VOLUME 19 - NUMBER 01 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 1983

IY 1983/$2. It /



•Sl•SSUe published bimonthly by the Film Society of Lincoln Center Volume 19, Number 1 January/February 1983 The 1982 Movie Revue ...... . 11 Attenborough's 'Gandhi' ..... 26 1982 was a year of contrasts: E. T. Winner of just about every and Inchon, Francis Coppola's One award but the Nobel Peace from the Heart and David Be- Prize, Gandhi is as much a gelman's one for the road. Herein motive as a movie, and per- we offer a quartet of backward haps more a production story glances. Richard T. Jameson than anything else. John pays tribute to E.T.-you remem- Kenneth Galbraith, who ber, the movie (page 11). Eight served as U.S. Ambassador industry experts tell Anne to India in 1961-62, considers Thompson who'll be nominated the film as a historical pag- in the Oscar sweepstakes next eant (page 26), and Joan month: Gandhi, Tootsie , Sophie , Goodman traces Richard E.T. (page 15). David Chute Attenborough's heroic 20- scans the screen for some promis- year effort to put his dream ing New Faces of '82 (page 18). on screen (page 30). Stephen Harvey and the editor poke light-fingered fun at the year Midsection: Arcadia ......... 33 gone by, and six critics pick their ten best films. (page 20). You play it; it plays you. Videogame fe- ver is a contagion as old as the carnival Altman & 'Nickleby' on TV... 51 peep show. It applies artful technology ~__ to the greatest common denominator: The prime-time season may be fun. But as soon as a videogame pro- as bad as ever, but there's good grammer put his auteur name on his viewing in the twilight zone of software, you knew the trend was se- cable and syndication. Plays and rious enough for a FILM COMMENT musicals are aired in a profusion Midsection. Mike Moore describes undreamed of since the Fifties. the bustling arcade scene (page 34). Robert Altman has brought Richard Gehr tells How to Read a three plays to cable; and this Videogame (page 37). Sue Adamo month the Royal Shakespeare charts the movie industry's foray into Company's nine-hour Nicholas Arcadia (page 40). Harlan Jacobson Nickleby is glorifying the Mobil \"reviews\" the latest games (page 41). Showcase. Richard Corliss of- And Marc Mancini appraises the won- fers a guide to the best to be ders of movies shown at world's fairs, seen on Play TV. from 1900 to the present (page 43). Also in this issue: W.R. Burnett ...............58 Independents ...............76 The scars of the first atomic bomb are Journals ....................2 You think Hammett and Chandler still with us, and the evidence is on The Strange Behavior folks are back, were tough? Listen, pal, Burnett 16mm. By Amos Vogel. and David Chute is with them. The wrote the book on tough-36 gang- Chicago festival revels in controversy; ster and western novels that became Television ..................78 Marcia Froelke Coburn reports. movies like Little Caesar, High Sierra, On PBS, an expert adaptation of and The Asphalt Jungle. Just before his Wagner's Ring turns great opera into 'American Pictures' ..........22 death, Burnett talked (tough, of great TV. John Engstrom reports. Mitch Tuchman interviews a Danish course) with Ken Mate and Pat Odysseus named Jacob Holdt on his McGilligan about his 50 movie years. Bulletin Board ..............80 five-hour film essay of the U.S. Cover photo: Columbia Pictures. 1982 FILM COMMENT Index...71 Editor: Richard Corliss. Senior Editor: Harlan Jacqbson . Business Manager: Sayre Maxfield. Advertising and Circulation Manager: Tony Impavido. Art Director & Cover Design: Elliot Schulman. West Coast Editor: Anne Thompson. Research Consultant: Mary Corliss . Executive Director, Film Sociery of Lincoln Center: Joanne Koch. Second class postage paid at New York and additional mailing offices . Copyright © 1983 by the Film Sociery of Lincoln Center. All rights reserved . The opinions expressed in FILM COMMENT do not represent Film Sociery of Lincoln Center policy. This publication is fully protected by domestic and international copyright. The publication of FILM COMME NT (ISSNOOI 5- II 9X) is made possible in part by support from the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. Subscription rates in the United States: $12 for six numbers, $22 for rwelve numbers. Elsewhere: $18 for six numbers , $34 for rwelve numbers , payable in U.S. funds only. New subscribers should include their occupations and zip codes. Editorial , subscription, and back-issue correspondence: FILM COMME NT. 140 West Sixry-fifth-5treet, New York , N. Y. 10023 U.S.A.

ounlals Strange Invaders in Toronto and Chicago David Chute Laughlin launched the series last year work. But he was constantly popping up from Toronto with Strange Behavior, a humane, on the set in Toronto, huddling with densely textured horror show about re- Laughlin between takes, and both men In the roomy lavatory of a quiet back venge, parenthood, and mind control. insist that the Strange movies are a apartment, in a drab little pile on a nar- (The third installment, Adventures of wholly collaborative enterprise. On the row street, in a tree-lined residential PhiLip Strange, will be a thriller in the face of it, though, the two men compose neighborhood a few minutes from To- John Buchan mold about a playboy who a mighty unlikely partnership. Condon, ronto, something peculiar is afoot. Ac- trouble-shoots for Uncle Sam.) in his mid-20s, is a bit on the short side, a tor-playwright Wallace Shawn, grinning jeans-and-sweaters type with a bristly, anxiously, stands there with his pants In Strange Behavior, working with a up-to-the-minute crew cut. He's a for- around his ankles, shirttails dangling, as cast whose depth was almost unprece- mer publicist and journalist. Laughlin, a thin electric wire is taped to his right dented for a pop horror film (Michael leg, over his shorts and across his tummy, to be attached at last to an ex- Director MichaeL Laughlin and actor PauL Le Mat . plosive \"squib\" ins.ide his button-down shirt. Wally seems to be quaking in his Murphy, Dan Shor, Dey Young, Louise in his mid-40s, is extremely tall and ex- Weejuns-as who wouldn't, when pre- Fletcher), Laughlin and Condon made tremely thin, and he displays an almost paring for a sweaty career-first like perfo- an immensely appealing case for the saturnine, patrician elegance. (\"He's the ration by laser beam? Through the warmth and sanity of the fictitious leafy only director I know of,\" a colleague magic of montage, viewers of the 1983 hamlet Galesburg, Illinois. And so, observed, \"who always wears a coat and Orion Pictures release Strange Invaders when clinical, dehumanizing horrors tie behind the camera, every single will be led to believe that the piquant were unleashed by a pair of crazed Skin- day.\") Before he made his directorial Fiona Lewis (playing an alien intruder nerian behaviorists (Arthur Dignam and debut with Strange Behavior, Laughlin disguised as an Avon lady) is concealed Fiona Lewis), the moviegoer could take had a solid reputation as a producer: The in the john behind a peppermint-striped these outrages personally, as a foul inva- Whisperers (1967), Joanna (1968), Two- shower curtain. Shawn will slink into the sion of privileged, sylvan terrain. Lane BLacktop (1971). Laughlin and bathroom, stopped short by some unto- Strange Behavior was stuffed with fond Condon could be a mismatch made in ward rustling sounds, and then creep references to earlier genre classics: Con- heaven: The eerily familiar but oddly closer to investigate-only to be zapped don says, \"There are hard-boiled detec- assorted elements that go into their into oblivion by a steely-blue bolt of tive scenes, a Dr. Mabuse mad scientist movies produce a conglomerate effect cosmic lightning! plot, some family melodrama, a Hardy that is fundamentally original. Boys mystery, and a few musical num- Minutes later, the milestone safely bers.\" At the same time, the movie ex- Strange Invaders, too, will look like a passed, Shawn mops his frazzled brow, tended the emotional limits of each homage to the cheesy sci-fi-paranoia and the beaming technicians break out genre. No wonder Jonathan Demme, pictures of the Fifties. Although the set- the hearty applause. The seared director of such gender-benders as Han- ting is contemporary, even the fumiture smudge of the recently ignited squib is dLe With Care and MeLvin and Howard, is and clothing will betray a \"fabulous Fif- borne like a badge of honor on Wally's a Strange Behavior fan. ties\" influence. But the references chest. aren't intended as in-jokes or decora- On Strange Invaders, Condon passed tion: They add up to a visual motif with Wallace Shawn, the diner with Andre, up the Associate Producer credit he held consistant thematic implications. For as a dapper death-ray casualty? Just one on Behavior, because living up to the Laughlin, \"A movie has to have some- of the droll novelties ofoff-casting prom- title requires too much tedious detail thing more than an abstract idea. The ised in Strange Invaders. You will also encounter: Paul Le Mat as a tweedy Ivy League professor; veteran heavy Mi- chael Lerner (Postman's scum-bag attor- ney) as an Ozzie Nelson-style family man; B-flick giant Kenneth Tobey and Oscar nominee Diana Scarwid as fire- breathing aliens-and so much more. Invaders is the second film in a projected Strange Trilogy of lightly parodistic genre films. The team of writer William Condon and writer-director Michael 2

\"Jessica Lange is exhilarating... Her perfonnance as the bright, beautiful, emotionally ravaged Hollywood actress of the late 1930's... is stunning:' -Vincent Canby, New York Times \"'Frances' belongs utterly to Jessica lange. A soaring performance ... a combination of forcefulness, intelligence and a haunting sensuality:' -Sheila Benson, L.A. Times \"A scalding performance by Jessica Lange whose Frances can only be described as miraculous ... she leaves you outraged, stunned and deeply moved:' -Rex Reed, New York Post \"'Frances' is riveting!\" Jessica Lange, in an outstanding performance ... is touching, harrowing,and finally heartbreakmg:' -Gene Shalit, Today/ NBC·TV \"Astunning performance. Jessica Lange is simply a knockout:' -Judith Crist, WOR-TV

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idea has to go into everything else, and it look like refugees from a picture made to feel that you would kill for the gener- has to be constantly evolving. Or else in 1956-and they'll look that way both osity and scope of an American movie.\" after ten minutes the viewer says. 'OK. to the people in the movie and to the One could easily infer that Laughlin's Interesting idea. Now what?' \" people watching it. If the film woI'ks the commitment to popular genres-not to way Laughlin and Condon hope it will, mention his sharp appreciation of indig- And so, the back-story of Strange In- we should all begin to get the creepy enous American settings and character vaders actually begins in the mid-Fif- feeling that our hackneyed, movie-fed types-was heightened by this period of ties, when a huge flotilla of aliens glides fantasies are suddenly coming true, im- high-art exile on the Continent. to earth in another idyllic Midwestern pinging on reality. town. The green meanies proceed to \"Great directors have often worked in zap the entire population, transforming And if Invaders follows the pattern of genres,\" Laughlin insists. \"And art the citizens into hovering blue spheres Behavior, the fantasy element, when its films, really, are just another genre, like of energy-and assuming their corpo- pop-cultural roots are emphasized, will comedy or horror-and I like them all. real forms. There's an element of \"or- become an extension of the movie's The only kind of movie I don't have any ganic camp\" built into the structure: In dense depiction of American fads and interest in is the Stately Social-Problem order to perfect their impersonations of mannerisms. For example, when Fiona Drama, likeKramervs. Kramer. I tend to earthling, the invaders take a crash Lewis turns up in New York in her think, That might as well be a book.' It course in native behavior from televi- Eisenhower-era duds, she's perfect for has nothing to do with movies, with that sion, films, and comic books. \"The the modish apartment occupied by sense of almost physical elation you get aliens,\" Condon explains , \"are por- Nancy Allen's Betty Walker, a reporter from the best movies. trayed as people who feel uncomfortable for The National Enquirer. Pop taste has in unaccustomed surroundings-as any- come full circle; Betty has decorated the \"On the set, it's a continuous struggle one would. They try a little too hard to place with a clutter of retro bric-a-brac between the technology and the meta- ape normal behavior, and the result is from the Fifties. \"The look,\" Allen physics. Hollywood has a great tradition rather stiff and awkward. Fiona's charac- snaps, when she first claps eyes on of technical perfection, and I do pay a lot ter always seems a little arch and out-of- Lewis. \"It's new wave, right? Are you in of attention to design elements, shot- it, because she's consciously copying a band?\" patterns, an overall visual scheme. But mannerisms she's seen on television.\" you don' t want that to get in the way of • the actors or the spirit of the movie. A For a quarter century, the ploy works big movie can easily look over-re- fine: the aliens live placidly in the town When I spoke with him in Toronto, hearsed, with everyone hitting every as ersatz mid-Americans. It isn't until Michael Laughlin showed little diffi- single mark every single time. A film 1983 that a sudden threat prompts a se- culty putting his finger on the disparate like The Road Warrior is almost too per- lect delegation (with F. Lewis at the influences that he has synthesized in fect: You need a little sloppiness around helm) to skulk into Manhattan on a sin- these Strange pictures. During a lengthy the edges. You have to leave the actors a ister errand. But the aliens are still partly sojourn in France in the Sixties, with little elbow room, so they can move stuck in the period of their earliest accli- then-wife Leslie Caron, Laughlin so- comfortably. You should be able to em- mation, back in the Fifties. Imagine cialized with Jean Renoir and Franc;:ois brace .a human error, to sacrifice the them slinking through today's New York Truffaut, and developed an enduring technology for the eccentric perform- in their double-breasted suits, broad- fondness for the \"naturalistic human- ance. And whatever extra human as- brimmed hats and beehive hairdos, and ism\" of French cinema. \"But as wonder- pects you can put into it-well, that you'll have some sense of Strange In- ful as those movies are,\" he quickly makes it something you can be even vaders' special flavor. These aliens will adds, \"when you see nothing but French films week after week you come prouder of. \" ® Marcia F roelke Coburn Every November the Chicago Film from Chicago Festival rolls into action. It includes a lot of movies (up until this year, the festival Stripped down to white bikinis and stretched over three weeks instead of its slicked up with Pam spray, three male current two) and a lot of parties. Both are body builders stand on platforms and essential, even equal activities, if only pose for the cocktail crowd. Over in one because the people you see at the parties corner, some tightly muscled women- are not the people you see at the movies. including a socialite who is on the board And every year the auteur of the festival of directors-take their turns flexing, is Michael J. Kutza, Jr., its founder and too. For days the local gossip columns director. have been touting this display of glisten- ing delts as shocking; but most of the In the beginning, Kutza managed to people in the ballroom of the Lake pull together a festival for a city that was Shore Holiday Inn are embarrassed and shockingly uninterested. He's worked baffled. This is, after all, the opening hard to keep it running (not always night party for the 18th annual Chicago smoothly), even though the most com- International Film Festival. One foreign mon local reaction to foreign movies is visitor leans over and whispers in my ear, still blank indifference. \"I don't get it. You do this every year?\" Then , there is the gay issue. Chicago Well, yes and no. is not, by definition , a gay film festival , . but it has always been wrapped in gay 6

the 94 minute uncut version of Werner Herzog's filming ofFITZCARRAWO \"**** \"**** Burden o/Dreams should be ranked with the Les Blank is a brilliant filmmaker who is finest of films about great artists. \" unafraid to ask difficult questions and portray Werner Herzog, warts and all.\" -Ge ne Siskel , CHICAGO TRIBUNE - Roge r Ebert , CHI CAGO SUN TIMES \"Brilliant.' , \"Superbly crafted... -Jay Scott , TORONTO GLOBE AND MAIL A chilling chronicle of artistic obsession. . . One \"A great work of art, of the most thorough and disturbing movies ever made about an artist at work.. .\" a terrific document. It chilled my bones-you've frozen Werner for eternity, half-genius, half- - David Chul e , LOS ANGELES HERALD·EXAMINER fool, an unforgettable fiction character:\" \" An extraordinary portrait of a filmmaker in the -Loui s Malle grips of an artistic passion that knows no bounds .\" - Judy SlO ne , SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE \"Vivid and engrossing \" * * * 'ii A masterful job ... depiction of one man's mania .\" A riveting portrait. - J . Hoberman , VILLAGE VOI CE -Ka lhl een Carroll , NEW YORK DAILY NEWS ,,* * * * Extraordinary. . . \" ...A magnificent account One of the most exquisitely detailed, dramatically compelling films ever made about of an obsessed artist at work; by turns funny, the creative process.\" inspiring and hair-raising. . .\" - Michael Blowen , BOSTON GLOBE -Richard Freedman , NEWHOUSE NEWSPAPERS \"The most revealing portrait of a filmmaker and ,'Remarkable. . . filmmaking ever made .' , One of the most candid, most fascinating - Kevin Th oma s, LOS ANGELES TIMES portraits ever made of a motion picture director \"Absolutely beautiful. \" at work . . There's never been anything quite -Jorge Preloran , Filmmaker, Teacher U.C.L.A . like it. ' , - Vincent Canby, NEW YORK TIMES LES BLANK'S FLOWER FILMS· 10341 SAN PABLO AVENUE· EL CERRITO, CA 94530·415-525-0942 The Home of Always for Pleasure, Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers, Hot Pepper, SpendltAll, The Blues Accordin' To Lightnin' Hopkins, A Well Spent Life, Dizzie Gillespif, Chulas Fronteras and Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe New Films Ready Now: Sprout Wings and Fly, Stoney Knows How Coming Soon: In Heaven There Is No Beer?and Kidlat Tahimik's Perfumed Nightmare

trappings. Festival posters have fea- on. Like any festival, Chicago shows its stands to one side, taking in the stream- tured a man revealingly draped in a share (maybe more than its share) of lined , flying-saucer style of the place. thigh-length wet T-shirt (with the festi- losers. It also brings in a large number of \"What kind of theater is this?\" he asks. val logo), a nude male sunbathing on a interesting films , many of them U.S. \" It looks like a giant lecture hall at a festival beach towel. Yes , those photo- premieres and some that would not oth- university. We should all be in geology graphs were taken by Victor Skrebneski, erwise have played this conservative 101 , talking about moon rocks .\" and yes , two of them also display a city. This year that list includes Thomas woman (who, in turn , doesn't display a Brosch's Domino, Krzysztof Zanussi's Moon rocks might have been more thing); but when the advertising copy Imperative, Wolf Gremm's stylized sci-fi interesting. for those posters includes lines like, \"So Kamikaze 1989 and the real prize of the wet you have to want it, \" some Chica- festival, Clean Slate (Coup de torchon) by This year's festival was dedicated to goans start thinking that maybe this fes- Bertrand Tavernier. Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Ann- tival is just a little too outre for them. Margret (along with a less publicized Several sources have said that Mayor Based on the novel Pop. 1280 by tribute to the French distributor Gau- Byrne herself felt that way, which might American writer Jim Thompson, Clean mont), a combination that Chicago explain why, for the first time in recent Slate is a screwball comedy that ulti- topped only with its 1978 tributes to years, the festival didn't get a city grant. mately goes insane-a funny, bold, dis- Orson Welles and Mickey Mouse. (Nei- turbing film. It tells the story of an oblig- ther showed.) As a local girl who's made In the past, Kutza's taken a lot of heat ingly corrupt minor law officer (Philippe good by acting bad, Ann-Margret for his unconventional tastes in festival Noiret) in French colonial Africa who is seemed like a natural choice. But in posters, movies and parties-this year's driven over the edge by the crazy de- spite of some desperate determinedness body builders were bearded transves- mands and insults of his wife, her boy- by Reed, the interview never took off. tites a few years back. But never have he friend, the local pimps and the venal bureaucracy. His solution is to deal out There was one intriguing moment, and the festival been so openly attacked though. \"Surprises\" have become al- as this year. The criticism started this more justice than even the law requires. most de rigueur at these kinds of trib- summer over a new Skrebneski photo- Tavernier has worked wonders, and utes; in Toronto this year, Robert graph of Kutza and executive director been rewarded: Clean Slate is France's DeNiro jumped out of the audience to Suzanne McCormick. Wearing black entry in the Academy Award's Best For- surprise his buddy Martin Scorsese; and turtlenecks, Kutza, his arms crossed, eign Language Film category. so, in Chicago a confetti-throwing Rip stares ahead almost angrily (as if he Taylor (yes, from The $l. 98 Beauty knew what was in store for him this sea- Another find is the social comedy Par- Contest) popped up for his good friend, son), while a smiling McCormick is en- adise for All by Alain Jessua. In a Ann-Margret. ergetically draped around and behind rivetingly spooky last performance, Pa- him. The photo ran in Variety over the trick Dewaere plays an incompetent in- Later, at a party attended by what the coyly erotic title \"The Best.\" Then, a surance agent: he even botches a suicide gossip columns called \"festival biggies,\" month before the festival, local film attempt. Carted off to a hospital, De- the talk turned to the Querelle fiasco. critic Gene Siskel began his annual pub- waere becomes a guinea pig for a medi- The closing screening was to have been lic swipes in the Chicago Tribune. Pick- cal technique called flashing. The flash the U.S. premiere of -the film-an ap- ing up the ad's sexual metaphor, Siskel machine promises to remove all of De- propriate end for a festival dedicated to wrote that the festival consisted of noth- waere's anxiety, which it does, along Fassbinder. But at the last minute the ing but\" 'sloppy seconds' in the foreign with his ability to feel or care. And that, picture was pulled, according to its dis- market.\" He panned Kutza's \"strange\" naturally, enables him to finally become tributor, so that it can be dubbed from its and \"second-rate\" taste, and went so far a business success. Dewaere and the original English into German, then sub- as to propose that Kutza should leave the other flashees are perceived-and per- titled back into English. That's so it can festival. This is like suggesting that the ceive themselves-as being happy; ac- \"feel foreign. In the end, Yol closed swallows should ditch Capistrano. tually, they project a wistful, ironed-out the festival. blankness. Eventually the doctor who As the opening drew near, press criti- started all this flashing realizes that it's The day before this party, Variety ran cism, led by Siskel and Sun-Times critic only another form of suicide, but by a story depicting Kutza as \"livid\" over Roger Ebert, grew heated over the lack then, the unflashed are not to be de- this embarrassment. (Several days later, of critics' screenings. This year, screen- terred from their chance at happiness. the embarrassment would grow when it ings started only four days before the Three weeks after Paradise for All was becomes known that somehow Querelle festival and then continued haphazardly completed, Dewaere committed sui- managed to show up at the London Film after that; Columbia, United Artists cide. Jessua has dedicated the film to Festival.) The article also suggested that Classics and Cinecom International him. Charles Schreger, president of Triumph rented their own screening rooms for the Films-the probable U.S. distributor of critics. Siskel and Ebert's harsh words • Querelle-may have been the power be- for the festival did not prevent them hind the yank. So at this party, over very from taking out a full page ad in the In the back of the McClurg Court curious drinks (Reed orders a bourbon program book for their independent TV Theater, there are ripples of displeasure sour, and Franco Nero-here partly to show; Siskel had an additional ad which coming from Kutza and other festival promote QuereLle-wanted an aperitif, promoted his reviews on a local TV officials. For one thing, the healthy but they both got something with para- news program. crowd that turned out to see Ann-Mar- sols), there was a lot of talk about \"what gret seems lost in this 1271-seat house. is really going on with Querelle.\" • Then, too, the tribute is already running late: Ann-Margret hasn't arrived . \"I'm not the villain here,\" Schreger Somewhere amid all the hyping and told me at another dinner party. \"I am sniping, there was a film festival going , Rex Reed , who will show film clips absolutely not the villain. The agree- and interview Ann-Margret on stage, (Continued on page 79) 8

