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“You Had This Dream. You Know, When You Were Sleeping? You Said Something About Blood.”

June 15, 2011 in Excerpts, Film, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

From “The Devil and John Holmes,” Mike Sager’s 1989 Rolling Stone article about the further decline of porn star John Holmes, whose rapacious drug habit led him from adult films to even darker and more desperate corners of Tinseltown in the 1980s:

“Blood! Blood! So much blood!” Holmes was having a nightmare. Tossing and moaning, punching and kicking. “So much blood!” he groaned over and over.

Jeana was scared to death. She didn’t know what to do. Wake him? Let him scream? It was Thursday, July 2nd, 1981. After bathing at Sharon’s, Holmes had come here, to this motel in the Valley. He walked through the door, flopped on the bed, passed out.

Jeana sat very still on the edge of the bed, watching aTV that was mounted on the wall. After a while, the news. The top story was something about a mass murder. Four bodies. A bloody mess. A house on Wonderland Avenue. Jeana stood up, moved closer to the tube. “That house,” she thought. Things started to click. “I’ve waited outside that house. Isn’t that where John gets his drugs?”

Hours passed, John woke. Jeana said nothing. They made a run to McDonald’s for hamburgers. They watched some more TV. Then came the late-night news.The cops were calling it the Four on the Floor Murders. Dead were Joy Miller, Billy DeVerell, Ron Launius, Barbara Richardson. The Wonderland Gang. The murder weapon was a steel pipe with threading at the ends. Thread marks found on walls, skulls, skin. House tossed by assailants. Blood and brains splattered everywhere, even on the ceilings. The bodies were dis- covered by workmen next door; they’d heard faint cries from the back of the house: “Help me. Help me.” A fifth victim was carried out alive. Susan Launius, 25, Ron Launius’s wife. She was in intensive care with a severed finger and brain damage.The murders were so brutal that police were comparing the case to the Tate-LaBianca murders by the Manson Family.

Holmes and Jeana watched from the bed. Jeana was afraid to look at John. She cut her eyes slowly, caught his profile. He was frozen. The color drained from his face. She actually saw it. First his forehead, then his cheeks, then his neck. He went white.

Jeana said nothing. After a while, the weather report came on. She cleared her throat “John?”

“What?”

“You had this dream. You know, when you were sleeping? You said something about blood.”

Holmes’s eyes bulged. He looked very scared. She’d never seen him look scared before. “Yeah, well, uh,” he said. “Um, I lifted the trunk of the car, and I gave myself a nosebleed yesterday. Don’t worry.”

Paul Thomas Anderson providing commentary for scene from the Holmes documentary Exhausted.

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“The First Time I Lay Actual Eyes On The Real David Lynch On The Set Of His Movie, He’s Peeing On A Tree”

June 12, 2011 in Excerpts, Film, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Premiere magazine, which published from 1987-2007, offered first-rate reporting about the movie industry for a good, long time, until corporate interference reduced it and destroyed it. One of its last gasps of greatness was “David Lynch Keeps His Head,” David Foster Wallace’s 1996 on set-reportage about the mystifying filmmaker as he made the equally inscrutable Lost Highway. An excerpt:

“The first time I lay actual eyes on the real David Lynch on the set of his movie, he’s peeing on a tree. This is on 8 January in L.A.’s Griffith Park, where some of Lost Highway’s exteriors and driving scenes are being shot. He is standing in the bristly underbrush off the dirt road between the base camp’s trailers and the set, peeing on a stunted pine. Mr. David Lynch, a prodigious coffee drinker, apparently pees hard and often, and neither he nor the production can afford the time it’d take to run down the base camp’s long line of trailers to the trailer where the bathrooms are every time he needs to pee. So my first (and generally representative) sight of Lynch is from the back, and (understandably) from a distance. Lost Highway’s cast and crew pretty much ignore Lynch’s urinating in public, (though I never did see anybody else relieving themselves on the set again, Lynch really was exponentially busier than everybody else.) and they ignore it in a relaxed rather than a tense or uncomfortable way, sort of the way you’d ignore a child’s alfresco peeing.”

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Trailer for Lost Highway:

More David Foster Wallace posts:

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DC + JLG

June 9, 2011 in Film, Videos | Permalink

Dick Cavett queries Jean-Luc Godard in 1980. Both were past-peak but smart.

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“The Script Was So Bad”

June 8, 2011 in Film, Videos | Permalink

Casablanca went through an astounding number of writers and directors, somehow becoming an all-time classic against all odds. In 1971, Ingrid Bergman recalled the turmoil for an interviewer whose hair was subsequently declared a sovereign nation.

