MOVIES MADE ME

Thoughts for Desperate Writers

2012-01-24T09:17:00.000-08:00

How long has it been since you wrote a story where your real love or your real hatred somehow got onto the paper? When was the last time you dared release a cherished prejudice so it slammed the page like a lightning bolt? What are the best things and the worst things in your life, and when are you going to get around to whispering or shouting them?
- Ray Bradbury

It’s a world, it’s a world of potential suicides, well, I speak mostly of the United States, I don’t know the rest, but it’s a place of potential and actual suicides and hundreds and thousands of lonely women, women just aching for companionship, and then there are the men, going mad, masturbating, dreaming, hundreds and thousands of men going mad for sex or love or anything, and meanwhile, all these people, the love-lost, the sex-lost, the suicide-driven, they’re all working these dull soul-sucking jobs that twist their faces like rotten lemons and pinch their spirits, out, out, out... Somewhere in the structure of our society it is impossible for these people to contact each other. Churches, dances, parties only seem to push them further apart, and the dating clubs, the Computer Love Machines only destroy more and more a naturalness that should have been; a naturalness that has somehow been crushed and seems to remain crushed forever in our present method of living (dying). See them put on their bright clothes and get into their new cars and roar off to NOWHERE. It’s all an outside maneuver and the contact is missed.
- Charles Bukowski

Artists are the Indians of the white world. They are called dreamers who live in the clouds, improvident people who can't hold onto their money, people who don't want to face "reality." They say the same things about Indians. How the hell do these frog-skin people know what reality is? The world in which you paint a picture in your mind, a picture which shows things different from what your eyes see, that is the world from which I get my visions. I tell you this is the real world, not the Green Frog Skin World. That's only a bad dream, a streamlined, smog-filled nightmare.
- Lame Deer of the Sioux

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.
- Bradbury

(Bukowski print available here.)

MOVIES MADE ME #37: Howard Hawks - "The Slim Years"

2012-01-22T13:34:00.000-08:00

In his book Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood, Todd McCarthy writes: "There is no question that the eight films [director Howard Hawks] directed during the eight years he and [his wife] Slim were involved - from Only Angels Have Wings to Red River - represent the greatest and most creatively vibrant period of his career." I'm certainly not going to question it, and I can't help noticing that almost all of these films feature memorable love stories. Here's the list:

1) ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS (1939)

"Only Angels Have Wings came from a true story. There was a little airfield like that - with a man who radioed the pilots when they'd get through the pass. A chorus girl stopped there, ran into this fellow, got a little tight, slept with him and fell in love with him. She hung around there and he married her. And they were two of the happiest people I've ever seen." - Hawks to Peter Bogdanovich

This is a story about a guy who's very reluctant to fall in love again, but who just can't help himself. The guy is Cary Grant - not the helplessly goofy Cary Grant of Hawks's earlier film BRINGING UP BABY, but Cary Grant in a more hyper-masculine mode. At times in this film he acts so self-righteous that you'd think he'd just stepped out of a Somerset Maugham novel. He's a daredevil pilot who refuses to give up his profession (which is also his true passion) for any woman, whether it's Rita Hayworth or Jean Arthur. Arthur falls for him anyway and, while her performance is a little weak (Hawks has said that he couldn't coach the actress out of her comfort zone, and Arthur has said - in no uncertain terms - that she later regretted it), her character nevertheless becomes an ideal partner. By the end of the film, she has made it clear that she loves Grant's character for exactly who he is, and wouldn't ask him to change for anything. What more can a guy hope for?

2) HIS GIRL FRIDAY (1940)

"We were having dinner one night at the house, six or eight people, and we were talking about dialogue. I said that the finest modern dialogue in the world came from [Ben] Hecht and [Charles] MacArthur. After dinner we went in, and I had two copies of their play The Front Page. There was a girl there who was pretty good, and I said, 'Read the reporter's part, and I'll read the editor's part.' And in the middle of it, I said, 'My Lord, it's better with a girl reading it than the way it was!' See, The Front Page was intended as a love affair between two men. I mean, they loved each other. There's no doubt about it." - Hawks to Joseph McBride

I'm not crazy about THE FRONT PAGE (1932), but there's no question that HIS GIRL FRIDAY is on fire whenever Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell are onscreen together. In classic screwball comedies, verbal sparring is the substitute for sex, and with actors of this caliber, it's hard not to feel the passion behind the dialogue.

Walter Burns: There's been a lamp burning in the window for ya, honey... here.
Hildy Johnson: Oh, I jumped out that window a long time ago.

Divorce never seemed so romantic.

3) SERGEANT YORK (1941)

A lot of critics tend to downplay this film when they're writing about Hawks as an auteur, probably because it lacks the cynicism of so many of his other films. Gary Cooper's backwoods soldier is a far cry from Cary Grant's smug businessman, and innocent Joan Leslie has even less in common with Rosalind Russell... but these two still have a pretty amusing courtship scene on her front porch, when Cooper runs off a competing beau. Sure it's hokey and mawkish, but Cooper wins the day, the girl and the audience through sheer charisma.

4) BALL OF FIRE (1941)

"I've been accused of promoting Women's Lib, and I've denied it, emphatically. It just happens that kind of a woman is attractive to me. I merely am doing somebody that I like. And I've seen so many pictures where the hero gets in the moonlight and says silly things to a girl, I'd reverse it and let the girl do the chasing around, you know, and it works out pretty well." - Hawks to Joseph McBride

Hawks says that his writers were having a hard time with the script for BALL OF FIRE until he told them how he saw it. It's SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARVES, he explained, with a burlesque singer as Snow White and a bunch of stodgy academics as the dwarfs. The film pairs the kind of straightforward and straight-laced romantic hero that Cooper played in SERGEANT YORK with a smart and sassy Hawksian heroine, played by Barbara Stanwyck. It's an obvious mismatch - not unlike Stanwyck and Henry Fonda in Preston Sturges's THE LADY EVE (1941) - but that's what makes it fun. Stanwyck is luminescent.

5) AIR FORCE (1943)

It's tough to make a case for AIR FORCE as love story, since there are few women in the film, but this is still a very emotional film. AIR FORCE is Hawks's tribute to the airmen of the World War II-era military, and the director's affection for every soldier onscreen is as heartfelt as any romance he's ever filmed.

