Monday, May 30, 2011

MOVIES MADE ME #20: WONDER BOYS


When WONDER BOYS came out in February 2000, I drove an hour to see it in the theater on opening night. I hadn’t read Michael Chabon’s novel, but I had read an advance review of the film that convinced me I needed to see it. At the time I was a junior in college, and only just beginning to gain some confidence as a writer. I was taking my first creative writing course, and seriously interacting with other aspiring writers for the first time.

My creative writing professor – a young “post-feminist” author who was working on her first novel – was perceptive, but not easy to engage. (At the end of the semester, she wrote to me: “I know you’re looking for in-depth analysis, but that’s not what I can give you right now.” To which I wanted to reply: Then why are you teaching this course?) I think she may have seen some promise in my work, but I know she also saw problems. She pointedly told me that the biggest problem with my writing was my “hyper-self aware, hyper-masculine” voice. If only I’d had Grady Tripp (whose own wife dismissed his work as “too male”) as my writing professor…

The truth is that I had already been privately mentored by too many other writers: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Knut Hamsun, Ernest Hemingway, Somerset Maugham, Herman Hesse, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Charles Bukowski, Hunter Thompson, Raymond Carver, Russell Banks, Bret Easton Ellis, Rick Moody, etc. My fiction was a fusion of all these different voices, which I was trying to turn into something new. I didn’t consciously choose to emulate a bunch of hyper-masculine alcoholics. I was naturally drawn to them because I knew too little about women and too much about alcohol.

I didn’t know anyone else who was “training” to be a writer the same way that I was. Everyone in my creative writing class was reinventing the wheel, without realizing it. They all believed that their work was unique… which reminds me of a great line in a Charles McGrath poem: “No two snowflakes are exactly alike, but every fucking snowflake is pretty much the same.” Most of my them were – and I don’t think I’m being unfairly judgmental – boring writers. I don’t envy anyone the job of being a creative writing professor… It can’t be easy to have to constantly find something constructive to say about boring writing. Stephen King once said that you can’t teach someone how to write. The only thing you can do is to tell good writers to keep at it… and tell bad writers the same thing.

Thankfully, there were a two naturally talented fiction-writers in my class. During my junior year, I convinced them to meet me once a week at a local bar to talk fiction. Those casual meetings were something I desperately needed in order to convince myself that I might have a future as a published writer. I needed to know that I wasn’t the only one for whom fiction writing was a vocation. I even started my own Beat Generation-style novel to reinforce the idea that we writers were “alone together.” It was, I think, the first time in my life that I didn’t feel like a complete loner, and that had a profound effect on me.

Getting to the point: I identified pretty closely with James Leer, the aspiring novelist played by Tobey McGuire in WONDER BOYS. I understood that he was looking for a new identity and a new “home.” He was trying to reinvent himself as someone he could live with, and that’s how he fell in with a tribe of eccentric liars, led by his writing professor Grady Tripp (Michael Douglas). I loved the movie because I couldn’t help but envy James Leer’s access to a caring (if rather unfocused) mentor. I also envied Grady Tripp, who had his own caring and unfocused mentor in editor Terry Crabtree (Robert Downey Jr). I envied all of them their proximity to ingĂ©nue Hannah Green (played by Katie Holmes)…. But we’ll get to that in a minute.

All of the main characters in WONDER BOYS are bonded by the fact that they suffer from the same affliction. In Chabon’s novel, Tripp calls it “the midnight disease,” and describes it as follows:

“The midnight disease is a kind of emotional insomnia; at every conscious moment its victim – even if he or she writes at dawn, or in the middle of the afternoon – feels like a person lying in a sweltering bedroom, with the window thrown open, looking up at a sky filled with stars and airplanes, listening to the narrative of a rattling blind, an ambulance, a fly trapped in a Coke bottle, while all around him the neighbors soundly sleep.”

Later in the book, Tripp explains that the disease “started with a simple feeling of disconnection from other people, an inability to ‘fit in’ by no means unique to writers, a sense of envy and of unbridgeable distance like that felt by someone tossing on a restless pillow in a world full of sleepers. Very quickly, though, what happened with the midnight disease was that you began actually to crave this feeling of apartness, to cultivate and even flourish within it. You pushed yourself farther and farther and farther apart until one black day you woke to discover that you yourself had become the chief object of your own hostile gaze.”

This is exactly what has happened to both Grady Tripp and James Leer… and, I realized, to me. In an epiphany moment, Tripp says:

“I looked up at that dark window and thought of how it was said that acute insomniacs often experienced a kind of queasy blurring of the lines between dreams and wakefulness, their waking lives taking on some of the surprising tedium of a nightmare. Maybe the midnight disease was like that, too. After a while you lost the ability to distinguish between your fictional and actual worlds; you confused yourself with your characters, and the random happenings of your life with the machinations of a plot.”

In the movie, Tripp’s problem (as diagnosed by Hannah Green) is that he “hasn’t made any decisions… at all.” He’s having the same problem with his current novel: a sprawling epic with no end in sight. In Michael Chabon’s novel, Tripp’s problem is that he’s lived his whole life in fictional worlds instead of the real world, and he’s unable to make the leap into reality. I could relate. By sharing my fiction with other people, I was searching for the confidence to take a leap beyond fiction. I wanted to have the kind of confidence in life that I had in my writing, so I tried to merge the two worlds as much as possible. I constantly put real-life events and dialogue into my fiction, and I used pre-tested ideas and lines of dialogue from my fiction in real-life situations – just as James Leer does.

I also did something else that Leer does in WONDER BOYS – I used studio-era Hollywood film titles in a story that had nothing to with studio-era Hollywood. Leer names his a novel “The Love Parade” (after a 1929 Ernst Lubitsch film) and carves Frank Capra’s name into his hand. I wrote a short story about a dysfunctional relationship between a man and his wife. Act I was called “It Happened One Night.” Act II was “Holiday.” Act III: “The Awful Truth.” (The title of the short story was even more random: I called it “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” after a funky jazz tune by Joe Zawinul.) My creative writing teacher asked me what I was trying to accomplish with the movie references. I didn’t know how to answer. I wasn’t trying to accomplish anything. I was just experimenting.

