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A piece of a fun 1971 Merv Griffin interview with Dennis Hopper, who had just shown Hollywood a way out of its post-Studio System doldrums with the cheap indie smash, Easy Rider, and was in the process of undermining his own newly booming career with the quixotic, drug-fueled mess, The Last Movie.
See also:
Tags: Dennis Hopper, Merv Griffin
I would have preferred Paul Thomas Anderson.
Steven Spielberg has made a movie about the life of President Abraham Lincoln. I personally think they should have waited until he was dead before making the movie. Oh, I’m not taking about Lincoln. I mean Spielberg.
Some Lincoln posts:
Tags: Abraham Lincoln
I can’t say that I’ve been the biggest fan of Leos Carax’s films, but my smart little brother Steven Boone has an article in Capital New York about the director’s latest work, the fantasy drama Holy Motors, which has convinced me I need to catch up on it. Boone draws comparison between Carax’s take on the oft-brutal changes of our technological revolution with Chaplin’s meditation on the hardships the Industrial Revolution wrought a century ago. An excerpt:
“We’re at a cultural crossroads, those of us who live in countries where iPhones and social media mean something. We’re leaving behind a whole range of physical products forever, in favor of ones that exist only as data or abstractions. We’re crossing these precarious bridges on faith, or just resignation to the tools set before us as we scramble to survive.
What are we losing in the transfer? In Holy Motors, glimpses of ancient Etienne-Jules Marey motion photography and still-stunning Edith Scob (star of the 1960 French classic Eyes without a Face) as Lavant’s limo driver, seem to cry for continuity with the past.
Now that whole archives are trusted to ‘the Cloud,’ there’s as much risk of losing it all as there is promise in the way digital media smuggle history over to the very demographic that mega-corporations prefer to remain unawares, the youth. (Go to YouTube and witness all the awed teenagers commenting under classic silent movies.) Carax is thinking about all that stuff in Holy Motors, pitting Lavant’s Lon Chaney makeup kit and costumes and absurdly luxurious limo against a world that suddenly moves faster than any vehicle, silently, invisibly, through data cables and air waves.”
Tags: Leos Carax, Steven Boone
Marcello Mastroianni was a sensitive, befuddled male icon of screen in the second half of the 20th century, often crumbling under the modern world and its changing mores. At the end of 8 1/2, in one of cinema’s greatest scenes, he walks away from all that he’s built, realizing the folly of constructing on a shifting landscape. In real life, the Italian actor was none too fond of the era’s feminist movement, never quite grasping that an unequal society is a sick one for masters and servants alike. Though, yeah, the masters have it way better. An excerpt from a 1965 Playboy interview with Mastroianni during the early days of the cultural revolution:
“PLAYBOY:
All the films you’ve made, in one way or another, are about weak men—psychologically, socially and often sexually impotent. Is that you?
MASTROIANNI:
Yes and no. It’s part of me; and I think it’s part of many other men today. Modern man is not as virile as he used to be. Instead of making things happen, he waits for things to happen to him. He goes with the current. Something in our society has led him to stop fighting, to cease swimming upstream.
PLAYBOY:
What is that something?
MASTROIANNI:
Doubt, for one thing. Doubt about his place in society, his purpose in life. In my country, for example, I was brought up with the thought of man as the padrone, the pillar of the family. I wanted to be a loving, caring, protective man. But now I feel lost; the sensitive man everywhere feels lost. He is no longer padrone—either of his own world or of his women.
PLAYBOY:
Why not?
MASTROIANNI:
Because women are changing into men, and men are becoming women. At least, men are getting weaker all the time. But much of this is man’s own fault. We shouted, “Women are equal to men; long live the Constitution!” But look what happened. The working woman emerged—angry, aggressive, uncertain of her femininity. And she multiplied—almost by herself. Matriarchy, in the home and in the factory and in business, has made women into sexless monsters and piled them up on psychiatric couches. Instead of finding themselves, they lost what they had. But some see this now and are trying to change back. Women in England, for example, who were the first to raise the standard of equality, are today in retreat.