In 1944, Hawks produced a similar (though much less heartfelt) tribute to the Canadian Navy, called CORVETTE K-225. In that film, Randolph Scott and Ella Raines make a charming enough couple, but the character development is marginal. Hawks later told Peter Bogdanovich that "it's very hard to make a good movie out of anything like that because you are always bound by limits laid down by the Army and Navy and so forth. There are too many people who have an idea of what it should be."

In the same year Hawks also co-directed a lusty western called THE OUTLAW, which introduced newcomer Jane Russell to drooling men around the world. His co-director Howard Hughes famously said, "There are two good reasons why men go to see her. Those are enough." It seems safe to say that Hughes wasn't quite the romantic that Hawks was. Hawks took no credit for the controversial aspects of the film, which completely overwhelmed the silly plot.

6) TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT (1944)

"So we had a party out at the house Saturday night, and I asked [Lauren Bacall] to come out there. I said, 'Can't you get somebody to take you home?' She said, 'I don't do too well with the men.' I said, 'How do you treat them?' She said, 'As nice as I can.' I said, 'Well, try insulting them and see what happens.' So she came around the next Saturday and said, 'I got a ride home.' I said, 'What happened?' 'Well, I insulted a man and he liked it.' I said, 'What did you do?' She said, 'I asked him where he got his tie, and he said What do you want to know for? and I said So I can tell people not to go there.' I said, 'Who's the man?' She said, 'Clark Gable.' She was doing pretty good. So on Monday, I went to the writer and told him about this girl who could insult people and make them like her. Insolence, you know - that they liked. I said, 'You know, Bogie is the most insolent man on the screen. Do you think we can write a girl that is as insolent as he is?' The writer said, 'It would be fun to try.'" - Hawks to George Stevens Jr.

What can I say about this film? Bogart and Bacall are perfect together. Walter Huston recognizes the chemistry right away, when Bacall responds to his non sequitur about being bit by a dead bee. "Why don't you bite him back?" she asks, exuding sexuality. Off screen, Bogart fell in love with his co-star, and who can blame him? Bacall knows how to put the old "stinker" in his place, and he loves it. There are stories that Howard Hawks also fell in love with her, which may be why he used his wife's name "Slim" as a nickname for Bacall's character. She, in turn, calls Bogie "Steve," which is what Hawks's wife called him.

7) THE BIG SLEEP (1946)

It was a no-brainer to pair Bogart and Bacall in another film. As with TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT, THE BIG SLEEP is driven by great performances. The real-life lovers are eminently watchable, but in this one Bacall has a little more competition... from her character's jailbait sister (Martha Vickers) and a sultry bookstore clerk (Dorothy Malone) who closes up her store early so she can seduce the private dick. The bookstore scene is unforgettable. According to Hawks:

"That wasn't the way it was written at all. We just did it because the girl was so damn good-looking." - Hawks to Joseph McBride

8) RED RIVER (1948)

Joanne Dru plays the love interest who initially comes between the father and son duo of John Wayne and Montgomery Clift in RED RIVER. If the actress doesn't seem quite up to the task, that's because shewas a last minute replacement for Maggie Sheridan, who announced that she was pregnant two days before the film started shooting. Dru has one particularly good scene with Montgomery Clift, in which she plays it tough while he removes a war arrow from her shoulder, but RED RIVER is more of a love story between Wayne and Clift (and no, I'm not suggesting that this is Duke's BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN). As for Maggie Sheridan:

"Maggie had been taught by a fellow how to deal cards and the whole idea was this woman couldn't be a whore because she was too good at cards - that sort of thing. She had some great stuff to do. But Maggie married a very dull man and led a dull life for about five years. When she came back she wasn't the same person. If she'd only done Red River she'd have been a big star." - Hawks to Peter Bogdanovich

So Dru took the role and Clift became a big star. Soon after making this film, Howard Hawks and his wife Slim divorced. Hawks's next film was A SONG IS BORN, an embarrassing musical remake of BALL OF FIRE starring Danny Kaye and Virginia Mayo. Proof that good chemistry is everything.

A World of My Own

2012-01-16T18:12:00.000-08:00

Graham Greene never wrote a full autobiography. The closest he came was a thin volume called A World of My Own - a collection of short excerpts from several decades worth of daily dream journals. Greene felt that these insights into his subconscious mind were a more honest self-portrait than any conscious autobiography could ever be, so he arranged for them to be published after his death in 1991.

In one chapter, the author writes about “some famous writers I have known” - known, that is, through encounters in dreams. Greene observes that only dead writers seem to visit his subconscious, which lends a ghostly credibility to what he refers to as his “other world.” I must say I like the idea of dead writers visiting the dreams of living writers, perhaps granting only as much time as the living writer deserves before moving on to another dream. Greene was “visited” by quite a few noteworthy figures, including T.S. Eliot (and it’s obviously the much older Eliot, the dour critic who inspired the nickname “The Pope of Russell Square”). Their exchange is brief... but at least more convincing than a book written a few years later by a medium that claims to have channeled Eliot repeatedly. (I can’t remember the name of the book, and I’m not sure I’d mention it here even if I did... As soon as I started reading it, I felt like an idiot for taking the time to track it down.)

While I’m indulging this fantastic idea of ghostly visitations from dead writers, let me add that I too have been “visited” by a few noteworthy figures. The first one I can remember was Charles Bukowski. Roughly four years after he died, I observed L.A.’s dharma bum in Heaven, conversing with a little girl who was crushed by an avalanche. When I woke up and wrote about the encounter, I noted that Bukowski was “uncharacteristically silent.” Around the same time, I dreamed about George A. Romero’s “retirement party.” Obviously Romero is still alive... but, since he has spent his career making films about the “living dead,” I think it’s appropriate that he should already be visiting the dreams of wannabe filmmakers. One of my favorite dream encounters happened just last year. This one was with an actor that I’ve admired since I was a kid...

February 15, 2011

I met Boris Karloff last night... at the tail end of a long dream in which I narrowly escaped a collapsing building during an earthquake.

In the aftermath, Mr. Karloff and I crossed paths and I instantly recognized him. He was very old, and carrying a fishing rod and tackle box away from the anxious crowd.

I followed him into a quiet riverside community and approached with as much confidence as I could muster. "Mr. Karloff," I said timidly.... He acknowledged me, but didn't stop. He seemed to be in a hurry, so I figured I'd better get to the point fast. "I was wondering if I could take you to lunch."