I made references to old movies because old movies were my friends. I too was a sufferer of “the midnight disease,” and I gravitated toward AMC and TCM in the early morning hours when I couldn’t sleep. There was something profoundly reassuring about the simple black and white photography, and the slightly hollow sound of old voice recordings, and rapid-fire dialogue between two people who pretend to hate each other but secretly love each other, and the way that every actor and actress always stuck to the same reliable persona in every film. When I wrote “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy,” I imagined Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall as a young couple in my college. Why? Because I liked the way they communicated… and, of course, because I wanted to be Bogart. Who doesn’t?


(On a side note, I recently re-watched John Duigan’s superb coming-of-age move THE YEAR MY VOICE BROKE on Netflix. Noah Taylor’s Bogart impersonation says everything that needs to be said on this topic…)


In WONDER BOYS, Tripp is writing a novel about three brothers in a haunted Pennsylvania town, because he wants to replace his own lonely childhood with something better. He doesn’t just want the story – he wants the reality. And, in a sense, he gets it. Terry Crabtree and James Leer are his “brothers” in arms, similarly afflicted: the three “wonder boys.” The Crabtree character is a bit more complicated in the book. Robert Downey Jr. can do no wrong, but there’s something about his performance in WONDER BOYS that – while very amusing – makes the character more anecdotal than he deserves to be. In the book, there’s a lot more dramatic tension between Tripp and Crabtree, and a lot more sexual tension between Crabtree and Leer. Filmmaker Curtis Hanson obviously opted to keep the film lighter and less sexually confused.

That decision is partly responsible for an increased emphasis on the character of Hannah Green. As played by Katie Holmes, Hannah is God’s gift to hyper-masculine writers. She’s beautiful. She’s innocent. She’s brilliant. She lives for fiction, without living in fiction the way the dysfunctional “wonder boys” do. In short, she is the perfect Muse. The character is presented as such in Michael Chabon’s novel, but the casting of Katie Holmes made the role even more memorable… because the character was a natural evolution of the actress’s onscreen persona. (I’m going to wander a bit here, so bear with me…)


Katie Holmes started her acting career with a small part in Ang Lee’s THE ICE STORM, a brilliant adaptation of a brilliant novel by Rick Moody. She plays the precious object of Tobey McGuire’s awkward affections – a vulnerable prep school girl, emotionally abandoned by her rich parents. In DAWSON’S CREEK, she played another perceptive but self-doubting orphan. By the time she made Doug Liman’s GO, she had gained enough self-confidence to take life as it comes. (There’s a great scene where she sums up her newly-won outlook on life with wide-eyed glee: “Wow, bang, surprise!”) In WONDER BOYS, she’s 100% confident and 100% present… though maybe not 100% real. Hannah Green doesn’t exhibit any of the nuances or complexity of the male characters, so I’d have to say that she exists mostly as a moon-eyed writer’s ideal.


The real flesh-and-blood woman who keeps these “wonder boys” grounded is Sara Gaskell, played by the always-amazing Frances McDormand. She’s the one who keeps Tripp from completely disappearing into a world of illusion, simply by maintaining faith in him as a person… maybe moreso than he deserves. In the book, it’s a pretty thankless role. She’s the domesticator. Tripp finally chooses her, as much as he can. The book features a great scene in the maternity ward of a Pittsburgh hospital, where Tripp contemplates his future as a responsible family man: “Did one really feel the need for a child – as a craving in the nerves, a spiritual yearning, the haunting prickle of a lost limb?” Obviously, Tripp doesn’t. In the movie, things are simpler. As soon as the middle-aged, drug-addled writer decides to settle down with Sara, he’s miraculously cured of all the inconvenient aspects of the “midnight disease.” In fact, he’s pretty much cured of all his misgivings about life in general.

Basically, the movie is a bit too idealized for me. It’s as if the filmmakers is saying: “Hasn’t this been an amusing way to spend a couple of hours? Now back to reality…” The thing is: That’s not the feeling I want to be left with after vicariously experiencing the serious trials and triumphs of someone else’s “midnight disease.” From a movie about how complicated a writer’s life can be, I expect a complicated ending… not a “cure.”

On the DVD commentary for GO, director Doug Liman brilliantly sums up his film as a story about that time in a person’s life when you can get away with anything. His teenage characters put their lives at risk several times over the course of a single night, and yet they come out of every crazy situation unscathed, smiling and laughing about the experience. That’s age appropriate. The middle-aged writer’s life in WONDER BOYS is just as much of a whirlwind, and novelist Michael Chabon’s conclusion to the story feels much more authentic than filmmaker Curtis Hanson’s… because it shows the damage. Tripp has to grow up, accept responsibility for his new family and join the real world… but that’s not a simple process. The only way he can do it is by giving up the life he leads through fiction.

In the end, Tripp’s choice isn’t between being a family man and being an irresponsible writer. His choice is between living in reality and living in the world of imagination. For those who mostly live in reality, this is a no-brainer: Why would anyone want to live a lie? For those who mostly live in fiction, it’s also a no-brainer: Why would anyone ever choose to surrender complete freedom? At the end of WONDER BOYS, Tripp has decided to reinvent himself. Filmmaker Curtis Hanson shows us that he has a lot to gain, but writer Michael Chabon – a longtime carrier of the midnight disease – reminds us that he also has a lot to lose.

PS – music by Christopher Young

Friday, May 27, 2011

MOVIES MADE ME #19: JENNIFER EIGHT


It's been less than a month since my biography of Lance Henriksen came out. We kicked things off with a blogathon that went beyond my wildest hopes, followed by a book launch party that went beyond my wildest hopes. We made our first west coast convention appearance at L.A.'s Weekend of Horrors and are preparing for our first east coast convention at Baltimore's Monster-Mania. In the meantime, we've been signing books, shipping books, and talking about the book with everyone who expresses an interest. At this point, you'd think that I would be ready to talk about something other than Lance Henriksen...