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“If One Radiates Doom And Gloom About The Possibilities Of Technology, One Is In Danger Of Creating A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy About Self-Destruction”

June 8, 2011 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Two excerpts from Arthur C. Clarke’s 1986 Playboy interview.

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“PLAYBOY: You’ve said that the famous opening sequence, in which the bone thrown into the air by the prehistoric man-apes becomes the space vehicle Discovery, came about by accident.

CLARKE: Yes, Stanley and I were trying to figure out that crucial transition. We were walking back to the studio in London and, for some reason, Stanley had a broomstick in his hand. He threw it up into the air, in a playful way, and he kept doing it, and it was at that moment that the idea of making the broomstick into the bone that gets turned into Discovery came about. I was afraid it was going to hit me in the head. [Laughs] So later we filmed it with some sort of bone. That shot was the only one in the movie done on location. It was shot just outside the studio. There was a platform built and, just beneath it, all the London buses were going by.”

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“PLAYBOY: In the postscript to your book Ascent to Orbit, you talk about technology quite a bit. You have a lot of technology in your own home—your John Deere computer “Archie,” your satellite dish, your Kaypro-II computer. Yet you write, “This power over time and space still seems a marvel to me, even though I have been preaching its advent for decades. But the next generation will take it completely for granted and wonder how we ever managed to run the world without it … which we never did. May these new tools help them to succeed where we failed so badly.” Do you still think that way?

CLARKE: [Pauses] Absolutely. That’s why I’m so delighted that kids these days are not using their computers strictly to play games but are using them to process information. Knowledge really is power, and computer technology has increased an individual’s potential for power considerably. I still think it’s one’s duty to be optimistic about the possibilities of that power, without being unrealistic. It’s just that if one radiates doom and gloom about the possibilities of technology, one is in danger of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy about self-destruction.”

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Bone becomes spaceship:

More Arthur C. Clarke posts:

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“Once Voted ‘The Filthiest Person Alive,’ Divine Built His Reputation On The Ability To Shock”

June 8, 2011 in Excerpts, Film, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

The shit-kicking (and shit-eating!) Divine visited that bombastic chucklehead Tom Snyder in 1979. Also on hand: Warhol superstar Holly Woodlawn.

From Divine’s 1988 obituary in the Times of London: “Divine, the 21-stone drag artist who has died in Los Angeles at the age of 42, won a cult following through his appearances in American underground films.

Once voted ‘the filthiest person alive,’ Divine built his reputation on the ability to shock. But it was, he claimed, part of a calculated assault on what he saw as American materalism and hypocrisy.

He always disliked being labelled a transvestite and insisted that cha-cha heels and thigh-splitting spandex dresses were purely ‘work clothes’ designed to make people laugh.

He was born Harris Glen Milstead and started his career as a hairdresser in Baltimore, Maryland. The film director John Waters, who had been at school with him, devised his professional name.

Made during the 1970s, the Waters/Divine films were deliberately raucous, crudely made and sexually explicit but achieved a critical respectability as a searing portrait of a sick society. They included Desperate Living, a tale of rape, murder and cannibalism, and Female Trouble, in which Divine played a delinquent schoolgirl who is violated by a struck driver and ends up in the electric chair.”

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“It Gets Bigger All The Time Without Ever Becoming More Coherent”

May 30, 2011 in Books, Excerpts, Film, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

First published in 1975, the book now stretches past 1,000 pages.

From “Hollywood: A Love Story,” an excellent article in the Atlantic by astute cultural critic Clive James about David Thomson, that woolly film maven best known for his indispensible and idiosyncratic reference book:

“After five editions in 35 years, Thomson’s famous compendium of biographical sketches about the movie people—hey, it’s read by the movie people, the movie people are fighting to get into it, male stars measure their manhood by the length of their entry—is still a shantytown with the ambitions of a capital city. It gets bigger all the time without ever becoming more coherent. But with more than a thousand pages of print to wander in, only the most churlish visitor would complain about lack of cogency. Better to rejoice at the number of opportunities to scream in protest at what the author has left out, put in, skimmed over, or gone on about with untoward zeal. As a book meant to be argued with, it’s a triumph.

Also, there is the frustrating consideration that Thomson is often right. Most people of his generation who have spent their lives seeing every properly released movie even if it stars Steven Seagal are incapable of judging them. The reason is simple: those people are monomaniacs. Thompson has found time to do other things: read books, breathe clean air, cook and eat real food.”

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David Thomson in 2010 at Google Talks:

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Orson Welles Two Hours Before He Died

May 27, 2011 in Film, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

The 70-year-old legend passed away soon after this talk with Merv Griffin.