PLAYBOY:
How about American women
MASTROIANNI:
They should retreat, but they don’t. I’ve never seen so many unhappy, melancholy women. They have liberty—but they are desperate. Poor darlings, they’re so hungry for romance that two little words in their ears are enough to crumble them before your eyes. American women are beautiful, but a little cold and too perfect—too well brought up, with the perfume and the hair always just so and the rose-colored skin. What perfection—and what a bore! Believe me, it makes you want to have a girl with a mustache, cross-eyes and runs in her stockings. I got to know a few of them when I was there, but I swear it was like knowing only one woman. Geraldine Page was the only exception—and an exciting one.” (Thanks Cinema Archive.)
Tags: Marcello Mastroianni
Werner Herzog, one of my favorite filmmakers, discussing my least favorite Werner Herzog film, Nosferatu the Vampyre. Maybe I need to give this updating of German Expressionism another chance. Or perhaps it would have been better if he’d cast Fred Astaire as a stupid, stupid vampire. (Thanks Biblioklept.)
Tags: Werner Herzog
Here’s an oddity I never knew existed until now. In 1975, seven years after making the landmark horror film Night of the Living Dead, George A. Romero directed a serious documentary about old timey pro wrestler Bruno Sammartino. The connection seems to be that they both lived in Pittsburgh. (Romero also did a TV film about Pittsburgh Pirate Willie Stargell in the ’70s.) The following year, Romero released Martin, his eerie, moving allegory of soldiers returning from Vietnam with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Tags: Bruno Sammartino, George A. Romero
I didn’t know until now about filmmaker Cindy Kleine’s Kickstarter campaign to raise money for a documentary about her husband, André Gregory, but I’m glad she reached her goal. I’m a big fan of My Dinner with Andre, as you may have noticed here and here. I’m even a fan of My Breakfast with Blassie.
Tags: Andre Gregory, Cindy Kleine
I posted a brief Jeremy Bernstein New Yorker piece about Stanley Kubrick that was penned in 1965 during the elongated production of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The following year the same writer turned out a much longer profile for the same magazine about the director and his sci-fi masterpiece. Among many other interesting facts, it mentions that MIT AI legend Marvin Minsky, who’s appeared on this blog many times, was a technical consultant for the film. An excerpt from “How About a Little Game?” (subscription required):
By the time the film appears, early next year, Kubrick estimates that he and [Arthur C.] Clarke will have put in an average of four hours a day, six days a week, on the writing of the script. (This works out to about twenty-four hundred hours of writing for two hours and forty minutes of film.) Even during the actual shooting of the film, Kubrick spends every free moment reworking the scenario. He has an extra office set up in a blue trailer that was once Deborah Kerr’s dressing room, and when shooting is going on, he has it wheeled onto the set, to give him a certain amount of privacy for writing. He frequently gets ideas for dialogue from his actors, and when he likes an idea he puts it in. (Peter Sellers, he says, contributed some wonderful bits of humor for Dr. Strangelove.)