But I find myself returning to my woefully-neglected blog with a desire to pick up exactly where I left off a few weeks ago. When we wrapped up the blogathon, there were still a few Lance Henriksen films that I felt had been overlooked. At the top of that list was Bruce Robinson's film JENNIFER EIGHT. I've had a strong affinity for this early 90s thriller ever since I was a teenager working in a small town video store. For some reason the video store had a VHS copy of the movie without a slipcase, and so I felt the need to tell people about it... I suppose that's what I'm still doing, though I think I have a better grasp now on what works about the film.

The first thing the viewer notices about JENNIFER EIGHT is the music, which kicks in as soon as the Paramount logo appears onscreen. The piano-driven score is by a guy named Christopher Young, who's one of my favorite film composers. Young has scored well over a hundred films, big and small, and dabbled in a lot of different genres, but (surprise, surprise) I'm particularly fond of his work on horror films. He's responsible for what is arguably the best horror film score ever produced -- for Clive Barker's HELLRAISER. Although the music in HELLRAISER is very unconventional for a horror film (it sounds surprisingly classical), I can't imagine a better way of introducing people to Clive Barker's visions of hell. The operatic score makes Barker's nightmares every bit as complex as they have to be: dark and terrifying, sure, but also beautiful and exotic, hauntingly ethereal, hopelessly entrancing and ultimately overwhelming.



Young also did the score for George Romero's film THE DARK HALF. In my opinion, it's a flawed film that lacks the subtleties of Stephen King's novel (George Stark shouldn't be all monster... the real horror in King's work comes from the fact that "Mr. Hyde" is in more likable than "Dr. Jekyll"... even to Jekyll's own children), but it benefits tremendously from a breathtakingly beautiful score. I've read that the studio ran out of money at the end of filming and Romero wasn't able to shoot his original ending, but personally I think that Young's music makes the existing ending as poetic as anything we could hope for.



Young has also done some exceptional work for filmmaker Sam Raimi (THE GIFT, SPIDER-MAN 3, DRAG ME TO HELL) and, more recently, an excellent score for the underrated Bret Easton Ellis adaptation THE INFORMERS. I could go on and on... In fact, I did go on and on when I met Young briefly at a signing for the DVD release of the NEVER SLEEP AGAIN documentary. (It turns out that Young also wrote the music for A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET PART 2... but we didn't talk much about that one.)

I digress. Back to JENNIFER EIGHT, which boasts an opening credit sequence that effectively lulls the viewer into a dream world. The first image is of Andy Garcia driving. His face is partially hidden by shadowy reflections in the windshield, and his eyes hidden even deeper behind dark sunglasses. The subtle layers of light and shadow set the tone of the film perfectly. On the surface it's a film about literal blindness, but on a deeper level you could say that all of the characters see the world of JENNIFER EIGHT as "through a glass darkly."

Garcia's character is headed to Eureka, California - a coastal town with the stereotypically gloomy weather of the Northwest. (We won't see sunshine until the final shot of the film... and then it comes streaming in, so sharply that we're blinded by the light.) No doubt the aesthetic and the storyline were partially inspired by SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, which practically reinvented the horror genre in the early 1990s. Instead of monster movies, everyone with darker desires was making "psychological thrillers." This was the era of Hitchcock-plunderers PACIFIC HEIGHTS, SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY, FINAL ANALYSIS, THE HAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE, SINGLE WHITE FEMALE, MALICE, BLINK, and of course SE7EN. (I have to say that I'm looking forward to John Muir's upcoming book Horror Films of the 1990s, to see what he makes of this subgenre.) What makes JENNIFER EIGHT stand out from the pack, I think, is the performances.


Let's start with Lance Henriksen. When I first saw the film, I was well aware that Henriksen mostly played heavies... and, as Lance himself points out, that makes his character the most obvious suspect in a whodunit. That said, I never suspected that he was the killer in this movie. In fact, if the twist ending had revealed that he was the killer, I don't think I'd be writing about JENNIFER EIGHT today. I'd feel too cheated. Henriksen's character, Freddy Ross, is just too damn likable to be a killer.


In an interview with Fangoria writer Ian Spelling, Henriksen described his character this way: “I’m a regular guy with a slight drinking problem. He loves his wife, but he’s in denial about the drinking. He’s still a good cop, and he walks right into the biggest crisis of his life.” The simple exchanges between Ross and his wife, played by actress Kathy Baker, are beautiful because of they way the two actors play off of each other. As a viewer, you know right away that this couple has been married for a long time, because they don't have to talk... They can apparently read each other's minds. From their playful exchanges (Lance stealing a drink and pretending to get away with it; Kathy smirking knowingly in response), it's clear that they love and respect each other enough to embrace all the little quirks, foibles and even weaknesses. Their onscreen relationship is not so much about what they do, but what they don't do... They don't communicate with each other in obvious ways. They do it in very small, subtle affectionate gestures. They do it instinctively, effortlessly. You see those kinds of relationships all the time in real life, among people who've known each other forever, but it rarely happens between actors onscreen.


Henriksen's rapport with Andy Garcia works the same way. In their first scene together, the two men are digging through a garbage dump in the rain, searching for decomposed body parts. It's a grim scenario, but they play off of each other so casually and naturally that it's surprising when, at the end of the scene, we realize that they haven't worked together for years. Right away we understand that they are the type of friends who can go without speaking for months or years, and then pick up exactly where they left off. They're the type of friends who know and trust each other so implicitly that they can say whatever they're thinking, even if it's critical or unflattering, without having to choose their words carefully. For example: When Andy falls for Uma Thurman, Lance jokes: "Isn't she a little young for you, bro? You really think she's going to go for an old dog like you?" The line doesn't quite work because Andy Garcia appears to be in his prime (which is exactly how the character smugly responds to the question), but there's no question about the rapport. Later, when Andy has become obsessed with a murder case, Lance plays big brother again by taking him out drinking and insisting that "we're not talking the talk tonight." He's not making a criticism; he's showing genuine concern. Again, that's something we observe more often in real life than in films.


