- made a grand !llove from England to home and watches the kids and does papers. Scholarships and Teaching L.A. and didn't want to lose touch with the laundry. But it's not patronizing ei- Assistantships available after the my own roots. You've got to know ther. Even more so, in my first film, first year. where your strength comes from-and Triple Echo, I told a story about chang- in theircase itwas their marriage. Their ing sexual id~ntities. It's about a rela- - Doheny Library's Cinema Special relationship was the spine of the movie, tionship between a good-looking, fine Collections, one of the - world's which gave me a lot of trouble in the featured boy (Brian Deacon) and a largest motion picture arch ive s. editing room; Beverly d'Angelo (Patsy woman with a masculine streak to her Cline) was good, but whenever Sissy (Glenda Jackson) during the war. He is - Norris Theatre, equipped for 16,35 and Tommy weren't on the screen, the a deserter from the army and hides by and 70 mm with a Dolby Sound film lost its way and became flabby. I dressing up as her sister. Of course, the System. had to cut and cut and cut. more of a woman he becomes, the quicker their relationship disintegrates. -Excellent faculty, including Arthur In Gorky Park, the challenge was to Knight (Hollywood Reporter) and make each scene move the story along, Were you thinking of the Tracy-Hep- Marsha Kinder (Film Quarterly), and yet to make the relationships work. burn comedies when you made Conti- I could never stop the film to observe nental Divide? -Guest Lectures regularly given by them. In a way, the warmest relation- such film luminaries as Orson ship in the film is between Arkady and Yes and no. I have an enormous ad- Welles, Robert Altman, Martin Kitwlll (Brian Dennehy): an American miration for the kind of material they Scorcese, Bernardo Bertolucci, cop who is looking for his lost brother dealt with-the way Hepburn de- Haskell Wexler and many others. and a Russian cop who tracks him down manded to be treated by the very na- discover that they have the same en- ture of what she was ... I loved their For more information, send the emy, that they are on the same side. It's films, but I don't think you could get a relationship that transcends cultural away with them these days. You ...c.o.u..p.o.n..b.e.l.o.w..: ......................... differences. couldn't make Adam's Rib, or The Afri- can Queen, which I watched while I was Director of And in Agatha? preparing this. It's a magnificent film, Critical Studies That didn't work as well as I wanted but it's also disappointing: there's a cru- it to. I never got the kind of creative cial moment in Huston's film and in University of control-or creative energy-that I mine-and, believe me, I'm not com- Southern California had on my other films. It was a hostile paring the two-where they fall in Los Angeles, CA 90089-0111 experience, and it shows. We had two love. Huston ignores that moment. of the best actors in the world, but Suddenly, Hepburn is in love with Bo- Name: _________________________ lacked the proper climate on the film to gart. I believe in my film you do see get the emotional dimension right. how it happens. I was pissed with the Address: _____________________ Bitchiness, infighting. It wasn't any- general run of American comedy, body's fault in particular, certainly not where the humor is a succession of sight City/State/Zip: __________ only Dustin's-we all behaved badly. gags-I believe it should come out of The beauty of its look-Vittorio the situation and the characters. I want more information about your: Storaro is the greatest-substituted for You've lived herefor three years . How do its emotional anemia. It was made for you feel about American society? BA 0 MA 0 Ph.D. 0 the exploration of detail, which I think is always deadly. It had an interesting What I like about America is pre- Please send me an application form 0 premise: a woman whose ability to dis- cisely what I dislike about England-I tinguish between her life and her work dislike the class system, which goes be- breaks down and so she puts herself in yond rich and poor. There's something her own mystery; becomes one of her very corrosive about it-it destroyed us characters. But we never pulled it off. and it's still strong. It's distressing that the government there is still run by a small class of people, some of whom 31

have nothing to do with quality. I be- why there' ll never be a major film in- thriller, everything has to go very fast. Hurt really looks Slavic. We dyed his long to the first generation of film direc- dustry in England. Which doesn't hair and combed it backwardli. He's a tors who have not been related to class. mean that I won't work there-I shot distinguished actor and I was very im- pressed by the range of what he's done, All my predecessors-David Lean , Kipperbang in 18 days for $700,000, by his willingness to give new things a crack. I liked him the way I liked Sissy Carol Reed , Terence Young, Basil originally for British TV (the executive before Coal Miner's Daughter-she'd done terrific work and the critics liked Dearden, Alexander MacKendrick- producer was David Puttnam), but it her and I knew that if she pulled it off, she'd be a star. I thought Bill was in a come from that class. In America, with turned out quite well and was released similar position in the industry. He'd played leading roles before, but he was a little luck, you can achieve that Amer- theatrically. I've always said I'm willing now ready to carry a movie. I tried the same with Belushi in Continental Di- ican Dream. In England, you're up to work wherever there's good material vide, but it didn't work with the audi- ence. Bill is much more difficult to against a brick wall. I'm a lower middle- -so I put my money where my mouth categorize than John. With John, it proved the audience wasn't flexible class person. I was educated at a minor was. enough with its movie stars. John was pleased with the movie and was dis- public school and later at Cambridge. I Did you like the \"Kitchen Sink\" films? tressed that it didn't find a bigger audi- ence. Anyway, Hurt. He's open and could never be a high court judge. Not really, because I'd already seen vulnerable and loves to rehearse and figure things out. He's very hard-work- In a way, I was surprised that Kipper- them as magnificent pieces of theater. ing and collaborative, very interested in other actors, very generous. And also bang didn't contain a critique of the up- Their place in British society was abso- meticulous and difficult . ... per classes. lutely phenomenal, but to see The En- Lee Marvin was wonderful too. I had a lot of difficulty convincing the stu- It dealt very firmly with the middle tertainer or Look Back in Anger as dio-and Orion is a terrific group of people; they were supportive through- class. I have to admit I identified with movies was deja vu. When I was 20, at out-that Marvin could do it. They had him typecast as the marine sergeant, all the boy's middle-class fixations . I went the time, I preferred to watch Anto- action and no words. Here he had not only to be elegant as Osborne, who to a boys' school-the joint school nioni. I was brought up on European smuggles sable furs, but express him- self verbally. I never saw a problem. shown in the movie was quite rare. The cinema, and Renoir and Buiiuel are still I've always loved him. It's a very impor- tant role for him, because he hasn't boys sit on one side of the classroom, my heroes . American cinema was worked for three and a half years. I suppose his career has been marking the girls on the other .... It's the same \"sweet\" during the late Fifties and Six- time-a success here will open a new career for him. sexual attitude I grew up in-repressed ties, while Europe had an exciting As to Joanna Pacula, I was with Ro- and puritanical. time. American cinema didn't wake up man Polanski in the south of France because (screenwriter) Dennis Potter How did you start makingfilms? until the mid-and-late Sixties, which is was there on holiday when we started rewriting. I asked Polanski if he knew I went directly from the University to when European cinema went to sleep of a good Eastern European production designer in the West. He didn't think television in the early Sixties, when -and that's where it still is. I'm also there was, but he suggested Joanna for the part of Irina. I found her in New commercial television started in Eng- discovering the American cinema of the York, tested her and she did very well. It's a difficult love story and it only land and the BBC had lost its strangle- Thirties and Forties as I go along. It's a works if Arkady and the audience fall in love with her the moment they see her. hold. The attitude when I started was gap I still have to fill. I'm very inter- She's Polish and she had a quality that American or English women don't have to train first-generation TV people in- ested in Pasolini's vitality, but I'm less for an English-speaking audience: a certain style, grace, class. She was Sibe- stead of taking them from theater, wild about Bergman, who has become a rian in the book, so in her case it was OK to use an accent-it served to set movies and journalism. I was doing TV genre of his own. And I can't stand her apart from the rest. ~ until 1978, because you couldn't make contemporary French cinema-it a living in England doing feature films . drives me crazy. Except for Gerard De- What's good is that you can move be- pardieu: he's incredibly sexy and won- tween TV, films and the theater without derful to look at. the kind of snobbishness that prevails How do you work with actors? here. In America, television is much Of all the jobs that a director does, more producer oriented ; it has a factory putting the right people in the film and sensibility: TV directors here work very getting the best out of them is the most fast and have little creative control over important thing. I may compromise on the material, the casting, and the fin- the choice of cinematographer or pro- ished product. duction designer, but I'll never give By contrast, in England , it wasn' t too away that right to cast a film . I've never different from making a movie-on a taken a project with a cast I didn't want. smaller scale. It was your movie. Some One of the major decisions I had to of my best work in England was done make on Gorky Park was how to play for TV and it's true for most British di- the voices. I didn't want to use Eastern rectors, like Ken Loach and Jack Gold. European voices and funny accents. I How do youfeel about the state of the decided to have English actors with British film industry? English accents play the Russians, It's always going to have two insur- which is why the two Americans in the mountable problems: 1) that it can't film could be played by Americans. pay for itself-there's no habit of mo- Since everybody in the film speaks viegoing in England anymore; 2) we Russian, we could substitute English. can't have a truly indigenous industry As Arkady, Bill Hurt uses an English because of the shared language that accent. He's lived in England for some forces us to compete with American time and went to drama school there, so films. The French, the Italians, and the it wasn't a problem for him. I felt ac- Germans don't have this problem-but cents would have slowed down the way we have to become mid-Atlantic. We people speak, because the actors would must find a market in the US, which is worry about their accents. And in a 32