At this, he turned and sized me up. I figured I'd better say something else, so added, "If I'm not imposing too much... I'd really like to know more about you."

After a moment of apparent confusion, he smiled with acceptance. "That would be fine," he said, and he handed me the rod and tackle box. He didn't say "follow me," but I got the distinct impression that I was supposed to.

We kept going until we reached a stone house. It looked like it had been carved out of a very old rock - like something from The Flintstones. The surroundings looked like Malibu Creek Park in the summer... on a weekday morning when nobody is around, and the only sounds are nature: birds and running water.

I followed Karloff around the back of his house and saw that it was perched on a wide river. He kept moving, across several sections of wooden deck that were rotting away. One section was in such poor shape that it swayed like a hammock when he crossed it. I looked down and saw that it was hanging by only three nails. I hesitated, saying, "I think I'm heavier than you." He didn't bother to look back. He simply said, unconcerned, "It'll serve it's tour of duty."

So I took a leap of faith and crossed the deck. It swayed, but held.

When I safely reached the other side, Karloff was sitting on a well-worn rock, waiting for his fishing rod and tackle box. I dutifully gave them to him and watched as he cast a line into the river. I wondered how long he had been doing this... and how much longer he would continue doing it... but I said nothing. When he cast the line, I turned and looked across the river.

On the other side was a Native American community center. There were six or seven people cleaning up after a mid-day outdoor picnic - taking everything off of the picnic tables. Their faces were solemn, so I asked, "Why are they so sad?"

"Their time is almost up," he said, and that was all. He was intently focused on the water, so I did the same.

At first, all I could see was the reflection of the afternoon sun dancing in the current. Then my eyes began to focus on what was beneath the water. I could hardly believe what I saw... a giant blowfish, then a giant sting ray. The water was teeming with life... but not the kind of life you'd expect to see in a river in southern California. These were creatures that belonged at the bottom of the ocean...

The longer I looked, the deeper the river became and the more I saw. After a while, I was utterly hypnotized by the bottomless river and the dream-like world in Karloff's back yard. "You live here?" I asked, awe-struck. Karloff simply smiled.

Then I noticed a new shape in the water. It was too big to discern at first, but as I saw more and more, it became vaguely familiar.

Then, all at once, I knew what I was looking at.

"Is that Nessie?" I asked, daring to believe.

Karloff just laughed -- a good-natured laugh, full of life. It went on forever.

March 28, 2011

In my dream, I was a psychic writer who had access to the “mass mind” of all the great writers throughout history. Advertisers were courting me so that they could get promotional jingles by Shakespeare and Dostoevsky. It wasn’t entirely a power-trip dream, because I was not the only psychic writer. Somehow, the mass mind had been opened up to all writers with any integrity. This had the effect of weeding out all the bad writers, who had to go do something else with their lives…. In the dream the good writers not only became psychic but the bad writers suddenly realized that they were bad writers. If only…

Just After Sunset

2012-01-06T09:35:00.000-08:00

In the introduction to Just After Sunset, Stephen King confesses that he had forgotten how to write short stories. “There are lots of things in life that are like writing a bike,” he says, “but writing short stories isn’t one of them. You can forget how.” The way he got back on the bike was by editing the 2006 edition of Best American Short Stories. He remembered how to write his own short stories by reading hundreds of other people’s short stories. Then he sat down and wrote “Willa."

“Willa” is a story about a dead couple that don’t know they’re dead. The wife gets wise and starts hanging out in a bar – because it’s more exciting than hanging out at the defunct train station where she and her husband met their untimely demise. The story reminded me of a lot of ghost stories I’ve heard before, including some by Stephen King. I thought of Bobby Mackey’s haunted nightclub in Kentucky (the real-life inspiration for an episode of A Haunting that I produced) and of the haunted dance hall in Carnival of Souls and of a ghost town in one of King’s earlier short stories that features “a hell of a band.” What really struck me about the story, however, was the way it depicts time. When the dead couple realizes that they’re dead, they begin to see the world around them in a different way. The train tracks at the depot are suddenly overgrown with weeds and the signs are covered with graffiti. Time has passed, but somehow they haven’t recognized it until then. Time, the story suggest, exists only in the mind. It’s all a matter of perception.

The same idea informs “The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates,” another story in King's collection. This one is about a widow who receives a phone call from her dead husband. He calls two days after his death, but talks as if he’s only been dead for a matter of minutes. When she points this out, he says, “Mrs. Corey said time was different here.” He explains that he’s in a kind of limbo. It looks like Grand Central Station, but bigger and somehow less real (like a movie set, he explains). And, he adds, there are a million ways out. Gateways to other worlds… but which one to choose? He’s “living” in a dream, where anything is possible.

King says that two of the stories in the Just After Sunset collection essentially wrote themselves. He dreamed them, woke up and wrote them down – striving, no doubt, to capture the “feeling” of the story told to him by his subconscious. (I use this inarticulate phrase, because that’s how David Lynch describes it… and if it’s good enough for David Lynch, it's good enough for me.) It’s also what I’ve done with several of my own short stories that I’m most proud of – the ones that capture the “feeling” of the dream I'm trying to remember, the reality that exists in my head. “The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates” reminds me of a story that I wrote when I was a teenager. It was called “Gate 13” and it focused on a dead man who didn’t know he was dead, and so sat waiting at a bus station for the unknown to arrive. He didn’t know where he was going, or even why he was going. He knew only one thing: “It is time.”

Accomplished writers, I think, are writers who dream as they write. They let their subconscious do most of the work. They write convincing stories because, when they are writing, they genuinely believe in the world they’re writing about. It’s as real as the chair they’re sitting in. More real than that, actually… because, when we wake up from powerful dreams, the dreams seem more real than what we’re waking up to. To define fiction writing as active "day-dreaming" is an easy and boring cliché (no more articulate than talking about the “feeling” of a story), but it’s true: Writers are people who can dream while they’re awake.

The other dream story in King’s collection is called “Harvey’s Dream.” It’s entirely about a feeling of dread – a feeling that two worlds are about to overlap, and not for the better. There’s something of that same feeling in the short story “N.” which is King's ode to Arthur Machen – but this one doesn’t work as well for me, because it feels too literary and not dreamlike. (Then again, for my money, that's true of many of Machen's stories… and, while we’re at it, many of Lovecraft's stories too.) Two years ago, on New Years Day, I wrote a story that was a lot like “Harvey’s Dream.” It revolved around a writer who goes shopping with his wife and daughter instead of staying home to write. At the mall, his mind wanders and he sees a girl who looks exactly like his daughter – except that she has brown hair instead of blond. At that moment, he realizes that his daughter is missing. Instead of panicking, he approaches the lookalike and asks if she can help him find his daughter. The lookalike says, “Most people don’t talk to me. They don’t think I’m real.” The writer responds, “I know you’re real, because I write about things like you.”