For me, the heart of the film is the story of these two friends rather than the romantic relationship between Andy and Uma. The most devastating scene in the film is when Ross gets killed... all the while believing that his best friend is pulling the trigger. Garcia's character never quite recovers from that one. In the next scene, he's matching wits with a callous police interrogator John Malkovich (in an utterly brilliant love-to-hate-him kind of performance) and beginning to unravel. We've already been told that Garcia's character is an obsessive cop with a propensity for unnecessary violence, but this is where he begins to show his true colors. If pushed too far, he might even become as destructive as the man he's chasing.

When I first saw JENNIFER EIGHT, I felt that Garcia's performance was a little over the top... The fact that he could go from smoldering intensity to hot-headed rant in a matter of seconds seemed unlikely to me... and there's not much anyone can do with lines like "I wish you ill." That's not a criticism of Garcia's acting ability. I honestly believe that he's one of the most underrated actors of his generation -- I remember going to see Sidney Lumet's NIGHT FALLS ON MANHATTAN (anybody remember that one?) in the theater and thinking that he was right on the cusp of superstardom. Years later, I saw his performance in another unjustly overlooked film called THE UNSAID, and I have since changed my mind about his performance in JENNIFER EIGHT. In THE UNSAID, Garcia has to react to the suicide of his only son - and his "monk's wail" is truly chilling. As an actor, he completely sheds his self-consciousness and goes for broke. The same thing is true of his best moments in JENNIFER EIGHT, and you have to admire that kind of dedication.


Uma Thurman also gives a notably complex performance as Jennifer. She imbues her character with strength (when she meets Garcia for the first time, and calls him out on his smoking, and especially in the scene where she convinces him that she was in fact visited by the killer), innocence (particularly in the boat scene, where she is laughing in the rain), vulnerability (wearing high heels at the Christmas party) and of course beauty. It's hard not to fall in love with her.


Finally, it would be unfair if I didn't assume that writer/director Bruce Robinson was partly responsible for the subtleties of all these characterizations. From what Lance has said, I gather that the director scrutinized every line and every movement the actors made during filming. I don't think it's going too far to suggest that, on some level, he helped Lance to start developing his career-defining role as Frank Black. Henriksen had played cops before, but he remembers that his research for JENNIFER EIGHT made an impression that he carried with him until the TV series MILLENNIUM. Robinson had arranged for him to ride along with a Los Angeles homicide detective to prepare for the role. Henriksen remembers the detective distinctly: "He imparted something to me that affected me while I was doing MILLENNIUM. That was that I started seeing innocent street corners full of possible dangers and possible scams going on. We would go into certain situations, just hanging out, and he would see everything so differently than I did. I started sort of slipping into that a little bit."

If Bruce Robinson didn't quite craft a thriller of Hitchcockian proportions, he certainly created a character study that's worthy of repeat viewings. JENNIFER EIGHT is one of those movies that I can always go back to. In some ways, it's like a late night call from an old friend.

Friday, May 06, 2011

Horror & Comics

The limited edition of Lance Henriksen's biography came about because of a conversation I had with horror writer Steve Niles. I knew Steve as the creator of 30 DAYS OF NIGHT, CRIMINAL MACABRE and EDGE OF DOOM. What I didn't know at the time was that Steve had recently become a very vocal advocate for creator-owned comics and do-it-yourself publishing. When I mentioned Lance's biography to him, he not only offered to publish it, but he also began to rally some of his favorite artists to illustrate it.

In a blog post announcing the project, Steve said, "Our hope is that by combining Lance's book with some of comics top talent, then maybe we can each find new fans." A few weeks later, with his campaign in full swing, he added, "I'm now going to make an effort to reach out to possible fans OUTSIDE the [comics] bubble. I know a lot of Horror Fans and Science Fiction fans who don't read comics." (He further explained his agenda in a recent interview with Meltdown Comics.) In the past few years I've become one of those people, but this project has re-introduced me to the world of comics. As I began to explore the works of the artists who have contributed to Henriksen's bio, I began to realize just how close the worlds of comics and genre film really are. Here's a visual crash course:

BILL SIENKIEWICZ

Sienkiewicz's contribution to the book is already well-known. His depiction of Frank Black has been floating around the web for a couple of months now, and it appears on the cover of the final book. Sienkiewicz was so inspired by the project and by a short conversation with Henriksen (who he referred to on his facebook page as "a true artist really committed to his passion for acting") that he produced his drawing overnight! Anyone who doubts his enthusiasm for genre films need only look at some of his work from the past:



In much the way that Henriksen has been able to cross paths with so many iconic characters over the course of his career, Sienkiewicz is no stranger to modern-day myths. He has professionally illustrated Batman, Superman, Spiderman, The X-Men, The Hulk, Thor, Elektra (for the astoundingly beautiful Elektra: Assassin, written by Frank Miller) and even Yoda. And NOT BAD FOR A HUMAN is not his first biography cover - he also provided the art for Martin I. Green's VOODOO CHILD: THE ILLUSTRATED LEGEND OF JIMI HENDRIX and SANTA: MY LIFE AND TIMES. Upcoming projects include LionsGate's supernatural western film THE MAN WITH NO NAME, Dreamworks' film ALCATRAZ VS. THE EVIL LIBRARIANS, and an adaptation of his own graphic novel STRAY TOASTERS.

TIM BRADSTREET

Recently on his website, Bradstreet posted, "I'm a long time ridiculously huge fan of Lance Henriksen, so I about lost my mind when I got a call from my pal Steve Niles informing me that Lance was publishing an autobiography, that it would be illustrated, and they wanted ME to join in the fun." Bradstreet's love of NEAR DARK (which features Henriksen as a ruthless redneck vampire) probably doesn't come as a surprise to his readers who are familiar with his work on VAMPIRE: THE MASQUERADE. Bradstreet is also well-known as a cover artist for DC's HELLBLAZER, Marvel's THE PUNISHER, BLADE and BLADE 2, Spectra's ALIENS: MUSIC OF THE SPEARS, Fox Atomic's 28 DAYS LATER: THE AFTERMATH, Wildstorm's THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET and FRIDAY THE 13TH, IDW'S MOTEL HELL, and the new CLIVE BARKER'S HELLRAISER from Boom! Studios. Bradstreet also co-created Image's BAD PLANET with Thomas Jane and Steve Niles.