Films & Video for Study from Direct Cinema Limited The Rain Filmmaker: People A Diary bymarried woman on the run Robert Duvall, James Caan and Shirley Knight star in this extra- from responsibility. ordinary film. Considered a \"daring experiment in tech- \"A superbly acted private George lucas niques\" by critics in 1969, this trailblazing early American drama, saturated with the look independent film was shot on locations from Long Island to and feel of this country in the George Lucas captures the Colorado, incorporating events, people, and scenery into a flex- '60s :' Charles Champlin, Los passion , intensity, and humor of ible screenplay about a young Angeles Times the filmmaker, Francis Coppola Warner Brothers on the making of \"The Rain A film by Francis Coppola People\" 111 minutes Color Lucasfilm Ltd . 16mm 1969 For Rental Only 33 min Color 16mm 1982 The Making of Raiders Rocky-The American Dream ofthe lost Ark Continues Utilizing film clips from the The excitement of moviemaking \" Rocky\" trilogy, the real life and comes alive in the only film to screen life stories of Sylvester document the personalities Stallone and the character he (including Steven Spielberg and George Lucas) and the places created Rocky Balboa merge, which make \"Raiders\" the mo creating a personal film record exciting film of the decade. of Stallone's achievements. Lucasfilm Ltd . 58 minutes Color A film by Mark Schneider 16mmIVideo 1981 MGM/ UA t 26 minutes Color . 16mmIVideo 1982 David Holzman's Diary One of the neglected mile- 'Ramb unctiously funny and MY GIRLFRIEND'S WEDDING stones in contem porary film lNise .... Vincent Can by, is Jim McBrides com panion history, this legendary indepen- New York Times fil m to DAVID HOLZMAN'S dent classic captures the state of mind and the state of the art A fi lm by Jim Mc Bride DIARY It is a 60-min ute explo- in late 1960s America. 71 minutes 16mm B&W ration of the boundaries of documentary fiction al filmmaking . The Kennedy Crisis: Behind Primary Faces of Years a Presidential NovemberThi s pioneering documentary <i, Commitment provides a completely candid look at the 1960 Wisconsin The death of President John F Democratic Presidential Primary Kennedy is reflected in the This landmark documentary \"No previous film had so caught faces of Americans who takes us inside the White House the euphoria , the sweat , the attended his funeral . and confronts Gov. George maneuvering of a political cam- Wallace over the integration paign :' Erik Barnouw of the University of Alabama. Drew Associates Drew Associates 60 minutes B&W Drew Associates 58 minutes B&W 16mm 1963 16mm 1960 11 minutes B&W 1964 DrewArchive Partial list of titles available from the Drew Archive Since the early 1960s, film- James Libscomb, among THE CHAIR maker Robert Drew and his others. Robert Drew and his THE CHILDREN WERE associates have produced out- associates have pioneered a WATCHING standing films . The filmmaking new approach to the documen- EDDIE (On the Pole) associates have included tary, with films structured by the HERSELF, INDIRA GANDHI Richard Leacock, Gregory events themselves, as opposed JANE Shuker. DA Pennebaker, Hope to a pre-determined point of MOONEY vs. FOWLE (Football) NEHRU Ryden , Albert Maysles, and view or script. . YANKI NO! Rent or purchase these For in formation cont act. Direct Cinema Limited ~,~ outstanding films for your P. O Box 69589 Los Angeles . CA 90069 cmema @ film society or class. (213) 656-4 700 limited

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Reach out and Touch Someone: The year's biggest movie is also the year's bestfilm . by Richard T. Jameson type clouds roil in Spielberg's E.T. The verse suppress yet another resemblance: Extra-Terrestrial. The auspicious specta- grinning with backlight, the serrations of People in Steven Spielberg films live cle of CE3K's otherworldly arrivals is re- the jack-o'-Iantern's \"mouth\" evoke a in the right places: movies can't help placed here with disarming simplicity: a non predatory, cartoon version of Jaws' happening to them. It isn't necessary to gentle downward slant across the night \"Bruce.\" range as far as, say, Peru, where the right sky, with no lights save stars, no visible mountain had been patiently waiting to spacecraft, nothing to orient the sense of Still, the most striking thing about the emerge from the Paramount crest at the \"down\" but the bottom of the screen spacecraft in the second shot of the film beginning ofRaiders ofthe Lost Ark. Your and the fact that the movement is being is that we do not see it land. It's simply house will do. Indeed, it will do better. registered by the eye of an earthbound present, congenially embraced by a for- filmwatcher. The tops of fir trees pene- est clearing, its plentiful lights rhyming Remember the house where Barry trate the bottom of the frame , feathery with the glow of an American town Guiler and his mother lived in Close and just a cozy whisper of shade darker spreading out from the upper-left corner Encounters of the Third Kind. Not just than the night itself. They confirm the of the frame. The shot-progression is what it looked like (Forties bungalow locus of the action and reassure us. This perfectly coherent: the downward drift gone to seed behind a screen porch) but is Earth. This is the right place. of the opening shot was actually comple- where it sat. On an unkempt lawn merg- ted, a distinct rest achieved, before the ing into field and wood; the house itself That's the first shot of the movie. The cut to shot two; and there's no strain in slightly left of center-frame, with some second at once bears Out its logic and assuming that the spaceship participated middle-distant trees at right to keep the subtly contradicts our generic expecta- in the movement described by our own eye from straying; a valley slope behind , tions. There's a spacecraft after all, but eyes. At the same time, that movement unremarkable until you noticed that the one that hardly squares with the vi- was too clean, too abstract, to suggest a c10udscape above had bestirred and re- taminized swooping or sky-filling mass complete point-of-view identification shaped itself to create a second, forced- ,of previous Spielberg spaceships. In size with an extraterrestrial peering th'rough perspective valley in the sky-a trough and appearance it suggests a big brother the most pristine of ports; even within that an extraterrestrial craft just ha(i to to the Christmas ornaments that might the context of a fairy-tale narrative, the slide down, to collect one lucky little be hung on the surrounding firs , though shot is a kind of cinematic wish-fantasy. boy and take him for a celestial joyride. given the season-several days shy of The exquisite conjoining and disjunc- Movie landscape as poetic imperative. Halloween-its resemblance to a jack- ture of these two briefshots establish the o'-Iantern is more immediately apt. Nor tensions that will inform the rest of the No De Millean, Ten Commandments- can the habitue of the Spielberg uni- film . 11

Whatever sociological editorializing is read into E. T., no matter how distressingly the creature is merchandized and Pac-Manized, the movie still deserves its phenomenal popularity. Spielberg's depiction of the E .T.s' more limited terrain than any other big- normal light. He also scrupulously re- emergence into the world stresses the screen feature of Spielberg's (except its spects the terms by which we know benignity of their visitation. The crea- brilliant, underrated flipside companion E.T. so far-the fingers; the offscreen tures are first discovered by a camera Poltergeist, which Tobe Hooper di- chuckles that may be involuntary sound, slowly circling the spacecraft, peering rected under Spielberg's aegis), but it may be shaped language-and the through foreground branches. The veg- maps that terrain with gratifying lucid- terms in which we know Elliott's own etation is all astir, partly from the breeze, ity. Elliott (Henry Thomas) , E .T.'s world. The normal, functional follow of partly from the interplanetary dwarfs' Earthside soulmate-to-be, is kept out of his camera maps a zone new to us as well bustling about, and partly, it almost the older kids' Dungeons and Dragons as to E. T. (Elliott's table) and then , in its seems, from an agreeable excitement game with a condescending \"You can't return pass, the camera \" inadvertently\" communicated among all the living join just any universe in the middle! \" discovers that that terrain has already things present. Our first clear extrater- The movie not only disputes that (this is been annexed by the narrative and restrial sighting is of an E.T. semi-sil- said a mere moment after E .T., left be- imaginatively utilized. houetted within the door of the ship, hind by the hastily departing spacecraft, while immediately in front of the lens has involuntarily joined this world); it This fusion of the documentary and two tassel-like fingers reach up to pluck also demonstrates that we can rediscover the imaginative is so beguiling that the at an evergreen branch. our own universe \"in the middle\" unthinkable becomes possible. The through sensitive mise en scene . way Spielberg looks at contemporary The titular E.T. is first seen in long- suburbia, we can believe that his chil- shot, waddling rapt through the most A pointed, yet also inconspicuous, in- dren might actually grow up as nostalgic Edenic forest stand since the pastoral stance of this occurs when Elliott intro- about their childhood home as, well, heyday of D. W. Griffith. The trees duces his new acquaintance into his people who grew up pre-tickytacky. tower above him, but there isn't a hint of home. First encountered in the back- Spielberg retains the ability to visualize terror in the scale of things. Spielberg yard as a Halloween \"goblin,\" E .T. has the world as a child does-and that's not cuts to a traveling POV, two giant trunks been lured back from the forest with the meant as a goopy platitude, but as a that run out of ceiling before they run proffer of M&M candies. (Yes, they're precise observation. The director gets out of height. Here the points-of-view of really Reese's Pieces, but childhood as- the angles that can render the mundane viewer and visitant incontestably merge: sociations die hard.) Leaving pile after monumental without disfiguring or we are privileged to see a tree, to en- pile of these in his wake, Elliott entices falsifying it. He gets the kind of \"shots\" counter the Idea of Tree, as if we'd E.T. into his house, up the stairs, and one frames to valorize one's childhood never seen one before; and to know (re- along the corridor to his bedroom. The (and adult?) itinerary. gardless of whatever else we think we boy-and Spielberg's camera-ob- \"know\" ) that these trees don't come to a serves from inside the room as the crea- Elliott just walking up his driveway stop x feet above the mist into which ture's long, articulate fingers extend into after doing business with the pizza-de- they disappear, but provide a spiritual the doorframe to gather up the latest livery truck; Elliott and later his older connection between two realms of exist- offering. Then Elliott turns and crosses brother Michael (Robert MacNaughton) ence. the room to his desk (to turn on a lamp, I mounting up and cycling out of the ga- think); the camera pans with him, per- rage to conquer the world-these are Spielberg goes delightfully and defin- fectly naturally, and in doing so discloses lyrical and also astutely comic moments itively further in asserting E .T.'s kinship the long, cluttered playtable that lies when the most everyday architecture with a particular species of the imagina- between desk and door. Elliott immedi- becomes a heroic frame and the c1ose- tion. The creature comes to the edge of ately turns and resumes his previous plotted constructions of a tract neighbor- the forest , and also of a hill; some brush vantage, whereupon he and we discover hood loom with the telephoto grandeur obstructs his vision of what lies beyond. that the doorframe, in which we might of mountain backdrops. He moves forward, leans to bend the have expected E.T. to be standing, is shrubbery aside, and-marvelous neck empty. Is E.T. still lingering outside, Even when Spielberg does crowd fal- that he's supplied with-he cranes. The out of sight? Out of sight yes, outside no. sification, the deviations are so charm- city glimpsed in the corner of an earlier For suddenly E. T.'s fingers reappear, ingly cinematic we want to embrace shot now comes clearly into view. At this above the opposite edge of the play- them, too: the backyard cornfield, mist, moment E.T. becomes identified with table, and we hear his clucks and mur- and Halloween moon that mute the the very principle of movie movement murs of delight as he gropes his messily sense of suburban blight encroaching on (and, incidentally, E.T. vindicates the exploratory way among Elliott's nature; and a high-angle view of a rusti- cheerfully wasteful, $500,000 preview cated, fence-wrapped bend of road that shot for J94J!). treasures. Elliott bikes along as he leaves his town This is a wonderful passage. Not only behind-a bit of highway engineering • as improbable and as thrillingly right as does Spielberg manage to continue de- the Albert Whitlock roadway where an Such identification is entirely in or- v~loping the characterization of E.T. intoxicated Roger Thornhill is set up to der, for movie classicism lies at the heart while still delaying the moment we fi- buy the farm in North by Northwest. of the film's extraordinary purity and nally can see him clearly in closeup and power. Geographically, E.T. covers a Mostly, Spielberg transforms the 12

mundane simply by virtue of how he Indeed, E. T.'s device, with its ingeni- find before the adults are-though the sees it-like E.T. himself. If movie ous amalgamation ofso many incidental youngest, Gertie (Drew Barrymore), classicism, the purest manifestation of a household props, amounts to nothing properly rejects the sappy \"Only little pop-cultural medium, validates E.T., less than a funky variation on the grand kids can see him\" with a weary \"Give theme of CE3K, wherein a musical me a break!\" E.T. also returns the favor. At once ex- chord, flashing lights, hand gestures, a ploring his new environment and pon- mathematical formula, and the patterns Still, Mary (Dee Wallace), the big kid dering how to get back to his old one, of celestial shapes dancing in space all of a suddenly-single parent, literally E.T. tinkers with a learning toy and a became the physical-metaphysical cue can't see him, can't see that she's got an TV remote control while also perusing a for the close encounter between biologi- \"extra kid\" in her household, even Buck Rogers strip in the comix. As it cally alien, spiritually attuned species. when the beer-besotted E. T. shuffles happens, Buck has built himself a Rube and belches about the kitchen behind Goldberg gizmo to \"phone home\" from Spielberg everywhere hints at both her. (Spielberg is more generous than a hostile planet; E.T. cannot yet make the readiness of humankind to imagina- many reviews have given him credit for out the words in the comic strip, but tively embrace such possibilities, and about taking the curse off this adult ob- presumably he reads the graphic depic- the cozy overfamiliarity, the cultural tuseness-especially through his excel- tion of sonar waves as clearly as any conditioning, that militates against mak- lent taste in not-conventionally- earthling. Meanwhile, a TV commercial ing the sublime connection. Howappro- beautiful leading ladies, here Wallace urges Bell Telephone customers to priate, with respect to both levels of pos- and in Poltergeist the enchanting JoBeth reach out and touch someone. sibility, that the kids going outside to Williams. Even \"Keys\" [Peter Coyote], chase the goblin they don't believe in, the long-faceless leader of the sinister E.T. adds up his cues and sets to accompany and comment on their own posse seeking the extraterrestrial, be- work. He uses everything that happens mission by chanting the \"deedle-dee- gins to be disclosed as basically an all- to him; even an umbrella that pops open die, deedle-deedle\" theme from The right guy when, like E. T. 's, his fingers and terrifies him finds its way into the Twilight Zone. Of course, the kids are dip tentatively into frame to pick up an \"home phone\" he ultimately assembles willing to admit the reality of what they M&M from the forest floor and we hear to contact his own kind across the stars. Games people play. 13

his contented munching offscreen.) restrial powers on objects. more or less intended. Later, after find- When E. T. first manifests this ability, ing an anonymous bequest (Susie's do- Finally, Spielberg is committed to the ing) in his mailbox, he rushes to bring suspending several bright-colored balls home the news that he will now be able rediscovery of community rather than in the air of Elliott's room, in approxima- to go to' college; this time he manages to tion of the configuration of his own solar leap up onto the fence, teeter precari- us-against-them fragmentation. Elliott's system, he does so to certify his pro- ously, and then complete the transit in found relationship with all creatures something approaching a self-deter- telepathic communion with the extra- great and small in having, and cherish- mined style. Of course, he would never ing, a \"home.\" His later coups-while have made it without Susie's help. terrestrial, privileged and unique as it riding the handlebars of Elliott's bicycle -represent the same sort of inspired Steven Spielberg may never have sat may be, is in service of a just rebuke his extension of inherent, logical function down and studied the films of D.W. he practices on the homely this-and-that Griffith. He may not be aware that, for brother hurls at him early in the film: that composes his interstellar phone. instance, the transformation of Elliott's family home from collection of safety \"Why don't you grow up? Think how Spielberg shows elsewhere in the movie zones and personal shrines to an antisep- that, even without extraterrestrial inter- tic-white, violated desert recapitulates other people feel for a change. \" Michael vention, boys' bicycles can go places the the environmental progression of so most souped-up government automo- many Griffith classics, or that Elliott's himself manages to participate in this biles cannot. E.T. just takes that idea and E. T. 's space-defying, cinematically and flies with it. exultant spiritual union echoes such a process, to the extent that he literally psychic-cinematic bond as the one that It's worth noting, too, that E. T., links Lillian Gish and Richard gets into E. T. 's space-a closet hidey- though he comes from heaven and pos- Barthelmess before they have even met sesses a seriocomic variation on the di- in Way Down East (1920). Whether hole-as a touching response to the visi- vine Digit in Michelangelo's Sistine Spielberg ever thought of Griffith while Chapel painting, is scarcely infallible. conceiving and shooting E.T. is really of tor's own close encounter with death in When he and Elliott embark on their no consequence. But the classical vi- maiden voyage over the treetops, all is sion, the clarity and directness, the fu- the penultimate reel. rosy, but their eventual touchdown sion ofluminous, utterly straightforward leaves something to be desired: Elliott, form and world-opening meaning is of a In both E. T . and Poltergeist , E .T., and bike end up spilled in the kind. bushes. But E. T. , here as elsewhere, Spielberg develops a running commen- learns from experience, and when he Whatever sociological editorializing is and his vigilante bikers arrive at the read into it and its phenomenal popular- tary on closets as sectors of special child- same spot later on, five sets of wheels ity, no matter how distressingly E. T. is return to earth with breathless ease. merchandized and Pac-Manized, E.T. hood experience: in Poltergeist, as diat the movie sustains and deserves its suc- It's a small thing; Spielberg doesn't cess because it reinvents the radiant sim- nightmare zone so fearfully adjacent to dote on it. But watching that second plicity of film's own still-radiant begin- landing, I found myself recalling an- nings. Surely Griffith would applaud, one's safe and solitary bed; in E.T., as a other movie, some 63 years older: D. W. and recognize as the realization of his Griffith's True Heart Susie (1919). In that most essential impulse, one of the very private den impervious to adult eyes and exemplary masterpiece, Griffith uses a last images of Spielberg's movie: the similar, and similarly understated , figure heart made visible through the closing of apprehension. (The director makes es- of style to comment on the growth and a shutter. ~ progress of Susie's lifelong beau , Wil- pecially shrewd use of a rose window in liam (Robert Harron). As a schoolboy, William takes his leave of Susie at her Elliott's closet; it always seems backed gate and makes an ungainly run at the fence before his own house across the by suffusing light, 'whether seen from road; he hits it with his belly and suc- ceeds in flopping over into his yard as within by day or glimpsed from outside, at night, as a reassuring landmark while the dark forms of strangers prowl the brush.) Michael occupies E .T. 's accus- tomed resting-place as a gesture of both self-consolation and instinctive faith- as though his being there could reinforce E. T. 's fading life, his ability to survive by sustaining a geographic presence on the premises. • E.T. would appreciate the gesture. He clearly believes in collaboration. At least one normally discerning critic has complained that, given E.T.'s demon- strable ability to make bicycles fly late in the film, there's no reason why he shouldn't have zoomed back to the safety of the spaceship when menaced by Keys' marauders, rather than scurry- ing on ineffectual legs through brush and bramble. E.T. undeniably misses that boat, but this criticism also misses a crucial point. We never do have any rea- son to believe that E.T. himself can fly. What he can do is to exert his extrater-