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The Sixties: I two issues, acknowledged this relation- sion's seeds were planted. Birth of a Notion ship in his introduction to the inaugural In the chorus of struggling film mag- issue: \"With the increasing interest in A cigarette dangles Bogartishly from the motion picture as an art form, and azines Vision was an adolescent voice with the rise of the New American Cin- subject to unexpected changes; a voice his tight lips. A rumpled trenchcoat ema, Vision takes its place as a publica- shaped by its artistic environment but tion for the independent film maker independent of any fixed ideology. As hangs large and loose about his shoul- and those who share a sincere interest Hitchens notes: \"The important thing in the unlimited scope of the motion is that we began without a lot of a priori ders. He cradles a camera whose lens picture.\" preconceptions, elaborate philosophi- cal rhetoric, [or] grandiose schemes. It points provocatively outward at both Vision's ties to the new American was pretty much of a flexible, ad hoc, Cinema movement, however, were loose association of a few people. \" photographer and reader. He is docu- stronger than a common eclecticism and a few shared attitudes and ideas. That \"loose association of a few peo- mentary filmmaker Dan Drasin, and The magazine's editor, Gordon Hit- ple\" included : Hitchens, the maga- chens, had already served as a kind of zine's editor and most prolific writer; his wary expression graces the first is- Maxwell Perkins to New York's film Blanco, the magazine's first publisher, avant-garde. The son of thriller novel- who donated money, time, and a few sue of a TV Guide-sized film magazine, ists Bert and Dolores Hitchens (her short articles; Mary Batten, a regular Band of Outsiders was filmed by Jean- contributor to the early issues, who running 36 pages and costing 40 cents, Luc Godard in 1966), Hitchens was at- served as circulation manager; Harry tending Columbia University after Gantt, printing consultant, who ar- called Vision. serving in World War II and a long stint ranged matters with the printer and as a merchant marine. Despite a predi- helped with technical aspects of design This was the spring of 1962, when lection toward documentary film, and circulation; Clara Hoover, author of a number of articles, who assumed the everyone was starting to take movies publisher's position with the third is- sue; and Diana Macbeth, Hitchens' seriously, and the spirit of small-scale wife, who was credited as \"assistant to the editor\" but who, as Hitchens points artistic entrepreneurship was in the air. out, \"gave a lot of free work to FILM COMMENT. To this day she rebukes me In Britain, Movie magazine was raising a for not having acknowledged her more as a valuable aspect of FILM COM- strong challenge to Sight and Sound for MENT's survival. She and I together kept that thing going for twenty-four is- the arts and minds of sophisticated cin- sues while the Blancos were dropping out and the Hoovers came in and out.\" emagoers; in the U.S., Film Quarterly Financing for the first two issues was and Film Culture were hitting their a haphazard affair. Hitchens says that \"we sort of pulled together a few bucks strides; and in New York, the first of a here and there. Probably me and Joe Blanco put in most of it.\" No one was half-dozen specialized film magazines paid; Hitchens worked at other jobs to support himself and his family. The that would surface in the next three early issues, in particular, showed evi- dence of this amateurism: numerous years was hitting the stands. Vision typos, non-justified body type, hand- lettered headlines, and unimaginative, would be the only one of these \"buff confusing design. In addition, a paro- chial, New York-oriented atmosphere periodicals ,\" as Variety calls them , to prevailed despite the obvious catholic- ity of subject matter; the magazine last. Two issues later, to avoid confu- seemed cliquish and appeared uncon- cerned about appealing to a more sion with a Spanish-language maga- general audience. It was obvious that Hitchens, who describes himself as zine published in Latin America, Vi- having had \"almost total editorial con- trol,\" still was groping toward a format sion would change its name to FILM in these early issues. COMMENT. • By the third issue, however, ele- ments of professionalism asserted Vision's contents provided hints but themselves, and a distinct editorial per- sonality began to form. The result was a few clear signposts to the direction the narrowing of the magazine's field of vi- magazine eventually was to follow. Ec- centric and eclectic, Vision delved into Hollywood, foreign , experimental, and FILM COMMENT documentary films. Reportage, ama- teur sociology, and aesthetic judgments Volume I Numbo , 3 6 0 Con l$ commingled: articles on \"anti-Negro\" propaganda in films followed analyses Hitchens struck up acquaintanceships with a number of New York-based of \"the teen-age box office;\" critiques avant-garde film personalities such as Jonas Mekas and Gregory Marko- of New Wave films shared editorial poulos. Some of these independents published newsletters featuring classi- space with ruminations on abstract fied advertisements and short critical pieces that Hitchens unflatteringly de- ClOema. scribes as \"sloppy writing.\" Hitchens, Although this jumble of topics and who was then contributing short re- views and articles to the Columbia approaches was obviously indicative of Spectator, volunteered his services as editor. The filmmakers , Hitchens says, a still-embryonic editorial stance, it was \"felt that I was sufficiently indepen- dent of all of them to be trusted as a also an accurate reflection of the multi- kind of arbiter or arbitrator and editor who could reconcile their differences.\" faceted New York independent and ex- His offer was accepted, and in 1959 Hitchens began editing their copy. It perimental film scene of the early was in the soil of this experience that Vi- Sixties. Although the magazine even- tually was to oppose as much as support many of the avant-garde film move- ment's principal tenets and exponents, the magazine and the movement were born of the same independent spirit; their development was contempora- neous and their linkage significant. Jo- seph Blanco, publisher of Vision's first 34

sion: the early issues' all-encompassing period during which the magazine was pound of hashish-had been seized il- transformed from a grow-your-own legally. Hitchens describes Hoover's editorial wide-angle lens was sup- magazine to a slick, stable, professional leave-taking as a \"body blow to FILM publication. Although FILM COM- COMMENT\" but acknowledges that planted by the more focused zoom. MENT's bills were relatively small- \"she had helped us survive and given offset by advertising revenue, an us a strong start. \" With this third issue, FILM COMMENT unpaid staff, and a small print run (3,500 at its largest)-it nevertheless Nor had Hoover simply abandoned was for the first time calling itself FILM was Hoover's guaranteed source of fi- FILM COMMENT: Before her retire- nancing that was primarily responsible ment, Hoover had sold her rights to the COMMENT. • for the magazine's metamorphosis. Her FILM COMMENT name to Hitchens for financial contributions were responsi- one dollar, and her family attorneys had \"I was interested only in the edito- ble for the introduction of typesetting set up \"the Film Comment Founda- (Winter 1963), the upgrading and tion, Inc.,\" a nonprofit membership rial,\" Hitchens says. \"I didn't care standardization of design (Summer corporation organized under New York 1963), and the institution of a strict state law.\" Although Hoover's depar- abou t the commercial aspects.\" It was quarterly schedule. As managing edi- ture left the magazine without suffi- tor, Hoover dealt with printers, distrib- cient guaranteed financial backing, left to FILM COMMENT's publishers, utors, subscribers, and advertisers. these legal maneuvers enabled According to Hoover, her basic task was Hitchens to gain easier access to the Clara Hoover and then Austin Lamont, \"to hold the thing together and get it foundation and grant support necessary out on time.\" for the magazine's survival. In this fash- to keep the magazine afloat financially ion, FILM COMMENT managed to sur- By 1965, however, Hoover had vive almost exclusively on grants and and provide readers with a well-de- grown weary of the constant pressures handouts. of publication; in particular, chronically signed, punctual, and professional pub- missed deadlines by Hitchens had After three issues and three years of worn her patience thin. Although she struggle, however, it became clear that lication. describes the editor as a \"fellow of the foundation was an unworkable so- energy, dedication and knowledge,\" lution to FILM COMMENT's financial When Blanco, FILM COMMENT's she nevertheless \"got tired of dragging woes. Hitchens had been successful in issue after issue out of him on a reason- raising donations from a wide variety of original publisher, left the magazine af- able schedule. [I] tired of staying up sources ($2,000 from the New York several nights each time in order to get State Council on the Arts, free type ter two issues because of waning inter- the layouts pasted up by the printing composition from the Arno Press for the deadline. \" Fall-Winter 1967 issue, $5,000 from the est and severe emphysema, the Avon Foundation of Saint Paul, Minne- Basically, says Hoover, \"it was a mat- sota), but the foundation was proving, publication was still in need of much ter of 'burning out' after several years of in Hitchens' words, \"a tremendous this constant worry about late mate- drain on all of us because it was not a care. Without someone willing to as- rial,\" and, in the Summer 1965 issue, profitable situation and what income Hoover announced her departure. Hit- we had was burned up with expenses.\" sume the publisher's position, the mag- chens claims Hoover's departure was The magazine's \"chronic financial loss\" further precipitated by a drug raid at her of $8,000 annually continued un- azine was in danger of dying. Clara townhouse in May 1965. According to abated, and its shaky quarterly sched- Hitchens, there was a big family scan- ule collapsed entirely (only two issues Hoover (now Clara Hendin), a wealthy dal. Since numerous theater people were published in the years 1966 and were involved in the incident, 1967). Without a steady source of fi- aspiring actress with an interest in the Hitchens believes Hoover became nancing, FILM COMMENT was once \"thoroughly disenchanted after that again at debt's door. arts, luckily was available to fill the spell with the arts and finally dissented and cut out all these frivolous philan- The magazine's eventual resuscita- void. As Hitchens says, \"She saved the thropies of hers.\" Hoover, however, tor was Austin F. Lamont, a Boston calls this \"romantic nonsense\" and em- filmmaker who had been associated magazine, no question. \" phatically denies any relationship be- with the magazine in a peripheral way tween the two events. She also points from its earliest days, first as a sub- Hoover initially had become in- out that her case was never brought to scriber and later as an occasional con- trial because the evidence-a half tributor. His first contact with Hitchens volved with the magazine through her had been inauspicious enough-a let- close friend Mary Batten, one of FILM COMMENT's original staff members. Although not officially recognized on the masthead until the third issue, Hoover had helped assemble and pack- age the magazine from the outset. She states that \"it was very romantic, those issue numbers one through three: typ- ing them up ourselves, sitting on the floor of Gordon and Diana's apartment to paste them up.\" Given this early in- volvement and her fairly substantial fi- nancial resources (she had a trust-fund income 0[$2,500 a month), Hoover be- came a natural candidate for the pub- lisher's position after Blanco's departure. With the third issue (Fall 1962) Lorien Productions, Hoover's corporation \"formed to cover invest- ments in artistic enterprises,\" assumed ownership of the magazine. Hoover held all rights to the FILM COMMENT name. Hoover remained as publisher for twelve issues (Fall 1962 to Fall 1965), a 35