More Orson Welles Posts:

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A 1970s Adaptation Of J.G. Ballard’s Crash

May 22, 2011 in Books, Excerpts, Film, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

An experimental 17-minute BBC version. Better than Cronenberg’s 1996 adaptation, I think.

 

From a piece about Ballard in the Los Angeles Times by David L. Ulin: “If J.G. Ballard — the visionary British novelist who died Sunday of prostate cancer at age 78 — ends up being remembered, it will likely be as a science fiction writer who aspired to use genre as a vehicle for art. That’s true enough, in a certain small-bore manner, but it’s ultimately reductive, a way of categorizing Ballard that his entire career stood against.

A member of the New Wave science fiction movement of the 1960s, Ballard started out writing proto-environmental thrillers that highlighted the prescience of his imagination: The Wind From Nowhere posits a world-wide windstorm that becomes apocalyptic, while The Drowned World is about a planet swamped by risen sIt was really in the 1970s, however, that Ballard found his voice as a writer, focusing on the dangers of mechanization and socialization, the tension between the veneer of civilization and the animal brutality it sought to conceal. “

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Tom Snyder Interviews Alfred Hitchcock (1973)

May 19, 2011 in Film, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Tom Snyder was no Dick Cavett, but a lost Hitchcock interview is always great.

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Classic Film: Salesman (1968)

May 18, 2011 in Film, Videos | Permalink

Creative destruction is an essential part of economic regeneration, as paradigms shift, structures change and tools develop. Fresh ideas challenge the accepted order, and emerging industries replace established ones. Simply put, it’s out with the old and in with the new. We’re experiencing it now as the information economy and digital communications ascend, disappearing other industries. But even if this process is best (and even necessary) for long-term solvency, what about those left behind in the shuffle, those dots on the graph who are made with red ink?

This situation, of course, is nothing new. Albert and David Maysles made this prickly transition period the crux of their breakthrough 1968 documentary, Salesman, which put a sad and human face on those who were moving as fast as they could while still being left behind. In vérité style, the filmmakers follow a crew of Massachusetts-based door-to-door bible salesmen who try to push handsomely illustrated books on working-class people who are struggling to feed the kids and pay the mortgage. By the late ’60s, itinerant peddling had reached obsolescence as enclosed malls became popular, people grew reluctant to open their doors for strangers and cars were so ubiquitous that no one needed the “store” to come to them. Additionally, religion and traditional values were losing their grip on the collective will of the people, so these sellers were up against it.

There are funny moments in cheap motels and in the modest, often shabby, homes they visit, but as one of the salesman, middle-aged Paul “The Badger” Brennan, struggles to keep his job and quell his frustrations, the movie develops into an American tragedy. Right before his eyes (and ours), Brennan’s way of life runs out of time before he does. As the regional managers berate the crew into producing bible sales that seem to grow scarcer by the day, the men have to fool themselves into not losing their religion. But Brennan, a wizened chain-smoker, can no longer manage the ruse. “If a guy’s not a success he’s got nothing to blame but hisself!” barks one of the bosses. But sometimes problems are more complex than that and the sweep of history wider.•

Jack Kroll of Newsweek interviews the Maysles:

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“He Had Wasted Away To A Comparative Shadow From His Comical Bumbling Bulk”

May 17, 2011 in Excerpts, Film, Videos | Permalink

Great when they were silent and great when they talked, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy spend time together for the final time ever in this home movie, likely shot in 1956, the year before Hardy died. (Thanks Open Culture.)

From Hardy’s Los Angeles Times obituary: “Oliver Hardy, rotund film comedian, died yesterday. He was 65. Death came to the portly half of the famed Laurel and Hardy comedy team from the effects of a paralytic stroke he suffered last September 12. So severe was the stroke that it left him almost completely paralyzed. He was unable to speak and could hardly move one arm. He had wasted away to a comparative shadow from his comical bumbling bulk which at the height of his fame bulged to 350 pounds.”

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Fat & Skinny in “The Music Box” in 1932:

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“The Last Eight, Nine Years Of My Life Have Been A Mess”

May 13, 2011 in Excerpts, Film, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

"Have you ever been analyzed? I was afraid of it at first." (Image by Carl Van Vechten.)

Longform made an incredible find with “The Duke In His Domain,” a 1957 New Yorker profile of Marlon Brando by Truman Capote. The former was already an icon thanks to Streetcar, The Wild One and On the Waterfront; the latter was still roughly a decade from publishing his masterpiece, In Cold Blood. Capote traveled to the set of Sayonara in Tokyo to interview Brando, who was at the start of a long personal decline, still somewhat accessible but increasingly less so. An excerpt:

“The maid had reëntered the star’s room, and Murray, on his way out, almost tripped over the train of her kimono. She put down a bowl of ice and, with a glow, a giggle, an elation that made her little feet, hooflike in their split-toed white socks, lift and lower like a prancing pony’s, announced, ‘Appapie! Tonight on menu appapie.’