The 1982 Movie Revue: II And the Nominees Are, Maybe .. . porting actress in Tootsie). And, as Harmetz notes, many categories' nomi- nees are determined by the aggressive- ness of January campaigns in the Holly- wood trade journals. But peering into the future, we all walk in the dark. The difference is that, through experience and acumen, our Gang of Eight carry flashlights. Best Picture \"It's all going to boil down to E.T. vs. Gandhi,\" says Gregg Kilday. \"E.T. has to be the favorite, unless Hollywood de- cides the picture has already received Steven Spielberg . too much attention. It may hurt Gandhi Richard Attenborough. that Chariots ofFire won last year. Local MGM-UA's trio of semi-sleeper come- People in the movie industry don't moviemakers have had enough of these dies-My Favorite Year, Victor/Victoria, and Diner-they will have to fight for make New Year's resolutions. They British films.\" Opines Dale Pollock: acting and writing nominations. make lists: Ten Bests, Ten Worsts, \"E.T. will be nominated, but I don't Consensus:E.T. TheExtra-Terrestrial, Gandhi, Tootsie, Sophie's Choice, An Offi- Who's Hot and Who's Not. They take think it will win. The Academy doesn't cer and a gentleman. Maybes: The Ver- dict, Missing . special pleasure in exercising their pe- give awards to Steven Spielberg or Best Actor ripheral vision: looking back to the big George Lucas-there's a real resent- In an unusually strong year for male films of the year just ended, and ahead ment against them.\" Another panelist leads, the same five names keep recur- ring: Dustin Hoffman for Tootsie, British to the announcement of Academy disagrees: \"There's no backlash against screen newcomer Ben Kingsley as Gan- dhi, Jack Lemmon as the distraught fa- Award nominations in February. In the Spielberg any more. What more can he ther in Missing, Paul Newman for his sodden attorney in The Verdict, and Pe- next issue of FILM COMMENT, we'll have to prove? Unless everyone agrees ter O'Toole as the wastrel movie star in My Favorite Year. This would mark publish predictions of the Oscar win- that Gandhi is fabulous, E.T. will win.\" Hoffman's fifth nomination, Newman's sixth, O'Toole's seventh, and Lem- ners, based on those nominations. For Nearly everyone agrees that Tootsie is mon's third in four years. Why Lem- mon, in a year with many hot con- now, as part of our year-end review, we fabulous-a majority of our experts pre- tenders? Jokes one observer: \"It's in the Academy bylaws-he has to be nomi- asked eight Los Angeles movie adepts dict it will be nominated for Best Picture nated every year.\" -including Aljean Harmetz of The -but that the Academy's preference for Aljean Harmetz predicts, flat out, that \"Newman will win, as Spielberg will for New York Times, Dale Pollock ofthe Los high seriousness should deprive this best director, and for the same reason: they're overdue. There's no way of Angeles Times, Gregg Kilday and Peter Dustin Hoffman comedy from copping keeping sentiment out of voting-it's a Rainer of the L.A. Herald Examiner, the big prize. \"Sophie's Choice,\" says Rastar's Stuart Byron, quondam movie Peter Rainer, \"is a prestigious, Oscar- exec Lee Beaupre, and publicist Bruce type movie. Being good may count as Feldman-to offer their educated much as being great.\" And An Officer guesses on Oscar nominees for 1982. and a Gentleman is an immensely popu- Note that the observations of most of lar picture ($100 million gross in U.S. our experts were made in late Novem- and Canada) in an old-fashioned genre ber and early December; not all had that used to win Oscars. seen all the Christmas movies; some I But what of the highly regarded films films and artists may have benefited from early '82? \"Missing will be forgot- from early anticipation, rumor, and ten as Best Picture,\" says Aljean Har- hype. Our aces could not know .that metz. \"It came out in February and was the New York Film Critics would vote a commercial failure. Shoot the Moon is for Gandhi (best film), Sydney Pol- another flop that will be washed away by lack (director), or Jessica Lange (sup- the wave of Christmas successes.\" As for 15

key part of the Academy Awards.\" formance in Tootsie. And maybe you'll see which people get the big ad Kingsley has nothing going for him but the Academy will promote Carol campaigns in Variety and The Hollywood an awesome performance-as strong a Burnett, a Tinseltown favorite, into Reporter. A blitz like that can trigger star-making role as O'Toole's Lawrence Best Actress nominatability for her happy memories of fine performances- ofArabia in 1962, the year O'Toole lost comic turn as Miss Hannigan in Annie. say, Robert Preston's in VictorlVictoria.\" the Best Actor award to another aging Gregg Kilday thinks so. Lee Beaupre Preston will have some competition in favorite , Gregory Peck. thinks not: \"Carol Burnett will receive the drag race: John Lithgow, who as- no nomination, as actress or supporting sayed the transsexual Roberta Muldoon Kingsley easily defeated Hoffman actress. Why? 0 one will talk about in The WorldAccording to Garp, was pre- in the New York and L.A. critics' vot- Annie. No one wants to acknowledge it.\" dicted by five of our experts. ing; all those articles on the ten- sions between Hoffman and Sydney Consensus: Lange and Streep; then After that it gets dicey. Consider the Pollack may have won sympathy Keaton, Winger, Spacek. Maybes: possibilities: James Mason and Jack votes for the director. A minority Field, Burnett. Warden as opposing legal eminences in opinion from Stuart Byron: \"Hollywood The Verdict; Bill Murray, Charles Durn- is very eager to give Richard Pryor an ing, and director Sydney Pollack, all de- Oscar nomination , but it's hard to pre- lightful in Tootsie (Murray, who gra- dict for which-Some Kind of Hero. The ciously waived co-star billing, would Toy, or Live on the Sunset Strip.\" become the first uncredited actor ever to win an Oscar nomination); Mickey Consensus: Hoffman , Kingsley, Rourke, Kevin Bacon, Daniel Stern, Lemmon, Newman, O'Toole. May- and just about anybody else in Diner; bes: Mitchum, Pryor, Richard Gere. Albert Finney as Daddy Warbucks in Annie; Rutger Hauer (Best Supporting Best Actress Performance by a Deranged Robot) in Blade Runner; and E .T.'s best friend, Slim pickin's. \"In the best Actress cat- Best Supporting Actor Henry Thomas. \"Nope,\" says Dale Pol- egory,\" says one of our participants, lock, \"the Academy doesn't like to put \"you'll have five ' performances that A wide open race-at least for the kids up against adults.\" Maybe that's would not have been nominated in any nominations. Already Louis Gossett, why none of our experts mentioned 21- other year.\" Strong words for a weak J r., is seen as an ultimate winner for his year-old Eddie Murphy for his knockout field . Despite (or because of) the fact mean and meaty top sergeant in An Offi- debut in 48 HRS. that Sophie's Choice was not screened in cer and a Gentleman. \"There is strong Hollywood until shortly before it sentiment for a black actor to win,\" says Consensus: Gossett, Lithgow, Pres- opened in early December, Meryl Dale Pollock, \"and I don' t see how Ri- ton; then Mason, Keith. Maybes: half Streep is one of the two leading con- chard Pryor can make it this year. Gos- the actors in Hollywood. tenders in this category. \"Streep, sight sett will, and he' ll bump David Keith unseen,\" announces Stuart Byron. out of the running.\" Keith , another re- Best Supporting Actress \"She's getting to be like Katharine Hep- cruit from An Officer, is an Aljean Har- burn or Jane Fonda: they'll give her the metz pick: \"If the Academy likes a pic- A strong year, or just an uncertain Oscar when there isn't anyone else. And ture, they' ll find nomination slots for it. one? Our mavens named ten actresses as sometimes when there is someone IfGere or Winger isn't named , then look possible nominees, but only Glenn else.\" The other sure shot, say our for Gossett and Keith. There are eight or Close (frosty and serene as Mama Garp) eight, is Jessica Lange as the fated Thir- ten strong entries in both supporting cat- received as many as four votes. Every ties film star Frances Farmer. Frances egories. These are also the ones suscep- other potential supportress has a good has not been enthusiastically received. tible to advertising barrages. In January reason to be elected, and a better But the Academy loves actresses who reason not to be. So how about Kim play divine masochists. With graphic Stanley, another big mama, in Frances? shock treatment, gang rape, booze and Good rep, long-awaited return to the pills and Clifford Odets, Lange can't screen; smallish part, lousy picture. miss. Lainie Kazan, one more crazy mama, in My Favorite Year? Says Aljean Harmetz: Our experts are desultory in filling the \"It's a bravura performance that every- other three Best Actress slots. Deborah one's talking about. Hard to count her Winger registered strongly in a hit film out.\" But three others say no: the film -as Richard Gere's girl friend in An may not be thought a big enough hit. Officer and a Gentleman-but she is still Lindsay Crouse, who cracks the case in young, and a Hollywood outsider. The Verdict? Good role, looks awful (Hol- Diane Keaton's problem, as Kilday lywood loves actresses who deglamorize notes , is that \"She was in Shoot the themselves for serious movies); but, Moon: a fine performance in a movie says Dale Pollock, \"She's only on screen people have forgotten, or want to.\" Sissy for about four minutes-her role's cru- Spacek? She plays almost a supporting cial but too small.\" role in Missing, and besides, she won two years ago. May be the Academy The real challenge is in figuring out, will trump the New York critics and especially this year, who's a leading ac- cite Lange for her co-starring per- tress and who's supporting. Harmetz fig- 16

ures Carol Burnett could cadge a Best ioned that half the people in Hollywood, nominated for Best Picture who didn't Actress nomination for Annie, given her including one of our experts, think the get a nod in his own category. \"Back popularity and the dearth of competi- movie is an adaptation, not an original. then, \" note s Aljean Harmetz, tion. Will an uneasy feeling about the Hmmm, that leaves only four slots \"Spielberg was considered too young picture hurt her in either category? Dee filled. Well, Robert Towne actually put [27] and brash. Now he's mellowed into Wallace is top-billed in E .T. (1982 was his name on the Personal Best screen- his 30s and made a record-breaking pic- Mother's Year), and brought a quiet, nat- play. Will Hollywood reward the Old ture that is less manipulative than his uralistic strength to the role, but left the Script Doctor (Bonnie and Clyde, The earlier film s. He's no longer the enfant spotlight to Henry Thomas and a certain Godfather, Reds) for coming out into the terrible . He won't just be nominated as mechanical mensch. The other ac- open? Dale Pollock believes so. director, he will win.\" I1. tresses named all have plausible strikes Consensus: Briley, Levinson, None of our panelists d o ubt s I against them: Dana Hill , the oldest Mathison, Steiberg-Palumbo, Ste- Spielberg will be nominated , but Gregg daughter in Shoot the Moon (too young); wart. Maybes: Goldman, McGuire- Kilday wonders if he can win: \"There is Zelda Rubinstein, the psychic in Polter- Gelbart-Schisgal. a possible backlash that could hurt his geist (too short); Rohini Hattangady, chances-the Twilight Zone sca ndal. \" Gandhi's wife (too foreign) ; Lesley Ann Best Screen Adaptation LastJuly, actor Vic Morrow and twO chil- Warren, the concupiscent cutie in Victor! dren were killed in a suspicious accident Victoria (too much). There won't be five This isn 't the glamour category it was while shooting an episode ofThe Twilight nominees in this category; there will be in the Thirties and Forties, when A-list Zone, directed by John Landis and pro- five survivors. novels and plays were automatically duced by Spielberg. In Los Angeles, Consensus: Burnett, Close, Crouse, filmed, and a Best Picture award went where 90 percent of Academy members Kazan. Maybes: Hill , Stanley, Wallace, routinely to adaptations. Only three of live, continuing chapters of this saga Warren. Long shots: Hattangady, Ru- our wizards roused themselves to pre- have received much press play, includ- binstein. dict five nominees here. So: unanimous ing a page-l banner headline in the Her- votes for Steve Tesich's Garp screenplay ald Examiner reporting an unsubstanti- Best Original Screenplay and Alan J. Pakula's fidelity to Sophie's ated assertion that Spielberg was on the Choice. Blake Edwards' VictorlVictoria set when the disaster occurred. The A surfeit of superlatives will leave a gets two nods, but Gregg Kilday says question is not whether Spielberg is cul- couple of highly regarded original Academy members won't recognize it as pable, but whether conservative Acad- screenplays out of the running. Start an adaptation of a 1933 German farce. emy members will see the tragedy as an with four of the five films predicted as Maybe these are the same people who all-but-inevitable byproduct of young Best Picture finalists: E.T. (written by think An Officer and a Gentlemen is an directors who'll try anything for a thrill- Melissa Mathison), Gandhi (John Bri- adaptation. ing effect. ale y), An Officer and a Gentleman David Mamet, credited with the Ver- Richard Attenborough (Gandhi) and (Douglas Day Stewart), and Tootsie dict script, is major young playwright Sidney Lumet (The Verdict) have no (Don McGuire, Larry Gelbart, Murray -in New York and Chicago. \"They such cloud over their heads-but no Schisgal, with uncredited help from don't know him out here,\" says Dale E.T. rainbow either. Our correspondents ElaineMay, Bob Kaufman, Valerie CUi- Pollock. \"He could coattail in if The Ver- agree that each will be nominated for tin , Barry Levinson, and Robert Gar- dict gets a lot of nominations.\" Jason best director. Three pollees hazard the land). Add three \"writer's movies\": Miller is also given a chance with the guess that Sydney Pollack will fill a slot Diner (Levinson), My Favorite Year adaptation of his play That Championship -practically a dead cert now that the (Norman Steinberg and Dennis Pa- Season. And Peter Rainer foresees a Tootsie bandwagon is tooting along with lumbo), and Shoot the Moon (Bo Gold- nomination for the Missing script. In this critics' raves and torrid B.O. (In early man). group, this year, liberal sentiment reigns December, one likely nominee for best That makes seven; now start sub- supreme, with only Blake Edwards to director predicted: \"It'll do $60 mil- tracting. Gandhi is producer-director Ri- razz the grownups. lion in U.S. rentals. \") The fifth position chard Attenborough's movie. Though it Consensus: Edwards, Mamet, is up for grabs among Alan j. Pakula aspires to Lawrence ofArabia eloquence Miller, Pakula, Tesich. (Sophie's Choice), Taylor Hackford (An (in fact, an earlier version of the script Officer and a Gentleman), Barry Levin- was writtell by Lawrence author Robert Best Director son (Diner), and two foreigners , Costa- Bolt), Briley may get lost in the pack. Gavras (Missing) and Wolfgang Petersen Shoot the Moon had its share of dispar- Would the Academy dare withhold (Das Boot/The Boat). As Harmetz notes: agers, and less than its fair share of box- this year's Best Director prize from \"Each year for the past decade , the office coin. Crystal-balls Peter Rainer: Steven Spielberg? Considering the re- Spielberg-Jaws pattern has been re- \"Either Shoot the Moon will be totally views, word-of-mouth, metamovie good peated. So look again this yea r for one overlooked or it will get a lot of nomina- will, and box-office ($300 million in director of a Best Picture nominee to be tions: Keaton for actress, Albert Finney U.S. and Canadian gross, rest of world to aced out of a spot.\" The question is, for actor, Dana Hill for supporting, Alan Ifollow) generated by E.T.-not to men- which one? We'll all know February 17. Parker for direction, and Bo Goldman tion its consummate storytelling craft- for screenplay.\" As for Douglas Day Ste- Spielberg ought to be given the Irving J. Consensus: Spielberg, Attenbo- wart, scripting The Blue Lagoon didn't Thalberg Award. Here, though , we're rough, Lumet, Pollack. Maybes: Pa- add any blue chips to his portfolio; be- talking about a nomination as best direc- kula , Hackford , Levinson , Costa- sides, An Officer and a Gentleman is so tor, a citation denied Spielberg in 1976, doggedly (and successfully) old-fash- when he was the only director of a film Gavras, Petersen . ® REPORTER: ANNE THOMPSON WRITER: RICHARD CORLISS 17

The 1982 Movie Revue: III cable television. Anyway, these few New Faces did make me sit up and take notice in 1982. As you can see, it's a short list. • Eddie Murphy. Walter Hill's whip- cord romp 48 HRS isn't \"about\" much of Faces anything, except violence and tension and the high-strung defensive humor tension sometimes generates. In other words, it could be the snazziest \"empty\" ***of *~)* * action film since To Have and Have Not. The only really regrettable elision is sex- ual electricity-regrettable and unnec- essary since, with a little encourage- ment, Annette O'Toole could probably have given the young Bacall a run for her money. Of course, 48 HRS is a prime specimen of that sexually paranoid mod- - ern hybrid , the Buddy Movie: A pla- tonic male partnership carries all the emotional weight. But because the two men in this case are Nick Nolte and cies still have the power to fascinate and Eddie Murphy, Hill almost gets away by David Chute amuse. But the bread-and-butter mid- with it. dle ground of commercial production is Murphy swipes the picture, though, Cable TV is a newfangled joy, but it becoming increasingl y pallid, stale, and with the deft relish of a born foot- does have the curious side effect of mak- lame and tedious. It would suit me fine pad. Taking advantage of Hill's loose, ing Tinseltown S.O.P. seem more ar- if more movie critics emulated their col- MacGuffinish structure, Murphy cane than ever. On cable, we can now leagues in the book and mu sic depart- stretches his sarcastic comic riffs almost see many of the films that Hollywood ments and abandoned the notion that to the breaking point. But the riffs aren't deems unfit for theatrical release-and they' re honor bound to cover every- digressions; they extend the rather it's often as difficult to guess why these thing. Because \"everything\" (the whole wispy implications of the story line. If films were shelved as to understand why schmeer, the industry) isn't worth cover- Murphy is the focal point of the current a Megaforce or a Still ofthe Night was not. ing anymore, except on the financial Saturday Night Live, it's because there's Still, if there's a catch phrase that sums page. These days, movies work their always an undercurrent of true feeling in up the current dreary period in movies, traditional magic as popular art (provok- his dead-on shtick. In 48 HRS, Murphy it has to be ''I' m gonna wait until it ing shared, unifying, culture-wide re- plays a reckless, jaunty convict with a comes on cable. \" sponses) only in one or two clear-cut fast line of nasty patter, and the comedy, For most people, 1982 was the year of instances a year. This year it was E.T.- in context, becomes a winning new form E .T. For some, it was the year of The period. The rest was white noise. Tele- of grace under pressure. Road Warrior and 48HRS. It was also the vIsIon. When Murphy'S Reggie Hammond is year in which a major Hollywood studio, I had fun in 1982 at a number of pic- temporarily released from prison, he Paramount, put its TV division in charge tures that really have no business on a seems giddily exhilarated by the taste of of a big theatrical release, Star Trek /I : Ten Best list: Porky's, The Beastmaster, freedom , turned on by the possibilities. The Wrath of Khan, and was rewarded By Design, Creepshow, The Beast Within, It stimulates his wayward imagination. with hefty profits and (although I blush Monsignor, Battletruck, Xica, Tex, Eating Murphy's performance could easily be for my profession) some respectful re- Raoul, Over the Edge, Summer Lovers, misinterpreted as an S.NL.-style send- views. Francis Coppola has been telling Barbarosa, Forbidden World, Venom, The up of the macho super-dude characters us that video will soon rival film in its Long Good Friday. Perfectly pleasant in the old Blaxploitation films; but the flexibility and clarity. Meanwhile, com- stuff, most of it. This was also a good layers of passion in Murphy's comedy panies like Paramount seem to be hom- year for forceful actors who knew how to allow him to integrate his own sense of ing in from the opposite direction, turn- convey the emotions their face-saving humor into the conception of the charac- ing out movies that are indistinguishable gruffness was designed to conceal: Matt ter. It's the hip, flip , cheerful Reggie from telev ision shows-and getting Dillon (Over the Edge , Tex), Bob who seems to be putting on the act, not away with it. Within the industry, Hoskins (The Long Good Friday), Ar- Murphy. Reggie savors and embellishes skimpy TV-style production methods mand Assante (I, The Jury). But the a witty selection of black-macho atti- are perceived as thrifty. And if the end hope of encountering some \"pleasant tudes, but he's too smart not to see product also looks and plays like televi- stuff,\" when the odds against seem to through them. His posturing is a serious sion, well, here are the critics to testify worsen by the day, is a pretty mild stim- survival mechanism , but it's also a vehi- that nobody really gives a damn . ulus to moviegoing. I know that I am not cle of wry self-parody. This is a man who Yes, there are still a few very good the only person who, on any given eve- is so secure in his masculinity that he movies released each year, and a few ning, would prefer to just stay snug at rings inventive changes on standard very bad ones-and both eccentric spe- home, reading or writing ... or watching hard-boiled poses just to keep himself 18

entertained. Reggie Hammond is a pieces of a dozen genres (from Westerns most directors get their hands on in a street-tough swashbuckler, and his to samurai films) and colorful scraps lifetime. Beineix is a laconic expression- high-stepping pleasure in his own ex- from a hundred pop-cultural milieux ist. Color, sound and movement em- ploits is infectious, ingratiating. (from punk clubs to video arcades) con- body emotion, but the stylization also tributed to these seamless, festering tex- cools things off. Diva was such fluff that A handsome leading man who can be tures. The intensity is unprecedented; this dazzling, flexible style was left to tough and funny at the same time- Miller's vision combines dense night- fend for itself; so it's a good omen that whose humor is actually an aspect of his mare imagery with visceral crash-and- Beineix chose sterner stuff to wrestle toughness-ought to be able to write his burn wizardry. He's a fixated hybrid of with in his new picture, an adaptation of own ticket. David Lynch and Walter Hill. Steven (\"Nobody's Fool\") Spielberg quickly David Goodis' moody thriller, The Moon • signed Miller to direct an episode of The in the Gutter. Expect Beineix to render a Twilight Zone Movie . But even the possible film noir as un film bleu; his George Miller. Our candidate for 'Stodgier powers of Hollywood are too favorite color is also his favorite mood. Movie of the Year, The Road Warrior, shrewd to let this one get away. introduced many American filmgoers to • a visionary entertainer from Australia-a • peerless action craftsman whose broad, Rob Bottin. The surreal, blossoming teeming, apocalyptic landscapes framed Jean-Jacques Beineix. More bone- nightmare forms of Bottin's nasty-mon- the stalwart figure of Mad Max (Mel deep moviemaking talent was frittered ster set pieces in The Thing were so end- Gibson), a super-charged avenger on the away in Diva (which looked like a fea- lessly inventive, I forgot to be grossed decimated highways of the near future. ture-length Suzuki commercial) than out. Here, as in The Howling, Bottin's Miller is an inspired synthesist: Bits and flair and showmanship propelled the sub-craft of Special Makeup Effects into a flabbergasting new realm: in his hands, it's virtually an abstract art form. • Roger Donaldson. Sleeping Dogs and Smash Palace; from New Zealand. Blunt and matter-of-fact, but also elo- quent. Plain ,clear, sculpted storytelling. • Mickey Rourke: Con in Body Heat, soulful stud in Diner. Here's the actor who should be playing the lead in the remake of Breathless. And probably in the remake of Scarface, too. And while we're at it, how about the TV-movie version of Casablanca? • Sam Raimi The 22-year-old writer-di- rector of Evil Dead, a mini-budget flesh-eating-zombie picture produced in Detroit, serves up stomach-churn- ing visceral horror laced with goofy comedy. Raimi specializes in direct ac- tion, cattle-prod shock tactics, top- speed ground-level tracking shots em- bellished with percussive sound effects. Some of the laughs probably weren't intentional, but the silliness is oddly ingratiating. • Amanda Plummer. I wouldn't en- tirely trust myself on this one, except that she has cast an immediate spell over stronger men than me. Hypnotizing as Cattle Annie and Ellen James; a daz- zling raspy sylph even on the Tony show, copping a prize for Agnes of God after mesmerizing theater audiences in A Taste of Honey and The Wake ofJamie Foster. She divides audiences, inspiring devotion and dismay. But no one can stop looking at her. With luck, the cen- tral American actress of the Eighties. ~ 19