It’s a ghost story, I suppose… but the way I wrote it, the story is more about the writer’s perception of reality than about the objective reality of ghosts. The writer is (to use a phrase adopted by a good friend of mine who knows all about waking dreams) “time-walking.” He allows the two worlds to overlap. That’s the secret.

MOVIES MADE ME #36: LOST HIGHWAY

2011-12-24T13:31:00.000-08:00

This is a difficult movie for me to write about – not just for the obvious reason that it’s a difficult movie to logically explain, but also because my first feature-length script was a (failed) attempt to re-create the tone of dread in this film. LOST HIGHWAY got under my skin in a way that very few films do. It’s a thinking person’s horror film, technically brilliant and intellectually challenging. At first I couldn’t easily explain why it made such a strong impression on me, so I resorted to mimicry instead. All these years later, I still haven’t made that first script work the way I want it to, and I remain spellbound by LOST HIGHWAY.

In an extended interview with Chris Rodley, David Lynch says that neither he nor his co-writer Barry Gifford thought much about “meaning” when they were writing LOST HIGHWAY. What Lynch wanted was to be true to a “feeling.” The feeling originated with the simple phrase “lost highway” (used in one of Gifford’s novels) and with an extended sequence that came to the filmmaker on his last night of shooting TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME. (Lynch has said that he sometimes “receives” ideas the way a shortwave receiver picks up radio waves.) This is how he describes it:

It was like the first third of the picture, maybe, minus some scenes we had in the final script. A couple are living in a house and a videotape is delivered. When they look at it, it’s of the front of their house. They don’t think anything of it and then they get another one, and this one is going through the living room, and watching them asleep in bed. This thing I had went all the way up to the fist hitting Fred in the police station – to suddenly being in another place and not knowing how you got there or what is wrong.

A few years ago, I sat down to watch LOST HIGHWAY with my future wife. She made it through most of this extended sequence without saying a word – clearly hypnotized by the deliberately slow pacing and unsettling silence (except on the low end, with Trent Reznor’s bass-heavy drones unhinging the subconscious mind like the first few seconds of a powerful earthquake). The sequence perfectly illustrates Lynch’s ability to create an atmosphere of dread. With shadows and whispers, he draws the viewer in. I found myself turning up the volume on the movie… the way Father Karras does when he’s listening for the voice of the devil in THE EXORCIST. More recently, THE SIXTH SENSE and PARANORMAL ACTIVITY have used the same scare tactic. In LOST HIGHWAY, this gimmick is more than a simple setup for a jump scare. What Lynch’s carefully crafted dreamscape does is amplify the overall sense of mystery.

The bare-bones plot alone generates questions. In the first scene, Fred Madison receives a message that “Dick Lurant is dead.” We are left to wonder: Who is Dick Lurant? How did he die? Did Fred know him? And who delivered the message? This is the first round of questions in what seems like a straightforward murder mystery. Next, we meet Fred’s wife Renee, who is beautiful and aloof. Anyone who has any familiarity with a basic film noir plot must be asking themselves: Did she have something to do with the murder? Is she having an affair? Can she be trusted? Lynch doesn’t need his characters to ask any of these questions. He trusts the audience to ask them, based on what the characters don’t say. The director explains:

To me, a mystery is like a magnet. Wherever there is something that’s unknown, it has a pull to it. If you were in a room and there was an open doorway, and stairs going down and the light just fell away, you’d be very tempted to go down there. When you only see a part, it’s even stronger than seeing the whole. The whole might have logic, but out of its context, the fragment takes on a tremendous value of abstraction. It can become an obsession.

The videotapes escalate the mystery. We want to know who is stalking them and why. The first time I saw the movie, I thought of the novel RED DRAGON, in which a serial killer videotapes his prey before murdering them in their own beds. In that story, the police eventually establish that the killer does this so he can re-live the murders over and over again. The actions in LOST HIGHWAY are even more unsettling, because they suggest a different motive. The killer (or killers) want Fred and Renee to see the tapes. They tapes are intended to create fear. The police, in LOST HIGHWAY, offer no other thoughts or consolation, and David Lynch continues to torment us with his own video just as surely as his red dragon is tormenting Fred.

The first moment of relief (though it’s a very mild relief) comes when Fred remembers a dream he had the night before. In his dream, he saw his wife but didn’t recognize her as his wife. “It wasn’t you,” he tells her, “It looked like you, but it wasn’t.” This reinforces the viewer’s probable perception of Renee as an icy femme fatale… maybe even a schizophrenic… or, for viewers more inclined toward horror than film noir, a pod person. Lynch is deepening the mystery, forcing us to ask what is real in the world that Lynch has drawn us into. At this point, we – by association with Fred – are completely at the mercy of the unknown. We sense that we are vulnerable. Because we don’t have any clues about what we might be vulnerable to, we are defenseless. That is the “feeling” of the first act of LOST HIGHWAY.

The plot turns on a party sequence, in which Fred meets Renee’s enigmatic sleazy friend Andy (and prompting us to wonder,How do they know each other?) and a Mystery Man (Herk Harvey’s pasty-faced ghoul as played by the eminently creepy film noir actor Robert Blake) who introduces himself with a haunting pronouncement: “We’ve met before.” As with the rest of the film, what makes this scene so disturbing isn’t what’s said, but what’s felt. Fred tries to laugh off his nervousness. Surely, he would remember a face like this – pale, wide-eyed, sardonically smiling, Peter Lorre on meth. “Where is it that you think we met?” Fred asks. The Mystery Man answers: “At your house… You invited me. It is not my custom to go where I’m not invited.” To prove his point, he performs a kind of magic trick, allowing Fred to talk to his “other self” on the phone. When Fred recoils in horror, the Mystery Man laughs maniacally – the sound reverberating endlessly as if in an echo chamber. At this point, my wife got so creeped out that she left the room, never to return. Probably, the mysteries seemed insurmountable to her. There was simply too many overwhelming questions: Was the Mystery Man a vampire? A demon? Some kind of inhuman monster that could manipulate or travel through time? Or just a messenger, delivering the truth of a reality much worse than anything a straightforward horror movie could conjure?