ter of complaint about the sporadic na- contributions to the look and profes- Blue's relationship with FILM COM- ture of the first volume's publishing sionalism of the magazine were perhaps MENT dated as far back as 1963, when schedule-but Hitchens had replied to outweighed by his monetary support. his film The Olive Trees of Justice re- that letter, acknowledging the maga- Lamont, who had \"inherited some ceived much praise and attention, in- zine's problems and asking for help. It money\" from his grandfather, was con- cluding an interview with Mary Batten. was this request that led to two articles tributing time but also helping support Later in the Sixties, Blue was a col- by Lamont (Fall 1963 and Spring 1964) the magazine with financial aid. His league of Hitchens at the United States and eventually to a short stay on the first issue as managing editor was also Information Agency (USIA), where, ac- magazine's editorial staff in the summer the first published by the Film Com- cording to historian Richard Dyer Mac- of 1966. Hitchens, says Lamont, was ment Publishing Corporation-headed Cann, he \"was one ofthe men the USIA attending film festivals in Europe that by Hitchens but largely financed by depended on most.\" These ties and a summer and \"needed someone to run Lamont-which replaced the col- developing friendship with Hitchens the magazine.\" Lamont assented to lapsed foundation. Lamont thus was led to Blue's eventual contribution to help, stayed in Hitchens' apartment in the de facto publisher of the magazine the magazine, and once on board he New York for the summer, and, he says, for three issues (Summer 1968 to quickly established himself as \"FILM \" started to learn how to run a maga- Spring 1969). Finally, with the Fall COMMENT's best contributor during its zm. e. \" 1969 number, Lamont formally assu- first decade\" (Hitchens, in. an obit in med the reins of FILM COMMENT and FILM COMMENT in 1981). This brush with the editing and pub- took over all expenses. Lamont paid lishing end of the magazine piqued La- $50,000 to Hitchens for clear title and BIue's extensive knowledge of film, mont's curiosity, and although he ownership of the magazine; Hitchens his status as an award-winning film- assumed a teaching post at Ohio Uni- remained as editor, but his position was maker, and his considerable writing versity in Athens, Ohio, in the fall of for the first time defined exclusively as and interviewing skills helped establish 1967, he remained interested in main- an employee. Lamont, a secondary fig- the magazine's \"early identity and com- taining his relationship with FILM ure for much of FILM COMMENT's life, mitment to the social aspects of cin- COMMENT. thus assumed the primary role in shap- ema.\" Hitchens goes so far as to say it was Jim Blue upon whom the maga- Luckily, a light teaching load gave •ing the magazine's future. zine's \"personality and reputation were Lamont adequate time to pursue other A magazine must first be written be- founded.\" Two articles and seven in- interests; accordingly, he wrote to Hit- fore it can be published. While these terviews served as cornerstone to Hit- chens and volunteered his services. behind-the-scenes machinations in- chens's editorial foundation-and Hitchens accepted Lamont's offer, and volving FILM COMMENT's publishers FILM COMMENT stood solidly on both. with the Summer 1968 issue Lamont were taking place, Hitchens was devel- assumed the position of managing edi- oping a stable of contributors who were The Sixties: II tor. Lamont says he and Hitchens \"split helping to give the magazine shape, A Social Conscience the responsibilities\" of running the purpose, and direction. Some were magazine: Hitchens handled the edito- critics who shared Hitchens' belief in a However vital the contributions of rial chores, and Lamont sent the edited sociological and historical approach to FILM COMMENT's publishers and material to design and paste-up. La- film-such writers as Harriet Polt (four writers, it was Gordon Hitchens who mont also took on other important du- articles), film historian Herman Wein- truly established the magazine's iden- ties, chiefly the correction of persistent berg (seven articles), and the late Edith tity. With the exception of one issue errors and inadequacies on the part of Laurie (ten articles). But the most im- (Summer 1963, edited by Peter Goode the magazine in the areas of copyright portant group of regular contributors to while Hitchens was in Africa), law and postal regulations. (According the magazine were working film- Hitchens was the magazine's sole arbi- to Hitchens, Lamont discovered that makers. Hitchens states: \"I felt it very ter regarding content. Hitchens' inter- certain issues of the magazine had auto- important to get filmmakers to write. ests and prejudices were the maga- matically entered the public domain ... A filmmaker is very closely involved zine's; it was his personality that because of improper copyright registra- in and aware of the contrivance of a governed and controlled. tion.) With a colleague at Ohio Univer- film, the seeming reality of it, [and] I sity, graphic designer Karen Nulf, wanted writers [who] would take the FILM COMMENT was never to be- Lamont also considerably upgraded the mystery out of the thing.\" Over the come doctrinaire in its approach; quality of the magazine's design with years, Hitchens enlisted Gregory Hitchens' interests were too broad- varied typefaces, a cleaner, more open Markopoulos, Dan Drasin, Arthur Bar- ranging and his philosophy too demo- look, and a more liberal and integrated ron, Emile de Antonio, and William cratic to permit that. His magazine, use of photographs and stills. (Nulf is however, did come to evince strong ed- now the art director of Wide Angle, the Bayer. itorial preferences that severely limited film magazine published by Ohio Uni- By far the most significant of these discussion of many film topics. Chief versity. ) among these least-favored notions were filmmakers, however, was James Blue. As with Hoover, however, Lamont's 36