1 andAllThat ************ WORST STARS OF YESTERDAY MOVIE EVER MADE BY A MESSIAH Jill Clayburgh: I'm Dancing as Fast as The Rev. Sun Myung Moon's [Can Inchon Richard Dreyfuss: Whose Life Is It, Anyway? ( Ryan O'Neal: Partners ALL THE AI Pacino: Author! Author! Jon Voight: Lookin' to Get Out WORLD'S A STAGE AND ALLTHE SEATS * ARE EMPTY STARS OF TOMORR Tempest Maxwell Caulfield: Grease 2 Frederic Forrest: Hammett A Midsummer Night's Sex Luciano Pavarotti: Yes, Giorgio Aileen Quinn: Annie Ken Wahl: Jinxed! The entire cast of Making :::::::::::::ii~ RICHARD CORLISS HARLAN JACOBSON DAVmCHUTE 1. E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial 1. E .T. 1. The Road Warrior 2. Moonlighting 2. Pennies From Heaven 2. E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial 3. The Road Warrior 3. Muddy River 3. Tootsie 4. Brideshead Rivisited 4. Road Warrior 4. 48 HRS. 5. Diner ,5. Moonlighting 5. Three Brothers 6. Poltergeist 6. Diva 7. Blade Runner 6. Diner 7. Poltergeist 8. Veronika Voss 7. Interiors (So I'm late) 8. Smash Palace 9. Tootsie 8. Gandhi 9. The Verdict 10. Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset 9. Smash Palace 10. Chilly Scenes ofWinter 10. My Favorite Year Strip -- 20

THEY THOUGHT THEY HE THINKS HE'S THEY THINK THEY'RE WEREMGMj SAMUEL GOLDWYNj LUCASFILMj HE'S REALLY LEW GRADE THEY WERE REALLY LORIMAR Francis Coppola of Zoetrope: THEY'RE REALLY ZOETROPE The David Begelman MGM: One from the Heart , The Escape Artist, Walt Disney Studios: Buddy Buddy; Brainstorm; Cannery Hammett Tron, Tex, Something Wicked This Row; Pennies From Heaven; Rich and Comes , Never Cry Wolf, Mickey's Famous; Whose Life Is It, Anyway?; HE THINKS HE'S WALT DISNEY: Christmas Carol HE'S REALLY AT&T Yes , Giorgio Steven Spielberg: E .T. STARK LOVE 'THOSE CRITICS HAVE TOO DARN STILL UNWRAPPED Two weeks after a pan of Ray Stark's UNDER THE Annie appeared in Time magazine, MUCH POWER!' Stark sent a wreath of dead flowers to CHRISTMAS TREE the Time critic, requesting that he be They Can Make 'Em Or Break 'Em photographed with the wreath. Annie toothpaste Barbarosa Best Little Whorehouse Summer Lovers ouzo 11111111 Diner Conan the Barbarian Inchon battle maps 111111 the Grease 2 LP Jimmy Dean . . . Porky's 1111 Shoot the Moon Rocky 11/ 1111 Sword & the Sorcerer ~ ARGUMENTS FOR THE GREATNESS OF: Arthur Freed: Grease 2 Alfred Hitchcock: Still ofthe Night Val Lewton: Cat People _ '.I' Vin~e~te Minnelli: Onefrom the Heart \"\"\",,* Chnstlan Nyby : The Thing RICHARD T. JAMESON STEPHEN HARVEY ELLIOTT STEIN 1. Three Brothers 1. Eijanaika: Why Not? (Shohei Imamura) (as of 4: 14 P.M., 12/22/82) 2. The Sender (Roger Christian) then, alphabetically: 3. The Judge and the Assassin (B. Tavernier) 1. E.T.lPoltergeist Le Beau Marriage 4. Diner (Barry Levinson) Bob le Flambeur 5. The Clinic (David Stevens) 2. Moonlighting Diner 6. Kofuku: Lonely Heart (Kon Ichikawa) 7. Reporters (Raymond Depardon) 3. The Road Warrior I The Judge and the Assassin 8. Cinq et la Peau (Pierre Rissient) Marianne and Julianne 9. Now, After All These Years (Harold Luders 4. Lola Moonlighting 5. Le Beau Marriage Time Stands Still & Pavel Schnaber) Tootsie 10.... Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (Robert 6. Personal Best Yol 7. The Long Good Friday Altman) 8. VictorlVictoria 9. Contract 10. My Favorite Year ... 21

\"/ was ambushed by the Ku Klux Klan . .... umenting his observations with a Bell and Howell Dial 35mm camera bought by Mitch Tuchman work television has devoted very little for $30 in a pawn shop. Eventually he time to what Michael Harrington once amassed 15,000 slides, images of stag- Harvest of Shame. the famous, one- called \"the other America.\" Generously, gering degradation, attesting to an odys- hour, black-and-white documentary one might conclude not that the subject sey of discovery and danger. about black and white migrant agricul- was found somehow lacking by the me- dium, but that the medium may not best Returning to Copenhagen, he se- tural workers was Edward R. Murrow's serve the subject, which demanded a lected 3,000 images for an exhibition, new approach. It was discovered by Ja- from which came a book, a narrated slide last for CBS. Originally telecast Thanks- cob Holdt, whose five-hour American presentation, and this film. The book giving weekend 1960, the irony of its Pictures, shown at Filmex '82, is the old sold well throughout Europe. The slide timing must have sharpened its indict- plaint in new form. show has played continuously in Copen- ment. Following a PBS revival over a hagen since 1977. The film, which con- year ago, an attorney for California mi- Holdt is a tall, spare, thirtyish Dane, sists primarily of Holdt's slides (plus grant workers showed a Los Angeles whose hair is long and whose beard trails some archival images of the pre-Holdt public television newsman photographs in a narrow braid down his chest. From South) and a tendentious commentary, of his clients as evidence for his assertion 1971 to 1976 he lived as a vagabond in is not an easy thing to see. Rarely are the that nothing much had changed: The America, traveling hundreds of thou- images beautiful. What is unimpeach- prosperity of America's upper class was sands of miles, depending for food on able is their authenticity. still predicated on the poverty of its un- the kindness of strangers, for cash on the derclass. sale of his blood. That his letters home Holdt availed himself of an experi- describing the poverty of rural America ence few middle-class Americans Of the intervening 194,000 hours might not be disbelieved, he began doc- would, or could, duplicate voluntarily. since the Murrow show debuted, net- In his publicity material, he claims: \"Four times I was attacked by robbers armed with pistols; two times I managed to avoid cuts from attackers with knives; two times frightened police drew their guns on me; one time I was surrounded by ten-fifteen blacks in a dark alley and almost killed; one time I was ambushed by the Ku Klux Klan on a desened back- road; several times I had bullets flying around me at nightly shootouts, not to speak of my experiences at Wounded Knee; two times I was arrested by the FBI; four times I was arrested by the Secret Service; I lived with three mur- derers and many other criminals; twelve of my best friends were murdered while I was in America, some of them right in front of my eyes; both my father-in-law and mother-in-law were also murdered while I was there; I myself have had so many death threats against me that I don't even remember the number of them any longer. \" So outrageous is Holdt's litany that skepticism ensues, for not only does he recount tales of gore unimaginable but also of a drunken drive with Ted Ken- nedy and a kitchen table chat with a Rockefeller, or two. If only he didn't have the photographic proof. If only he didn't sound a bit like Jesus, Kerouac, and de Tocqueville melded. American Pictures is either a stunning contrivance or a new Harvest ofShame. Having played the odd audience in Chicago, in Greensboro, in Atlanta, as well as the San Francisco Film Festival and Filmex, Holdt is seeking to estab- lish sites for long runs here as in Europe (where box-office proceeds are chan- neled through the nonprofit American 22

Pictures Foundation for Humanitarian the time I got to them. Now I could \"So many lonesome people . .. \" Aid to Africa for schools·in Zimbabwe). afford to fly in to see a good riot. So, that was incredible. Also to see the increased the film I don't think you reveal that. • hostility: I mean, the previous riots had No, I don't. But I think the key be- been mostly class riots , but this one in You journeyed through the United States Miami was a pure race riot directly hind many of the pictures I had in the for five years? against white people; so, that was film is the \"yes\" philosophy. It's the greatest freedom I know, to throw your- That's the vagabond years, as I call it, Unique. self into the arms of everyone you meet from '71 to ' 76. But, then, I came back With your first pictures, had you any on the road. I can mention countless in '78 and in 1980 to update the show examples of what that experience and to visit all the people in the film. intent of creating a comprehensive docu- brought me into. The plantation homes in Mississippi with those antebellum And how were those trips different from ment? dresses? I would never have seen them, the initial trip? For the first three years I didn't know but I got picked up by an antique seller in Mississippi who's homosexual, and he The second one in '78 was mainly what I was doing. I was just taking pic- said he would take me to one of those different because a TV station in Port- tures of the people I stayed with. The plantation homes. Of course, I didn't land, Oregon, gave me a car so I could vagabonding was more important than believe him, but I ended up in one of drive around, and with a car you just feel the photography. As a vagabond, you them and stayed there for weeks. I be- totally alienated from people and lonely. constantly meet lonesome people. I had came very good friends with the family That was the first time I didn't like never experienced so many lonesome and have been ever since. America, because from a car you just people before, and I wanted to remem- tend to see McDonald's and restaurants ber many of those people. Given the nature of your traveling of that kind all over the country, and you around, were more of the encounters ho- carry your own lonesomeness with you. Would you talk, or would youfind your- mosexual than heterosexual? As a hitchhiker you constantly meet people who open up to you and invite s e l f listening? No. In America, people, both men you inside. So I didn't like America the In some cases they wanted entertain- and women, are very aggressive sexu- ally; that's my experience, at least. I second time, but with a car I was able to ment, they wanted me to talk, but in don' t regret it. I felt it was an eye-opener go out to areas I had not been able to most cases they just wanted to unload for me to go through all those experi- cover as a hitchhiker; some of the worst their problems, and, of course, I would ences. pictures in the film are from that last respond to it. In many cases they would trip. For instance, that Ku Klux Klan invite me home. Of course, many of What motivated you to continue? meeting was from '78. those relationships were sexual also, be- I was just constantly curious. It was cause when you travel on the road like like one question led to another. I found Then, the '80 trip was partly because that, you're constantly abused sexually out about criminals in the North, then I we had to make a credit sequence for the by many of those lonesome people. But found an interest in knowing where they film from graffiti walls, and I realized I I always just had the philosophy of say- came from and what had molded them; had not enough graffiti backgrounds. I ing yes to everything that came around, so I went to Mississippi to find cotton made the trip partly to run around first of all, because I felt it was more pickers. Harlem and the South Bronx to photo- dehumanizing to say no to people-I So you were beginning to analyze what graph walls. But it was also to see the riot just didn't like that feeling-so I went you were seeing even then? in Miami; so I flew into Miami to see a along with every experience, and in I guess it came little by little. I would riot. I had missed all the big riots. While many cases it brought me to fantastic say that the slide show, and thereby the I traveled here, there were not too many situations. film, was mostly made per intuition. big ones, and I could never hitchhike to When I came home to Denmark, I them in time; they were always over by /' m very surprised to hear that many of wrote it down in a couple of weeks, the these encounters were sexual, because in Jacob Holdt in American Pictures. 23

whole manuscript, and I never felt more Philadelphia gave me $70 to drive her cotton pickers. Then the story devel- at ease with something I had written; it car to Miami. That's the first time I had oped. was just like it flowed out of me. I had it money, and I invested the money in all built up from five years of traveling. making some of the slides into prints It's an order of ideas rather than of and put them in little books I could show images. You talk about the victim getting You characterized yourself early in the people, drivers and people I stayed blamedfor his poverty. film as a conservative. with. From then on I got a lot of encour- agement, moral encouragement, from Conservatives do it, but what I've I used to be a member of the conser- people who saw those pictures, and also tried to show is that liberals do it, maybe vative party in Denmark. financial encouragement. Many people not in words, but in their actions in thou- gave me five and even ten dollars. At sands of ways. And yet at least one critic blasted it as that time, people said I had to exhibit Marxist. this one way or another, although profes- You say slavery survives. That's not ex- sional photographers, when I met them, actly true. The Marxism I express in the show is always criticized me for doing this and what I picked up on the road in America. that wrong; so I never really turned out Much ofwhat I say in the show should It's mostly street philosophy, I would to feel I was a photographer. not be taken totally literally. They're say, and therefore of limited validity. emotional words. Many blacks would Many Marxists find it interesting, be- 1 agree when I say slavery survives; cause they find it simply one person whites will totally disagree with it, be- looking at a capitalist society and turning v( cause, of course, slavery does not sur- into a Marxist-except that I'm not a vive in an actual way, but there are many Marxist. Today, when I read certain ~j:-, similarities, and it's those similarities books and talk about the film with Marx- I'm trying to show in today's world. ists, I do see many similarities, and I \"They just wanted to unload . .. \" understand why they call me a Marxist, The notions offalse consciousness and but I wouldn't call myself a Marxist. Do you continue to make photographs? the rise offascism run through thefilm. Yes, but mostly when I'm out hitch- The film, as it exists now, is very much hiking. Since we in Europe have such a strong like a shaggy-dog story. You still do that? class consciousness, poor people have a Yes, I just did it before Christmas, tendency to vote socialist or left-wing, Well, the thing is that it was made as a after the film festival in San Francisco. I because that's in their class interest. slide lecture. I never understood the hitchhiked across the country to meet (Even mentioning class in America is a success of this lecture: Thousands and many of my friends in the North and dirty word.) Therefore, we look at poor thousands of people were standing in Northeast. Americans, poor whites who vote very line in Denmark and Sweden and all So now when you do it, you do it with a right-wing-in many cases they vote for over Europe to see this show. So, when purpose: to get somewhere or to see some- Wallace-and feel pity for them, be- we decided to make it into a film, I one? cause we feel that this is clearly against didn't dare change it much. I think this I do it with the purpose of constantly their own interest. American right- is one of the problems we're having updating the thing I made, so that it wingers would totally disagree probably, now. Some people, when they see the doesn't end up as a historical document. but it's a general European outlook on film, think, \"Wow, this is more a lecture If it does that, people put the blame America, I think. than a film,\" and they're right. Another away from themselves into a distant, un- problem is that it's two films, and in both just past, which is too easy for most peo- As to the rise of fascism: Again, that's film festivals, they decided to show the ple. a European word. Some poor whites in two films at once, so people perceive it How did you develop the order of the America go in a fascist direction, where as one big film. photos? they would support more dictatorial When I came home from America, I measures, which, for instance, the And it's not that at all? took all the slides-I had begun this on American Civil Liberties Union will Not at all. The first part should be the boat-and grouped them in sec- work constantly against. So there's a distributed, and then, maybe half a year tions: homosexuals, prostitutes, crimi- strong conflict there all the time. later, the second part should come. nals, and so on. I simply made stacks in When you see it in one sitting, you start my parents' home and then grouped the Would you be open to the ACLU using getting dizzy; when your concentration stacks, starting in the South with the yourfilm to raise moneyfor its own organ- is not so great, you feel that it's repeating ization? itself. Yes, definitely. I have always sup- How did you handle the ever-growing ported them. I think the main thing about the show is that it becomes a pro- numbers ofphotographs as you traveled. tector of the American democracy as it I used to send them to a mail-order really should be, against the interests in society that try to destroy it. In Europe company in New Jersey immediately af- we have always used the show to sup- ter the roll was exposed, and they sent port different organizations. Mostly them on to addresses of friends who what they do is, they organize the stored them for me during the five years. screening and as organizers they get thirty percent of what comes in. In Aus- Those must have been prepaid mailers. tria, for instance, Amnesty International Yes, it cost five dollars usually. That has a monopoly on organizing all our meant I had to sell blood twice weekly shows; it's one of their great fund-raising for two rolls of film. things. In Germany, it's mostly Lu- What type blood did you turn out to be? theran church organizations working O. But it's plasma that you sell. That's with political staffs. In Denmark, it's the why you can do it twice weekly. In '74 I got a breakthrough when a woman in 24

left-wing socialist party. It's a little bit Aveteran independent producer different in each country, but in America wants rOut fdm to succeed. I definitely feel that the ACLU would be one of [the organizations to benefit]' That's why he's put all the knowledge gained in sixteen years of The NAACP also, even though I don't experience-together with pointers gleaned from other agree with everything they stand for, b~t filmmakers-into the first truly comRrehensive guide to producing a I think we have to support those orgam- film independently. Far more than just a handbook on filming tech- zations. nique, this volume covers every step from conception to promotion: TeLL me something about the American • The legal and financial framework Pictures Foundntion {jor Humanitarian • The pre-production package Aid to Africa} . What roLe do you play in • The filming itself • Post-production that? • Distribution and marketing We are twelve people who have Examples drawn from recent independent productions (i?cluding worked on this, mostly black Americans Halloween and Chariots ofFire), a variety of charts and diagrams, who have come over to Europe to help including sample budgets, sample schedules, and sample boards distribute the show. I'm just one of the round out the book that has advance readers in the industry cheer- people, and I don't have more voting ing. It's the one source that can answer all your questions. Available rights than the others. We all live to- at bookstores or by mail direct from the publisher. gether in a collective in Copenhagen- and live on very little money. Ten of us Wbat the experts say... last year had 150,000 krona, which is just $20,000 for ten people. Because we've \"The clearest, most comprehensive text on film production available:' lived in a collective, we could make it so -Fay Kanin, President, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences cheaply, and, there, we've been able to make a lot of money for the foundation \"In both its conception and execution, this book is superb:' and to make this film, which has cost -David Puttnam, Producer, Chariots ofFire quite a bit of money, too. '~ excellent book for the serious independent filmmaker.\" How are you viewed in the Danish -Verna Fields, Vice President for Feature Production, MeA press: as an eccentric or a hero? CTION It's very hard for me to really find out r------------------b-y -Gr-eg-or-y-G-oo-de-ll what they think. I do think among a lot of young people I'm a hero, but you've I Please return this coupon to: got to realize that people are very afraid of worshiping heroes in Denmark. I do I St. Martin's Press know that many young Danes are taking off on the road after having read my 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010 Attn: JW book, and you can find them on the roads in South America, Africa, India, I Please send me _ _copy(ies) of Independent Feature Film Production @ $17.95 each. and America, traveling with my book. I I Please add S1.50 per book for postage and handling. My check or money order is enclosed found quite a few of them in Greece last summer, just coming there with my in the amount of S . I may examine the book for thirty days and, if not 100% book. It has become sort of a traveler's I satisfied, I can return it for a complete refund. bible. I should also say that the book is a I Name_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ____ little more travel-oriented than the film. There's a lot of personal stories about I Address_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ traveling experiences. I City________________________________________________ Is the book availabLe in EngLish? Not yet. I'm going to work on it this L - -I State - - - - - - - - - - - ___Z_ip __________ I spnng. J Have you considered turning your at- tention to other topics? I feel I've stumbled into this success -whatever you call it-and I feel it's my duty to get the best out of it. It's easy for any writer or photographer or vaga- bond to get success by means of poor people. What is difficult is to turn the success into a success for poor people, and this is what I'm just starting on now. I hope by using it in different ways in America that it can have some impact, at least creating a debate around the issue in America. Without a debate, the poor people are dying. ~ 25

by John Kenneth Galbraith summarily shot. He believed and said Massacre on April 13, 1919, is, perhaps, that his methods would only have been the high point. This is superbly por- Let there be no doubt: this is a won- successful-or as successful-against trayed, with a special eye on the Gurkha derful achievement. Magnificent is a the British. troops who, in a disciplined way, fired all word that rises readily to one's lips. their available cartridges into the help- Later I will have quibbles; as an amateur The story moves from South Africa to less and entrapped crowd. (By modestly in film matters I must show that I am not India, to the rise of the.Congress Party, more precise calculation than that in the without critical judgment. But no nit- the growing and eventually massive film, 379 persons were killed that day picking can detract from the superb evo- popular influence of Gandhi, to nonco- and 1200 left wounded.) There are cation of the Indian scene, the compel- operation, to violence countered by many who think that, after Amritsar and ling character of the story, and the scale, Gandhi's commitment to nonviolence the courtly rebuke of General Reginald intricacy-and success-of the organi- whatever the provocation, to the fasts, Dyer here also implied, eventual British zation and effort that were back of this the Great War, jail, the round-table con- departure from India was inevitable. enterprise; or the way, as audience, one ference in London, prison again, an- becomes involved with the result. other war and then Partition and Inde- The long lines of Hindus filing into India from Pakistan and the reverse flow One matter deserves a special word. John Kenneth Galbraith . of Muslims into the Pakistan Punjab af- Not everyone will appreciate the length, pendence and the horrible resulting ex- ter Partition are also memorable. So is incredible complexity, and pure tedious- plosion in the Punjab and Bengal. The the riot that breaks out as the two col- ness of the negotiations-political, bu- film ends (as it also begins) with an evo- umns clash. The great march to the sea reaucratic, and otherwise-that were cation of the evening of January 30, for salt is admirably organized (although needed to win Indian government and 1948, in the garden of G. D. Birla's I have always imagined that the Indians financial support for this film. I have house in New Delhi, where Gandhi, proceeded at a slightly more leisurely some sense of what was required; I am shot by a Hindu fanatic, says, \"My pace than here depicted). So is the re- devoutly happy that it was someone God!, My God! \" and dies. He had just sponse of the police. It cannot be else's task, and I am profoundly admir- announced his intention of going to Pak- doubted that Richard Attenborough is a ing of those who carried it through. istan to try by his presence to ease the master of the riot as an art form. continuing communal anger in the wake • ofthe partition that he had so devoutly Where India is concerned, there is opposed. always a terrible tendency for the scene The story begins in South Africa, and the throngs to dominate; here the where Gandhi, as a young and very As I noted, the film is wonderfully cows and water-buffalo as well as the bright Inns of Court attorney, encoun- valid on the Indian scene and sounds; crowds are entirely under control, and ters rigorously indignant and violently never, watching it, are you away from the trains, another Indian cliche, are imposed segregation: he is kicked, quite the cities, villages and countryside. It is only slightly overused; these are alI very literally, out of the first-class railway even more compelling on the great epi- much the servant of the story. The compartment in which, with a wholly sodes of the Gandhi era. The Amritsar temptation, in turn, to skimp on the proper ticket, he is riding, and off the history, especialIy to straighten out or train. He is moved, in consequence, to evade the puzzles and seeming contra- lead resistance to the pass laws and to dictions in the Gandhi mystique, was the mass fingerprinting of the Indian also resisted; the Gandhi story is told, if minority; eventually he encounters Jan not in alI its length and complexity, at Smuts and the continuing ambiguity of least with an honest commitment to im- British justice. The latter, as in India, portant detail, subtlety and contradic- sought to combine effective systemic re- tion. I do not suppose that films are ever pression with an underlying commit- perfect history by the more somber aca- ment to the rule of law. It was a conflict demic standards. Books can be of any that, over a lifetime, Gandhi was a ge- length; lectures can extend to a term; nius at exploiting. Under more modern films cannot go much beyond three arrangements and rulers, an enduring hours. But the effort here is wholly se- solution would have been found: Gan- nous. dhi would have been dispatched into permanent exile or he would have been There is a yet further achievement, and that is in the handling of time. It 26