Lynch found his answer in the reality of 1995 America. In his book Catching the Big Fish, the writer/director points to the most likely inspiration for the second and third acts of LOST HIGHWAY:

At the time that Barry Gifford and I were writing the script for Lost Highway, I was sort of obsessed with the O.J. Simpson trial. Barry and I never talked about it this way, but I think the film is somehow related to that… What struck me about O.J. Simpson was that he was able to smile and laugh. He was able to go golfing later with seemingly very few problems about the whole thing. I wondered how, if a person did these deeds, he could go on living. And we found this great psychology term – “psychogenic fugue” – describing an event where the mind tricks itself to escape some horror. So, in a way, Lost Highway is about that. And also the fact that nothing can stay hidden forever.

In the second act of LOST HIGHWAY, Fred Madison seems to physically and psychically transform into a different person – a younger man named Pete Dayton. One way of interpreting this illogical story twist is to view LOST HIGHWAY as a narrative coming from inside O.J. Simpson’s head. Or Michael Peterson’s head. Or even (as fate would have it), Robert Blake’s head. All three of these men were accused of murdering their wives. At present, all three of them have been cleared of murder charges. Not one of them has ever confessed to murder… perhaps not even to themselves. I wouldn't be the first to suggest that, like Fred Madison, they prefer to “remember things my own way.” Many a commentator has noted that it’s difficult to convict someone who genuinely, thoroughly – to the very core of their being – believes that they are innocent. And many of those same commentators, using terms like “fugue state,” argue that it is entirely possible for a person to be a killer and not know it. The greatest horror in LOST HIGHWAY – as in everyday life – exists in the mind.

Since he is obviously the “wrong man,” Pete is set free... just like O.J. With a guilt-free conscience (ostensibly due to amnesia), he returns to his own life. But almost immediately, his life becomes mixed up with Fred Madison’s mystery. As Lynch says, “Nothing can stay hidden forever.” Pete gets involved with a hot-bodied blonde named Alice who looks exactly like Renee Madison, as well as a hot-headed porn producer named Mr. Eddie who is later identified as “Dick Lurant.” Even Renee’s friend Andy turns up again. Alice asks Pete to murder him, so that they can run away together. Pete, taking a DETOUR from THE WRONG MAN to DOUBLE INDEMNITY and KISS ME DEADLY, never seems to have a choice. On some subconscious level, he knows that Alice is Renee, that she’s “damaged goods." He also knows that he himself is a killer, though he feigns shock after doing the deed. And he knows how this story – told a thousand times in a thousand Hollywood movies and sordid true crime narratives – ends. So do we (the movie geek half of the audience, at least).

Act 3 is the journey into endless night, a Freudian plunge into a predestined universe. Déjà vu means that Fred has been here before and will be here again – a helpless victim of cruel fate. The end (which shows him violently morphing into a new “self”) is his beginning, and the implication is that he may never be able to to escape the cycle of violence and denial, no matter how many times he is (literally or figuratively) reincarnated. The “lost highway” is his purgatory, and that’s the concept that makes this a true horror film to me.

Toward the end of LOST HIGHWAY, the Mystery Man offers the closest thing we have to a coherent explanation of Lynch’s metaphysical mystery. “In the Far East,” he tells Fred, “when a person is sentenced to death, they’re sent to a place where they can’t escape, never knowing when an executioner may step up behind them and fire a bullet in the back of their head.” Embedded in this explanation is the most profound question that the film poses to its audience: Is this what life must like for someone who completely denies responsibility for their own actions? Reflecting on the O.J. Simpson case (and the Michael Peterson case and the Robert Blake case), my mind wanders even further into the everyday darkness: What is the “reality” of a world where more and more of these kind of people run free among us?

Lynch’s focus, of course, is not on this world. I once glibly called LOST HIGHWAY the Limbo of David Lynch’s Divine Comedy, noting similarities to the inferno of TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME and the paradiso of MULHOLLAND DRIVE. I don’t mean to draw out a Christian subtext in these films, only a mythological one. The focus of each story is not on dogma, but on love - in all of its incarnations, good and bad. On some levels the "Divine Comedy" theory is still a reductive theory (as is any clean-cut theory of Lynch's movies), but I think it suggests an appropriate level of philosophical thought. In my mind, the dreamscapes in these three films are definitely “of a piece.” It’s worth noting that Lynch served as sound designer on the trilogy; his only other films on which he performed this function were ERASERHEAD and INLAND EMPIRE. Mary Sweeney edited all three films (her only other collaboration with Lynch being THE STRAIGHT STORY) and Angelo Badalamenti composed the scores for each of them. I can’t believe that the filmmaker wasn’t, on some subconscious level, aware of a subtle progression from Laura Palmer’s fiery private hell, through the purgatory of Fred Madison / Pete Dayton, into the transcendent light shared by Rita and Betty Elms / Diane Selwyn at the end of MULHOLLAND DRIVE. Which must have left him with an overwhelming question: What comes next?

Writing Los Angeles

2011-12-18T16:27:00.000-08:00

“There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge…”
- Raymond Chandler, “Red Wind” (1938)

One night a few weeks ago, hurricane-force winds blew over the San Gabriel mountains, toppling trees and leaving thousands of homes without power. It was the beginning of “winter” in Los Angeles, heralded by the almost mythic power of the seasonal Santa Ana winds (though, according to one news reporter, they weren’t technically Santa Anas because the air came from the Great Basin instead of the Mojave Desert). On the night of the storm, my wife and I sat inside, listening to the howling wind with reverent silence. We usually usually think of this as a “weatherless” city. It’s not often that weather makes itself known in L.A., but when it does…

Just a few days before the storm, I started reading a 2002 anthology called Writing Los Angeles, edited by David L. Ulin. A praiseworthy collection, it gathers work by more than a hundred writers (famous and not so famous) into roughly 900 pages, revealing countless layers of myth and fact about the semi-fictional city of Los Angeles. In one quote-worthy essay, Joan Didion re-defines Raymond Chandler’s “red wind” as a foehn wind. I was unaware of the term until I read Herman Hesse’s first novel, where the main character remembers the foehn winds of his youth in the Swiss Alps. “A native of the mountains can study philosophy and natural history, and even dispense with God altogether,” Hesse writes, “but when he experiences the Foehn or hears an avalanche crash through the forest, his heart trembles and he thinks of God and death.” Didion is equally dramatic about the Santa Anas (which, not coincidentally, derive their name from the Spanish word for devil)…

“A few years ago an Israeli physicist discovered that not only during such winds, but for the ten or twelve hours which precede them, the air carries an unusually high ratio of positive to negative ions. No one seems to know exactly why that should be; some talk about friction and others suggest solar disturbances. In any case the positive ions are there, and what an excess of positive ions does, in the simplest terms, is make people unhappy.”