MIKE MIGNOLA

Mike Mignola has become a household name, based on his creations B.P.R.D. and HELLBOY, a comic series published by Dark Horse Entertainment and adapted into a pair of excellent feature films directed by Guillermo del Toro and starring Ron Perlman. This was not Mignola's first foray into the world of horror. He's done cover art for the Topps comic adaptation of BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA, Image's SPAWN, Dark Horse's ALIENS: SALVATION and DC's ALIENS VS. PREDATOR. He also created B.P.R.D. and BALTIMORE: THE STEADFAST TIN SOLDIER AND THE VAMPIRE. In 2011 he's returning to his most famous creation, working with Richard Corben on HELLBOY: BEING HUMAN (due May 11 from Dark Horse) and the graphic novel HELLBOY: HOUSE OF THE LIVING DEAD. In June, Dark Horse will also release a hardcover collection of his series BALTIMORE: THE PLAGUE SHIPS.



ERIC POWELL

Eric Powell is best known as the creator of Dark Horse Entertainment's THE GOON, which is currently being adapted into an animated feature directed by David Fincher and starring Paul Giamatti and Clancy Brown. Powell may also be familiar to horror fans as the cover artist for Dark Horse's UNIVERSAL MONSTERS: CAVALCADE OF HORROR and DC's monster mash FREDDY VS. JASON VS. ASH. His current project is IDW's GODZILLA: KING OF THE MONSTERS. Also, keep an eye out for THE GOON / CRIMINAL MACABRE crossover, due on July 20.



TOM MANDRAKE

In addition to his superheroes work for Marvel (CALL OF DUTY: THE PRECINCT) and DC (JLA DESTINY and THE SPECTRE), Tom Mandrake is well-known for his horror comics, including the creator-owned CREEPS. Often he combines superheroes and horror, as in DC's SUPERMAN AND BATMAN VS. VAMPIRES AND WEREWOLVES and THE X-FILES / 30 DAYS OF NIGHT crossover. He's also done artwork for books based on John Carpenter's film HALLOWEEN and the recent TV series FRINGE.



Hell, this guy's illustrated everything from HAMLET to ALICE IN WONDERLAND... which reminds me of another pro-comic movement that's worth mentioning here. 5280 Comic Book Classroom is a nonprofit organization that uses comic books to teach underprivileged kids how to read. If that isn't a sound argument for the value of comics today, I don't know what is.

ASHLEY WOOD

Ashley Wood is an Australian multi-media artist known for his wide-ranging work on comics, video games, toys and art books. In the comics world he is perhaps best known for IDW's METAL GEAR SOLID as well as the original covers for 30 DAYS OF NIGHT and Image's HELLSPAWN and SPAWN: BOOK OF THE DEAD. You'll have to check out his website to get a sense of his full empire.



KELLEY JONES

Kelley Jones, who has created an additional piece of art for the softcover edition of Lance Henriksen's biography, is a well-established creator of horror comics, including DC's BATMAN-as-vampire series (with writer Doug Moench), DC's DEADMAN, and Dark Horse's ALIENS: HIVE. He also worked with Neil Gaiman on SANDMAN and with Steve Niles on the current EDGE OF DOOM series and the first Bloody Pulp book CAL MCDONALD: DETECTIVE TALES.



It's worth pointing out that all of these artists chose their own image ideas for the NOT BAD FOR A HUMAN book - based on their own interests and their own perceptions of Lance Henriksen. The results are distinct artistic interpretations, and the subject of these visual musings could not be more pleased with the results! Check out the book and definitely check out the work of these amazing illustrators.

Thursday, May 05, 2011

MOVIES MADE ME #18: THE INVITATION


On the cusp of the new millennium, Lance Henriksen spoke in an AOL Celebrity Chat about the fate of Frank Black. Production on Season Three of MILLENNIUM was winding down, and fans were eager to know where the show’s hero would end up. One of them posed the question to Henriksen, who answered, “I see myself sitting on a beach with my daughter Jordan and talking about, almost in a new language, a man’s potential… and the things we’ve learned are about how people have advanced themselves. Intimacy is a different thing. Intimacy is the grand finale. I think what people fear the most is going to their grave alone. And what they desire the most is intimacy. Maybe I’ll be walking down the beach and drop dead.”

The MILLENNIUM series finale does sound some of these notes. The final images are of Frank Black and his daughter Jordan, talking about man’s potential for goodness as they head off into the sunset together. Ultimately, however, the series is open-ended. The fan-made series MILLENNIUM: APOCALYPSE picks up Jordan’s story several years later, but Frank’s fate remains a mystery. The only answers we have are the casual speculations of cast and crew-members who have spoken to “Back to Frank Black” over the past two years… and one overlooked film that Henriksen describes as a “Frank Black dream.”

THE INVITATION is a nearly-forgotten title in Henriksen's filmography, made for only a few hundred thousand dollars in 2002. In my opinion, it's a deeply flawed experiment. The story is muddled and the performances are uneven... but I love it anyway, for one very simple reason: It features Lance Henriksen at his most beatific..

I hadn't seen THE INVITATION until I was a few weeks into a series of in-depth biographical Q&As with Henriksen, and I was blown away by two scenes in particular. The first scene reunites Henriksen with fellow MILLENNIUM alum Sarah-Jane Redmond. Their onscreen chemistry, in a moment when she physically attacks him, is undeniable... As a result, the scene rises way above the melodramatic scenario they're playing out. It's amazing to see how vulnerable Redmond allows herself to become and how accepting Henriksen becomes in response. The entire movie is worth watching just for the looks on their faces at the end of this sequence.