The British had come as liberators to a land ofpetty, exploitive despots. They were far better than what had gone before. Thousands ofEnglish- men devoted their lives to India, and were justly proud ofwhat they did. was, I have heard, Richard Attenbo- achieved by Gandhi himself; he ages in have been sacrificed to Gandhi's youth rough's belief, prevailing against some harmony with the history, and with as the son of a sometime Indian official, skepticism, that Gandhi could be por- manifest skill and conviction. a member of a culturally rigorous family trayed from youth to death in strict in one of the lesser princely states. On chronological sequence. He was right There are, needless to say, grounds the lasting effect of this background- but partly because he has kept the audi- for complaint. And there is one at the including an adolescent marriage and ence brilliantly aware of the moment. very beginning. Gandhi is brought on children-Gandhi was eloquent in his Something, but not much, is accom- stage too suddenly in South Africa; one autobiography. There was something, plished by artifacts-along with cos- knows nothing and is told nothing about many will think much, from this period tumes and press headlines, automobiles this mannered young man in his excep- that helps explain the young man on the of appropriate vintage keep showing up tionally precise English attire. It is hard South African train and that adds to the on the screen . Mostly the effect is to argue that a three-hour film should be understanding of the later years. even longer, but some later history could

At some juncture someone also con- (as also Pakistan) in the years to come. why he did it?\" cluded that the film should have a ges- Finally I was troubled, as will be audi- Coming to character authenticity and ture to the hoped-for American audi- ence. In consequence, Margaret ences in general, by the handling of the acting, no one should doubt that my Bourke, the noted Life photographer death of Gandhi. The face of the mur- view has all the value of a rigorously (played by Candice Bergen), is brought derer appears in the crowd, appears average member of the audience. I Onto the scene to take pictures of Gan- again, and then he raises his gun and thought Gandhi true to the original and dhi and engage him in sprightly conver- shoots. There is no explanation, and Ben Kingsley extraordinary at making even though there is no very good expla- him so. Notably present was Gandhi's sation. It is an embarrassing intrusion. A nation of the action of this Hindu fanatic recurrent touch of sardonic humor, and those who supported him-even something that might easily have been couple of Americans on the salt march though it was a wholly mindless action, overlooked or lost. As a passing thought, have the same irrelevance. Were some- in the manner of Sirhan Sirhan-this it was too bad that the script missed his thing needed to engage American inter- needs to be told. Many who see these deathless observation on Lord Irwin, est, there could have been a reference to scenes will ask, \"Why don't we learn later Lord Halifax and here John Franklin D. Roosevelt and his great- hearted commitment to Gandhi's cam- paign for Indian independence. It was one matter on which he was wholly will- ing to challenge Winston Churchill, who had strongly opposed earlier concessions to Indian self-rule and in the war years was proud to say that he had not become the King's first minister to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire. However, it is on the relationship be- tween the British rulers and the Indian leaders that the film most seriously fails , most of the failure being in its treatment of the British side: The Indians have a love/hate relationship with the British- as noted, there was much about the rulers and their civilization that Gandhi and Nehru admired and even loved. This, on the whole, is evident in the film. But the attitude of the British to- ward India was also complex. They had come, in some sense, as liberators to a land 'of petty, exploitive, incompetent and sometimes incoherent despots; they were far better than what had gone be- fore; Marx in the last century, as has often been remarked, thought the Brit- ish Empire in India a strongly progres- sive force. Thousands of Englishmen devoted their lives (and frequently gave them) to India and were justly proud of what they did. All things, including im- perialism, are in their own time. Little of this emerges from the film. The rulers range in role from the disci- plined, certain, self-assured awfulness of General Dyer to run-of-the-mill mili- tary idiots to confused and frustrated British civilians in New Delhi, along with an occasional man of intelligence emerging oddly on the scene. Only Mountbatten, coming to proclaim the independence of India, redeems the Raj. The truth on the relationship of rulers to ruled is more kindly as well as more complex. Notice might have been taken, incidentally, that by the end of the British era, India was extensively ruled by Indians. These British-trained officials were to continue to govern India 28

Gielgud. Irwin was a churchly man, and thought that Seth was Nehru. This was the two men who, none could doubt, one of Gandhi's acolytes once defended also the response of my wife. Partly this would guide India through the infinitely him to the Mahatma, saying Lord Irwin was because we knew Nehru well, loved complex tasks of the early indepen- never took a decision without praying him much and did not know Gandhi at dence years. He had qualities for this job over it first. Gandhi reflected on this all. If one knew the original well, he -the patience, temperament and ad- intelligence for some moments and adheres in the eye and mind even ministrative commitment for heading a asked, \"Then why do you suppose the through the best acting. But also the government-that Gandhi never pos- Lord so consistently gives him the film does not do full justice to Nehru. sessed. (Patel, who achieved the incor- wrong advice?\" Here he is a slight, slightly diffident poration of the princely states and was figure standing only a bit above the also an exceedingly practical operator, I was much less impressed by Roshan other members of Gandhi's entourage. died a couple of years later.) If Nehru Seth as Jawaharlal Nehru. Through the In fact, by the time of Gandhi's death, isn't quite right in the film, it is because film I felt I was in the presence of Gan- Nehru was a major figure in his own in the scenes dealing with the last years, dhi, both old and , as one could imagine right-with Vallabhbhai Patel, one of he isn't accorded nearly the emphasis him, relatively young. I never quite - that he deserves. The depiction of the British civilians, Gielgud inevitably apart, I thought rather unsatisfactory. That is partly again because, as' with Nehru, the history is not quite right. They were better men than they here appear. I was, however, briefly attracted to one official, I'm not quite sure who he was, who bore a strik- ing first-glance resemblance to our for- mer and only moderately lamented Sec· retary of State, Alexander M. Haig. • The temptation in any form of re- viewing is to dwell on the flaws . How else can one establish one's superior knowledge as compared with that of the author, playwright or producer? This, no doubt, is my tendency here; obviously I cannot leave anyone in doubt as to my knowledge of India, Indian history and of the life and influence of Gandhi. So let me plead with the reader: do not be restrained by this criticism. If the film weren't so good, I wouldn't be indulging myself by so criticizing it. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was one of the supreme figures of the cen- tury. He was also one of the great politi- cal innovators of all time. In the usual dialectic of power, force is countered by force, money by money, propaganda by propaganda. There is a basic symmetry between action and response: men al- ways fight fire with fire. It was Gandhi's genius that he saw the strength that lay in asymmetry. Had he fought the armed power of the Raj with armed force, his movement would not have survived a week. Meeting violence with commit- ted nonviolence, repression with care- fully conditioned disobedience, he was invulnerable. It was a lesson later to be used with similar effect by Martin Luther King, Jr. Gandhi brilliantly por- trays this design-the asymmetrical re- sponse to violence is the central theme from which the film never deviates. Ev- eryone will understand Gandhi (and In- dia) better for seeing it. ® 29

The Empire Shoots Back Attenborough and Kingsley on the set ofGandhi. by Joan Goodman Mountbatten, the last Governor Gen- rupees.\" Someone noted it was more eral of India before Independence, the than Satyajit Ray has spent on all of his It was like the return of the Raj. To project came to the attention of Nehru, films combined. Others felt that the the Indians, watching from the side- then India's first Prime Minister. He Gandhi money was diverting funds from lines, the arrival of Sir Richard Attenbo- gave it his official blessing. a project to build low-cost cinemas rough's film unit to make Gandhi had all around the country. the earmarks of an invading army. For The project floundered , however, for Attenborough, Gandhi was the culmina- lack of finance. Promises fell through But the greatest outrage was reserved tion of a twenty-year quest-ever since one after another. There were a lot of for the notion that a foreigner, and an an Indian civil servant based in London, \"almosts\": Lord Lew Grade, Joe Le- Englishman at that, was making the Motil Kothari, had given him the Louis vine, Darryl Zanuck, J. Arthur Rank, film . A respected producer said bitterly, Fischer biography of Gandhi. Gandhi's and Charles Bludhorn. Attenborough \"They've taken everything else from honesty, humility, nonviolence, and dig- made over SO trips to India and, in the us, are they now going to take our his- nity, he felt, had profoundly affected the end, that is what paid off. With two- tory too? Can you imagine the British world. \"I took the book with me on a thirds of the projected $18 million government giving me money to make a holiday to the south of France and be- budget (it grew to $22 million) in the bag movie about Winston Churchill?\" Even fore I was half way through it, I knew I from GoldcrestlI. F. I. Films, Attenbo- the normally conservative Times ofIndia had to make the film,\" Attenborough rough raised the final one-third from questioned whether a British filmmaker recalls. Mrs. Indira Gandhi's government. It was the best person to handle a film was a gesture that secured the film but about Gandhi or not, while left-wing Attenborough had been Kothari's plunged it into controversy. journals were openly derisive of Atten- court of last resort, having earlier tried to borough, whom they called \"a Iittle- interest David Lean and writer Robert Independent Indian filmmakers had known director. \" Bolt. In 1962, Attenborough was known been fighting for years for more govern- chiefly as an actor, although he had pro- ment subsidies through the National India is a restless agglomeration of duced one film. KoQari had seen Atten- Film Development Corporation. Tapan people, religions, and philosophies. As borough at an auction bidding for Jacob Bose, from India's Forum For A Better such, there is a diversity of opinion Epstein'S bust of Nehru and thought he Cinema (the organization of serious ci- about everything, but certainly about might have the right man at last. He did. neastes as opposed to Bombay's Gandhi, and therefore about the film. Attenborough, now 58, a chunky man 'quickie' commercial producers) was an- with a pink face and a thick fringe of gry at the wholesale lifting of restrictions There are Gandhi-ites who feel that it white hair, looks like a kindly cartoon of for Gandhi. The NFDC normally doles is too soon to make a film. (Replies At- the British bulldog, and, like a bulldog, out its money in stages and keeps a close tenborough , \"There have been films he doesn't easily let go. eye on projects. Gandhi was not subject about Roosevelt and Churchill.\") There to such scrutiny. He set about obtaining rights, permis- are Gandhi's spiritual followers, largely sions, and finance. The first two proved The amount of money, too, was stag- the rural population, who feel that his considerably easier to come by than the gering to local filmmakers. A well- greatness cannot be captured on film last. Fischer, pleased with the idea of known Indian director pointed out that and wanted him represented by a blind- the movie, signed over the film rights for \"While an Indian producer or director ing white light (evoking Attenborough's one dollar. Through the offices ofAtten- can't raise more than a few hundred now famous \"I'm not making a film borough's friend, the late Lord Louis thousand rupees to develop a quality about bloody Tinker Bell.\") There are picture, it's saddening to see a foreign the urban sophisticates who think that director being given tens of millions of Gandhi's teachings are out of tune with the times and want to get on with devel- 30

oping India's nuclear weapons program. therefore accepted most gracefully. emotionally. I wanted to tell the story of (\"Precisely why this is the right time to What is more, the money was invested Gandhi the man, and all the connota- make the film,\" says Attenborough.) as it would be in a normal commercial tions and premises and peripheral mat- One political faction wanted the film to enterprise, and the recoupment from ters don't matter to me. A national army focus on the men and the details of the profits is to remain with the NFDC and doesn't matter to me, political rivalries Independence. (\"You make that film,\" go toward financing other indigenous don't matter to me, the history of the productions. If Gandhi is successful, it Congress Party is not relevant. It is the Attenborough snapped at a reporter will help people like Ray, whom I adore man I care about and, if I am obsessive, and whose understanding I have it is as nothing compared to the Indians' who suggested it.) Meanwhile, a film- sought.\" prejudices. There is no way they can maker on the left announced that he remain objective. It would be like ask- \"would apply to the govemment for a As a former actor, Attenborough is ing a Jew about the Third Reich.\" subsidy to make an anti-Gandhi film. \" wonderfully persuasive and can hold an audience, even an audience of dissi- Maybe. But Attenborough suspected It was the government's involvement dents. His speech is laced with theatrical that making his film would be a hard slog in the project finally that focused peo- 'dears' and 'darlings'. (\"Of course, dar- without government support. Accepting ple's anger. Would the investment have ling, I don't agree with you ... \") What its investment was a shrewd move to- been made if the film had been directed the Indians, who rarely use terms of en- ward greasing the wheels of the bureau- by Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, or Shyam dearment in public, thought of this, God cracy. Permission for location shooting, Benegal, all respected Indian experi- knows; but they did enjoy chatting with access to public buildings, use of public mentalists? Probably not. Attenbo- him even as they challenged him. In- roads and railroads are difficult in a coun- rough's film was clearly designed to sell. stinctively, though, Attenborough knew try drowning in a sea of red tape. it was a no-win situation. • Attenborough's capable Indian pro- Sir Richard Attenborough. duction manager, Shama Habibullah The debate smoldered until Atten- (most offices were twinned with an In- For his part, Satyajit Ray kept above dian and English crew member), gave borough's arrival in New Delhi in No- the controversy. Speaking from his him an added advantage. Born in India, vember 1980, when it erupted at a ran- home in Calcutta, where he has been Habibullah was educated in England corous press conference. \"I was aware, working on a series of six short stories for and, after graduating from Cambridge, of course, of the controversy,\" Attenbo- Indian television, he said, \"Richard At- returned to India where she made a con- rough recalls, \"but I must say I was tenborough is a very good friend [At- siderable reputation as a documentary somewhat staggered at the hostility of tenborough had acted in Ray's The Chess director. \"Many of us,\" she says, \"gave some members of the press.\" Prepared Players] and I am not making any pub- up some status to work on this film. with answers and sensitive to the prob- lic statements on the making of Gandhi. There were two reasons: We wanted to lems of independent filmmakers, Atten- I haven't made a film about Gandhi my- be involved with a film about Gandhi, borough sought to defuse the situation self because I don't like to make films plus it was an opportunity to learn the with facts. about recent political figures. I prefer to methods of a large-scale production.\" go back in time. I'm not really much in Second unit director Govind Nihalani, \"What slant will your film take?\" he favor of re-enacting recent history with whose own film Aakrosh won the Delhi was asked. \"None,\" replied Attenbo- professional actors, but that's a personal Film Festival thai same year, agreed. rough. \"Gandhi said, 'My life is my feeling. However,\" he added with al- \"We have never seen such equipment in message,' so we have attempted to pick most reluctant approval, \"within India, this country. The Panavision cameras I there is still a great deal of controversy and the louma crane are machines to be out the incidents that reflect the manner about Gandhi himself. A film about him reckoned with.\" in which Bapu (the affectionate Indian could only be made by an outsider.\" term for 'father') conducted his life.\" Despite early goodwill, the relation- Attenborough agrees. \"The Indians ship between the two sides was for the \"Will you show communal rioting? are unable to separate the man histori- most part awkward. The British were And won't that engender some?\" was cally due to what they have been taught often insensitive to Indian feelings. another question. \"We will re-create \"You've got that the wrong way round, communal rioting but under control,\" Gunga Din,\" an assistant called to one of said Attenborough. \"There are many the Indian crew in a typical aside. \"We fine Indian actors who could have used to be hurt by things like that,\" says played Gandhi. How many years did Shama Habibullah, \"until we realized Ben Kingsley spend in India?\" It was a that British humor under duress takes sore point: Kingsley, an Anglo-Indian peculiar forms. \" brought up in Bradford, England, had never been to India before. More serious was the cry of discrimi- nation that went round when it was dis- When the question of the money covered European extras were being came up, Attenborough carefully ex- paid 300 rupees a day, while Indians got plained the circumstances. \"I did not only 100. \"Not discrimination, just the ask for government money. It was of- going rate,\" said Terry Clegg, Attenbo- fered to me and not as a grant or a loan, rough's assistant producer. \"Europeans but as an investment which it was hoped are more difficult to come by. You have would eventually accrue to the favor of to go and get tourists, and they're not Indian filmmakers. The Minister of In- going. to work for fourpence a day. If I formation, Vasant Sathe, suggested it be done through the NFDC, which would invite private finance as well. I agreed to this on condition that it would not rake any money away from indigenous pro- ductions. I was assured it wouldn't, and 31

Announcingl-Publication of all-new could get them for 100 rupees , I'd be doesn't really add anything,\" he delighted.\" Canyon Cinema averred . Wouldn't it have added to our Catalog #5 Often, the Indian way of doing things simply defeated the British. It literally understanding of Gandhi, the man? Per- caused Loretta Ordewar, who ran the film's production office, to bang her haps , but what it probably wouldn't head against the (production headquar- ters) Hotel Ashoka's walls more than have done is get past the cautious eye of Canyon Cinema is a Canyon Cinema once. On a graffiti board that hung in the Indira Gandhi. • film distribution carries over 1800 office, she wrote: \"This is the greatest country in the world for solving prob- Perhaps, Attenborough's difficult dia- company specializ- films by 300 film lems that shouldn't exist in the first ing in indepen- place. \" Under that, production secre- logue with this nation of philosophes all artists: experimen- tary Judi Bunn added: \"There are two dently-produced tal/ art films. anima- chances of getting things done in this devolved upon the final day of shooting short films for the tion. documentary- country-fat and slim. \" Another line current work and ran , \"This office runs on the Kiss tech- in Delhi, the re-enactment of Gandhi's educational classic shorts by the nique\" ('Kiss' being an acronym for ( college/ university). best artists in the 'Keep it simple, stupid') . funeral march. It was more than just a museum. and media field Ordewar and Bunn bore the brunt of scene. It was to be Attenborough's tri- center/ film society an unending stream of government reg- market. ulations. Said Bunnie, \"The utter pre- umphant exit, a dazzling display, a posterousness of some things: you don ' t know the meaning of bureaucracy until thumb of the nose to the gadflies who you get to India. You need permission to do anything, right down to a Ministry of had bedeviled his every move during Communications permission to move Canyon Cinema, Inc_ the telex from one side of the production those first several weeks of shooting. 2325 Third Street, Suite #338 office to the other. That one nearly The deployment ofvehicles and person- San Francisco, CA 94107 killed us , we laughed so much.\" Both (415) 626·2255 women would go back in a minute; they nel was staggering. A crowd of 250,000 loved the Indians, hated the regulations. was expected. Leaflets advertising the Attenborough claims there was no such tight control over the creative side. event had been posted in every suburb \"Nobody questioned the script. No- body said what may or may not be in Delhi and in special buses organized filmed. At one tirne, I was told that ev- Please call or write for illustrated catalog. ery single set-up would be watched , but to bring people to the Rajpath to watch that turned out not to be true. We had an observer on the set two or three times, the cortege that would wind down its but that's all.\" (On the other hand, visit- ing journalists had their activities care- length from the President's House to fully monitored by plainclothes police- men.) Indira Gandhi , who'd read and India Gate. People were asked to wear approved the script before shooting John Simon started, told the director, \"The picture clothes of mourning. Military units from at his must not in any sense suffer from cen- best sorship.\" the Gurkhas, the Bengal Lancers, the An illuminating, A fair supposition would be that At- Navy, Air Force, and police in full pano- penetrating look tenborough and the screenwriter, John at 249 foreign Briley, exercised a good deal of self-cen- ply were provided by the Indian govern- films of the last sorship. Although working from letters, 12 years, by diaries, biographies , and personal remi- ment. bestselling niscences, Briley's script contains noth- author/film critic ing of Gandhi 's impersonal relationship Gandhi was laid out on a weapons John Simon. with his four sons, his wife Kasturbai's emotional problems, his habit of sleep- carrier, with his closest colleagues- SOMETHING ing with young girls in order to test his TO DECLARE vow of abstinence, or of his complex Nehru, Patel, and Kripalani-seated relationship with Mirabehn, the English Twelve Years of Films from Abroad Admiral's daughter who became a disci- around him, while the Westerners ple. Briley thought there was \"no need by John Simon to bring in the business about the sons\" walked behind the slow-moving bier. or the \" darker side\" of things. \"It 480 pages. $17.95, now at your bookstore, or Every white face in sight was pressed send check or money order to Crown Publish- ers, One Park Ave. , N.Y., N.Y. 10016. Please into uniform including Attenborough add $1 .40 postage and handling charge. N.Y. and N.J. residents, add sales tax . himself, as a Brigadier. Clarkson N, Potler, Inc. @ Ten cameras lined the route. Dave Photo: Anne Zeman Tomblin, the first asssistant director, or- MOVIE STAR NEWS chestrated the movement with military COME IN PERSON. MON-FRI 11 -5 SAT 12-5 (Mall Order) precision: on schedule, the Gurkhas Pin-Ups • Portraits • Posters • Physique slow-marched toward India Gate, peo- Poses • Pressbooks • Western • Horror • Science Fiction • Musicals • Color Photos • ple threw rose petals, the crowd pressed 80 Years of Scenes From Motion Pictures in. It was one take and it worked. It Rush $1 .00 FOR OUR ILLUSTRATED BROCHURE became the opening scene in the film. 212 East 14th Street, NYC, New York 10003 But while Attenborough and company 32 congratulated themselves, the Delhi press corps remained unimpressed. Next morning's headlines read \"Ma- hatma's Funeral Fails To Click\" and \"Small Crowds Watch Filmed Funeral.\" Crowd estimates ran from 15,000 to 80,000 in the papers as opposed to the official police estimate of 200,000. In Bombay, Attenborough was in- censed. His face an even brighter shade of pink, he was uncharacteristically sharp. \"I'm often asked what has been the principal problem I have had in mak- ing this film,\" he began, \"and I have rudely said on a number of occasions, certain sections of the press ... \" ~