Brando groaned. ‘Apple pie. That’s all I need.’ He stretched out on the floor and unbuckled his belt, which dug too deeply into the swell of his stomach. ‘I’m supposed to be on a diet. But the only things I want to eat are apple pie and stuff like that.’ Six weeks earlier, in California, Logan had told him he must trim off ten pounds for his role in Sayonara, and before arriving in Kyoto he had managed to get rid of seven. Since reaching Japan, however, abetted not only by American-type apple pie but by the Japanese cuisine, with its delicious emphasis on the sweetened, the starchy, the fried, he’d regained, then doubled this poundage. Now, loosening his belt still more and thoughtfully massaging his midriff, he scanned the menu, which offered, in English, a wide choice of Western-style dishes, and, after reminding himself ‘I’ve got to lose weight,’ ordered soup, beefsteak with French-fried potatoes, three supplementary vegetables, a side dish of spaghetti, rolls and butter, a bottle of sake, salad, and cheese and crackers.

‘And appapie, Marron?’

He sighed. ‘With ice cream, honey.’

Capote, world-weary in 1959. (Image by Roger Higgins.)

Though Brando is not a teetotaller, his appetite is more frugal when it comes to alcohol. While we were awaiting the dinner, which was to be served to us in the room, he supplied me with a large vodka on the rocks and poured himself the merest courtesy sip. Resuming his position on the floor, he lolled his head against a pillow, drooped his eyelids, then shut them. It was as though he’d dozed off into a disturbing dream; his eyelids twitched, and when he spoke, his voice—an unemotional voice, in a way cultivated and genteel, yet surprisingly adolescent, a voice with a probing, asking, boyish quality—seemed to come from sleepy distances.

‘The last eight, nine years of my life have been a mess,’ he said. ‘Maybe the last two have been a little better. Less rolling in the trough of the wave. Have you ever been analyzed? I was afraid of it at first. Afraid it might destroy the impulses that made me creative, an artist. A sensitive person receives fifty impressions where somebody else may only get seven. Sensitive people are so vulnerable; they’re so easily brutalized and hurt just because they are sensitive. The more sensitive you are, the more certain you are to be brutalized, develop scabs. Never evolve. Never allow yourself to feel anything, because you always feel too much. Analysis helps. It helped me. But still, the last eight, nine years I’ve been pretty mixed up, a mess pretty much.'”

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Dick Cavett interviews a reluctant Brando in 1973. After the show, Brando took Cavett to dinner in Chinatown, and the actor famously punched paparazzo Ron Galella, breaking his jaw. The photographer sued and ultimately agreed to a $40,000 settlement.

Watch the rest of interview here.

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Classic Film: Night Of The Living Dead (1968)

May 13, 2011 in Film, Videos | Permalink

Released the year after the Summer of Love, when the counterculture lost its warmth, George A. Romero’s low-budget landmark, a genre-definer about the undead feasting on the living, can be read as a parable of a culture run amok, feared by those with no desire to join it.

Barbra (Judith O’Dea) and Johnny (Russell Streiner) are young adult siblings headed to a desolate Pennsylvania graveyard to place flowers on their father’s resting place, the way good middle-class children do. Conservative Barbra has no problem with the pilgrimage, but Johnny grumbles about such customs not being his scene. Suddenly he has an out, but not one he’d hoped for: A boneyard zombie seizes and murders him. Barbra escapes to a nearby house, empty except for a bloody corpse, but how long will she be able to stay in one piece since more and more of the undead surround the home? Misery loves company and the terrified woman gets some when a few other members of the living, including resourceful Ben (Duane Jones), also take shelter from the marauders in the humble abode.

Trying to find out what’s turned the formerly sensible world upside down, Ben gets a radio working and listens for information. Did a recent space probe emit radiation that is making the dead rise? Is it something else? The answer isn’t clear, but one thing is certain: A meat-loving legion is cannibalizing the uninitiated and is still plenty hungry. The radio announcer reports that “frightened people are seeking refuge in churches, schools and government buildings.” But none of these traditional bastions of respectability can provide much comfort in a society gone insane.

In one chilling scene, a small child, possessed by the zombie madness, approaches her cowering, pleading mother with a sharp object in hand and demonstrates precocious butchering skills. The following year this scene would be repeated with scary precision for real by sons and daughters of the middle class answering to a zombie named Manson. The dead would rise and the culture would change forever, and no one could ever truly feel safe again.•

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Classic Film: The Conversation (1974)

May 4, 2011 in Film, Videos | Permalink

A product of the Watergate decade, an era when spying and snooping at least gave us pause, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation was made before ubiquitous public security cameras were watching us, phones were tracking us and seemingly everyone was living in public. A lack of privacy has never been as well-regarded as it is today nor have the perils of such actions, which are investigated in this film, been so invisible.

Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) is a jazz loving San Franciscan who earns his living as a surveillance expert, stealthily recording private conversations with an elaborate array of mikes of his own making. Caul is top dog in the trade, and he’s paid handsomely to find answers for his bosses and not ask them any questions. A devout Catholic, the wire tapper has moral issues with his work, especially since information he culled in a past case led to murder. But it’s hard for Caul to stop doing what he’s doing because he’s so damn good at it, something of an artist.

While he may be an artist, Caul is definitely a hypocrite. He keeps everything about himself strictly private, even from his girlfriend (Teri Garr) and point man (John Cazale). He rationalizes he’s doing it for safety reasons, but it’s also in his nature. This delicate balance is thrown off-kilter when Caul believes his latest assignment, in which a wealthy man is paying for info about his young wife, may also lead to murder. Caul can’t head down that road again and a crisis of conscience makes him go rogue. Soon he himself is the target of surveillance, a probing that he can’t withstand.

In the era that saw the downfall of an American President who listened to the tapes of others and erased his own, The Conversation was amazingly relevant, but in some ways it may be even more meaningful in this exhibitionist age, in which we gleefully hand over our privacy to satisfy our egos. As Caul and Nixon learned, and as we may yet, those who press PLAY don’t always get to choose when to press STOP.•

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“I Have Been Shot At, Without Being Hit, Much More Seriously”

May 1, 2011 in Excerpts, Film, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

“You may speculate as much as you want.” (Image by erinc salor.)

As Werner Herzog takes an unlikely step into the world of 3-D with Cave of Forgotten Dreams, he receives a smart profile in GQ courtesy of Chris Heath. The opening of “Mad German Auteur, Now in 3-D!“:

“Today Werner Herzog has chosen to be interviewed indoors. Perhaps it’s for the best. One of the more puzzling and improbable moments in the legendary 68-year-old German director’s career, and there have been many, came when he was doing a filmed interview for a BBC program called The Culture Show in 2006. He was standing a few miles from here on some barren scrubland in the Hollywood Hills, chosen so that the city of Los Angeles would be the backdrop falling away behind him, and he was explaining how nobody seems to care about his films in Germany when an unexpected noise interrupted him. Herzog flinched. Understandably so, because he had just been shot.

It has never been established who was doing the shooting—if it was more than just someone with an air rifle taking a random pop at a stranger for fun, it may have been because Herzog and the film crew were trespassing. Afterward, Herzog refused to call the police, fearing a SWAT-type overreaction, and he also declined, for the same reason, to seek medical help. Still, the pellet made its mark—under his mauve and pink windmill-motif boxer shorts, now blood-blotted, was a seeping entry wound near Herzog’s groin.

This shooting is an event he still chooses to play down—’It was kind of insignificant’—although I get the sense he also quite likes the opportunity to play it down. ‘It was just very silly,’ he insists. ‘I have been shot at, without being hit, much more seriously. What I experienced here was completely harmless.’ Barely worth noting. Though when I persist in challenging him to name one other person who has ever been shot in this way while doing a TV interview in America, he naturally has no answer. ‘The funny thing is, people sometimes believe I make things up, and nobody would believe it if it hadn’t been caught on tape. Nobody would have believed it.’

He is right. It seemed so unlikely, so preposterous, and yet somehow so perfectly Herzog. So much so, I tell him, that I think some people still suspect it was a great stunt he’d somehow arranged.

‘You may speculate as much as you want,’ says Herzog, a man whose own work frequently involves fascinating juxtapositions of fact and fantasy, and who is long accustomed to drawing such suspicions.”

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“It is not a significant wound.”

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Other Werner Herzog posts:


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“Dennis Hopper Was Undisturbed. Furor Trails Him Like A Pet Anaconda.”

April 29, 2011 in Excerpts, Film, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Open Culture posted a bunch of Andy Warhol screen tests, including the Dennis Hopper one from 1965, which reminded me of “The Easy Rider Runs Wild in the Andes,” a great 1970 Life magazine article about Hopper that I came across on Google Books. At the time of the Life piece, Hopper had carte blanche to do whatever he wanted as a filmmaker thanks to the Easy Rider phenomenon. Such freedom poses dangers for a free spirit. Hopper went to Peru with a cast that included Samuel Fuller and Toni Basil, and embarked on a quixotic, confused project, eventually entitled The Last Movie, which pissed away all of his new capital. His career never completely recovered until his insane turn in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.