Didion concludes her essay by declaring that the Santa Ana winds are a reminder to Angelenos of “how close to the edge we are.” She is not the first and she certainly won’t be the last the last writer to describe Los Angeles as a city on the verge of natural disaster, to say nothing of identity crisis. In addition to her ode to the east wind, Didion writes about the apocalyptic wildfires (often fueled by the Santa Anas.) in her first novel Play It As It Lays. There, wildfires provide a psychic backdrop for the main character’s emotional collapse. At the end of the novel, it seems as if the entire city is destined to burn to the ground. But would that be a blessing or a curse?

In another essay from Writing Los Angeles, Evenlyn Waugh predicts that drought will be the eventual undoing of Los Angeles. John McFee, on the other hand, argues that “debris flow” is the most terrifying natural disaster for residents of the L.A. foothills. Oddly enough, none of the writers in this collection says much about the perennial threat of earthquakes… perhaps because that’s such a well-worn cliché. Check out Curt Gentry’s novel The Late Great State of California (1968).

Why do writers envision Los Angeles as such an apocalyptic locale? Is it because, as Simone de Beauvior notes, we are “surrounded by indomitable nature”- countless parks dividing us from our neighbors, and endless rugged mountains towering over us? Is it because, as Stewart Edward White points out, the modern city was partly founded by religious cranks (“clairvoyants, palm readers, Hindu frauds, crazy cults, fake healers, Chinese doctors”… to say nothing of filmmakers)? Or maybe it’s because the identity of Los Angeles, in the public imagination, has always been rooted in idealistic visions of “Hollywood” that are simply too good to be true. I recently read a book by a successful screenwriter, who offered this bit of practical advice for those aspiring to a career in the entertainment industry: “Think of Hollywood as a sexy young cheerleader with a great pair of legs and Alzheimer’s disease.”

Personally, I’m most interested in two kinds of L.A. writers – the kind who fall in love with the fantasy side of Hollywood and then write about it from on “high,” and the kind who get so disillusioned by the chasm between the fantasy and the reality that they ended up re-imagining “reality” as a much darker fantasy. What would L.A. fiction be, after all, without dark fantasies? Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust (1939) is surely the best-known – and probably the most acidic – “Hollywood novel” (though my personal favorite is Carl Van Vechten’s Spider Boy). Combined with the wry detective thrillers of writers like Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain, it dictates the recipe for “classic” detective noir, set in a city of shadows and fear. Civic corruption runs rampant, everyday people teeter on the edge of violent eruption, and the night is endless.

Filmmaker Paul Schrader claims [in an essay reproduced elsewhere] that detective noir reflects the disillusionment and moral ambiguity of the post-war generation: “a delayed reaction to the Thirties” expressing “the loss of public honor, heroic conventions, personal integrity and, finally, psychic stability.” The stories show us a culture defined by the demoralizing suspicion of every individual and every institution, and an overwhelming fear of the future. Another film historian sets the scene this way: “A dark street in the early morning hours, splashed with a sudden downpour. Lamps form haloes in the murk. In a walk-up room, filled with the intermittent flashing of a neon sign from across the street, a man is waiting to murder or be murdered…” For a resident of Los Angeles in Santa Ana season, how about this instead? A winding mountain road baking in the sun, cracks in the pavement appearing like blisters, reminders that the earth is alive and restless. In the distance, the hills are ringed with fire and plumes of smoke choke the sky. Heading home he wonders if there is still such a place.

What is it that’s so dreadful about Los Angeles? Why do so many of its authors write about endless night in a city with 350 days of sunshine a year? Cain explains: “Nothing changes… Life takes on a dreadful vacuity here.” The main character of Didion’s Play It As It Lays suffers from this affliction (the French call it “ennui”); she can’t adjust to a place without seasons. The monotony of the weather drives her crazy… at least, it drives her to a kind of spirit-crushing boredom. Life is perfect, but it’s life in stasis… so who cares? As Orson Welles once said, “The terrible thing about L.A. is that you sit down, you’re twenty-five, and when you get up you’re sixty-two.” Didion’s ennui has influenced a fair share of L.A. writers since the 70s… most obviously, Bret Easton Ellis in his debut novel Less Than Zero (1985), the opening pages of which might easily have been included in Writing Los Angeles.

Ennui is, I think, a fair reaction to life in L.A… but I’d argue that it’s only fair initially. Didion, after all, moved on from writing about “weatherless” L.A. to writing about apocalyptic L.A… and many of the other transplanted writers in Ulin’s connection seem to fall in love with Los Angeles in spite of themselves. Why? Once you’ve been here for a while, you begin to pick up the nuances that make it real. As Carey McWilliams explains in his seminal book Southern California: An Island on the Land, one begins to recognize that there are actually many seasons: “two springs, two summers and a season of rain.” You start to anticipate the Santa Anas and the fire and the rain. You prepare for them, mentally and physically. You won’t be as lucky about anticipating earthquakes, but you’ll learn to take them (the small ones) in stride… and, oddly enough, you’ll start to feel proud about “living on the edge.” Again I’m reminded of Herman Hesse’s first novel, in which he writes, “Toward the end of each winter the Foehn approached with a roar. The terrified people of the Alps listened to it, trembling; yet, when away from home, they always long to hear it.”

Hesse’s peer Aldous Huxley was among the first generation of Hollywood outsiders to publicly lambast the city of angels. In a 1923 essay, he called it the City of Dreadful Joy, and described “the joy of rushing about, of always being busy, of having no time to think, of being too rich to doubt… of being always in a crowd, never alone…” Huxley took his criticism even further in his 1939 novel After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. By then, he was a permanent resident of Los Angeles. It seems he couldn’t bring himself to leave.