33

Death Star, using The Force to find the con chip with infallible logiC, makmg the moves. An exact electrical measure- Videogames: exhaust pipes to the reactor. In Zaxxon, ment of skill. None of pinball's tilt. Sons of Pong the player flies down over a mountain- Pong was ubiquitous. In drugstores. In airports. In drive-ins. In movie the- If defending the nation were possible top fortress and shoots at radar installa- aters. Everywhere the blip, blip, blip of by flipping a lever, spinning a sphere tions, rockets lifting ~ff, munitions Pong, like a second heartbeat. The soft and pushing buttons, America has an green glow of the screen, the simple army in training. They spend hours in buildings and fuel tanks. Then the purity of the straight lines, the numbing front of the screens, mesmerized by monotony of the Pong sounder, a kind of blinking, colored lights; anticipating the plane swoops out into space to confront a electronic water dripping from an un- appearance of some new enemy; super- closed tap. charged by a strike and the accompany- squadron of enemy fighters that dance ing electronic music of victory; shrug- In that first year, Pong made $3 mil- ging off failure as their nuclear cannon around like gnats. 101 moves the toggle lion for Atari. Four years later, Atari was are neutralized, their spaceships crash sold to Warner Communications for $28 on landing, their horde of goods is stolen stick to his initials and the machine million. Last year, Americans spent $8 by cockroach-like aliens. million a week to play Pac-Man. blinks that he is Number One. 101 is Just before 5 P.M. on a weekday eve- Videogames have grown exponen- ning in a videogames arcade in Times emotionless. Only one other person has tially, like a virus. Pong began to disap- Square: This is as seedy as seedy gets. pear, mutated into Breakout. Again the Yet, the crowd is well behaved. No one witnessed this virtuoso performance. nice geometry, the soothing colors and is selling dope. The security men have sounds. Then videogames learned to collared no one recently for pickpocket- 101 plays again, but the edge is lost. shoot and developed plot. Space In- ing. Even chivalry is observed here-a vaders became The Game. Ranks of token's toss from a peep show being This game is over almost as soon as it ugly space monsters descend to earth as picketed by Women Against Pornogra- the player tries to pick them off like phy. A quarter placed on a busy machine begins. Destroyed, 101 turns to leave ducks in a shooting gallery. Asteroids claims the next play. It is the only place knocked off Space Invaders as King of you can put a quarter in Times Square the arcade, but the alphabet flashes at the Hill in late 1980. In Japan, where the and find it still there when you return game was invented, it had caused public twenty minutes later. him again. Even this game makes the obsession and a coin shortage. In Amer- ica, the reception was nearly as fevered. At one machine, two middle-aged honor list-fifth best. 101 owns this ma- Greeks alternately draw slim rectangles In Asteroids, the gun is not mounted of pale blue and tan as a stick of light- chine. Four of the six records are his. In at the bottom of the screen. It floats ning caroms across the screen and strikes around in the middle, shooting at rocks them. A pudgy boy stands like a preg- three hours, all of 10I's records will be and spaceships that menace it. The nant flamingo, piloting a fighter plane player controls the action with five but- that streaks across mountainous terrain. gone. Sic transit gLoria mundi. tons allowing left or right rotation, No one is protecting the Eiffel Tower thrust, fire, and one that zaps you into and the Colosseum from parachutists Videogames are our current national hyperspace. It was not long before ad- and bombs. At Missile Command, an dicts discovered a bug in the Asteroids Oriental youth placidly lays balloons of mania. We will shell out an estimated $8 program that allowed them to play for gunfire across the sky, an impenetrable hours on one quarte;r, to roll up astro- blanket of rocket smoke that pulsates billion on them this year, almost $5 bil- nomical scores. The game's biggest white, then briefly runs through the threat is posed by the small flying sau- spectrum as it fades. lion more than we'll spend to see cer, dubbed Mr. Bill by fans. By lurking in a corner of the screen, a player could 101, a young Latin man, has just com- movies. There are at least a half dozen zap Mr. Bill before he became a threat. pleted a record run at Zaxxon. It is strictly out of Star Wars: Luke Sky- books out on how to beat them. Kids Vulnerable, Asteroids fell to Defender. walker piloting into the trench of the The plot had thickened. Not just a lone seem to be addicted. George Gallop spaceship fighting nature and aliens. In found that 93 percent of the teenagers he surveyed play or have played vi- deogames. The average teenager spends more than a dollar a day on games; 11 percent of those surveyed played for more than two hours daily. Parents have tried to ban games from their communities. TV talk shows de- vote endless hours to a debate of the dangers of the rage. Videogames have joined movies. jogging, psychotherapy, and sex as the most common cocktail party chitchat. As new to the psychic landscape as herpes-where did this come from? • In the beginning there was Atari. Atari was Pong. The year was 1972. In one short decade, vast changes have been wrought. Pong started a whole new rage. Suddenly, pinball was passe. Now, there was the cathode ray tube, the sili- 34

Defender, the player has ten crewmen on the surface of the planet, and they're under attack from aliens. The aliens send little green landers after the men and lift them off the face of the planet to their doom, if the player does not shoot the lander and catch the crewman before he falls back to the planet. If the player preciated the fun of it. I thought it was on to new professions in computer sci- doesn't shoot the lander, it changes into so silly. The music, the characters. For ence, then the mania is worth it. Dec- a mutant when it reaches a certain alti- me, it was like going to the movies, but ades into the Computer Age and hu- tude, and that's bad news because a mu- in a really short amount of time. It was mans are still hesistant about this tant will chase your ship and cause all entertainment. Except it wasn't just powerful tool. Until now, computers re- kinds of trouble. Ditto the purple passive. mained in the hands of the powerful, squares called bombers that leave small \"The other games seem to isolate the corporate few. Computers make errors mines in the air in the form of little cross players. But Pac-Man almost invites kib- on our telephone bills , keep us on hai~s. Touch one and your ship blasts bitzers. The last time I went, I spent a junkmail lists and send us 300 identical into electronic debris, over a hundred long time watching two guys play. One letters selling the indestructible Marko different lights that flicker and die-the was an out-of-work actor, a white guy. knife. Computers manage the atomic last hope of the stranded crewmen gone. The other was a black delivery man. arsenal that holds us all in deadly fear. GAME OVER. Ordinarily, they would have had nothing Computers are inflexible and unforgiv- • to do with one another, but they had mg. Pac-Man is said to have changed the been playing for three hours straight and Hollywood has illustrated our worst face of the arcade. Pac-Man is less vio- they were really tight buddies. They computer fears. In Desk Set, Spencer lent than most games. For the first time were really funny. The actor was the Tracy's computer seemed to threaten a game that women, in great numbers, loudest player I had ever heard except Katharine Hepburn's job. In 2001: A could relate to. There are no projectiles. for myself.\" Space Odyssey, HAL goes berserk and Pac-Man moves through life humbly, Cute has opened up a whole new di- wipes out everyone. In Colossus: The troubling no one, asking no favors. Pac- rection for videogames. Now there is Forbin Project, an American master- Man makes a choreography across the Frogger, where the player must help a computer links up with its Soviet coun- screen. He has a small shuffle step to frog cross a busy freeway-dodging terpart and dictates a peaceful, freedom- avoid danger. Skilled players work up a trucks and cars that will squash him- less existence for humans. In Demon suspenseful rhythm like brisk exercise. then cross a stream by jumping from log Seed, what the computer does to Julie For the two people in the universe to log. In another game, a painter must Christie is punishable by law. who have not seen Pac-Man, it is a maze cover the perimeter of a small square But now, computers are taking on an- game. The play controls a little yellow before mischievous piggies foil him by other image. Now there's that nice, circle with a mouth. It moves along the stepping on his outline. smart computer that gives you money in maze eating tiny dots. Four ghosts chase The current number one game is the lobby of the bank. And there have Pac-Man: Inky, Blinky, Pinky, and Donkey Kong. The game begins with been cute computers, like R2D2. And Clyde. Some call the red ghost, Blinky, King Kong grabbing Fay Wray and all over the place are these clever video- \"Shadow\" because he's the fastest and climbing to the top of a structure of games-the least complex human inter- will hunt Pac-Man down. When Pac- girders linked by ladders. Her rescuer face with computers. They are the Man eats all of the dots on the maze, a must save the beauty, sometimes by Computer giving us a cheap thrill, like new screen of dots appears and things climbing to the top, sometimes by the Sphere in Sleeper. Video-rush is a speed up. As the game progresses, cher- knocking out the pegs that hold up the simple way of raising adrenaline. With- ries, keys, apples, pretzels, and other girders. If he does that, Kong tumbles out any danger, one puts oneself in a objects appear and are worth extra down from his perch and lands on his situation fraught with danger. One ex- points if Pac-Man can eat them. Some- head. All the while the chimp hurls bar- periences an ersatz attack and defends times the lines of the maze disappear rels down on Everyman, who can jump oneselfwith the most violent and final of and you have to turn comers from mem- over them. Donkey Kong is so cute, the means. ory. Pac-Man plays cute little tunes and little man wiggles his ass as he climbs off \"After I reached my personal best,\" makes nice noises. When Pac-Man eats the ladder and onto a girder. says an addict, \"I was covered with a power pac, he can turn on and eat his •If videogames have any value, it is to sweat. People came over to see if I was pursuers ifhe can catch one. Nice. Then OK. I went outside and I felt like I was the ghosts' eyes remain and run back to demystify the computer. If through rep- going to faint. \" The kind of exhilaration the ghost replenishment tank. Now etitious play, some teenagers are turned Katharine burn felt after . there is a Bride of Pac-Man, Ms. Pac- Man, who sports a red bow on her head and runs faster. One woman devotee, who admits to spending two dollars exclusively on Ms. I Pac-Man when she makes her biweekly forays into the arcades, says, \"I l1ever even wanted to play any of the games until I saw Pac-Man. At first, I just ap-

nels to areas that hide jewels. Robots give chase. And above, an alien tank is blasting away the rocks that shield your spaceship. You must retum before the spaceship is destroyed. And you have to be careful not to be crushed by falling rocks. LocoMotion makes you a railroad switchman. The screen is divided into small squares with interlocking pieces of track on them. One square is blank. By flipping around the squares, you have to keep your engine running for a specific period of time. As you clear a path ahead, it lights up in yellow. Ifyour train runs into a blank space, or into a termi- the rapids in The African Queen. the 1890s. For a nickel, you could see a nal on a track square, you lose. The Beyond the roller-coaster reaction, five-minute film, something simple, a longer you survive, the greater the risk. videogames add little to our lives. Peo- ple who love to play videogames are workman building a fence or a train pull- Little red cars appear on the track and quick to state that they hone hand-eye coordination. Unless you are a profes- ing out of a station. Still, to see moving start heading toward you. sional baseball player, a watchmaker or a chicken plucker, fantastic hand-eye co- images seemed to be a miracle. In Tempest, a number of abstract line ordination will not add substantially to your bank of life skills. Videogames, at this point, appear to drawings form the grid of play. Your yel- Arcade games resemble nothing so be a curiosity trembling on the brink of low crab-like weapon flips around the much as Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope , the fetus from which the movie industry becoming an art form. In the short dec- perimeter of the drawing. F rom the cen- developed. The Kinetoscope was a pinewood box peepshow unveiled in ade of their existence, they have devel- ter of the figure come fuseballs, pulsars, oped intriguing concepts and dazzling flippers, tankers, and spikers-all graphics. deadly, it seems, all sharp, laser-col- A more sophisticated maze game than ored, exquisite electronic images. When Pac-Man is The Pit, by Centurian. A you clear one form, the screen travels spaceship lands you on top of a moun- through deep hyperspace and a new pat- tain. By dynamiting into it, you dig tun- tern appears. In Space Duel, there are equally stun- ning graphics. Double pyramids oflaser- color, box shapes, stars, snowflakes, and spiraling wheels are among the elements you have to clear. Late in the game, the screen looks like an acid dream of color and form. More fascinating than the shooting or maze games is The Qix. The player con- trols a line and draws across the screen. Ifhe uses fast draw, a light blue appears; if he uses slow draw, a tan shape lights up. Also on the screen is the Qix, a stick of lightning that ricochets around the playing area, leaving an echo of images behind it as it bounces. If the Qix hits the line you are drawing, you lose. Simi- larly, if the sparks of fuse (they traverse the lines you draw) touch you, you are zapped. You beat the game by filling in more than the target amount of space. . The game ends as soon as you surpass the target, but you get no points unless you greatly exceed the target. So, in the final phases of play, you must contend not only with a greatly confined Qix and the fuses but you must also close the small gaps and connect them all with a final triumphant move. But complex as all this sounds, The Qix is still more a ........................... -game of moving a toggle stick fast than one of artistic creation. Ten years later, it still costs a quarter

to play most videogames, and with skill \"shoot-'em-up\" experiences (Defender, a quarter can buy five minutes of fan- How to Read Robotron, Zaxxon) . \"They involve what tasy. Between watching and playing, a Videogame I call theta-wave meditation ,\" theorizes you could have a cheaper, better time at Skelly. \"A video screen is already hyp- an arcade than you could in a movie notic: It's a light source, something your theater. Maybe. Today's games seem Play can contain within itself not only eye will tend to drift to and look at any- limited, rudimentary, superficial after a the clear apollonian moment offree self- way. When you play a game your con- short while. determination , but also the dark dionysian centration is focused on your enemies The urge to play comes from the crisp moment ofpanic self-abandon. and on what you' re doing. If you don't feeling of management of the controls. -Eugen Fink, \"The Oasis of Happi- pay complete attention you'll quickl y A clean slate for a quarter; everything is ness: Toward an Ontology of Play\" lose the game-which won ' t be very under your control. You are crisis man- satisfying. So there's a little zen master- ager. Suddenly, things fall apart before It took decades for the movies to be ing there that's kicking thoughts out of your eyes. You cope as best you can. A accepted as serious objects of study. your head. The important words are ag- new classroom game is called Meltdown. Criticism, in both the secular and aca- gression and anxiety. \" The student must avoid the China Syn- demic realms, has since gone out of its That it was Japanese designers who drome at a damaged nuclear plant. If way to unpack the wrinkled laundry of programmed relentless bombardment that, why not Municipal Collapse, where popular culture. Only recently has tele- into the circuits of a science-fiction vi- the mayor battles federal budget cuts, vision earned the respectability of time. deogame should come as no surprise. As riots, crumbling highways , shabby pub- Is there any reason why videogames the economics of micro-circuitry bore lic transportation , jobs leaving for the shouldn't warrant the same respect? Sun Belt, soaring crime statistics, and Formulaically, they are close to popular falling gargoyles. Or Video Monopoly, film, and they approach TV in repre- with tapes of the slums of Baltic Avenue senting modem myths. and the mansions of Park Place. In jail, To gauge the confusion of the infidels you are forced to watch reruns of the about videogames, you need only look Tom Snyder-Charles Manson interview at the mass reaction to Tron, the movie and are subjected to video tape by fel- and the game. The film's potential ap- low convicts. peal for many lay in the expectation that NASA could raise fifty times its most it would chart a region of youth culture hopeful budget if it translated its train- for them. But Tron's interior geography ing tapes into arcade games. And imag- -specifically the rules of the arcade ine what games NASA technicians have games the film's characters were sucked stored away for their own personal use into-were as unclear to the film's audi- under their exclusive passwords. ence, and as seemingly unmotivated , as Videogame addicts suffer blisters, cal- the average guy's initial exposure to a luses, sore wrists, neck tension, head- videogame. For those already addicted aches, eye fatigue, delusions, flash- to videogames, however, the cinematic backs, and paranoia. In Berserk, the legend of Tron looms large: the arcade deadliest villain is a bouncing Happy version was for a while outgrossing Pac- Face, clearly imprinting in the mind the Man, Donkey Kong, and the rest; the idea that nothing, no one can be trusted. film was the subject of feature articles in In Phoenix, birds attack. In Centipede , a at least three specialized videogame bug crawls through mushrooms, then magazines. explodes into a profusion of bugs when The decisive difference between vi- smashed-all of them crawling toward deogames and other forms of art-enter- you while you're menaced by falling tainment-film, television, painting, fruit, the inevitable martial progression fleas and leaping spiders. Is this not sports, you name it-lies in the intensity of electric blips comprising Space In- clearly something out of The Lost Week- of the experience. Film can captivate vaders could easily serve as an analogy end or The Days ofWine and Roses? and hypnotize by focusing our attention for the waves of electronic devices If compulsive, you can spend hun- on sound and a flickering light. Televi- churned out to tempt the public. dreds of dollars running the same rat sion provides a bland, trivializing day- Like a video version of Richard Con- race, trying to beat your last losing ef- dream and night light for our workaday nell's \"The Most Dangerous Game,\" fort. Ultimately, the game never lives. Videogames are much more: a Space Invaders also engendered three changes and you never win. You can get sporadically transcendent sensurround cardinal laws that would thereafter en- better at losing, but you can never win. of sound, light, sport, play, participa- compass the existential telos of all vi- Many people reject that metaphor for tion, spectacle, battle, aggression, anxi- deogamery: 1. You are always on the life. Even the sounds of the arcade ety, and paranoia. The videogame is run; 2. You can learn to run better; and 3. threaten them-the constant, random both play and art. melody of electronic sounds, of synthe- You cannot escape. We don't need a vi- Game designer Tim Skelly enjoys deogame to tell us it's ajungle out there. sized voices saying \"Help Mel\" or \"You talking about the transcendental impli- Yet the vision circumscribed by arcade Got Me!\" the explosions, the sonar, the cations of the pleasures derived either screens repeats that message over and ping and bleep, the roars and fake laugh- from cartoonlike games (Pac-Man, Don- over, until the player's pockets are emp- .----------------------~----------------------~~~~~----~ter. -MIKE MOORE key Kong, Frogger) or from the tougher tied: No quarter will be given. 37