In addition to writing and directing, Kubrick supervises every aspect of his films, from selecting costumes to choosing incidental music. In making 2001, he is, in a sense, trying to second-guess the future. Scientists planning long-range space projects can ignore such questions as what sort of hats rocket-ship hostesses will wear when space travel becomes common (in 2001 the hats have padding in them to cushion any collisions with the ceiling that weightlessness might cause), and what sort of voices computers will have if, as many experts feel is certain, they learn to talk and to respond to voice commands (there is a talking computer in 2001 that arranges for the astronauts’ meals, gives them medical treatments, and even plays chess with them during a long space mission to Jupiter–‘Maybe it ought to sound like Jackie Mason,’ Kubrick once said), and what kind of time will be kept aboard a spaceship (Kubrick chose Eastern Standard, for the convenience of communicating with Washington). In the sort of planning that NASA does, such matters can be dealt with as they come up, but in a movie everything is visible and explicit, and questions like this must be answered in detail. To help him find the answers, Kubrick has assembled around him a group of thirty-five artists and designers, more than twenty-five special effects people, and a staff of scientific advisers. By the time this picture is done, Kubrick figures that he will have consulted with people from a generous sampling of the leading aeronautical companies in the United States and Europe, not to mention innumerable scientific and industrial firms. One consultant, for instance, was Professor Marvin Minsky, of M.I.T., who is a leading authority on artificial intelligence and the construction of automata. (He is now building a robot at M.I.T. that can catch a ball.) Kubrick wanted to learn from him whether any of the things he was planning to have his computers do were likely to be realized by the year 2001; he was pleased to find out that they were.•
Tags: Jeremy Bernstein, Jeremy Bernstein A Space Odyssey, Marvin Minsky, Stanley Kubrick
Before 2001: A Space Odyssey became screen legend in 1968, Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke struggled forever to complete the project that was originally entitled, Journey Beyond the Stars. From a 1965 “Talk of the Town” piece by Jeremy Bernstein in the New Yorker (subscription required) about the work-in-progress three years before its release:
Our briefing session took place in the living room of Mr. Kubrick’s apartment. When we got there, Mr. Kubrick was talking on a telephone in the next room, Mr. Clarke had not yet arrived, and three lively Kubrick daughters–the eldest is eleven–were running in and out with several young friends. We settled ourselves in a large chair, and a few minuted later the doorbell rang. One of the little girls went to the door and asked, ‘Who is it?’ A pleasantly English-accented voice answered, through the door, “It’s Clarke,” and the girls began jumping up and down and saying, “It’s Clark Kent!”-a reference to another well-known science-fiction personality. They opened the door, and in walked Mr. Clarke, a cheerful-looking man in his forties. He was carrying several manila envelopes, which, it turned out, contained parts of Journey Beyond the Stars. Mr. Kubrick then came into the room carrying a thick pile of diagrams and charts, and looking like the popular conception of a nuclear physicist who has been interrupted in the middle of some difficult calculations. Mr. Kubrick and Mr. Clarke sat down side by side on a sofa, and we asked them about their joint venture.
Mr. Clarke said that one of the basic problems they’ve had to deal with is how to describe what they are trying to do. “Science-fiction films have always meant monsters and sex, so we have tried to find another term for our film,” said Mr. C.
“About the best we’ve been able to come up with is a space Odyssey–comparable in some ways to Homer’s Odyssey,” said Mr. K. ‘It occurred to us that for the Greeks the vast stretches of the sea must have had the same sort of mystery and remoteness that space has for our generation, and that the far-flung islands Homer’s wonderful characters visited were no less remote to them that the planets our spacemen will soon be landing on are to us. Journey also shares with the Odyssey a concern for wandering, and adventure.”•
Tags: Arthur C. Clarke, Jeremy Bernstein, Jeremy Bernstein A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick
As Argo is released, documentarian Judd Ehrlich has taken to Kickstarter to raise money to finish a stranger and truer film on the topic. It was begun long before the Hollywood version.
Tags: Judd Ehrlich
The great Gene Wilder is the star of what’s probably my third favorite film comedy, Young Frankenstein. (1. Kubrick’s Lolita, 2. Duck Soup.) Here’s Wilder in 1979 in a closed studio discussing his life and career with Merv Griffin.
Tags: Gene Wilder, Merv Grifffin
Pretty amazing 1972 video of Anthony Burgess and Malcolm McDowell discussing Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of A Clockwork Orange.
Tags: Anthony Burgess, Malcolm McDowell
The third and final Jane Fonda post this week: A 1972 cine-essay about a photo of the actress visiting Vietnam, as analyzed by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, who had co-directed her in Tout va bien. This post-script is more successful than the film that it sprang from.
See also:
Jane Fonda and Roger Vadim visit Merv Griffin in 1967, before she was Barbarella or Hanoi Jane or lots of other stuff.
Tags: Jane Fonda, Merv Griffin, Roger Vadim
Mike Douglas and Alfred Hitchcock in conversation for 14 minutes in 1969. That’s Joan Rivers whom Hitchcock zings at the opening.