FILM ~T Hollywood and the avant-garde. Al- makers aggressively tout themselves as ipant in the debate rather than its con- though FILM COMMENT did publish artists, and to prove this claim they con- the occasional sympathetic piece on the stantly search for new ways to be differ- troller. Today Hitchens says: \"I've al- commercial cinema (Peter ent at all costs . . . .These films amount Bogdanovich on Mr. Arkadin in the first to masturbation in public view. As ex- ways felt about FILM COMMENT that it issue, Andrew Sarris on Otto Preminger periments, so-called, theyover-empha- in the third), the magazine's Hollywood size form and technique at the expense should have been more aggressively a coverage was infrequent, its tone deri- of theme and content.\" For Hitchens, sory. Today Hitchens says only: \"We too, the authorial voice so important to forum, platform, collection, or compos- felt that the Hollywood film was ade- fhe avant-garde filmmakers and auteur quately covered by other periodicals critics meant little, if nothing of signifi- ite of points of view-whether the edi- and by the TV medium and the daily cance was being said; form, technique, newspaper. ... We didn't want to re- and an individual sensibility were sim- tor agrees or disagrees-as long as the dundantly repeat what had been said ply not sufficient. \"I felt that the film and done.\" And so, while other film had to be discussed in terms of its na- person expressing the critical viewpoint magazines were elevating the Holly- tional industry and personality,\" wood film to paradigmatic status, FILM Hitchens says. \"The social-political is coherent, intelligent, and honest. \" COMMENT treated the subject with context must be included.\" Olympian disdain. At times readers vehemently dis- • Considering FILM COMMENT's early agreed with Hitchens' liberality in ties to the independent New American So the magazine's emphasis was Cinema, the magazine's slighting of placed not on judgment or evaluation these matters. In FILM COMMENT's Hollywood is logical-and its snubbing but on facts. \"What the film art badly of the avant-garde should be puzzling. needs, especially in America ,\" Winter 1965 issue, for example, But by the mid-Sixties independent Hitchens wrote in a review of Pauline film was veering away from the docu- Kael's Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (1968) \"is in- Hitchens devoted six articles to the mentary and naturalistic fiction and to- depth research, documentation, pri- ward experimentation and formalism. mary discoveries, [and] an historical work of the German filmmaker Leni Furthermore, as Gregory Battcock sense.\" FILM COMMENT was designed wrote in 1967: \"The entire, and only, to fill at least some of those needs. As Riefenstahl (The Blue Light, Triumph of purpose of every [avant-garde film] is to Michael Sragow wrote in 1970 upon express the artistic intention of its Hitchens' departure as editor: \" If much the Will, Olympia, Tiefland). Numerous maker.\" Hitchens found this emphasis of what Hitchens printed was not criti- on personal expression distasteful, for cal in a cultural sense, it was good readers lodged protests, with many crit- the same reasons that the debate over muck-raking over institutions and is- the relative merits of the Hollywood sues of vital importance to those con- icizing Hitchens' tentative interview film seemed to him essentially irrele- cerned with film's social involvement vant and unproductive. \"We had a lot of and survival. \" Hitchens put it rather with the director. The editor stood his doubts about the Mekas group, the more bluntly in FILM COMMENT's Film Culture kind of reader, the aes- \"first policy statement\" (Summer ground, writing in the Summer 1965 is- thete,\" Hitchens says. \"They lacked 1965): \"While Critic A in Magazine B political balls and awareness. They had froths at the mouth about Truth and Ar- sue: \"I think that FILM COMMENT has no social commitment and were elitist, tistic Integrity, we demonstrate in dry, concerned with self-expression while factual detail that American tax-payers performed a service to readers by our people were starving. We felt that that are sponsoring a fake battle film that was infantile, narcissistic, and self-in- promotes murder in Vietnam.\" And the having printed this Riefenstahl mate- fatuated. \" year before, Andrew Sarris described FILM COMMENT as \"virtually unique rial. Obviously the woman is important. As with Hollywood , FILM COM- in its espousal of social causes con- MENT did print occasional pieces on nected with cinema. \" As journalists, we got the story-her the experimental cinema (including, in Vision # 1, an odd precis of sorts for a Hitchens's editorial goal was to new African film, her forthcoming lec- work in progress, Operation Narqo , an present as many sides of an issue as pos- \"all heroin comedy\"). In the main, sible and allow readers to \"make up ture tour of American schools, her set- however, FILM COMMENT's editorial their own minds what their sense of approach to the avant-garde was suc- ethics requires them, ifanything.\" The tlement of ownership litigation and the cinctly expressed by Joseph Blanco in editor determined the agenda-the is- the first issue: \"Most of our new film- sues to be discussed and the format to re-issue of her old films. That's news. be used-and then chose to be a partic- That's a scoop, son. That's why we're here. \" • The traditional documentary, cinema verite, censorship, racism, and the Hollywood blacklist were among FILM COMMENT's preoccupations in the Hitchens years. But the most provoca- tive subject, and one given considera- ble space in the magazine, was film propaganda-especially as practiced in the Vietnam years by the United States Information Agency. It was a subject that Hitchens and James Blue, among other FILM COMMENT contributors, knew from the inside out: They had made films for the agency. The USIA, officially established in 1953, is the propaganda arm of the United States foreign policy establish- ment. (The agency was reorganized in 1976 and is now known as the United States International Communications Agency. Its function essentially re- mains unchanged.) The agency's avowed aim is informational and cul- tural exchange with other states, but 37

J A.~UA RY/ P BBRUARY ImJSI.1S - heavy emphasis is placed in this ex- magazine's many Vietnam pieces was a with Bayer. Bayer was understandably change on the United States' positive long interview with William Bayer, a upset by Hitchens' failure to consult contributions. Hitchens, who had USIA films officer and one-time FILM him and was equally distraught by the worked on six USIA films , admitted the COMMENT contributor, who had cloak of anonymity Hitchens had need for its role in disseminating infor- worked extensively on USIA Vietnam thrown over him. mation but faulted the policies devel- projects. The interview, which origi- oped and the means employed. In the nally identified Bayer only as an anony- Ironically, FILM COMMENT's critism main, FILM COMMENT's articles on the mous USIA \"speaker,\" was described by of the USIA came at a time of artistic and agency were sharply critical; in one, Hitchens as \"an account in the first- political power at the agency-a result Hitchens characterized the USIA as \"the person-singular by an experienced eye- of the efforts of its director, George greatest propaganda machine in world witness of and participant in certain im- Stevens, Jr., who would later become history. \" portant film events in Vietnam during director, then chairman, of the Ameri- the 1960's.... We offer readers this arti- can Film Institute. Wrote Hitchens in The magazine devoted extensive at- cle as a benchmark or fixed moment in 1980: \"George Stevens, Jr., came in tention and criticism to the agency's time and place, in regard to film propa- from Hollywood, with new contacts misuse of stock footage and its occa- ganda, form, content, tone and style.\" and ideas, ... and he imaginatively sional staging of fictional scenes in sup- True to Hitchens's claims, the Bayer sought fresh new talent, deemphasiz- posed documentaries. In Years ofLight- piece was a balanced and detailed ex- ing USIA s hitherto heavy and obvious ning, Day ofDrums, a USIA film on John ploration both of USIA Vietnam-related propaganda.\" But as the United States F. Kennedy that received a rare theatri- productions and of United States gov- (and thus the agency) became more cal release, director Bruce Herschen- ernment-sponsored film propaganda in deeply involved in the Vietnam con- sohn made frequent use of scenes and general. Despite its lack of any espe- flict, Hitchens began to plumb his in- shots that had appeared in previous cially shocking or disturbing revela- side sources-\"I knew a lot of USIA USIA productions. FILM COMMENT's tions, the transcript of the seven-hour filmmakers , some of whom were dis- objection was not to Herschensohn's session nevertheless remains a fascinat- gruntled and frustrated\"-and gener- use of this material (an obvious neces- ing window on the bureaucratic mazes, ate the magazine's articles on question- sity given the nature of the project) but often corrupt practices, skewed aims, able USIA practices and activities. to the director's misrepresentations of and small and large compromises in- that footage-misrepresentations that volved in government filmmaking dur- Since many of FILM COMMENT's Hitchens, as part of a 30-page section ing the charged and volatile Vietnam contributors (Blue most prominently) on the film , described as \"mischievous era. were employed in various capacities by and malicious little manipulations.\" the USIA, mining this rich ore involved One such sequence, purporting to The Bayer interview was not elements of professional peril. Accord- show Peace Corps volunteers, was in published without difficulties and com- ing to Hitchens, \"There were plenty of fact lifted from an unrelated documen- promises of its own. Bayer originally things that happened to indicate the tary, Crossroads in Africa, directed by had agreed to the interview in Decem- agency was not indifferent to stuff that Hitchens. ber 1965, shortly before he was to re- we were printing. The agency was re- sign his USIA post. Subsequent to the ally gunning for us.\" Hitchens claims FILM COMMENTwas even more crit- taping, however, Bayer decided to re- that his mail was watched and his ical of USIA films on the Vietnam War. main with the agency and requested phone tapped. He cannot document As early as the Spring 1965 issue- that publication of the interview be these allegations but cites his govern- within two months of the introduction postponed. At Blue's urging, Hitchens ment file-obtained under the Free- of U.S. combat troops to Southeast Asia reluctantly agreed to hold the piece to a dom of Information Act-as substanti- -the magazine was substantiating UPI later date. Three years later, however, ation. \"I got back my file of 82 pages,\" reporter Peter Arnett's charges that the after Bayer had left the agency in May says Hitchens, \"which included a lot of USIA had staged battle scenes for its 1968, Hitchens published the inter- juicy stuff. I was amazed at the extent purported documentary Night of the view without first clearing the article to which they were documenting my Dragon, a film that overtly approved of activities.\" In addition, Hitchens says a American intervention. Throughout phone company employee confirmed the Sixties FILM COMMENT published that his \"phone was wired in such a way a wealth of material concerning USIA as to be tapped.\" On one occasion, says Vietnam films and related issues: frame Hitchens, Stevens tried to dissuade blowups and transcripts of Viet Cong, FILM COMMENT from publishing U.S. Army, and privately sponsored USIA-related information: \"One night Vietnam propaganda films; interviews he called me [for] 90 minutes, begging with North Vietnamese filmmakers; me not to print certain stuff that he and reports on antiwar and anti-Viet- knew I had.\" Hitchens, however, re- nam war films . mained unmoved by such entreaties, and FILM COMMENT continued to Perhaps the most significant of the publish USIA material-both positive and negative-until the end of his edi- torship. • It is to FILM COMMENT's credit that this harassment, both actual and poten- tial, never prevented an article from 38