From Brad Darrach’s Life article: “Peru has painfully learned to live with earthquakes, avalanches, tidal waves, jaguars and poisonous snakes. But Dennis Hopper was something else. When the director of Easy Rider arrived in Lima several months ago, a reporter from La Prensa asked his opinion of marijuana (illegal in Peru) and ‘homosexualism.’ Taking a long reflective pull on an odd-looking cigarette. Dennis said he thought everybody should ‘do his thing,’ and then allowed that he himself had lived with a lesbian and found it ‘groovy.’ No remotely comparable statement had ever appeared in a Peruvian newspaper. The clergy screamed, the ruling junta’s colonels howled. Within 24 hours the government denounced the article and issued a decree repealing freedom of the press.

Dennis Hopper was undisturbed. Furor trails him like a pet anaconda. At 34, he is known in Hollywood as a sullen renegade who talks revolution, settles arguments with karate, goes to bed with groups and has taken trips on everything you can swallow or shoot.

On the other hand, in the salons and galleries of Los Angeles and New York he is recognized as a talented poet, painter, sculptor, photographer and as a leading collector of pop-art. He is also, after eight years on the movie industry’s blacklist, the hottest director in Hollywood. Easy Rider, which cost only $370,000, is rapidly approaching a projected $50 million gross. In the process it has polarized a new film audience of under-30s, generated a new school of talented young directors such as Jack Nicholson, Peter Bogdanovich, Richard Rush and Melvin Van Peebles, and established the style of a New Hollywood in which producers wear love beads instead of diamond stickpins and blow grass when they used to chew Coronoas.”

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Classic Film: Smile (1975)

April 26, 2011 in Film | Permalink

Made during another era when American exceptionalism was at risk, Michael Ritchie’s 1975 satire, Smile, takes the pulse of a nation plagued by recession and sagging confidence at a regional beauty pageant in Northern California. Ritchie spent the 1970s meditating on a variety of American institutions as contact sport: commerce (Prime Cut), politics (The Candidate) and sports itself (Bad News Bears and Semi-Tough), looking at the ties the bind us, the competition that defines us and the amazing way we keep playing a game that’s clearly rigged.

High school girls (Joan Prather, Annette O’Toole and Melanie Griffith, among others) descend on Santa Rosa, California, to compete to become the Young American Miss representative for the Golden State. They all come from different backgrounds, but each is determined to achieve. Apart from light comedy segments of the girls’ less-than-amazing singing and dancing skills, Ritchie treats their hopes and dreams with seriousness. These aren’t bad or foolish people–they’re just doing the best that they can.

As the three-day competition wears on, you see the strain on the girls’ faces, as they come to realize that winning isn’t really so great and losing is unacceptable. They’re all essentially participating in something they know isn’t true, but since it’s already begun they may as well see it to the end. And they’re encouraged to do so by barely functional adults, like pageant organizer Brenda (Barbara Feldon), a former contestant whose own hopes have been dashed by an unhappy marriage and myriad other disappointments.

Despite all the females on display, the central character is pageant judge Big Bob (Bruce Dern), a used-car salesman and all-around local booster who is a true believer in the American Dream. But Bob has a problem: a close friend of his, grown despondent with the meaninglessness of his life, has become a bitter alcoholic who wants to leave town in search of something better. Big Bob won’t hear of it. He involves his friend in an idiotic local fraternal order, encourages him to cut down on his drinking and bails him out of jail when his emotions finally explode. But as he counsels his buddy, Big Bob comes to acknowledge that he too has settled for less than he hoped for. He’s a good soul, but he’s been bluffing his whole life, and in this moment his faith is shaken. But you can’t keep Big Bob down for long. Come Monday he’ll be back at the used-car lot, twisting his stiff upper lip into a smile.•

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Classic Film: Being There (1979)

April 22, 2011 in Film, Politics, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Not so long ago in America, when privacy was still an option and TV was the dominant medium, we feared that maybe this box could prove us idiots, that it could be used to dupe us at the highest levels, that Trilateral Commissions could fool us with Manchurian Candidates, that we could elect a President who was a propped-up simpleton or even an enemy among us. Now, of course, with the Internet’s constant flow of information and crowdsourcing vetting each candidate, all of those fears should be banished. But, of course, they’ve just been heightened. Hal Ashby’s picture-perfect realization of Jerzy Kosinski’s rich 1971 novella, Being There, written during the era when television was considered the problem with us, provides some clues to this phenomenon, though probably not the ones it intended.