Tags: Alfred Hitchcock, Joan Rivers, Mike Douglas
Awkward and private, Robert De Niro was never a fan of the talk-show circuit, especially in his prime when he was turning out one indelible performance after another. But he relented for Merv Griffin in 1981, the year he won Best Actor for Raging Bull. De Niro also discuses the next movie he and Martin Scorsese were collaborating on, The King of Comedy.
Francis Ford Coppola speaking with Merv Griffin in 1979, at the end of an insanely brilliant decade of work in which he directed four classics: the first two Godfather films, The Conversation and Apocalypse Now.
Tags: Francis Ford Coppola, Merv Griffin
I caught this promo recently while watching ESPN Classics. It took about three seconds before it was clear that it was directed by Errol Morris.
Tags: Errol Morris
We Need to Talk About Kevin + Chronicle
Is it the children we fear or the future?
As we move deeper into the Information Age, the West seems increasingly concerned that something is awry with the young people. We assign them illnesses to try to explain them and medicine to attempt to placate them. Are they more hyperactive because of the constant flow of stimuli they receive? Dubious. Do they suffer from a higher rate of autism because of vaccines? Nonsense. But we continue to root around for an answer to a question we can’t quite articulate, hoping that the right words or white pills will make it all go away. There’s something about Mary, and her brother is equally worrisome. As the tension mounts, film and TV arm children with old-school crossbows and new-age smartphones, positioning them as capable of the type of atrocities that heretofore has always been committed by those more gray than green.
Two such insightful recent films about these unspeakable creatures are Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin and Josh Trank’s Chronicle. In the former, a mother tries to manage a child who is nihilism incarnate. A cold and brilliant thing who seems to have fallen to Earth, Kevin physically appears to be beyond race and gender, lacking the familiar characteristics that might bring his parents comfort. He’s a new world man–or whatever. The terror he imposes on his quiet family with a string of sadistic acts is just a warm-up for the wrath he’ll unleash on the larger world. In Trank’s thoughtful fantasy, a trio of high schoolers develop telekinetic powers after exposure to some sort of military-experiment radiation. Soon the lost boys can move cars with their minds and fly at will. But parlor tricks soon become blood sport, as the most disaffected of the bunch begins to wreak havoc.
Youth always delivers the new wave, but there’s a foreboding sense that they’ll do something horrible with today’s unparalleled information and tools, as if we’ve given birth to a generation of Frankensteins who’ll turn the electricity on us. But perhaps what’s so disconcerting isn’t that they’re announcing what’s to come but that it’s a future so radically different from what we’ve known. One of the angst-ridden teens in Chronicle says, when he realizes their powers might lead to mayhem: “We’re getting stronger…we need rules.” As we likewise grow stronger, thanks to science and technology and medicine, we also need rules. Rule number one: Don’t shoot the messenger.•
It’s difficult to think of another American who had a life just like Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry, better known as polarizing comedian Stepin Fetchit. Born in 1902, Perry used a stereotypical lazy-man persona to become the first black actor to reach millionaire status. History hasn’t been kind to his screen character, as blacks and whites alike came in time to see it as degrading. But Perry felt otherwise; he believed it was a means to an end. He thought that his on-screen buffoonery, stereotypical as it was, transformed the popular perception of a black man in America from one of a fearsome or predatory figure to that of a lovable clown. And he felt he paved the way for other people of color to become screen stars who didn’t have to play the fool. Perhaps he’s right, though it’s still incredibly painful to watch. Perry became a lightning rod for criticism during the Black Power movement of the 1960s but never backed away from his beliefs.
A tangent: When he was young, Perry was friends with embattled boxer Jack Johnson. (They must have been quite the pair–the fighter who enjoyed making whites nervous and the entertainer who wanted to reassure them.) After he joined the Nation of Islam during the 1960s, Perry supposedly taught Johnson’s “anchor punch” to another controversial African-American heavyweight, Muhammad Ali. The Greatest used the maneuver to defeat Sonny Liston in their second fight. At the 8:00 mark of this passage from the 1970 documentary A.K.A. Cassius Clay, Perry and Ali ham it up for reporters.