Huxley’s compatriot Christopher Isherwood does a good job of explaining the appeal of Los Angeles for outsiders. For him, it is the same as the appeal of America in general, to an Englishman. In 1939, Isherwood writes, “In my sane moments, I love this country. I love it just because I don’t belong. Because I’m not involved in its traditions, not born under the curse of its history. I feel free here. I’m on my own. My life will be what I make of it.” Quite a few of the works anthologized in Writing Los Angeles rhapsodize about freedom, which is synonymous with life in L.A. The city was built on one basic principle: Anything goes. Edmund Wilson writes about the emblematic “mixturesque beauty” of the city’s art and architecture. Of course, not everyone sees that endless variety as beautiful.

Truman Capote calls L.A. “the noplace of everywhere… a dumping ground for all that is most exploitedly American.” (This includes, of course, Truman Capote, who died and was buried here in 1984.) In On the Road, Jack Kerouac called it “the loneliest and most brutal of American Cities” (though one wonders how Kerouac, an infrequent visitor to Los Angeles and a notoriously impulsive writer, could have formed more than a superficial opinion). Writing just a few years later, Norman Mailer dismisses L.A. as the “land of the pretty-pretty,” concluding, “Los Angeles is the home of self-expression, but the artists are middle-class and middling-minded.” The truth of that statement depends, I suppose, on which artists he was thinking of. It’s a big city and just about everyone in it is a dreamer… You can look for your niche or create your own private island, as Charles Bukowski explained in his forward to the 1972 Anthology of L.A. Poets:

“I think it is important to know that a man or woman, writer or not, can find more isolation in Los Angeles than in Boise, Idaho. Or, all things being far, he can with a telephone (if he has a telephone) have 19 people over drinking and talking with him within an hour and a half. I have bummed the cities and I know this – the great facility of Los Angeles is that one can be alone if one wishes or he can be in a crowd if he wishes. No other city seems to allow this easy double choice as well. This is a fairly wonderful miracle, especially if one is a writer.”

Bukowski, unlike Kerouac, was grateful to be condemned to freedom. He didn’t feel the need to explain Los Angeles. He let it be, the way the city let him be. I, on the other hand, am frequently guilty of trying to reduce vast, complex subjects to simple organizational schemes or theories, and I’ve been tempted to do the same thing with my thoughts on Los Angeles. As Ulin’s book proves, I’m not the only one. But the longer I live here, the more the city (if we can even call it that) resists classification.

In 1947, Simone de Beauvior describes Los Angeles as “a phantom city… a kaleidoscope… a hall of mirrors.” She explains, “It isn’t a city at all but a collection of villages, residential neighborhoods, and encampments separated by woods and parks.” This reminds me of Carey McWilliams’ assertion that Los Angeles is really eight-eight different cities, each of which must be explored and considered independently. In 1959, English writer Gavin Lambert muses, “Los Angeles is not a city, but a series of suburban approaches to a city that never materializes…. How to grasp something unfinished yet always remodeling itself, changing without a basis for change?” He concludes that Los Angeles – like “Hollywood” – is an imaginary construct. That’s okay, because “in America, illusion and reality are still often the same thing. The dream is the achievement, the achievement is the dream.”

Many writers have chosen to narrow their focus to sub-cities and ethnic enclaves. No doubt that makes the subject of defining Los Angeles more manageable, and it probably seems like the most natural approach to natives who’ve grown up in specific neighborhoods and discovered the greater city without a foreigner’s preconceptions. They can internalize the dream-like qualities of Los Angeles without dissecting them. Sometimes, even a foreigner can do this. I’ve always been a huge fan of John Fante for this reason. He opens his arms to the city and accepts everything it has to offer, good and bad, with courage and good humor. Bukowski followed his lead. I’d also argue that Ray Bradbury captures the essence of L.A. He inadvertently sums up the city in three words: “Mars is Heaven.”

Other writers, understanding that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, search for real-life symbols around which to build expansive theories. Umberto Eco’s essay on Disneyland presents the idea of Los Angeles as a giant amusement park. John Gregory Dunne re-christens L.A. “Autopia,” noting that the freeways are its lifeblood. (Dunne’s essay is an interesting counterpoint to a 1933 essay by James M. Cain, in which Cain enthusiastically declares that traffic control in L.A. is “perfect.”) Jan Morris argues that the Watts Towers commemorate the “failing faith” of a visionary settlement. Pico Iyer chooses LAX airport as his symbol, calling the city a concrete “caesura.” David Thomson is even more poetic in his essay on Mulholland Drive, which he compares to Marilyn Monroe’s naked body. He writes, “Imagine Marilyn Monroe, fifty miles long, lying on her side, half-buried on a ridge of crumbling rock, the crest of the Santa Monica Mountains, with chaparral, flowers and snakes writhing over her body, and mists, smog or dreams gathering in every curve…” What could possibly be a more intimate ode to the city?

Cees Nooteboom is the writer who gets right to the heart of the matter. He writes, “Humanity, including its more sensitive members, falls into two groups: haters and lovers.” It seems as if Los Angeles is a litmus test, showing which type of person you are. As Jan Morris points out, everybody complains about the problems of the city -- overcrowding, traffic, air quality, earthquakes, floods, fires, etc. -- but nobody wants to leave. I guess it’s a city people love to hate. Wanda Coleman blames it on “smog addiction.” A friend of mine, who grew up in Los Angeles, says that the smog is actually much better now than it was when he was growing up in the 60s and 70s, and couldn’t run through his neighborhood without coughing and wheezing… I know he’d be just as likely to make the “smog addiction” joke, because that’s the kind of joke you make when you’ve embraced – or at least internalized – Los Angeles, warts and all. It’s sort of like that mock-celebratory Randy Newman song:

Look at that mountain
Look at those trees
Look at that bum over there, man,
He’s down on his knees…

Everybody’s happy
‘Cause the sun is shining all the time

For my money, the most poignant essay in Writing Los Angeles is Lawrence Weschler’s “L.A. Glows.” The title sums it up. Weschler writes about nuances of the city’s famous “airlight”: winter shadows in the desert (I like to think of them as a precursor to the Celtic Twilight), melancholy sunsets (Faulkner’s “golden land”) and astoundingly clear nighttime skies (likewise attributable to the dreaded “thermal inversion” that traps the smog in the L.A. basin). Weschler’s friend Don Waldie is even more analytical. He describes four different types of L.A. light:

(1) the “cruel actinic light” of summer

(2) the “gunmetal-gray light” of winter

(3) the meditative light of fall (which he says is “the light the tourists come for – the light, to be more specific, of unearned nostalgia”)

On a recent trip, I noted that this is the same light that suffuses the afternoon sky in Rome around this time of year… and since the city of Los Angeles is barely 150 years old, maybe that’s the sort of comparison that provoked Waldie to use the phrase “unearned nostalgia.”