Chance (Peter Sellers) is a mentally-challenged gardener who’s worked his entire life at the Washington D.C. home of man who has just passed away. Chance, who’s never left the grounds or learned to read or write, has learned all his life lessons from watching television. (“I like to watch,” he tells all he meets, often having has mantra to passivity misunderstood.) Since he’s not mentioned in the old man’s will, he’s evicted by lawyers. Forced into a spinning world he’s previously encountered only on the static tube, the bewildered man has unlikely good luck when he is hit by a limo carrying the wife of a political power broker. His injury is slight, but Eve (Shirley MacLaine) takes Chance in, and she and her sickly kingmaker husband (Melvyn Douglas) are enchanted by him, mistaking his opacity for wisdom, believing through a series of misunderstandings that he is a financial hotshot named “Chauncey Gardner.” Soon, Chance has met with the President (Jack Warden) and been quoted on TV by the beleaguered Commander in Chief. A lonely nation turns its eyes to Chance, and in addition to advising the President, he is soon being considered a potential candidate himself for the nation’s highest office.

George W. Bush was essentially the final TV candidate, so why have conspiracy theories been trumped up in an age when so little can be hidden? Perhaps if there is no unknown to fear we create it. Perhaps, like Chance, we like to watch, but what we really love is to see what we want to see.•

 

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Recent Film: Marwencol (2010)

April 18, 2011 in Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

There are stories of people awakening from horrifying head injuries and being able to speak languages that they never knew before. Perhaps these tales are urban legends, but that’s not the case with Mark Hogancamp, the subject of Jeff Malmberg’s amazing documentary, who learned to communicate in a whole new way after barely surviving a savage beating.

Hogancamp was a gifted amateur artist and raging alcoholic who loved women–and wearing their clothes. One night about a decade ago he drunkenly acknowledged to a group of young men in an upstate New York bar that he was a cross-dresser and they battered him into a nine-day coma and caused massive brain damage and memory loss. Medicare cruelly cut Hogancamp off long before his recovery was complete, so he had to create his own therapy.

With hands now unsteady, drawing was no longer possible. So Hogancamp collected junk and made small purchases at the local hobby shop and worked meticulously to create an elaborate hyperrealistic scale version of a fantasy WWII-era Belgian town, called Marwencol, with characters based on himself, his relatives, his friends and his attackers. Into this tableaux he introduced narratives that allowed him to jog his memory and run through his tortured feelings about his victimization. Hogancamp took thousands of photographs of his sprawling installation and serendipitously became a celebrated outsider artist.

Perhaps what’s most interesting is seeing the stunning ways the human brain can compensate for such devastation, not able to completely restore what’s been lost but activating new pathways that have never been utilized before. Marwencol isn’t a simple, life-affirming film. It acknowledges all the rage that still seethes within the artist, but it is an amazing tale of perseverance. Somehow Hogancamp took the loose threads of his memories and weaved a rich tapestry, created something from nothing when nothing was all that seemed to be left inside his head.•

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Strange, Small & Forgotten Films: Two Lovers (2008)

April 14, 2011 in Film | Permalink

James Gray’s beautiful 2008 romantic drama was largely lost in the wreckage of Joaquin Phoenix’s misguided, well-calibrated and public “mental breakdown,” which served as a test run of sorts for Charlie Sheen’s sadly real and much more interesting one. Making the stupid stunt even more maddening is that Two Lovers contains the best performance of Phoenix’s career.

Leonard Kraditor (Phoenix) is recently out of a mental hospital but not nearly out of danger. A broken engagement led to a suicide attempt and once liberated from the facility Leonard spends time in between subsequent attempts to do himself in by working at his father’s Brooklyn dry cleaners and taking gorgeous black-and-white photographs of street scenes. Into his life come two very different women: Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), the daughter of his father’s business partner who yearns to tend to his wounded, sensitive soul; and his druggie next-door-neighbor, Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), who is caught up in a destructive romance with a married man.

Leonard is trapped between what’s right and what feels right, dating the stable woman but longing for the one whose inner turmoil matches his own. But as he’s forced to make a choice he realizes that perhaps the choice isn’t his, and that the decisions made for us are almost always less satisfying than the ones we make ourselves, whether they’re for the best or not.•

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“The Film Company Retained A Full-Time Snake Man, Who Appeared Every Morning On The Set With A Sack Full Of Pythons”

April 8, 2011 in Excerpts, Film, Urban Studies | Permalink

An inside look at the insane set of Apocalypse Now, reported with verve in 1977 in Newsweek by Maureen Orth:

“Life on the set – four different locations in the Philippines – also escalated quickly to apocalyptic dimensions. The young crew, composed largely of Americans, Filipions and Italians, weathered a typhoon, survived dysentery and sweated through day after day of relentless heat – alleviated by periodic R&R trips to Hong Kong. Stuntmen amused themselves by diving from fourth-story windows into the motel pool below. The prop man, Doug Madison, became adept at fabricating top secret CIA documents, thought nothing of driving 400 miles to fetch a special Army knife, and made a connection with a supplier of real corpses – before he was vetoed. At one point, Coppola asked Tavoularis to produce 1,000 blackbirds, which prompted the designer to consider making cardboard beaks for pigeons and dyeing them black. The film company retained a full-time snake man, who appeared every morning on the set with a sack full of pythons. The Italians brought in pasta and mozzarella from Italy in film cans. Did Coppola want a tribe of primitive mountain people living on the set in their own functioning village? He got it.” (Thanks Longform.)

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Classic Film: The Man In The White Suit (1951)

April 8, 2011 in Film | Permalink

Science has long reduced drudgery while expanding economies, but what if it forgets to do the latter? Alexander Mackendrick’s 1951 Ealing comedy looks at the purgatory a society becomes when work is drastically reduced but workers are not. It’s a time much like our own.

Sidney Stratton (Alec Guinness) is a brilliant if haphazard chemist who’s been bounced by Cambridge and a string of textile firms due to his curious, combustible research projects, many of which end in literal explosions. But most explosive of all is his new invention: a fabric that can’t be dirtied or damaged and never wears out. Stratton has the indestructible fabric fashioned into a white suit and is prepared to present it to the press but neither Capital nor Labor is quite so sanguine about a magical material that will cause profits to plummet and displace workers. Soon, Stratton is on the run, his life’s work on his back, being pursued by suits and overalls alike.

Made during the decade when economist Joseph Schumpeter redefined the Marxist term “creative destruction” to mean innovations that bring with them uncertain times and painful adjustments, Mackendrick’s satirical comedy presaged the vocational tumult of the Information Age, when numerous careers have been disappeared into the 0s and 1s of an unblinking computer screen. “I admit some will suffer,” says one the film’s seemingly forward-thinking captains of industry, “but I will not stand in the way of progress.” As if any of us could.•

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Classic Film: 8½ (1963)

April 4, 2011 in Film | Permalink

Pauline Kael whiffed big time on "8½," calling it a "structural disaster."

An ode to giving up instead of going on, Federico Fellini’s 8½ is a mid-career, mid-life crisis film that should be self-indulgent and insufferable but is instead one of the most audacious, transformative works of art of the last half-century.

A voluptuary grown weary of the flesh, distraught director Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni) bathes in the soothing waters of a spa while planning his next project, an extravagant sci-fi film with a cast of thousands. His personal life seems to have just as many speaking roles, as collaborators, agents, producers, family, friends, mistresses, journalists and hangers-on attempt to push the forlorn filmmaker into completing the complex script and pull from him what they need for themselves, material or emotional. And that’s not even counting all the ghosts he encounters in his head.

Of course, Guido is far from faultless himself, having long treated his beautiful wife (Anouk Aimée) and string of mistresses carelessly. In one of the film’s famous fantasy sequences, the many women he’s done wrong turn on him and Guido brandishes a bullwhip to try to keep them at bay. But the demons that threaten his latest epic will not be turned aside, circling violently and moving in for the kill.

Guido finally has an epiphany when he decides to shut down the expensive picture and walk away from all that he has become. In the film’s final ten minutes, as the scaffolding of the set is torn down and colorful extras frolic in the ruin of his life, Guido is reborn as he accepts his collaborator’s nihilistic yet oddly soothing view of the world, realizing the figurative facades he’s built around him need to likewise be shaken to the ground. As his co-writer says to him, “It is better to destroy than create what’s unessential.”•

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“I Really Didn’t Know Bob Dylan. I Didn’t Know Who He Was.”

March 30, 2011 in Excerpts, Film, Videos | Permalink

dylan

D.A. Pennebaker interviewed about his landmark 1966 Bob Dylan doc, Don’t Look Back, by the legendary music and culture journo Greil Marcus.

From a 1967 Life magazine review of the movie:

Technically, Don’t Look Back is not much above a home movie. Pennebaker uses available light and his sound pick-up equipment seems to be immersed in potato salad, which loses him a lot of dialogue. But Dylan emerges as a human being. He checks himself in the mirror a couple of times, puncturing forever the theory that he is groomed by a Waring blender. He loses his temper. He reads articles about Bob Dylan and giggles. Fans pursue him, a drunk incites him to violent cursing, friends relax him, a pre-concert wait creates tension. He is alone early on stage (the tour antedated the electric accompaniment he uses today), where his voice and soulful images have the power and the beauty to transfix an audience of thousands.•

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