In 2001, Henriksen talked to journalist Tim Ferrante about the project, and said that "the conditions were right for all the people involved. We sat around a table the first meeting and I said, ‘Let’s trust each other. The essence of this movie is that we trust each other to go as far as we wanna go in an honest way and support each other while we’re doing it. That’s what we’ve gotta do or we’re not gonna have a movie.’ I gotta tell you, the material made demands that are just dangerous, and if they worked we were gonna be somewhere, and if they didn’t it would only be because we didn’t take a chance.” The two actors surrendered themselves wholeheartedly to the film. The intimacy is real.

In a separate interview, Sarah-Jane Redmond raved about her co-star: "Lance Henriksen I simply cannot say enough about. I have worked with many 'stars,' and Lance has been by far the greatest example of grace, talent, joy, commitment, and generosity I have ever come across… He is so alive, so willing to play, and be challenged. I think that some found him intimidating, but if you can look him in the eye and 'dance,' there is a respect that is formed, and then the stage is wide open to play, and create dynamic scenes… It is clear to anyone who comes in contact with Lance that he loves his craft, and his exuberance for life comes through in his work."

The other scene in THE INVITATION that blows me away every time is the final scene in the movie. I can't say much about it without giving away important story points, but I will say that it's one of my favorite scenes in any Lance Henriksen film. People always talk about Lance's final scene in POWDER. To me, the final scene in THE INVITATION is just as powerful - because the actor's soul shines through, in his face and in his words. Both scene find the actor in a similar headspace. Henriksen explains: "The only thing that truly changes you is your fear of death. If it’s in the future, you can be in denial. But if [you're facing death] right now, it’s a different deal." Ultimately, POWDER and THE INVITATION are films about transcending the debilitating fear of death. The beauty of the final images overwhelm everything else in the films, because reveal the human being behind the onscreen character.

I told Lance that THE INVITATION seemed to me like a personal confession, in which he reveals himself as a flawed human being who works very hard to exercise the better angels of his nature. He agreed, noting that the "whole point of the movie was to tell the truth." That's what he does in those final moments... If the role of Frank Black broke him down, then THE INVITATION gave him an opportunity to surrender and experience a genuine moment of transcendence. In our interview, he added, “I’ve been to a lot of worlds – I’ve been to Australia, Africa, Thailand… They call Thailand the smiling country for a reason. These people absolutely have a Buddhist soul… That’s why I have a Buddha in my living room. To me, if I could allow the peace and acceptance of that reality... All the rest of life is not a reality. It’s a constructed story.”

Nothing else needs to be said... except HAPPY BIRTHDAY, LANCE!!! I'm proud to know you.

Wednesday, May 04, 2011

MILLENNIUM: Critical Mass

The critical buzz over the Fox TV series MILLENNIUM officially began in July 1996. On the 1st of that month, Ron Miller of the San Jose Mercury News enthusiastically reported that "the dumbest programming decision of the coming fall TV season is now looking only half as dumb as it did." The "dumb decision" was removing Chris Carter's wildly popular series THE X-FILES from its Friday night time slot. The not-so-dumb decision was replacing it with MILLENNIUM.

Miller was among the television critics who received an advance screener of the series pilot and – although Fox asked critics not to write official reviews until they had a final cut of the show – he immediately raved about it: "I can tell you it's going to be one of the season's best shows if Carter can keep up the quality of that opening show." Miller was particularly impressed with the show's lead actor: "Henriksen is the perfect guy for this role. Gaunt, laconic and forceful, he looks properly haunted."

Carter was equally enthusiastic, as he told Paul Simpson of Dreamwatch magazine: "You want to get a great actor, and you want to get a person who's been tested, who's been through enough life experience and tragedy, seen enough horror to be affected by it. It wouldn't have worked with a younger, less lined face, less gravel-voiced hero. It just wouldn't have been believable. This is a man who you just believe, like Atlas, has the weight of the world on his shoulders." Carter explained to Xpose magazine that Frank Black was, in no uncertain terms, his heroic ideal: "Here was a hero I wanted to create who I think, if he embodies anything, embodies the appropriate response to the world we live in, to the newspaper headlines we read everyday. I wish there were more people like Frank Black and this is my way of addressing that."

Audiences received the show and its hero enthusiastically. When it premiered in the U.S. on October 25, 1996, ratings were through the roof. The show got a 14.4 Nielsen rating and a 24 share in 32 of the nation's 33 overnight markets... the best premiere figures for any Fox drama and the best numbers of the year for any drama premiere. The critical response had just as much heat.

Variety scribe Jeremy Gerard called the pilot “literate, well-acted and blessed with an irresistible hook,” and proclaimed it “the best new show of the season." He also heaped praise on Henriksen, calling him "exceptionally appealing as Frank, sort of Clint Eastwood with a tough of Stallone thrown in for good measure." The review was not, however, an unqualified rave. Gerard added a personal note: "I just wish it were a little more fun, that I didn't have this nagging feeling that it wants to hurt me the next time I come around." His was not the only conflicted response.

New York Times writer John J. O'Conner hailed MILLENNIUM as "the season's most chilling drama," while Los Angeles Times critic Howard Rosenberg dismissed it as "gruesome, foreboding television to slit your wrists by." Time magazine applauded the show's "marvelously unrelenting sense of unease," while Newsweek complained that it delivered "all the smut and violence that Bob Dole warned you about - and then some." The latter even called for the "V-chip police" to arrest Chris Carter on sight.

Carter and Henriksen vehemently defended their show against accusations that they were celebrating ugliness and violence. Carter told TV Guide, "If you just deal with goodness and selfishness, it means nothing - unless it is in jeopardy. This is what people don't understand about the show. It is irresponsible to just set out to tell sweet stories because I think it is Pollyanna-ish and it does a disservice to the audience." Henriksen added, "Instead of having a V-chip, we should have the B.S.-chip. We need to take the B.S. off the television. This show is not B.S." Later, he told New York Times reporter Justine Elias, "We're not living in a world where we understand the outcome of violence. More offensive to me than the nature of MILLENNIUM is some show that ends precisely at 11pm with everything all wrapped up in a nice cliche, everybody beaming and happy."