Another Perry tangent, this one horribly tragic: His disturbed son, Donald Lambright, who used his stepfather’s name, committed what appeared to be a number of racially motivated murders. From the April 7, 1969 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:
Johnson said Lambright slept with a .30-caliber rifle in his bed.
‘Donald said he needed protection from whites,’ Johnson said. ‘He was paranoiac at the time.’
Johnson said Lambright was friendly with many black militant leaders and was a member of the Republic of New Africa, a black separatist organization.
‘Donald thought he had the answers to a lot of problems. And he felt the only way some of them could be resolved would be through violent action.’
At 9:14 a.m. yesterday, state police said, Lambright and his wife entered the Pennsylvania Turnpike where it crosses the Delaware River from New Jersey.
About 45 minutes later, Lambright began shooting.
Witnesses said most of the firing was done as he drove along, slowly weaving from lane to lane. They said he fired into eastbound traffic. Now and then he pulled over and fired from the roadside.•
Tags: Donald Lambright, Lincoln Perry, Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry, Muhammad Ali, Stepin Fetchit
Charlton Heston interviewed about his career, including parts he would have rather forgotten, by the gleefully obnoxious Russell Harty in 1979.
Tags: Charlton Heston, Russell Harty
Paddy Chayefsky, that brilliant satirist, holding forth spectacularly on the Mike Douglas Show in 1969. It starts with polite chatter about the success of his script for Marty but quickly transitions into a much more serious and futuristic discussion. The writer is full of doom and gloom, of course, during the tumult of the Vietnam Era; his best-case scenario for humankind to live more peacefully is a computer-friendly “new society” that yields to globalization and technocracy, one in which citizens are merely producers and consumers, free of nationalism and disparate identity. Well, some of that came true. All the while, he wears a fun, red lei because one of his fellow guests is Hawaii Five-0 star Jack Lord. Gwen Verdon, Lionel Hampton and Cy Coleman share the panel.
Chayefsky joins the show at the 7:45 mark.
Tags: Jack Lord, Mike Douglas, Paddy Chayefsky
My little brother, that provocateur Steven Boone, summing up the loud, jarring, cynical last decade of multiplex fare in a recent article at Capital New York:
“The video game industry is currently in a war that the movie industry fought and decided last decade. It’s a struggle between loud, assaultive, photorealistic game design that rewards wispy attention spans while demanding minimal problem-solving skills of its players and … games where shotguns to the face and chainsaws to the jugular are not so essential.
The American film industry settled on high-resolution ultraviolence as the default multiplex experience sometime after 9/11 and sometime before its superheroic screen response, The Dark Knight. The violence is not necessarily a matter of content but of the graceless way shots jam up against one another now, keeping us invested through a constant state of agitation where narrative suspense used to do the trick.
During that decade, many viewers retreated from mainstream blockbuster cinema into the bosom of what critics call a television renaissance. So many smart, adult, spellbinding, hilarious TV shows, the story goes. Any stragglers still hoping for an immersive experience at the multiplex were suckers and masochists.”
•••••••••
From “Fuck You Productions”:
Tags: Steven Boone
Sorry to hear of the passing of Nora Ephron, who was one of the women who saved New Journalism in the ’60s and ’70s from being an all-boys school. From “Yossarian Is Alive and Well in the Mexican Desert,” her 1969 New York Times article about Mike Nichols filming Catch-22, a passage about the presence of Orson Welles and his legend:
“The arrival of Orson Welles, for two weeks of shooting in February, was just the therapy the company needed: at the very least, it gave everyone something to talk about. The situation was almost melodramatically ironic: Welles, the great American director now unable to obtain big- money backing for his films, was being directed by 37-year-old Nichols; Welles, who had tried, unsuccessfully, to buy Catch-22 for himself in 1962, was appearing in it to pay for his new film, Dead Reckoning. The cast spent days preparing for his arrival. Touch of Evil was flown in and microscopically reviewed. Citizen Kane was discussed over dinner. Tony Perkins, who had appeared in Welles’s film, The Trial, was repeatedly asked What Orson Welles Was Really Like. Bob Balaban, a young actor who plays Orr in the film, laid plans to retrieve one of Welles’s cigar butts for an admiring friend. And Nichols began to combat his panic by imagining what it would be like to direct a man of Welles’s stature.