The hoary economics of videogames Pac-Man and a female counterpart. popular in the future, and would be differs from that of pinball in this re- Pac-Man's spin-off game, Ms. Pac- combined with ever more realistic char- spect: Success at a videogame only en- Man, exemplifies the success of this acters and scenarios. The enforced sures that you'll be able to play with the strategy in game design. The latter learning involved in pattern memoriza- machine that much longer-a machine game emphasizes the code of romance tion, he said, \"is not like acquiring a skill that just keeps attacking you faster and both in its color scheme (much warmer, that you'll need over a long period of more efficiently. (In some arcades, Pac- with lots of pink) and music (more lyri- time. The satisfaction is immediate. \" Man, Defender, Tempest, Joust, and other cal), and the new edition is hardly less The improved packaging of a game games now cost 50 cents: expert players popular in the arcades than the original. depending on pattern memorization is were spending too much time, and thus The vast commercial success of Pac- exemplified in Tutankham. More than too little money, on a single game to Man is reflected ad infinitum in a contin- slightly similar to another Steven satisfy merchandisers.) uous stream of greeting cards, bubble Spielberg project, Raiders of the Lost Perhaps the appeal at stake is a matter gum, wrapping paper, a Saturday morn- Ark, the game involves and celebrates of control. But does the player control ing cartoon show, pajamas, slippers, the quest of an archaeologist whose goal the game, or the game the player? sheets, supermarket cakes, telephones, is a pharaoh's mask hidden within four Edward Goldfarb, a designer with Gold- and even a corporate economic strategy: levels of mazes. The game is visually farb, Benko and Associates, believes the \"Pac-Man defense.\" organized to give the appearance that that to a large degree childrens' attrac- The only other item generated by the the archaeologist is traveling horizon- tion to videogames is grounded in \"the entertainment industry that has tally from left to right, and thus the ability of the child to control something achieved anywhere near the same game's narrative resembles the reading that's highly technical. \" Videogames are amount of popularity as Pac-Man is E.T. ofa comic book or, cinematically, a long, thus \"a form of expression he or she can The Extra-Terrestrial. In its first six lateral tracking shot. What is distinctive handle without becoming the best months, E.T. grossed about $300 million here is that repetition, although present, pitcher in Little League. They can con- in the U.S.-about $11.5 million per is less immediately apparent, and the trol , practice, and excel at something week, to Pac-Man's steady weekly take game relates a story through play simply that provides an outlet for creative and of $8 million-and there are piquant and effectively, without a beginning, physical exercise. \" similarities between the two creations. middle, and end. A conclusion to a game The other face of control is anxiety. Both are too cute, vaguely anthropomor- must be implied, but can never be Tim Skelly has coined the expression phic figures fleeing from run-amok body stated in the language of videogames- \"arcade xenophobia\" to sum up the de- parts (a mouth, a pair of legs). Both sig- for what would then be the reason to fining rule: Anything that touches you in nify little other than their own endear- continue play? a videogame kills you. This fact of vi- ingness, and have become cultural icons Visually, most videogames rely less on deogame life determines the two broad representing emotional warmth and, cinematic techniques than on those of categories into which videogames can be above all, consumption. television; they could be compared to separated: games of avoidance (Make The importance of consumption in do-it-yourself cartoons in that the back- Trax, Kangaroo, Donkey Kong Jr.) and Pac-Man is obvious: Points are scored ground remains static, or merely repeats games of aggression (Defender, Aster- according to how much is ingested, and itself, while all the action takes place oids, Omega Race). Paranoia/anxiety can the moral is Eat or Be Eaten. Likewise, upfront. Anybody raised to enjoy the then be compared to controVaggression. the mutual seduction of E.T. and the second-rate animation of Saturday Simply stated, a videogame is most family takes place due to the alien's morning cartoons will have no problem successful in relation to the amount of fondness for Reese's Pieces, left in a trail accepting the design of space-age anxiety it can release in the form of con- of \"energy dots\" leading to the home. videogames. trolled aggression. Other scenes in the film, most notably Paranoia and terror in the movies are Elliott's inebriated conquest of a female • classmate, also revolve around the inges- successfully mirrored in the arcade all tion of food and drink. the more effectively because ofthe short As with every videogame, Pac-Man bursts of dramatic energy a videogame begins with the player submitting to the Pac-Man is E.T. screened at will. The provides. The stalking killers inhabiting machine by feeding it a quarter. After moral lesson of the film is lost in the such slash films as Halloween and Friday the machine has consumed the coin, the game, however. The message Pac-Man the 13th, faceless and mindlessly de- player then goes on to consume oral re- leaves is that you can never really phone structive, are found again in the relent- wards himself through his surrogate. less electronic enemies pursuing the Pac-Man consumes, like every member home. In myth, mazes are penetrated player in videogames like Berzerk, Robo- of society, and is himself consumed by tron, Frenzy, and others. Berzerk, the four ghostly pursurers (today's Three for their hidden rewards, but in a maze prototype for this kind of game, finds Stooges, Keystone Cops, and Bowery without entrance or exit, Pac-Man is no the player once again in a rudimentary Boys). When Pac-Man is captured by longer even able to turn back upon his maze, running from and shooting at one of these he withers on contact like a pursuers, at which point the endeavor is large looming figures reminiscent of the deflated balloon. The excitement of the purely about anxiety and paranoia. masked killers of The Texas Chainsaw game is enhanced by the increasingly Massacre and Halloween. Berzerk cun- shorter periods of time the player is able • ningly elicits and exploits an urban, pri- to tum back upon the anxiety-producing mal fear of mindless violence. aggressors and vent his pent-up spleen Patterns are almost always an integral upon them. The sexual nature of this aspect of videogames, for they are the Violence against the family unit is the released energy is represented by the sentences of the language that must be underlying plot of Robotron (as it is in little love scene played at intervals by learned to master the machine and pro- the films Death Valley and The Hills Have long play. Tim Skelly recently predicted that games depending on pattern mem- orization would become increasingly ~------------------------------------------------------------ 38

Eyes). A nerdy, bespectacled player-sur- times (according to the level of difficulty Then Shoot Mom. As games become graphically more realistic, it's only a mat- rogate must defend the last family on the player has achieved) of girders, lad- ter of time before we find teachers, poli- ticians, and other authority figures con- earth against the high-tech robots who ders, rivets, elevators, and conveyor veniently represented in the arcade. Do videogames cathect or perpetuate have deemed mankind dispensable (a belts. In addition to these symbols of the violence? The debate rages on. theme often played out in the science- construction and factory trades, Mario One designer who worries about this is Steven Sidley, who, although he pro- fiction of Philip K. Dick). Not only does also wins points along the way for pick- grams games devised by the Atari team, confesses that \"the one thing that bugs the player have to destroy the \"bad ob- ing up such quotidian accouterments the hell out of me is that most all of the games have been 'shoot-me' games, al- jects\" but the person who would in \"re- left behind by Nell as her purse, um- ways with a violent element. The only interaction has been holding a joystick, ality\" serve as defender and solace, the brella, telephone, and birthday cake. pressing a button, and shooting a bul- let.\" Sidley foresees the future of vi- father, is here merely another impotent, Everyday labor is represented by the deogames as providing a more com- plete, detailed relationship between vulnerable cartoon in a business suit. conveyor belts, tools, and industrial ac- ,player and game, perhaps involving true 3-D and voice interaction between Thus the aggression and anxiety of a cidents that threaten Mario with a quick them. The fantasy element of play will be thereby enhanced, in Sidley's view, young male are exploited on several plunge to the foot of the economic lad- because \"videogames are much nearer to the truth than are board games, toys, levels. Here the player both rescues a der. Instead of exploding or expiring in a little trucks, and things.\" With video- games, \"you are much closer to the weak father and strikes back against a flash, Mario suffers a bureaucratic de- source, and the experience is more awe- inspiring.\" Watch out: the next vi- bad father (the robots), controlling and motion for his failure to \"reach the top.\" deogame smash could be Golden Pond, • in which Grandad must reel in the big protecting the controlling protector. De- fish before he gets his third heart attack. signer Skelly puts it this way: \"Norman Up to now the figures toward which Ultimately what videogames are about is the simultaneous interplay of Mailer boxes guys; I play Robotron. \" the player's aggressions have been di- entertainment and aggression to the • rected were crude, almost expressionist tune ofelectronic destruction played out As close to home as many of these globs of color. Yet we can now begin to some 20 billion times a year in the U.S. alone. While Sidley sees this as a sad scenarios strike, there is nothing ap- foresee the direction the frankly de- comment on society, Skelly and Gold- farb believe that the child's sense ofcon- proaching \"nobility\" in any videogame. structive tendencies elicited in video- trol and power are enhanced. Assuming we desire them, books probably trans- The creatures inhabiting these minia- games may take. mit these experiences better than movies or television, simply because of ture universes are childish, cartoonlike, Ifthe end of aggression is domination, the imagination and identification re- quired; film is more voyeuristic. At the and generally insipid facsimiles of the sexual or otherwise, then nothing illus- moment, though, videogames are un- matched for providing the player with a human species (just like, some would trates this manifestation of the will to corporal and sensational set of ersatz thrills. See you at the ontological arcade. say, the games' players). One must look power better than the spicy cartridge -RICHARD GEHR long and hard for the simplest intersec- games now being marketed by Ameri- tions with our daily lives in the arcade can Multiple Industries (AIM) of world, although the same comment has Northridge, California. The Atari com- of course been tendered in respect to pany, whose system is compatible with movies as well. Nevertheless, there are these games, has filed suit to prevent those games that reflect the ideological the distribution of Custer's Revenge. side of the workaday world as well. Bachelor's Party, and Beat'Em and Eat \"I know of no other way of coping 'Em. Indian activist groups are them- with great tasks, than play,\" Nietzsche selves also protesting Custer's Revenge, declared in Ecce Homo. And as Martin since it involves a cavalry officer scoring Amis notes in his book Invasion of the points for the player by avoiding arrows Space Invaders: \"The average arcade- to repeatedly rape a female Indian who fodder homo may not be very sapiens, is tied to a stake. The manufacturer but, my, is he ludens.\" While certainly claims the games are \"risque\" and taking care of the big jobs like saving the \"comic,\" not \"dirty,\" and why can't universe, videogames are also some- some people learn to take a joke? times able to give us a fix as well on On the home front, Tim Skelly has humbler environments. observed a young male player in an ar- The protagonist of Donkey Kong is a I cade chase down the mother figure and lower-class janitor-type commonly repeatedly shoot her during a round of known as \"Mario,\" who must rescue his Robotron. From this he has derived the \"Nell\" from an ape at the top of 'a ba- title of his forthcoming book of cartoons roque structure composed at various involving videogames: Shoot the Robot 39

Hollywood Is Game If Hollywood lolled on the beach of point, Tron, the arcade game from Bally- other opponent. In May, to coincide profits and perquisites in recent years Midway, had already enjoyed several with the release of the third film in the when videogames began vying for en ter- weeks ofbeing the pick-hit among game series, the Return of the Jedi game tainment dollars and quarters, it has players. Licensing divisions took note. will be available. The final Star Wars learned better. Videogames have be- game installment, due in the latter part come more than simply a lollipop contri- • of the year, hasn't been announced. bution to the corporate coffers; they Atari had already secured the rights to Due to contractual problems Parker have come of age. Wall Street traders Raiders of the Lost Ark from Lucasfilm has scrapped plans for a home game bought up the relevant feature film com- Ltd. as the Tron phenomenon was un- based on Jaws, but James Bond 007 will pany stocks, as well as that of the game folding. The Raiders cartridge, made for be in stores in time for the two Bond merchandisers, because they passed the the VCS system, and released in late films coming out this summer: Octo- quarter-arcades on their way home and 'S2, features just about everything the pussy, starring Roger Moore, and Never recognized the arrival of the new nickel- film did, and more: whips, snakes, Say Never Again, with Sean Connery. In odeons. magic flutes, sheiks and, of course, Dr. the 007 game, Bond must piece together Indiana Jones. clues to a mystery, while villains pursue Says Polygram producer Adam him \"by boat, car, airplane, even on Fields, \"All the studios now clearly rec- Atari wasted no time in bringing the foot.\" Parker is also basing a game on ognize the enormous potential in the E.T. game to the public once the license The Lord ofthe Rings. videogame business. I think Warner was acquired. Implementing a special showed them what Atari can do for a plan, the game was conceived, the pro- Out of the mainstream and straight to company. Once it was a mighty film gram written, and the cartridges manu- the cultists, Wizard Video Games, a sub- company, now it's Atari that's the factured in a record-breaking 16 weeks sidiary of Wizard Video, is bringing The leader. \" in a process that normally spans nine to Texas Chainsaw Massacre to the home twelve months. screen. Billed as the \"first violent Despite the early December debacle game,\" Chainsaw offers the option of on the floor of the N. Y. Stock Exchange Assuming the role of E. T ., the player taking on Leatherface or his innocent that knocked the videogame stocks must assemble a device to-yes- victim. Wizard also announced the \"first down by as much as 33% per share over- phone home. Aiding E.T. is Elliott, who adult video game ever,\" a cartridge night, as happened to Warner Commu- has energy-giving powers to thwart the based on Flesh Gordon, but has since nications (Atari), Hollywood is some- pursuing G-Men and scientists. Atari reconsidered. In its place, Wizard has thing of a corporate pervert: It'll also has the rights to produce home slotted Halloween, the second violent cross-breed with any new species. video game cartridges based on Colum- bia Pictures' forthcoming fantasy film video game ever. The third, Conan the To wit: Krull while Columbia's games subsidi- Barbarian, a late 'S2 release from Astro- § Six months after Steven Spielberg's ary, D. Gottlieb & Co., will create ar- cade, features swordplay and monsters Poltergeist was released, owners of Ra- cade video and pinball games based on in a series of dungeons. dio Shack's TRS-SO Color Computer the film's settings and characters. were on their own videogame quest to Spectravision last year came out with rescue young Carol Anne Freeling. Parker Brothers, not Atari, has the China Syndrome, where the player be- They must zip through the busy streets license for the home game rights to Star comes the supervisor of Spectra Island's ofWesthaven, clamber up a stairway fre- Wars. Last summer Parker released The nuclear power plant after nine game quented by \"voids\" and spirits and, fi- Empire Strikes Back cartridge, the first of levels have been completed. Before nally, confront the poltergeist in its own four games that the company will do 20th Century Fox Films had a games energy field . based on the science-fiction saga. That subsidiary of its own, it licensed Tower- § Paramount Pictures Corp. has taken cartridge, which recreated the battle ing Inferno to U.S. Games. The object a second look at its games subsidiary, scene on the ice planet Hoth, sold one here is to helicopter yourself to the flam- Sega Enterprises, Inc., and Star Trek is million copies, or $20 million, by year's ing downtown skyscraper and rescue as the reason why. Not long after Star Trek end. Just out is Jedi Arena, based on the many people as possible for points: one II took in $76 million last summer, they first Star Wars feature, in which the point for each flame extinguished, decided that the good Starship Enter- player is Luke Skywalker, wielding a twenty-five for each survivor. prise would confront the nasty Klingons light sabre against the computer or an- in an arcade game by Christmas. § Before Atari shipped a single E.T. cartridge, it was predicted that the home game, like its feature film parent, would be a hit. It hasn't yet been, but just think: If the E.T. cartridge sells to just half of the eight to ten million Atari VCS 2600 owners, Atari will gross about $132 million. § While Tron, the Disney film, was still trying to reach the break-even 40

Last year Universal Studios licensed whole medium where they can have the Video games King Kong to Tigervision. After perch- same plot and script it out, just like the Pro-Rated ing the girl atop the Empire State Build- movies. But, with the game, the person ing, Kong hurls bombs down onto the feels much more control over his destiny It is surprising that it was the Japanese climbing player. Jump a bomb, score and what's happening than he would and Americans who figgled around with some points. Miss and you're blown to just watching the movie. \" their Sony TV sets and arrived at video- bits. Three misses and no miss, the games. Neither culture accepts the idea The new wrinkle is to develop films of inevitable defeat. Videogames are so game's over. and games concurrently. Spaceblasters, a much more Italian or French: playa lit- In Fantastic Voyage (Fox Video CBS theatrical and Polygram co-ven- tle, make a gallant show of it, and move ture, concerns a group of video game over. There's another army behind Games) the player maneuvers a subma- whiz kids who, through a series of un- yours. rine through the body of a dying scien- usual circumstances, are called upon to tist while battling white corpuscles. The save the world via their gaming skills. You win no money; you wield no sub must reach a clot near the brain and The arcade game mimics the film. No power; you only postpone catastrophe. destroy it before time runs out. Fantastic longer a Christmas '82 release, Space- But after being zapped into oblivion, the Voyage was shipped to stores at the end blasters is delayed due to changes in the good wizards of videogames have of '82 along with a maze game based on script. granted a kind of achievable immortal- Alien (where the dots along the way are ity; if you're good enough you can sign not power pellets but alien eggs) and a In 1981, Richard Spitalny and Bill your name. If that ain't art, what is? Megaforce game, in which the player Blake formed Pona Star, a joint venture controls a fighting machine called a that spun off a game division in one Well , we save Guernica and Beat the Moto-Fighter used to destroy enemy year's time, First Star Software. They Devil, but the betting is-right now- headquarters. Also on Fox's agenda are signed Fernando Herrara, game de- that we'll pitch Frogger. It's a little game games based on MASH, 9 to 5, Porky's, signer and winner of Atari's first annual about a stout-hearted frog-you-try- and Six Pack. Star Award of Merit, to a long-term con- ing to cross life's highway, ford life's tract. Together, they are planning Ar- stream, pick up a mate on the way and MCA-Universal, which formed a cade, a film that stars a video game get home. Home. Tom Wolfe's home in games division last year, is discussing called Savior One. A sleuth must track Asheville, James Agee's home in Knox- arcade games of two summer '83 re- down missing children, all high scorers ville, your home at the end of the day leases, Jaws 3-D and Smokey is the Ban- on the Savior One game. As the screen- full of tears. dit. CBS Video Games, another new writer writes Arcade, Herrara designs subsidiary, reports it has no immediate the Savior One game for a simultaneous You never save a continent in Missile plans to join the fray, although it has release. Command from nuclear splatter, you looked at scripts and films in production only put off the parry. You are a grown- to gauge the possibilities. So sold are the First Star people on up on a joystick in defense of civiliza- videogame tie-ins with new movies, tion; the arcades are full of you-men in • they've set up a service to read and re- ties, perfect specimens of the actuarial view completed scripts or works in de- tables, twisting your sagging frames As the film and videogame industries velopment to uncover the video game around these 25-cent machines to battle work closer together, the release of new within. If there is no game inherent in the dark princes, forgetting for awhile films and games will be timed, ala Tron the script, First Star will tell the client that there are forms to fill out, that and Krull. Near completion of the film, what has to be changed in the script in Bernice needs her vitamin C and you director Jim Henson gave software com- order to get one. forgot to pick it up. But you've scored pany Sierra On-Line Systems the go- 36,000. ahead for a Dark Crystal computer game. .The lesson of that depressed middle- Sierra co-founder Roberta Williams aged man who dreamed of playing Whooee, 36,000. If your small wrote an adventure program using char- center-field for the Yankees and nearly achievement of having lasted longer acters and scenes from the movie. became damned has not been learned. than those who have gone before you is \"Henson Associates is really excited Change what you will in the script, but soon erased by the next generation, then about this project,\" she says, \"because first start with your soul. you must face facts: you have acted with they have all these movies and creative the heart of Winston Churchill or Audie ideas, and here, all of a sudden, is this -SUE ADAMO Murphy, and no one will remember your name. Worse, they unplug the machines at night, emptying their brains, and like the Dark Ages, we start over each day. The following videogames have been rated . There is no Toward A Theory of Videogames at work, though the vision imposed on the screen and the sound extracted from it were noticed. The struggle's worth and grace are what matter. • Q*BERT(****)-You're a red thing with a nose and feet dropped onto a SPACE INVADERS · Game Program ™ 41

hops. Dubious message, here: Mom'll ... save your ass. But in Kangaroo, you're pyramid in space straight out ofVasarely. Mom. The plot is wacky comedy-jump to save your life-and even falling into the M~SSILE COMMAND(***)-Save void is a scream. New York, L.A., Chicago, and Philadel- phia-nah, forget Philadelphia-from PAC-MAN(***1/2)-Good oId-fash- nuclear rub-out. Lose them all and the ioned Republican game: feed on the damn screen does a great four-color plankton, lead your pursuers into a trap, bang. Makes you pant to see Armaged- and eat 'em. don again. POOYAN(***)-What happens to MS. PAC-MAN(**1/2)-Same idea, but a little coy. Why is it when Pac-Man the Three Little Pigs when their house gobbles plankton and eats his pursuers, is under attack by paratrooper foxes. he's a Republican, and when the Ms. Comic relief for you desk jockeys with does it, she's a tart? oink-stained hands. ZAXXON(**1/2)-Realism does not FROGGER(***)- Frog Everyman a game make. Of the your jet-against- must cross a two-lane blacktop full of the-squadron variety. trucks, then hop a streamfull of trouble to get home. Life's like that, Monday to DEFENDER(**)-Zaxxon-ish, but Friday. jet reverses directions to fend off at- . DONKEY KONG(***)-Working tackers from the rear. Paranoids wel- come. hero must climb his way to the top, knock off the gorilla and get the girl. SCRAMBLE(**)-Relive those hal- Office daydream. cyon days of being a helicopter pilot in Nam and bomb the crap out of gun em- KANGAROO(***)-Mom roo res- placements and grass huts. For all the cues Baby roo, flattens monkeys bent on Viet-vets who miss the smell of victory l)1ayhem with an uppercut, dodges and (Thanks, Francis). CENTIPEDE(**)-Like Space In- vaders, fire at an advancing column of meanies. Speed here counts. You're too old . EAGLE(**)-Shoot down Shogun maniac flyers . You've heard ofmiso, this IS soso. JUNGLE KING(**)-You Tarzan, Me Jane. Why don't you swing over, swim a croc-infested creek, duck falling rocks and give the slip to the Barbarians in my family and see me some time. Nah. QIX(*)-Make a Mondrian canvas before some mean-tempered line blows you away. Painter's nightmare. MOON PATROL(*)-Drive what looks like a Plymouth down a potholed, rock strewn road and shoot spacecraft. You do that anyway on the West Side Highway. JOUST(*)-Medieval knights on flying condors knock each other off. Beautiful, dream-like graphics; just couldn't figure out which condor was mme. TRON(*)-Five games, couldn't win, couldn't figure 'em out. Fuck 'em. VIDEO FIREPLACE(*)-Not a game, a one-hour cassette of a fireplace fire to cozy by. Proof of the end of civili- zation, as we know it. VIDEO AQUARIUM(*)-Same guy is back; this time watch fish swim around for an hour. Glug-glug. -HARLAN JACOBSON 42

• • •• • •• colored aerial-view films from ten 70mm up of a ship's bridge and \"sailed\" them, via film, from Marseilles across the by Marc Mancini projectors positioned beneath the bal- Mediterranean and into the port of Al- giers. And the Lumiere brothers sus- loon's gondola. The screen that lined pended a giant 70-ft.-by-53-ft. screen (the original plans called for one 100 feet Two hundred people crowd into a the building's interior spread 30 feet long and 80 high) in the middle of the Galerie des Machines. Its cloth was mois- basket suspended beneath a hulking hot high and 330 feet in circumference. tened just before projection, thus en- hancing the screen's translucence and air balloon. The crewmen cast off lines Though the danger posed by sailing at permitting audience viewing from both sides. Both sides were needed: each and the passengers peer down to witness great heights in Grimoin-Sanson's de- evening the cavernous art nouveau building housed 25,000 spectators. the receding Tuileries Gardens of the vice was illusionary, that from fire was • Louvre. They pass over Brussels, the unfortunately not. The nitrate prints of When Modest Petrovich Mous- Riviera, the hot sands of the Sahara and the time-monsters ofcombustibility- sorgsky visited an 1874 exhibition of the drawings of his late friend Victor Hart- the choppy waves of a stormy sea. They had already frightened many viewers man, the experience left him in agita- tion and profound awe. Pictures at an return to Paris, some with vertigo, most away from conventional theaters. When Exhibition, a series of piano pieces to \"accompany\" ten of those works, was with a sense of wonder and exhilaration Cineorama's projectionist passed out the eccentric, unprecedented result. And had dissolution and depression not that they have never before felt. from the heat thrown off by his ten pro- taken his life in 1881 at the age of 42, The balloon is inside a building. The jectors, the police closed down the ex- spectators to this giddy event never hibit. It had marveled visitors for only went anywhere-except into the realm three days. of imaginative extravagance. Luckily, there were other wonders at Sound like the Circle Vision presenta- this World's Fair. Only seven years after tion of \"America the Beautiful\" at Dis- I the invention of the cinematograph, and neyland? It is not. It was Raoul Grimoin- 27 years before The Jazz Singer, visitors Sanson's \"Cineorama,\" and it was to the Exposition heard Sara Bernhardt astonishing visitors at the Paris Exposi- speak to them from a projected image. tion UniverseLLe in 1900. The Cineorama In another building, something called achieved its effect by projecting hand- Mareorama placed viewers on a mock- 43