All the same, over the course of the first season, critics like TV Guide's Jeff Jarvis campaigned against the show's "serial killer of the week" formula. Jarvis wrote: "All that separates it from MURDER, SHE WROTE are extra wrinkles on its star's face, extra-grisly crime scenes, some self-indulgent hooey about apocalyptic prophecies, and an overall bad mood." (Oddly enough, he was strangely effusive about the show's lead actor, calling Henriksen “mesmerizing.”) Perhaps sensing that he was losing his audience, Carter decided to shake things up in the first season's "back nine" (an additional nine episodes ordered by the network in November). His goal, he told Entertainment at Home magazine, was to "give the series a chance to roll out and show what it can do." Accordingly, he added a supernatural twist to the show. Ratings-wise, the plan didn't work. MILLENNIUM finished the 1996-97 season ranked a lowly #94 in the Nielsens.

Fox remained hopeful and renewed the series while the creator moved on to Plan B. Carter hired writers Glen Morgan and James Wong to oversee the second season, and gave them free rein to put their own spin on the show's mythology. In a July 1997 interview with USA Today, Wong spoke about breaking up the "serial killer of the week" mold and focusing more on the mysteries surrounding the Millennium Group: "We're taking that story a step up into the metaphysical world, and we might be in that area of wonder, horror and the paranormal." In other words: making it more like THE X-FILES. Fox president Peter Roth, and even Chris Carter himself, called season two an “evolution” of the original vision, and Henriksen told On Sat writer Linda Yovanovich, "It's almost as though the first year as sort of the background of everything. And this year, it's going to [come to] fruition."

Halfway through the second season, Henriksen gave Orange County Register reporter Kinney Littlefield a clear vision for the future of the show: “I would like to see Frank as a loner going through a kind of hero's journey, like the one in Joseph Campbell. I think a new kind of ritual must be constructed to lead us into a new age." Nearly a year and a half later, when it came time for the actor to reflect on season three, Henriksen told fans in an AOL Celebrity Chat that he wanted to see the character continue to evolve, or to be abruptly stopped in his tracks. "My desire,” he said, “would be to de-program him or shoot him. No in-between." With six episodes remaining to be shot, he was already thinking about making a feature film as a capstone for the series. He commented, "This is the perfect time for a MILLENNIUM film. It would be shot this summer so it'll come out at the end of the year. What we can do would be a knockout. If Chris wrote it and we did it, I think we'd be in great shape... I hope Fox is watching this and getting the idea."

Instead, when the series was canceled after the end of season three, Fox bid farewell to Frank Black via a guest appearance on an episode of THE X-FILES... an idea that Henriksen was never fond of. The two series, he explained, belong to "different sides of the brain, in a way." He compared playing Frank Black in THE X-FILES universe to falling in love with a photo of a girl who died in the 1800s. Since then, he has repeatedly said: Frank Black's story is not done.

In a 2001 interview for TV Zone, Henriksen reflected on the changes of direction in the series as a whole. He opined, "Chris Carter was much more honest to the original idea which was of this character, Frank Black, and his world. If Chris had stayed with it, it would have evolved even better and been more hardcore." He remains eager to get back to that original concept of Frank Black, and to give Frank Black the closure he deserves. And he’s not alone. MILLENNIUM fans are waiting for Frank Black to lead us into a new age – a post-millennial world that has shown us darkness on a scale we could scarcely have imagined in 1996. Even though the world has changed significantly over the last ten years, Carter’s empathetic hero still embodies the “appropriate response to the world we live in”… and we need him more now than ever.

Join the campaign for the return of Frank Black.

Tuesday, May 03, 2011

Lance Henriksen's Ten Favorite Westerns

#1. THE BIG SKY (1952)


#2. THE PLAINSMAN (1936)


#3. SERGEANT YORK (1941) (a western "because of where the guy came from," his humble beginnings and his moral code)


#4. STAGECOACH (1939)


#5. THE TREASURE OF SIERRA MADRE (1948)


#6. TRACK OF THE CAT (1954)


#7. VIVA ZAPATA! (1952)


#8. THE LEFT-HANDED GUN (1958)


#9. LONELY ARE THE BRAVE (1962)


#10. PAT GARRETT & BILLY THE KID (1973)

Monday, May 02, 2011

Lance Henriksen Goes West

When I first approached Lance Henriksen about writing his biography in early 2010, I was halfway through writing a book on westerns. I had been working on it for about six months and in that time I'd watched and taken notes on more than 300 westerns - roughly two a day. When Lance expressed an interest in doing the biography, I put the western project on hold and started watching his films at roughly the same pace. I quickly realized that there was some overlap between the two projects.

Lance loves making westerns and, as filmmakers Philip Kaufman (who directed Lance in THE RIGHT STUFF) and Walter Hill (who directed Lance in JOHNNY HANDSOME) both attest, he's a natural for them. Kaufman says, "When I first met Lance, I knew. He had an intensity. I felt he was one of those real-life cowboys." Hill adds, “I think it might have been better if Lance had come along thirty years earlier – because he was born to do westerns. He looks so natural wearing the hat and riding the horse. When he walks into a bar, everybody looks up. He’s got that quality.”

When I started writing the biography, I mainly thought of Lance Henriksen as a horror movie icon - one of those rare character actors who can bring life to the darkest roles: Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Vincent Price. As I was writing, I began to see him in a very different light... as an actor with just as much in common with Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda, Lee Marvin or Charles Bronson. Much like director John Carpenter, Lance has spent a large part of his career making "hidden westerns." I count eighteen western-themed projects over the course of nearly three decades... which is not bad for a guy who got into film-making three years after the western genre effectively died at the box office. Here's the list:

THE RIGHT STUFF (1983)
It's a bit of a stretch to call the true story of the Mercury Seven a western, but I don't think it's a stretch to call Phil Kaufman's film a western. Kaufman chose to split the focus of the story between the seven astronauts ("the magnificent seven"?) and Chuck Yeager, the air force pilot who broke the sound barrier. In the film, the birth of the space program goes hand in hand with the death of an older type of hero. Think of it as a combination of "space western" and "elegiac western." Henriksen plays astronaut Wally Schirra.