finding its way into print. Hitchens, lines that he himself imposed.\" Letters Hitchens surrendered all control of the however, did not consider his decision and phone calls of complaint had no im- magazine and was given a one-year con- to publish USIA-related material to be pact, and Lamont was unable to effect tract as editor, subject to Lamont's re- particularly bold, because he did not re- any change in the magazine's timetable: newal. If Lamont and Hitchens had gard the magazine and agency as antag- The Winter 1968-69 and Summer 1969 been able to come to terms with each onists. FILM COMMENT was also care- issue dates were simply skipped. other during the editor's first year under ful to disassociate itself from any this agreement, it is possible that Hit- specific political party or position, right Hitchens readily admits that \"gener- chens could have remained. Hitchens, or left; Hitchens says, \"We wanted to ally speaking, I liked long articles, even however, was unable \"to effect a long- be independent yet committed.\" He if the issue would come out late.\" A term, equitable relationship with La- contends, in fact, that he \"was printing superior editorial product-virtually mont,\" and, in July 1970, he was re- the whole spectrum of pro and con on Hitchens' sole concern-was important, placed, ending his eight-year term at the the subject [Vietnam] as expressed on ofcourse, but Lamont was acutely aware magazine'S helm. film. In my odd way, I was very neutral that Second Class mailing privileges, and objective in my handling of all newsstand space, advertising revenue, The reason for Hitchens' departure that. \" and subscription sales (particularly to li- was not, as Lamont points out, \"a matter braries) were dependent not only on the of simple logistics, but also a fundamen- The USIA and Vietnam articles thus quality of the magazine but on its timely tal difference of opinion on how to oper- were not editorials decrying govern- publication. As time went on, this dis- ate a magazine. [Hitchens] was incapa- ment actions; they were instead con- agreement over Hitchens' lack of punc- ble of: meeting deadlines, selecting scious attempts to provide the \"docu- tuality generated ever more friction, and content to sell more magazines, structur- mentation\" and \"historical sense\" Lamont says that \"Gordon and I became ing the publishing requirements to get Hitchens found lacking in American increasingly at odds over the way to run the lowest cost from suppliers, the most film criticism. Although unafraid to fea- the magazine. \" advertising, and so forth. In other words, ture controversial political issues in he isn't a businessman.\" Hitchens, for FILM COMMENT's columns, Hitchens By the time Lamont left Ohio Univer- his part, thought Lamont had \"no brain refused to allow editorial commentary sity and returned to his home in Boston for journalism.\" He acknowledged the to take precedence over research and in 1969, he had decided to alter signifi- superiority of Lamont's business sense reporting. In his mind, to have done cantly his relationship with the maga- but believed that in requesting length otherwise-to have openly declared zine. Hitchens and Lamont's initial con- limitations for articles, rigid deadlines, his opposition to the Vietnam War, for tract had established a partnership, with and features on less obscure topics, La- example-was to compromise the Lamont serving as managing editor and mont was encroaching on editorial terri- magazine's integrity and dilute the im- Hitchens as editor. This arrangement tory, an area in which Hitchens believed pact of its investigations. FILM COM- was obviously unsatisfactory to Lamont Lamont had only limited talent. MENT thus was kept relatively free of for two related reasons: his inability to doctrine or dogma; the magazine had alter Hitchens' business practices (La- Lamont denies that his suggestions no party line. Propaganda, to Hitchens, mont felt Hitchens was ignoring all com- infringed upon Hitchens' editorial au- always remained a subject to report on, mercial considerations) and his failure to thority: \"I wanted to have more articles not a practice to engage in. assert any real control over FILM COM- about widely known films. That doesn't MENT's publishing schedule. Lamont mean that I wanted to exclude obscure The Seventies: I wanted a new contract which would in- films.\" Hitchens interpreted this atti- Beyond Survival crease his authority in these areas. He tude as a desire on Lamont's part \"to says, \"I don't know if I ever consciously take FILM COMMENTaway from contro- In July 1970, Gordon Hitchens-the said to myself, 'Boy, you could publish a versy, to take it away from 'dangerous man principally responsible for FILM film magazine. ' It just sort of evolved.\" radicalism.'\" Lamont replies that he COMMENT's creation, growth, and edi- Lamont came to believe-particularly had no quarrel with controversy: \"In torial development-was replaced as after extensive conversations with dis- fact, he [Hitchens] did print controver- the magazine's editor by Richard Cor- tributors, advertisers, and publishers- sial stuff, and controversy is what sells liss. This event was the culmination of that he \"could do a better job than Gor- magazines. \" forces set in motion in June 1969, and it don had as publisher,\" and that he likely was to have a profound effect on the could not publish the magazine if Hit- Given these fundamental differences magazine's future. chens remained. between Hitchens and Lamont, there was actually little doubt that Hitchens When Austin Lamont assumed the Lamont, of course, could have aban- would be replaced at the end of his first managing editor's position, with the doned FILM COMMENT (which proba- year as hired editor. His final departure Summer 1968 issue, he was teaching at bly would have resulted in the maga- was, in Lamont's words, \"not particu- Ohio University; Hitchens was soliciting zine's folding) and started afresh, but larly cordial.\" In fact, Hitchens claims and editing material in New York and since FILM COMMENT was established that he filed suit against Lamont in then mailing the articles and photo- and had \"a good reputation,\" Lamont 1969, charging editorial interference in graphs to Lamont for typesetting, lay- felt that it was less complicated \"to re- violation of their partnership contract. out, and assembly into an issue. This place Gordon than to start a new maga- Lamont says he has no memory of this arrangement led to troublesome and zine.\" He retained Tobias J. Bermant, legal action, and Tobias Bermant, La- persistent problems, and Lamont says an attorney with legal experience in the mont's attorney, says he has \"no record that, on the whole, it \"was a very frus- publishing field, to negotiate a settle- of any litigation between Mr. Lamont trating experience for me. Most of the ment with this end in mind, and, in June and Mr. Hitchens.\" It is likely that Hit- time Gordon would not stick to dead- 1969, Lamont bought the rights to and chens was preparing to bring suit before assets of FILM COMMENT for $50,000. the sale of the magazine was settled. 39

Hitchens had sold the magazine not tial friends of Lamont's-Willard Van his dormant interest in American movies because he had desired to disassociate Dyke, director ofThe Museum of Mod- was reawakened. Despite Sarris's influ- himself from it permanently, but be- ern Art's Department of Film (where ence, Corliss was not an auteurist in an cause he had tired of the endless diffi- Corliss was serving a two-year intern- absolute sense; in fact, he eventually culties he encountered in locating inde- ship) and George Amberg, chairman of would mount a persuasive challenge to pendent financing. Hitchens says that the graduate Cinema Studies program at the director-oriented bias of auteurism when Lamont \"offered to buy the maga- NYU (where Corliss was a doctoral can- with both articles in FILM COMMENT zine outright and keep me on salary as didate)-recommended the young and his own book Talking Pictures. Nev- editor, I felt I could accept that.\" Un- writer. In November 1969, at a lunch- ertheless, Corliss shared with auteurism likely as it might have been, Hitchens eonette in Greenwich Village, \"Corliss an admiration for and love of the classic no doubt harbored hopes that he could showed up,\" recalls Lamont, \"we American film, and FILM COMMENT's work out his differences with Lamont talked, and he seemed like the right editorial format was altered dramatically and remain as FILM COMMENT's editor. guy. \" By that disarmingly simple to accommodate this interest in Holly- When that failed to occur, Hitchens was process, Corliss was hired, and with the wood. Corliss also cites a more prag- understandably upset; he says, in fact, Fall 1970 issue he officially became matic reason: the three-and-a-half- that \"I would still, at this moment, like FILM COMMENT's editor. month lead time from submission of an to edit a magazine.\" Nonetheless, Hit- article to actual publication caused by chens does admit that \"I did it all know- Corliss' FILM COMMENTwas to be a the distance between FILM COM- ingly,\" and when the time came to take strikingly different magazine from MENT's editorial offices in New York his leave, his published words were sur- Hitchens' . Corliss states that \"Gordon and its publishing center in Boston. prisingly free of acrimony. In a short was more interested in social issues or at This long lead time precluded discus- farewell article in the Summer 1970 is- least more interested in having them sion of current films because the films sue, he ruefully summed up his eight represented in FILM COMMENT.\" Cor- had disappeared from theaters by the years with the magazine: \"What a strug- liss, by contrast, was more intent on in- time the magazine reached the stands. gle it has been!-the best and worst of vestigating the aesthetics of film. Under Older films, on the other hand, received my life.\" Corliss, FILM COMMENTwas to take an constant play in repertory houses and on entirely different road, using as its map television. • the auteur theory, a decade-old but still- controversial development in the field of The influence of auteurism was evi- Hitchens' successor, Richard Corliss, film study that had stimulated a new dent from Corliss' first issue, which fea- was an experienced free-lancer (his awareness of the Hollywood film. Cor- tured a lengthy new section (Film Fa- work had appeared in the New York liss states: \"When I took over FILM vorites) spotlighting old Hollywood Times, Film Quarterly, Variety, and Com- COMMENT, I noticed that for all the movies, as well as Andrew Sarris's monweal, and he had served as filrncritic flurry-although the auteur wave was \"Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1970.\" for National Review from 1966 to 1970) beginning to crest in the United States Lamont himself had reservations about and a one-time contributor to FILM -there wasn't a single magazine that auteurism, but he felt that the shift in COMMENT (his Columbia University concentrated on American film history.\" emphases was \"good for circulation.\" As master's thesis on the Legion of De- The new FILM COMMENT thus was de- Corliss notes, \"You could say there were cency ran for 20,000 words in the Sum- signed to \"pick up four decades of criti- more readers interested in reading about mer 1968 issue on Catholicism and cal slack\" and become that \"single mag- old Hollywood movies than there were film). For all his writing credits, how- azm. e. \" about new Rumanian ones.\" FILM ever, Corliss at 25 was an editing tyro; he COMMENT thus entered the new dec- had \"never seen a galley\" before his first In his search for Hitchens' replace- ade with a new format, a new editor, and issue of FILM COMMENT. Oddly, La- ment, Lamont had specifically sought a new approach to film. mont considered Corliss' neophyte an editor who could restructure FILM status \"an asset. I could set the require- COMMENT to fill this same film-maga- The Seventies: II ments for being editor. ...They were re- zine void. Although himself a champion An Individual Voice quirements that I thought were not un- of independent cinema, Lamont states reasonable, and if he [Corliss] were in that he \"was interested in publishing a Although auteurism-by stimulating that particular routine from the begin- magazine that would be widely circu- a new interest in American film-laid ning I figured it would greatly enhance lated, and I knew if it concentrated on the foundation upon which Corliss' the possibility that we could get the independent film it would not be widely FILM COMMENT was to be built, other magazine out on time.\" Lamont thus circulated. I wanted the magazine to influences and considerations had was careful to assert his authority from have a lot of stuff about mainstream equally major roles in determining the the outset: Corliss was to have a rela- films\" for purely commercial reasons, magazine'S overall design. Long before tively free hand in editorial matters, but and an editor with knowledge of and an the advent of auteurism, for example, Lamont was to have final control, partic- interest in American film thus was vital. there existed a strong tradition of Ameri- ularly in the area of scheduling. Corliss, a product of the auteur move- can film criticism that was distinguished ment and a Hollywood devotee, fit La- by a kind of feet-on-the-floor social im- Corliss's actual hiring was conducted mont's needs perfectly. pressionism-the writings of Otis in a rather relaxed manner given the Ferguson, James Agee, and Manny Far- vital nature of the editor's position. No Ironically, during his early years as a ber in the Thirties and Forties, and search for a replacement was ever for- critic Corliss admits that he \"was in the Pauline Kael in the Fifties and Sixties. mally initiated, and Lamont states that thrall ofIngmar Bergman\" and had con- \"there really wasn't any competition for centrated much of his energies on for- Under Corliss, FILM COMMENT did editor. I just sort of told everybody that I eign cinema. At NYU, however, Corliss not stray too far from this path: despite was looking for an editor.\" Two influen- became a student of Andrew Sarris, and 40