‘Before he came,’ said Nichols, ‘I had two fantasies. The first was that he would say his first line, and I would say, ‘NO, NO, NO, Orson !” He laughed. ‘Then I thought, perhaps not. The second was that he would arrive on the set and I would say, ‘Mr. Welles, now if you’d be so kind as to move over here. . .’ And he’d look at me and raise on eyebrow and say, ‘Over there?’ And I’d say, ‘What? Oh, uh, where do you think it should be?”
Welles landed in Guaymas with an entourage that included a cook and experimental film-maker Peter Bogdanovich, who was interviewing him for a Truffaut-Hitchcock-type memoir. For the eight days it took to shoot his two scenes, he dominated the set. He stood on the runway, his huge wet Havana cigar tilting just below his squinting eyes and sagging eye pouches, addressing Nichols and the assembled cast and crew. Day after day, he told fascinating stories of dubbing in Bavaria, looping in Italy and shooting in Yugoslavia. He also told Nichols how to direct the film, the crew how to move the camera, film editor Sam O’Steen how to cut a scene, and most of the actors how to deliver their lines. Welles even lectured Martin Balsam for three minutes on how to deliver the line, ‘Yes, sir.’
A few of the actors did not mind at all. Austin Pendleton got along with Welles simply by talking back to him.
‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like to say that line more slowly?’ Welles asked Pendleton one day.
‘Yes,’ Pendleton replied slowly. ‘I am sure.’
But after a few days of shooting, many of the other actors were barely concealing their hostility toward Welles–particularly because of his tendency to blow his lines during takes. By the last day of shooting, when Welles used his own procedure, a lengthy and painstaking one, to shoot a series of close-ups, most of the people on the set had tuned out on the big, booming raconteur.”
Tags: Mike Nichols, Nora Ephron, Orson Welles, Peter Bogdanovich
From “The Conception, Production and Distribution of Julia Ormond,” David Blum’s revealing 1995 New York Times Magazine profile of a classically trained actor being packaged for a mass stardom that never materialized:
“I FIRST MEET JULIA ORMOND FOUR MONTHS earlier in November 1994. We’re having breakfast at the Parker Meridien in New York, where Paramount Pictures has put her up. She’s in town for wardrobe fittings on Sabrina, which Paramount is producing. She seems upbeat as she tries to unravel for me the mystery of her sudden change in status. She takes her time with every question, and seems intensely quizzical herself about the inescapable belief among those around her that she may soon be a movie star.
It strikes us both as odd because at the moment, almost no one in America outside the movie business has yet heard of her. Until now Ormond has only been known to those who watch the movie business closely by reading movie magazines or scanning E!, cable’s entertainment channel.
As recently as three years ago, she was an unknown actress in London. Today she is pampered by an industry with the resources to provide every necessary comfort, and several optional extras. Ormond suddenly finds herself in the back of stretch limos, and struggling over what to do with the single-stemmed, wrapped-in-plastic roses often passed her way by friendly drivers, pilots and other helping hands. She has a personal assistant, Jane Collins Emanuel, to handle her schedule, her luggage and the roses.
‘I think you’re tapping into the bizarreness,’ Ormond is saying in front of a glass of grapefruit juice that remains untouched. Will Edridge, her pleasant, sandy-haired British doctor-boyfriend, sits beside her quietly. He listens intently as her unusually well-formed thoughts spill forth. Her words betray her emotions more than her face, but there’s an underlying sense that Ormond wants to please. ‘There are too many people who are talented . . . who fulfill all the things that are needed but are not movie stars,’ she says. ‘I don’t know what happened either.’ Ormond agrees that it would be interesting for a writer to examine the process of becoming a movie star without a single major movie in release.”
••••••••••
“Once upon a time…”:
Tags: David Blum, Jane Collins Emanuel, Julia Ormond, Will Edridge