Moussorgsky might have later found a corporate or government sponsor will- upheavals have really cut into its history: equal inspiration from entirely different ing to spend more money, per minute, sound, color and wide screens. Com- kinds of pictures at a quite different than could ever be considered on a con- pared to this tidy technological garden, style of exhibition. ventional feature. And since audiences the history of exhibition films is one of view the exhibit as part of a much larger unruly but luxuriant growth. Though it Technology's swift advances a decade entertainment event, the film is not the may be rooted in thin thematic soil, a after Moussorgsky's death elicited both sole reason for their coming. Though motion picture at an ex..~ibition may ide- wonder and pride from turn-of-the-cen- word-of-mouth does help extend the ally represent aesthetic and technical ex- tury society. No event reflected this na- lines outside a pavilion, the concept of perimentation of the most exciting kind. ive hubris as well as the \"international \"box-office\" hardly applies when the exposition.\" To reapply H. L. show is free and the seats gladly re- • Mencken's description of Mous- ceived by foot-weary visitors. sorgsky's art, these fairs depicted a world The 1900 Exposition Universelle, \"that must always appear charming and The situation, of course, is not en- however notable for its cinematic exu- more than half fabulous ... , a world in tirely rosy. Expo movies are usually berance, was not the first fair to show- which unfathomable causes constantly shorts, the orphans of critical and com- case movies. That distinction falls to produced unimaginable effects.\" mercial attention. Often projected Chicago's World Columbian Exposition through some baroque system, they are of 1893, which not only introduced the Among these effects, movies have billed as \"films of the future\" -the pro- Ferris Wheel, Cracker Jacks and Little been conspicuously and forcibly appro- phetic puffery of all world's fairs. If you Egypt to the American public, but also priate. Just as audiences stood in five- want to know the future ofcinema, how- made much of a promising novelty, Edi- hour lines to see the multiple-screen ever, the fortune-telling tents at the ex- son's kinetoscope. At the 1904 Louisi- films at Expo 67's Labyrinth, and just as hibition fringes are probably as reliable ana Purchase Exhibition in St. Louis, they are queuing at Walt Disney World's as the central pavilions. No matter how many spectators saw their first \"story\" Epcot Center, so Victorian audiences clever an exhibition movie or its format film, The Great Train Robbery, made the gathered before the huge projections at is, it is usually here today and nowhere year before. By 1915 motion pictures the Paris Exposition of 1900. Some of tomorrow. had penetrated to the core of American cinema's greatest technological achieve- culture: San Francisco's Pan-Pacific Ex- ments have flared not in the neighbor- Sponsorship itselfentails some thorny position claimed 73 separate screening hood theater but .at exhibitions, both problems. Exhibition films are often facilities. Importantly, the Pan-Pacific temporary and permanent, a very long soft-sell commercials- \"atti tude shunned technological swagger in its time ago. builders,\" in Arthur Knight'S phrase- films. Movies must communicate ideas, linking sponsors to grandeur, corporate the organizers said. Not until the late Exhibitions present filmmakers with philosophy and pseudo-daring. When 1930s did filmmakers once again certain advantages that movie theaters these spectacles are produced by a cut- sharpen their technological tools, all the cannot. The financing of massive curv- ting-edge company, the results can be while remembering the lesson that the ing screens, say, or 2000-line TV sets boldly quirky. At the IBM Pavilion at Pan-Pacific had made clear: spectacular may be immediately feasible only when the 1964-65 New York World's Fair, a effects need not provide only the thrills it occurs at a single, temporary location grandstand filled with 500 people would of a cinematic roller coaster. -especially when it is underwritten by lift itself hydraulically into a giant, Eames-designed egg. Seventeen sepa- Both the scope and seriousness to Helicopter shot, Ent:rgy, Epcot Center. rate screens-some rectangles, others which the exhibition film had come was triangles and circles-would bombard evident at the 1937 Paris International the audience with visions of everyday Exhibition. Fair organizers erected en- choice-making activities. The energetic tire buildings dedicated to the photo- presentation made a subtle pitch for graphic and cinematic arts, including a computer efficiency, but it left viewers Palais de Lumiere with a broad outdoor with a powerful pride in the complexity screen and a Pavilion du Cinema right of the human mind. under the Eiffel Tower. The 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition IBM's panache at New York is hardly introduced San Franciscans to another, the rule. In 1939 the conservative petro- more personal form of moving picture: leum industry worried mightily when the television. But it was at New York's Fred Waller proposed to build a curved 1939 World's Fair that cinema finally screen pleasure dome in the middle of took center stage. Flushing Meadows. Suppose it didn't work? Suppose it did, but said the wrong Everyone seems to know that a televi- thing? The project was canceled and re- sion display was the big hit during that placed with a safe puppet show. Waller, hot summer in Flushing Meadows. But of course, had the last laugh. He turned who remembers that that eloquent doc- his initial research for the oil companies' umentary, Ralph Steiner and Willard pavilion into Cinerama, one of the only Van Dyke's The City, was created for the alternate theatrical formats to ever suc- Science and Education Building? Or ceed. that, through projected images, \"pas- sengers\" in a Transportation Exhibit If the corporations seem too conserva- mockup rocket \"flew\" from New York to tive, the film industry looks downright London? Or that the Chrysler Pavilion's reactionary. Only three technological movie featured pixilated auto parts

marching and dancing onto a Plymouth the common ground and shared borders menslOn. chassis? Filmgoers readily overlooked of the world's peoples in To Be Alive. As The second pavilion developed the the film's commercial flagrance, so as- the focal point of the Johnson's Wax Pa- tonished were they by the novelty of vilion, the film alternated split screens Labyrinth theme: That worldwide mis- fenders, tires and chrome seemingly with wide vistas and in the process be- management of resources could be sailing in from over their heads. Director came the first exhibition movie in a spe- blamed on man's internal problems. John Norling had shot in a full-color, cialized format to receive an Oscar. The pavilion's access was a cramped cor- 3-D format, complete with polarized ridor about five feet wide and fifty feet glasses, on-screen actors and sync- Two years later, Montreal's Expo 67 high, a conspicuous and concrete meta- sound. Never before had this combina- reacted against the tone of New York's phor for the misuse of space. The cham- tion been attempted. extravaganza. This was to be a serious ber itself presented five screens ar- World's Fair, where nations would be ranged in a Greek cross. This shape World War II and postwar turmoil spotlighted, not corporations, where a could either frustrate or exalt a viewer. dampened enthusiasm for world's fairs. theme (Man And His World) would When used for a split-screen effect or to Brussels in 1958 renewed it. Though force coherence and harmony onto the present horizontally moving objects, it modest in scope, it set off a flurry of usual hodgepodge. But in one way Expo liberated its images. When something expositions and itself showcased two 67 did not tack in an opposite direction moved diagonally, however, the cross- major cinematic experiments. The first, from New York. It embraced films- shaped screens blocked imagined space, Circarama, was the eleven-projector, in- about 3,000 separate ones. Expo was creating an obstructing key-hole effect. the-round presentation first erected in practically wallpapered with movies. Though the concluding theme of Disneyland in 1955. Never before seen At Montreal, Thompson and Ham- Labyrinth (that we must conquer \"the outside of the U.S., Circarama and its private minotaurs within each of us\") \"America the Beautiful\" (updated twice mid followed up their To Be Alive with seemed cryptic and even a bit preten- since then) was a magnet for fairgoers. We Are Young on six screens. (Thompson tious, the pavilion provided a near-per- Eventually Disney revised the system, also had a film at the recent Knoxville fect fusion of form and content. Sadly, replacing the eleven 16mm projectors Fair.) Christopher Chapman used the Labyrinth is no longer-gone like most with nine 35mm ones and calling it Cir- Ontario Pavilion's giant 66-ft.-by-30-ft. World's Fair pavilions, and missed more cle Vision 360. In its new form, Circle canvas for A Place to Stand, a master- than any other. Vision became an affable ambassador of piece of screen-splitting, graphic com- the United States, visiting fairs in Turin, position and catchy songs which antici- Since Expo 67, there have been no Lucerne, Moscow, Tokyo and Sydney. pated TV commercial styles of the spectacular exhibitions. Perhaps such Seventies. The LaternaMagika, a Czech affairs now seem too frivolous and costly. The second Brussels process, Polye- production, further integrated live stage The Osaka Fairdid, however, introduce cran, came from a talented group of performance with background film and IMAX, a process significant in several re- Czechoslovakian filmmakers. Combin- added an interesting twist: by pushing spects. By projecting 70mm film side- ing live stage action with variously sized buttons, the audience determined ways (like the VistaVision process of the and shaped screens, Polyecran was a which plot variation would be followed Fifties), IMAX is able to put a frame on large-scale demonstration of a viewer's at key moments. When the Czechs film much larger than if it were pro- ability to absorb information projected faced funding problems toward Expo's onto widely separated but thematically end, they began charging admission- linked canvases. Today's multimedia and audiences still filled the theater. presentations trace roots to this Czecho- slovakian experiment. Then there was Labyrinth. Designed by the Canadian National Film Board, • Labyrinth remains to this day the most remarkable of all cinema pavilions. The If Brussels was a relatively tidy gala, first film chamber was shaped like a boat New York in 1964-65 was a flamboyant deck. On the floor was a 38-ft. -by-20-ft. bash. Enormous, brash, disjointed and screen; at the front, upright and at a right with few intellectual pretenses, it none- angle, was another of similar size. Spec- theless knew how to entertain, and it tators stood on balconies stacked on knew that film was one of the best ways each side of the high ovoid space. Look- of doing so. At the Kodak Building, Saul ing down and ahead, they saw illustrated Bass widened or narrowed the projected a major human problem: How can man image to match the perceptions and escape the labyrinth of frustration, stress imaginings of a child. The United States and confusion with which the modern Pavilion transported seated passengers world confronts him? Images of spa- on moving platforms past hundreds of ciousness contrast with images ofcrowd- projected icons of the nation's past. The ing. A man on the bottom screen Port Authority of New York pirated Dis- watches a stripper on the top one. Trap- ney's Circle Vision to set forth the com- eze artists fly from one canvas to the plexities of urban transport (they other. A child at the front throws a stone avoided litigation by using ten projec- I to the screen-pond below, and a hun- tors, instead of nine or eleven). IBM, in dred spectators gasp as they \"see\" a rock its Polyecran-like presentation, ex- pass through the empty space between plained how statistical decisions tether screens. Forced by the collective imagi- our daily lives. And Francis Thompson nation, they have perceived a third di- and Alexander Hammid explored both 4S

jected vertically. The resulting image however, at the 1964-65 New York Fair: triangular, with mirrors, scrims and pro- Audio-Animatronic families boasted of jection pillars that amplify a computer- clarity permits audiences to sit close to a theirGE appliances, robot children sang animated movie into an environmental of a small world, a mechanical Lincoln event. In another, Czechoslovakian very large screen which just about fills sat up and talked. Emil Radok, who had designed film at- tractions at expositions for decades, their oval field of vision. IMAX has begot In a certain way, Audio-Animatronics takes what was a rather dull, primitive was the product of failure. Ever the mi- system at Expo 67 (Diapolyecran) and several impressive short films, including meticist, Disney strived to anchor his turns it into a technological tour de force. fantasies in sensory reality, pursuing For Disney, he has fashioned a screen North ofSuperior, a masterpiece of large- techniques such as sound, color, multi- composed of 100 three-sided segments. plane photography and the rest. 3-D also Each segment-faced with black, white screen audience manipulation, concep- beguiled him, but the processes of the and reflective surfaces and keyed by mi- time seemed far too lubbery. He there- croprocessors to turn independently- tual coherence and aesthetic inventive- fore set out to build and sculpt, rather coordinates itself in synchronization to a than draw, his cartoons. \"Disneyland is movie cast by five projectors. This ever- ness. IMAX and its cousin, Omnimax, a three-dimensional thing to play with,\" changing, ultimately split screen is capa- he said, and in his Pirates of the Carib- ble of rippling, blacking itself out in se- have been permanently installed in bean ride one sails through an animated lective areas or achieving effects that swashbuckler movie. may not have been thought of yet. The about twenty parks, planetariums and conventional screen is a canvas for mov- Since then, Audio-Animatronics has ing paintings. Radok's is a mosaic. exhibits across the globe; even Caesars been a fine-tuned, but essentially ar- rested, stagnant process. Publicists brag A similarly derivative exhibit, The Palace has one. There is suddenly a fu- that Epcot walks Benjamin Franklin up American Adventure, is a Laterna Magika a staircase, but by now futurists would improved Disney-style. On a broad ture in exhibition films-and Disney have expected mechanical cowboys, pa- stage Audio-Animatronic figures of triots and spacemen strolling through Franklin and Twain quote John Stein- Studios is about to explore that future in the streets-Westworld for real. Science beck, Thomas Wolfe and their own writ- is still too stolid to create such prodigies, ings to underscore the cohesive diversity a big way. • so Disney \"imagineers\" have returned of America. The largest rear-projection to the pliant, familiar but advancing screen in the world backdrops When you walk onto Sound Stage 2 at technology of film. Movies, well-made them, with images of period artwork, and strangely projected, can still take an photography and newsreel footage. their Burbank lot, you know that the audience's breath away. Easily replaced Such presentations can easily pitfall into or reshot, they provide an updatable maudlin flag-waving, but The American Walt Disney Corporation means busi- flexibility that no impermanent fair Adventure largely avoids this through its could ever exploit. praiseworthy historical pluralism and its ness. A huge screen arcs across the precise, vigorous effects. Epcot flaunts eleven major movie state's center space. Another, even presentations, edited down from 11/z The most eloquent wide-screen mo- million feet of film shot in thirty coun- tion picture at Epcot is Symbiosis. It had larger one curves from wall to wall. A tries. (See box page 49.) None of the to be. Thrown by only one conventional processes is completely original, but 70mm projector and unpropped by tech- third flat projection surface seems incon- each is so accomplished that it certainly nological claptrap, the film powerfully will encourage numerous exhibition presents the delicate balance between sequential even though it must be clones. scientific progress and environmental integrity. Says director Paul Gerber: \"I twenty feet high and fifty feet wide. Among these the large, extra-wide wanted a contemplative, majestic expe- screen format is the most familiar. His- rience, with moments of quiet beauty Other odd, small reflective shapes lean torically, though theoretician-film- but also with moments of violent ac- makers like Abel Gance and S.M. tion.\" Symbiosis is at times too self-con- in empty corners: To all appearances, Eisenstein were smitten with projected scious in its visual and dialectic perspec- panoramas, others thought otherwise. tives, but Gerber shows his dexterity this is the laundry room set for The In- George Stevens quipped that wide with well-composed images, even- handed exposition, metaphorical edit- credible Shrinking Woman. screens were more suitable for boa con- ing and a daredevil's love for heady aerial strictors than for people, and Jean Coc- motion. A large screen and 30-frames- Stage 2 is the West Coast research teau snided, \"The next time I write a per-second projection enhance Gerber's poem, I'll get a big sheet of paper.\" For essay on man's equivocal relationship facility for Florida's Epcot (for Experi- a few of the Epcot films, this disdain for with nature, but the film's most breath- wide-screen extravaganzas is warranted: taking moment would probably work on mental Prototype Community of To- several are very large Britannica-ish a TV screen. Beginning with a calm films with tiny moments of panache and closeup of an Indian on horseback, the morrow), Disney's vast entertainment the obligatory drunken-sailor cinema- camera draws back across a lake, past tography. ripples, rocks, bushes, gains frantic ve- complex recently built where alligators Some of the pavilions, however, do once sulked. Shortly before his death, unusually clever things to otherwise nor- ,mal wide screens. In one, the theater is Walt Disney announced his utopian vi- sion of a technologically perfect city ad- joining Walt Disney World, but it evapo- rated in the social heat of the late Sixties. If Yippies could take over Disneyland's Tom Sawyer Island, what could they do to Epcot? Yet Epcot Center, which opened to the public last October, is quite an achievement: a permanent World's Fair, with more exhibition films and fantastic formats than any other single project. It tries to predict the future of America even as it portends the diversification of moving-picture presentations. Though commonly conservative in its philosophic stance, Disney over the years has spearheaded numerous radical cinematic advances. (Sound: Steamboat Willie. Color: Flowers and Trees. Stereo sound: Fantasia. Nature documenta- ries: The Living Desert.) And his com- pany has often consorted with forward- thinking world's fairs. Mickey's Surprise Party was a major attraction at New York's 1939 World of Tomorrow; Cir- carama was the hit of 1958 Brussels. Dis- ney's machinery literally got into gear, 46



locity-and suddenly drops over the top but only in extremely narrow theaters. ocular distance during a shot. A clown All other devices are either unproven grows and shrinks in the sunken space of a towering concrete dam. The visual ballyhoo or hoaxes. before you. A kite (optically produced, no less) rises from a beach below and contrast between nature and technologi- Disney researchers gave up the dream passes inches from your nose, remaining of spectacleless spectacles and decided all the while in perfect focus. A wind cal momentum in this one take could instead to refine the polarized glasses blows computer-generated images of approach. The engineers of WED, the seed puffs from a flower past your head. hardly be more forceful. research arm of Disney, reestablished that the two cameras and projectors Journey's inventiveness tempts one to The second major process deployed needed for quality 3-D must be in per- conclude that feature films of physical fect synchronization. WED's 30-frames- and thematic depth can now finally be at Epcot is that veteran of the Sixties, per-second standard totally eliminated made. There is, however, still one prob- flicker and crispened the deep images. lem. When a viewer looks at a normal Circle Vision 360. In many ways, Circle And comfortable glasses replaced the movie, his eyes have fixed focus at the awkward, nose-cutting cardboard ones. screen's distance from him. Looking at Vision can be a noose for strangling con- foreground or background objects does The most important discovery, how- not require refocusing; the cameraman tent. An encircling screen, however im- ever, concerned interocular distance: has done the work for him. With 3-D the the 2.5 inches that separate the irises of viewer does have a focusing choice. He pressive physically, is somewhat waste- the average person's eyes. 3-D cameras can look at things in the distance and have to be set up to exactly mimic na- refocus on things close up, just as in ful: it totally fills a viewer's oval-shape ture's triangulating view; the two camera everyday existence-as long as the shot lenses, either through a mirroring con- is in deep focus. But what if the camera- peripheral vision both left and right-it traption or by very close positioning, man shot a 3-D sequence in shallow must be about 21/z inches apart. Sloppy, focus? However much the observer fills even more, except for those with imprecise camera set ups are what have tries, he cannot unfuzzy what is beyond made past 3-D films look physically the depth of field. Will we have to re- eyes in the backs of their heads-but is goofy. What the WED folk have done is learn a new 3-D \"grammar\" in which the to either strictly observe correct interoc- director has eliminated the viewer's inadequate vertically. Says Randy ular distance or defy it to summon ef- freedom of focusing choice? Or will An- fects both novel and startling. dre Bazin's advocacy of deep focus be- Bright, who oversees all Epcot films: come not an aesthetic alternative but an Murray Lerner, the Oscar-winning di- inviolate rule if 3-D becomes the filmic \"In the original Circle Vision movies, we rector of From Mao to Mozart and now norm? Magic Journeys, explains: \"I knew we tended to keep attention riveted in one had to stay at the exactly proper interoc- • ular distance, but I also believe in audi- direction. That's unfortunate, because I ence involvement-that's why 3-D fas- Whatever happens, Disney has taken cinated me in the first place. So why not not only technological chances but the- feel Circle Vision still has unexplored disturb them by toying with inviolate matic ones as well. Indeed, the studio rules?\" Lerner had already acquired a has allowed its Epcot filmmakers rela- potential after 25 years. At Epcot, we good deal of understanding of the 3-D tively wide freedom of message. The process making his Sea World short, Sea Exxon-supported film Universe of En- hope to expand our storytelling by mov- Dreams. Now he deployed three camera ergy opens with an image, not of oil rigs, systems, one of which could vary inter- but of solar panels. Symbiosis tempers ing the audience's attention from panel to panel, to points everywhere in the roonl. \" Bright's ambition is apparent in the wrap-around productions at three pavil- ions: China, Canada and France (a half- circle of screen). The camera is increas- ingly mobile, the split-screens are more frequent, and lip-synch dialogue is used for the first time. , For the China film, director Jeff Blyth has peripatetic eighth-century poet Li- Po narrate onscreen what might have been nothing but a very wide travel- ogue. Li-Po's lyrical, affectionate dia- logue humanizes the film , and, wander- ing around in random directions, he forces the viewer to redirect attention toward unexpected vistas or newly ar- rived action. In comparison, and despite superb digitally recorded music, the Ep- cot presentations of Canada and France seem rather spiritless. It is Magic Journeys , however, that may joggle Epcot fairgoers the most. A child-world fantasy shot in 3-D, it achieves a degree of perfection never before seen in depth photography. Essentially, there is only one work- able 3-D system and it requires clear polarized glasses to achieve its effect. The more primitive anaglyph system- with its well-known campy red-green glasses-cannot accommodate full- color photography. Movie holograms are nowhere close to perfection; the \"talk- ing heads\" at Disneyland's Haunted Mansion are not holograms, but are cre- ated by projecting film onto sculpted faces. A Russian system using a corrug- ated screen functions without glasses, 48