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occasional forays into more abstract terri- as well as weapons. The idea was not to and the reason I like them is because tory, theoretical topics were seldom en- put the reader to sleep.\" Agee had writ- what they say is exactly what I want to gaged by FILM COMMENTwriters. Like ten for Time from 1939 to 1948, and read, and so I don't change it.\" his predecessors, Corliss was principally Manny Farber did a brief stint the fol- The initial process of selection, how- concerned with \"capturing on paper the lowing year. ever, was a slow one. For the first issues style and content of movies,\" not in con- This shortcut method of criticism has of his editorship, Corliss says, he chose structing a general film system. This is its detractors. Dwight Macdonald, for his writers by simply soliciting work not to imply that the new FILM COM- example, derided James Agee's Time re- from \"people I knew, people I'd gone to MENT was anti-intellectual or simple- views as \"clever hack work\" that con- school with, people who taught me.\" minded in its approach, merely that crit- trasted sharply with his \"more serious Prominent early contributors included icism, analysis, and judgment-as work for The Nation.\" Others, however, Sarris (a former teacher), Richard Kos- opposed to theory or reporting (Hit- support Corliss' view: Manny Farber has zarski and Paul Jensen (fellow students), chens' primary interest)-were Corliss' said that \"Agee's Time stint added up to a David Bordwell (a Jensen recommenda- goals. Already bolstered by tradition, sharp, funny encyclopedia on the film tion), and Gary Carey (a former co- this approach was supported further by industry during the 1940's,\" and has de- worker at The Museum of Modern Art). its mass appeal: Lamont and Corliss, scribed Agee's Nation material as In 1971, Michael Sragow described that after all, wanted their magazine to sell \"heavier writing which has a sensitively editorial mix rather derisively as a blend- not only to academics but to film enthu- tinctured glibness.\" Whatever the rela- ing of \"Andrew Sarris and less-talented siasts of all sorts. tive merits of Time style, Corliss con- Village Voice acolytes\" and \"a trickling of Even more than tradition or commer- tinues to write in the \"punchy, epigram- film school PhD candidates,\" producing cial considerations, however, Corliss'de- matic\" manner the magazine pioneered. \"criticism both florid and stodgy.\" As sire to avoid the stuffy, academic style And although FILM COMMENT's writers Corliss continued to recruit new authors, that characterizes much of film writing are not instructed to follow a similar pat- however, style and scholarship achieved -particularly when theoretical in orien- tern, many do exhibit a few of the same a certain balance. Writers such as Joseph tation-was his most important struc- Time characteristics. McBride, Jonathan Rosenbaum, and tural consideration in drawing up the According to Corliss, the two major Roger Greenspun-all of whom both magazine's final blueprint. The writing influences on FILM COMMENT's devel- wrote and researched well-soon came Corliss most admired and wanted emu- opment were Andrew Sarris and Pauline to be FILM COMMENT regulars. lated in his magazine was witty, erudite, Kael. Sarris' importance is obvious: His Two key \"acquisitions\" to FILM and stylistically strong: the work of intel- legitimization of Hollywood via the COMMENT in the early Seventies were ligent, practical critics who not only auteur theory made Corliss' FILM COM- Raymond Durgnat and Robin Wood, knew their subjects but could write MENT possible. Corliss also claims that both British critics with established rep- about them with vigor and craft. Corliss' \"in the early days, Sarris was very gen- utations. Durgnat, an iconoclastic critic periodical thus was designed to be as erous and quite important in bestowing with a sociological bent and a breathtak- much a writer's magazine as an a kind of cultural benediction on the ingly broad range of interests and exper- auteurist's platform. magazine.\" Kael's influence was less di- tise, contributed a number of articles to Issue by issue, Corliss' FILM COM- rect but equally palpable, for she is the FILM COMMENT between 1973 and MENT may appear to be an eclectic, hap- central presence in contemporary Amer- 1980. Among the most important of hazard collection ofconflicting opinions. ican film criticism. Corliss' first issue these pieces was his book-length study In fact, the magazine's authors-unique contained, he says, \"three or four arti- of director King Vidor (July-August and and \"criminally eccentric\" (Corliss' cles directly praising her or influenced September-October 1973), which critic term) though they may be-have had by her. \" That influence has grown in the Richard T . Jameson called \"perhaps the their attitudes shaped by the same au- years since 1970. \"At the moment,\" most illuminating 'book' on a director in thors and experiences. It may be true Corliss avers, \"everyone is imitating the Seventies.\" In his introduction to that FILM COMMENT, in Corliss' words, Pauline Kael.\" the article, Corliss described Durgnat's particular strengths: \"Because Durgnat •\"does not have a line,\" but it does have a unifying sensibility. The common Gordon Hitchens was able to cite an is equally a film historian and a social threads of knowledge that entangle articulated critical philosophy that gov- critic, his insights into Vidor's work are FILM COMMENT's writers also serve to erned the selection of the magazine's as informed as they are idiosyncratic. knit the magazine together. content and gave it a clear and cohesive . .. Indeed, like the filmmaker he so ad- Another influence on Corliss' criti- identity; Corliss cannot. The strength of mires, Durgnat contains multitudes.\" cism was Time magazine in the Fifties the magazine thus rests on the quality of Although perhaps a more limited and Sixties. Corliss became a movie and the individual article and their authors. critic than Durgnat, Robin Wood was TV reviewer for Time in June 1980, but Although Corliss chooses the writers and the most prolific, and arguably the most he claims that the magazine had helped assigns the specific topics to be dealt important, FILM COMMENT author dur- to shape his style well before that junc- with, Anne Thompson, the magazine'S ing Corliss' first decade. Wood's initial ture (a claim lent credence by his work former associate editor, says Corliss's work for FILM COMMENT was largely as film critic for New Times, 1976-78). \"strong sense is to respect the writer, to auteurist in orientation (he had, after all, Corliss says, in fact, that \"when I was respect his wishes,\" and no attempt is written two of the seminal auteurist hired here, I was told that I was continu- ever made to force a writer to conform to texts, Howard Hawks and Hitchcock's ing to write in Time style long after Time a particular point of view. Corliss says, Films), but, as the decade wore on, had abandoned it.\" Time style, accord- \"No word or phrase or article is too ob- Wood learned that \"an analysis which ing to Corliss, was \"extremely punchy, scure or obscene if I think it is well-writ- ignores the 'social and political context' epigrammatic, and used words as jokes ten. I tend to stick with writers I like, within which a film was made is certain 42