CHOKE CANYON (1985)
The cowboy in this eco-thriller is Stephen Collins, who plays a research physicist fighting corporate raiders. Henriksen leads the opposition. Despite the beautiful Moab scenery, he doesn't look like he's having much fun playing the "suit." On the up side, he met one of his closest friends, stuntman Rex Rossi, on the set. Rex taught him knife-throwing and trick-riding, talents that Lance would put to good use in ALIENS and THE QUICK AND THE DEAD.

SAVAGE DAWN (1985)
This nearly-forgotten biker movie, shot in the Alabama Hills, follows the classic western movie template to a T. A heroic loner rides into a town overrun by outlaws... Chaos ensues. In this case, the heroic loner is Lance Henriksen, and the outlaws include William Forsythe, Karen Black and Richard Lynch (as a nymphomaniac priest). The designation "so bad it's good" was invented for movies like this.

ALIENS (1986)
Almost nobody thinks of James Cameron's stellar sequel as a western... except for James Cameron himself, who has referred to it as a science fiction version of THE ALAMO.

NEAR DARK (1987)
This vampire version of THE WILD BUNCH is a sublime mix of beauty and savagery. Henriksen is unforgettable as anti-hero Jesse Hooker, the patriarch of a bloodsucking clan that also includes his ALIENS co-stars Bill Paxton and Jenette Goldstein.

"Reach" (1987)
After NEAR DARK, Bill Paxton assembled an all-star cast to make a western music video for his band Martini Ranch. Ranchers included director James Cameron, Kathryn Bigelow (who plays "The Woman with No Name" in the video), Rex Rossi, Jenette Goldstein, Paul Reiser, Adrian Pasdar, Judge Reinhold, Brian Thompson and Lance Henriksen.

STONE COLD (1991)
Director Craig R. Baxley describes this as a movie about "gasoline cowboys on steel horses." Henriksen, who plays the anti-hero biker Chains, also notes the western themes: "I love bikers. To me, they are Indians, not the cowboys, and people relate to them as such."

HARD TARGET (1993)
John Woo is a modern-day Sam Peckinpah. Similarities between the two filmmakers go beyond visual style (esp. the use of slow motion) to prevailing themes of spirituality and honor, as Woo explains: "I think any artist - especially a filmmaker - should have a moral responsibility. I'm not trying to glorify violence, because in every film of mine there's a moral standpoint behind the facade of the killings." HARD TARGET is a story of literal class warfare, with Lance Henriksen's high-octane capitalist pit against Jean-Claude Van Damme's blue collar rebel.

THE QUICK AND THE DEAD (1995)
Sam Raimi's eccentric spaghetti western features Henriksen as slick and stylish gunfighter Ace Hanlon - the kind of guy who who pauses to wax his mustache before he kills someone. Ace is one of the actor's most accomplished comedic performances, illustrating his enthusiasm and affection for the western genre. Henriksen also does his riding, his own shooting (he trained with Thell Reed, reputedly the world's fastest gunman) and his own stunts - including a trick dismount that wowed Raimi during rehearsals.

DEAD MAN (1995)
Jim Jarmusch's acid western features Henriksen as one of three bounty hunters who are hired to kill Johnny Depp. Along the way, he cooks and eats the other two. This is possibly Henriksen's darkest character... a shocking counterpoint to his role in THE QUICK AND THE DEAD.

GUNFIGHTER'S MOON (1995)
Henriksen's third western of 1995 is a more traditional one, owing much to classics like THE GUNFIGHTER, HIGH NOON and SHANE. This time, the actor gets to play the hero, Frank Morgan... and it's a role he was born to play. Gary Cooper couldn't have done it better. In a 1995 interview the film's writer/director Larry Ferguson conceded, "Lance brought aspects of Frank Morgan to the screen that I never knew were there."

"MILLENNIUM" (1996 - 1999)
Chris Carter describes his original concept for this series as a traditional hero's journey: "[Frank Black] was a hero I wanted to create who I think, if he embodies anything, embodies the appropriate response to the world we live in, to the newspaper headlines we read everyday. I wish there were more people like Frank Black and this is my way of addressing that." In other words, Frank Black embodies the best qualities of the laconic western hero. He says what he means and does what he says. He is an individualist and a bit of a loner, but he devotes his life to protecting his family and the community at large. He tries to restrain himself from acting hastily... and when he does strike out in violence, he does so at great cost to himself.

THE LAST COWBOY (2003)
This family-friendly western features Henriksen as a stubbornly old-fashioned rancher at odds with Corporate America. He also steps into the familiar role of loving father... a role he knows by heart.

INTO THE WEST: "Hell on Wheels" (2005)
Once again, Henriksen plays a family man - the patriarch of the pioneering Wheeler family. As Daniel Wheeler, he puts his faith in the Puritan ethic and the frontier spirit. The simplicity of the character is what makes him shine.

"Gun" (2005) - video game
I'm not a gamer, but I imagine it must be amusing to hear Lance Henriksen's voice coming out of a fat, one-eyed railroad baron in this video game by Neversoft...

BONE DRY (2007)
At heart, this indie film is really a revenge western. Like Jimmy Stewart's character in THE NAKED SPUR, the main struggle in the film is not between two men but between the main character and himself. The film asks the question: How alive is a man who lives only for revenge?

PRAIRIE FEVER (2008)
This is a surprisingly good b-grade western, because it starts out like a simple revenge story and then develops into something a little more nuanced. The final act reveals the better angels of Henriksen's gunfighter persona, and the film serves as a great companion piece to BONE DRY.

APPALOOSA (2008)
This traditional western re-teamed Henriksen with THE RIGHT STUFF co-star Ed Harris, as well as Viggo Mortensen, Jeremy Irons and Renee Zellweger. Henriksen is right at home among his peers in the Old West, playing a complex character with the potential to be good, bad or ugly in any given moment. Time and time again, it's that kind of human complexity that makes the his characters resonate.

Ride on.


TOMORROW'S POST: LANCE HENRIKSEN'S TEN FAVORITE WESTERNS!