film film film (I B! once both marvelously witty and ex- influence editorial content.\" Lamont did lend his aid in the editing of an tremely lucid: his articles remain im- occasional piece-a package of articles on anthropological film in the Spring mensely readable even when densely 1971 issue, and a few interviews with independent filmmakers-but he says packed with information. \"that was because Richard felt that I would be better than he was at it.\" Thomson, an English critic in his Lamont's laissez faire editorial ap- mid-40's with a sharp and cutting pen, is proach did not apply across-the-board, of course, and the publisher'S presence a fairly recent addition to FILM COM- was felt in other areas. As he had with Hitchens, Lamont continued to exer- MENT's rolls, but he has become, in cise control over the magazine's design. The geographic division of FILM COM- short time, the magazine's best and most MENT's offices to an extent necessitated Lamont's assumption of this responsibil- consistent contributor. Thomson is a ity, but Lamont also claims that Corliss \"was interested in the words. He was to be impoverished and likely to be mis- careful stylist, and despite occasional not interested in the captions or the pic- tures.\" After final editing, Lamont and leading.\" This lesson-the result of fre- lapses into needless obscurantism or Martha Lehtola, who designed the mag- azine from Fall 1970 to May-June 1974, quent encounters with structuralist willful perversity, he undeniably ranks thus had total authority over the maga- zine's production. Corliss, like Hit- critics of Wood's work-prompted among the finest contemporary film chens, would prepare the editorial mate- rial in New York and mail the copy to Wood to incorporate the concept of ide- critics. As Richard T. Jameson (appro- Lamont in Boston. Working closely with Lehtola, Lamont then would supervise ology into his criticism. Wood's evolu- priately enough) has written: \"no other the actual layout of the magazine. De- sign was an important consideration for tion as a critic thus became an integral writer makes me say I-wish-I'd-said-that Lamont: \"We spent a great deal of en- ergy on how the magazine would look. and highly visible part of Corliss' maga- as often, even when I disagree with .. .We felt that ifyou did a good job there that people just might buy the magazine zine: Wood's grapplings with structural- him.\" • from the look of it.\" FILM COMMENT's \"look,\" in fact, did steadily improve un- ism and his own homosexuality, and his While Corliss and assistant editor Me- der Lamont and Lehtola's guiding hands. More imaginative and colorful attempts to incorporate elements of linda Ward were restructuring the maga- covers, a tighter, less eclectic design for- mat, and a much improved use of stills both into his basically humanist perspec- zine's editorial format, changes were oc- and frame blowups were direct results of their influence, and Lamont is justifi- tive, were prominently featured in FILM curring on other fronts as well. Under ably proud of Lehtola's work and contri- bution to it. COMMENT throughout the late Seven- the steadying influence of Austin La- As important as this other work was to ties. • mont, FILM COMMENT's always precar- the magazine, however, Lamont's finan- cial and managerial contributions were Important as Durgnat and Wood were ious financial standing finally solidified. far more key, for without them the mag- azine could not have survived. Lamont's to the establishment of FILM COM- The magazine continued to lose money, patronage was the linchpin that enabled FILM COMMENT's wheels to turn: it was MENT's standards of criticism, it cannot but Lamont, unlike Hitchens, was able his business acumen that brought order to the magazine's formerly chaotic pub- be said that their criticism served as to bear those losses-at least temporar- lishing operation and his generous fund- ing that kept the magazine afloat despite models of the magazine's writing style. ily-and to insure that a professional, Wood's writing is highly structured and timely publication would be regularly almost schematic, while Durgnat's is delivered to advertisers and subscribers. loose and associative; but neither This process of stabilization, begun dur- writer's work can be accurately de- ing Hitchens' final year as editor, contin- scribed as stylistically fine. Instead, the ued throughout Lamont's five-year ten- two men who are probably the most rep- ure and eventually culminated in the resentative of \"FILM COMMENT style\" Film Society of Lincoln Center's as- -other than Corliss, of course, and not sumption of Lamont's position as pub- forgetting such significant contributors lisher. as Stuart Byron, Stephen Harvey, James Having chosen Corliss as his new edi- McCourt, Lawrence O'Toole, Elliott tor, Lamont concerned himself almost Stein, and Richard Thompson-are Ri- exclusively with the production and fi- chard Jameson and David Thomson. nancial aspects of running FILM COM- Jameson, the editor of Movietone MENT. Lamont made no attempt to dic- News, has spurted through FILM COM- tate editorial content, and Corliss says MENT since 1973. James Monaco has Lamont \"was a very supportive and dis- described Jameson as \"something of a creet publisher and managing editor. I cult object; not widely known, but very can't remember a single instance of him highly respected,\" and Corliss himself saying something shouldn't be has hailed him as \"the best film critic published because he didn't like it or under 40 in the country.\" (Both Corliss because he thought it would offend and Jameson turn 40 this year.) Jameson someone.\" has garnered this praise by combining an Although Lamont does allow that he astute eye, a good grasp of camera tech- sometimes would voice his displeasure niques and mechanics, and excellent over a particular article, he flatly states descriptive powers with a style that is at that \"I did not feel that my job was to 43

a continuing deficit. f- .- Lamont's resources were not inex- flilm haustible. Though the magazine's circu- C () \\1 \\1 I- '\\ r lation had more than doubled since 1970, it ran an annual $50,000-$60,000 deficit. Initially, Lamont had been able to offset the deficits with tax write-offs, but after five straight years of losses that means of relief had been withdrawn. Various alternatives were explored: In September-October 1972, for example, FILM COMMENT altered its publishing schedule from quarterly to bimonthly with the hope that the additional issues would generate more revenue. The fi- nancial hemorrhaging was never stanched, however, and by 1973, ac- cording to Lamont, FILM COMMENT had simply become \"too expensive for me to continue.\" A new publisher had to be found or the magazine would once again be in danger of dying. Help finally arrived in the form of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, the sponsor of the annual New York Film Festival and serveral other film-related activities in the New York City area. Corliss had served since 1971 as a mem- ber of the New York Film Festival's se- lection committee and knew that the Society was interested in finding some way of gaining year-round exposure for its activities. Both Lamont and Joanne Koch , the Film Society's executive di- rector, expressed interest in the idea; and after consultation with the Society's then-president Martin Segal, ownership was formally transferred in October 1973. Lamont did not sell the magazine; he gave all rights and assets to the Soci- ety. In addition, he agreed to donate $60,000 a year for three years, which was expected to cover FILM COMMENT's deficit as it swam upstream toward black ink. As a result of the agreement, La- mont was elected to the Society'S board. The magazine notified its readers of the change in the November-December 1973 issue. In his note to the readers, Lamont wrote: \"This arrangement ful- fills a long-held goal of FILM COM- MENT: to have the protection of a non- profit corporation, to be able to apply for grants available in the arts field , and to solicit tax-deductible gifts. These con- siderations are important for there are no film magazines publishing serious film criticism and analysis which are finan- cially successful, and as long-time readers will recall, FILM COMMENT has had a financially unstable past.\" With the May-June 1974 issue-the last to list Lamont as managing editor and the first to identify the Film Society as publisher-the transfer was officially 44

~m ~ I. 45

111m liltii I lil111 1 \\1 I \" I ~ ( . () \\I \\ 1 1- , 'I ~ completed; Lamont, through his gener- . the magazine editorially by allowing osity, had once again rescued FILM FILM COMMENT to expand its length COMMENT from extinction. Lamont Huston, a quartet of writers on Barbara from 64 to 80 pages with the January- now says: \"I was very happy because I Stanwyck, Tom Allen on Billy Wilder, February 1978 issue. This expansion of saw it was an opportunity for FILM COM- David Thomson on Laurence Olivier. FILM COMMENT's editorial space, ac- MENT to continue to be published by Despite their obvious promotional cording to Corliss, was \"a significant edi- sincerely enlightened people... .The value, however, these articles are not torial victory,\" and allowed for the intro- other alternative-if! couldn't find any- simply public relations puffery and can duction of a \"Midsection,\" a package of body who would treat it properly-was be termed genuine criticism without related articles. The \"Midsection\" con- to have it stop.\" Lamont has continued fear of embarrassment. In general, says cept was proposed by Michael Uris. his association with the magazine as a Corliss, the Film Society has given him Uris' new design-more conservative board member of the Film Society. In and Ward's successors-Brooks Riley, and structured than the previous FILM 1981, he contributed a lengthy article Anne Thompson, and Harlan Jacobson COMMENT format, devised in 1974 and (\"Independents Day\") to the magazine. - \"a totally free hand editorially.\" executed by art director George Sillas- He currently serves as president of the was introduced in the January-February Boston FilmNideo Foundation. The Film Society has had some indi- 1978 issue. Since November 1980 the rect (and generally positive) editorial ef- magazine has been designed by Elliot • fects on the magazine. Perhaps the most Schulman, working from Uris' format. significant of the changes stimulated by Although the Film Society's assump- the Society's takeover was the expan- By far the most precious contribution tion of the publication of FILM COM- sion of the magazine's coverage of new of the Film Society to FILM COMMENT MENT has had many ramifications, its films : since 1974, FILM COMMENT has is its provision of financial stability. takeover has had only a limited direct been devoting ever more space to con- FILM COMMENT still incurs losses of impact on the magazine's editorial con- temporary movies and moviemakers. approximately $50,000 annually, but be- tent. Corliss says that \"what went for This change in emphases was made pos- cause of the Society's structure and non- Austin Lamont goes for Joanne Koch sible by the simple consolidation of the profit status that deficit now can be ab- [the Society's executive director]. Jo- magazine's editorial and publishing of- sorbed without fear of the magazine's anne and I have had not one discussion fices in New York and the resultant drop folding. The Society does not encourage on killing an article or running one.\" in the magazine's lead time (from more profligate spending, however; the mag- Corliss emphasizes that \"a writer can than three months between writing and azine is run on an extraordinarily frugal make absolutely any opinion that he publication to about one month). Al- budget. In 1983, operating and adminis- wants about anything, including Film though Corliss admits that \"one be- trative costs totaled only $400,000; Society of Lincoln Center policies or the comes the handmaiden of the marketing FILM COMMENT's contributors were New York Film Festival.\" Mter the So- apparatus of any film if one agrees to run paid about ten cents per word, consider- ciety takeover, FILM COMMENT did be- an article . .. around the time the film is ably less than the rate paid by its chief gin featuring New York Film Festival released,\" he nevertheless defends competitor, American Film . In addition, previews and reviews-an obvious bow FILM COMMENT's coverage of current the magazine'S staff has been kept ex- to the Society's interests-but the mag- films . \"I do think the contemporaneity tremely small: two full-time editors, an azine's reviews have not always been helps the magazine: it helps sell it. art director, a business manager, and an positive and , in fact, have occasionally ... One of the reasons we put a photo- advertising and circulation director. been brutally critical of certain festival graph of a new film on the cover is to sell FILM COMMENT's generally efficient selections. our magazine. They' re not gonna read it operation and the continued growth of if they don't buy it.\" He adds that Mi- its paid circulation (from 9,000 in 1975, There have been a few rare instances chel Ciment, an editor of the French the Society's first full year as publisher, ofobvious boosterism. The March-April film magazine Positif, had once criti- to 31 ,000 in 1983) have even stimulated 1976 issue, for example, featured a cen- cized FILM COMMENT for its reluctance faint hopes in Joanne Koch that the mag- terspread touting Lincoln Center's pre- to champion young American directors. azine might someday inch into the miere of That's Entertainment, Part /I, a \"Michel told me a director had to be 75 black. movie to which FILM COMMENT would or dead to get mentioned in FILM COM- normally pay scant attention. Corliss ad- MENT. That's not the case anymore.\" Whatever its level of profitability, mits that \"the centerspread was proba- however, FILM COMMENT for the first bly not justified,\" and says that, \"as a Corliss' philosophy has its critics, of time in its existence has finally been matter of fact, our typesetter charged us course, and Richard T. Jameson has provided with a steady source of financ- for an ad rate instead of a text rate for the faulted FILM COMMENT in its own ing and a rock-solid publishing founda- copy I wrote.\" Recently, the magazine pages for publishing what Jameson calls tion. With Corliss as its editor, the soci- has been devoting laudatory articles to \"instant-analysis tie-ins with brand-new ety as its publisher, and a handful of film industry figures honored by Film film releases.\" Generally speaking, quality writers as its key contributors, Society tributes: Andrew Sarris on however, the magazine'S material on FILM COMMENT now seems assured of George Cukor, Dick Cavett on Bob contemporary films has enabled it to in- continued survival and success. ~ Hope, Richard T. Jameson on John crease its audience without sacrificing quality. The Film Society has also aided 46

JULIEN J. STUDLEY INC. ·625 MADISON AVENUE· NEW YORK NEW YORK· 10022· 212 ·308 ·6565 • BOSTON· CHICAGO· HOUSTON· LOS ANGELES· MIAMI· NEW YORK· • SUBURBAN WASHINGTON· WASHINGTON·

Feature Films from Direct Cinema Limited A Bigge, The Valley Splash (obscured by clouds) A Film by Jack Hazan A Film by Barbet Schroeder Produced, directed, written and photographed Starring Bulle Ogier, Michael by Jack Hazan Gothard, Jean-Pierre Kalfon, Written and edited by David Valerie Lagrange, and the Mingay Mapuga Tribe and its Chiefs Featuring David Hockney, Written and Directed by Peter Schlesinger, Celia Barbet Schroeder Birtwell, Henry Geldzahler, Photographed by Nestor Ossie Clark, Patrick Proctor, Almendros Mo McDermott and Kasmin Music by Pink Floyd \"One of the finest films I have ever seen about an \"Exquisite experiences. Schroeder documents the artist and his work.\" -Martin Scorsese eternal search for Paradise without moral judge- ments.\" -Andrew Sarris, Village Voice \"A 'splash' of strong emotions. Hypnotic and mysterious! It goes straight to some subliminal \"A film of incredible sensuality, of lush tropical visual reservoir where it takes hold. Two days after splendor, perhaps the best feature Barbet seeing it, I find I already want to look at its heats Schroeder has made to date. Bulle Ogier is and coolnesses again.\" -Sheila Benson, enthralling to behold. The Valley is provocative in Los Angeles Times the best sense of the word.\" \"An original eye-opening film experience with an -Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times unexpected sense of humor.\" -Hal Ashby \"A captivating, shimmeringly beautiful movie. It is \"A film that has been belatedly discovered, The Valley at once the story of an artist's painful loss of a is a beautifully stylized treatment of man's endless lover and a wittily observed depiction of his search for Paradise.\" -Joe Baltake, Philadelphia milieu.\" -Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times Daily News \"The best film ever about a living artist.\" -Ed Ruscha \"Strikingly powerful. A tantalizing mixture of latter- day Tolkien and visionary philosophy, a fascinat- A Bigger Splash is a penetrating impression of the art and ing example of cinematic Pink Floyd.\" lifestyle of David Hockney-one of the most brilliant and -Merrill Shindler, Rolling Stone successful painters of our time; an International ce lebrity at the center of London's \"Swinging Si xties; \" and a spon- The Valley (obscured by clouds), a film about the search taneous wit who understands humor and humanity. for Paradise Lost, was shot entirely on locations in Papua- New Guinea, over a six month period by a cast and crew of A Bigger Splash is also a new kind of feature film, in which only 15. It tells the story of Viviane, an uncomplicated young real people play themselves in both actual and dramatized woman married to the French Consul in Melbourne, who situtations, where a love affair threatens to destroy a major becomes entranced by a quest for a mysterious valley in work of art. Hockney, his friend and lover Peter Schlesinger, the uncharted regions of New Guinea. Played by Bulle and their friends-fabric designer Celia Birtwell, art curator Ogier, Viviane is initially drawn to the group of adventurers Henry Geldzahler, fashion designer Ossie Clark, artists and their expedition by a desire to find rare Bird-of- Patrick Proctor and Mo McDermott and gallery owner Paradise feathers , to sell to Paris boutiques. Gradually, Kasmin-speak for themselves on themes suggested by however, her exposure to the lush environment, Papuan director Jack Hazan and editor David Mingay. rites, and instinctual love pushes her farther and farther into the unknown .. . Over a three and a half year period in London, Los Angeles, New York and Switzerland, these ce lebrated personalities Director and screenwriter Barbet Schroeder was part of the were 'gently and imperceptively filmed' and worked into a Cahiers du Cinema group of the French New Wave. In addi- controlled plot, based on many of the themes in Hockney's tion to directing his own films. (More, Maitresse, Idi Amin art. Dada, Koko- The Talking Gorilla), Schroeder worked as an assistant to Jean-Luc Godard and produced for both Eric A Bigger Splash premiered in Critic's Week at the Cannes Rohmer and Wim Wenders. Film Festival and won the Grand Prix and Prix Cinegram (Best Photography) at the Locarno International Film Festi- Academy Award cinematographer Nestor Almendros val and the Golden Plaque for Originality of Concept at the (Days of Heaven, The Wild Child) shot portions of The Valley Chicago Film Festival. in the midst of an aboriginal population whose way of life is close to Upper Neolithic. The Mapuga Tribe and its Chiefs Presented by Mike Kaplan as a Lagoon release for came into the camera's range completely natural, totally Circle,Associates Ltd. Running time: 105 minutes free. Rent these outstanding films Presented by Mike Kaplan as a Lagoon release for for your group, theatre or class. Circle Associates Ltd. For additional information contact: Running time: 100 minutes Direct Cinema Limited ~,g direct Post Office Box 69589 cinema ffiC') Los Angeles, California 90069 limited @ (213) 656-4700