(4) the ideal light after the spring rains, when the sky is “clear as stone-dry champagne”

Waldie prefers the fourth, and rarest, of these lights – claiming that this is when you can see the real beauty of Los Angeles, beyond all the illusory haze. On days like that (we just had one a few days ago, following a seasonal rainstorm), it’s tempting to climb to the top of the nearest hill and stare out at the city in silent revery. Then again, for me, that’s worthy doing on just about any day… in any light.

Bottom line: You could write forever, but there's always more to say.

Rome: A Study in Light

2011-12-18T16:26:00.000-08:00

Horror Films of the 1990s

2011-11-05T08:12:00.000-07:00

I’ve been eagerly awaiting the publication of John Muir’s Horror Films of the 1990s for a long time – not just because I admire the author’s previous books, but because I came of age as a horror geek in the 1990s. It was a rough decade, seeming to lack the ingenuity of the 70s and the glee of the 80s. I remember a period when I felt like I was being punished for going to see horror films in the theater…The films were so uninspiring: HALLOWEEN 6, HELLRAISER 4, CANDYMAN 2, VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED, THE MANGLER, etc. I didn’t outright hate any of these films, but they were all pale imitations of the horror films I loved. Until SCREAM, and then again shortly afterwards, it seemed to me that the genre was dying a slow, painful death.

Muir acknowledges that the horror films of the 1990s are the “redheaded stepchildren of the genre,” often suffering “watered-down” scares and an overall sense of “sameness.” To be fair, the films Muir reviews here seem a bit less formulaic than the slasher films of the previous decade. The horror films of the 1990s overall have a bit more variety, but they are nevertheless haunted by bad storytelling. “By the 1990s,” Muir writes, “virtually every film to come out of the Hollywood machine was flawless from a technical standpoint, even sumptuous. Camera work is pristine. Music is evocative. The sound is impeccable… [but] these ‘face’ values hide the fact that the movie’s script is inadequate.” This reminds me of something Wes Craven said to me about the current (post-2004) spate of sequels, remakes and re-imaginations: It’s like jazz. The new masters of the form have more technical skill than their predecessors, but they don’t put as much of their souls into the music.

Muir identifies Craven as a true master of the form in the 1990s, providing insightful analyses of THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS, NEW NIGHTMARE and SCREAM. (Of course, he also concedes that WES CRAVEN’S CARNIVAL OF SOULS is the most soulless exercise of the decade.) It’s no surprise that the author thoroughly excavates the work of established masters like Craven and John Carpenter, since he has written books on both filmmakers. He also gravitates toward the work of David Fincher, praising the critically-reviled ALIEN 3 and the harrowing SE7EN as two of the ten best films of the decade. I can’t help wondering if there’s a Fincher monograph in Muir’s future… or perhaps a study of the works of Chris Carter, whom he nominates as THE major influence on horror films of the 1990s (in spite of the fact that Carter only made one film which loosely qualifies for inclusion here).

It's fair to say that Carter, the creator of TV’s THE X-FILES, is at least party responsible for the popularity of 90's horror films featuring aliens and government conspiracies… and certainly he helped to popularize police procedurals and serial killer mythos with his TV series MILLENNIUM. All of these became popular mainstream horrors at a time when mainstream filmmakers (from Francis Ford Coppola to Mike Nichols) were eager to dabble in the commercially-thriving genre, blurring the lines between horror and melodrama.

One of the biggest obstacles that Muir faces in his book is presenting a solid definition of a “horror film” in the 1990s. He opts to include a category of films that I have always thought of as “psychological thrillers,” beginning with PACIFIC HEIGHTS (Amityville for the post-yuppie era) and SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY (which he labels “exhibit A in the case against 1990s horror movies”). These films are defined by the presence of an “interloper” (usually a highly sexualized woman… and, in one case, a dog) that single-handedly overturns the yuppie status quo. See THE HAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE, POISON IVY, SINGLE WHITE FEMALE, THE CRUSH, MAN’S BEST FRIEND, THE TEMP, etc. Another popular breed of psychological thriller is the police procedural. THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS is the most obvious and influential example, with BASIC INSTINCT not far behind. What all of these films (psychological thrillers, horror movies, call them what you will…) have in common is everyday sociopaths - self-centered villains who lack basic empathy for their victims. In that sense, the “monsters” in these films are a more realistic extension of the faceless slashers of the 1980s… and arguably more frightening because they’re not simply outsiders who impose themselves on others. In the horror films of the 1990s, we are sleeping with the enemies. It's harder to escape from someone that you've invited into your house, someone who uses careful manipulation instead of brute force. (Taking this line of thought one step further, it’s no surprise that the vampire myth saw a resurgence of popularity in the 1990s… Our attraction to the monster, in this sexually-charged decade, more than equals our repulsion.)

Clearly, the horror genre was undergoing a kind of subtle reinvention - something every genre must do periodically in order to stay alive. The old horrors were too familiar to be scary, as demonstrated by another trend that Muir explains. His reviews show that self-reflexive horror didn’t begin with SCREAM (check out the expert analysis of POPCORN), but reveal how SCREAM did it best – by not just relying on parody, but also capturing the cynicism (and the downright terrifying lack of empathy) of the millennium generation. Muir’s book reminds one of those few years in the middle of the decade when Kevin Williamson was the biggest name in horror – contributing scripts for I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER, THE FACULTY, H20 and KILLING MRS. TINGLE. Muir's review of THE FACULTY explains why lifelong horror fans were eager to dismiss the supposed wunderkind, why H20 was so well-received in spite of its simple-mindedness, and why KILLING MRS. TINGLE is a “perfect metaphor” for the impeachment of Bill Clinton (!). Most intriguing is his review of I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER, which he defines as an astute metaphor for the post-yuppie era. The theme of the film, he says, is “actions have consequences.”

For me, the best thing about Horror Films of the 1990s is the way Muir defines some of the most challenging films of the decade as variations on this theme – films with a deep moral undercurrent. Of Joel Schumacher’s FLATLINERS, he says, “If watched in conjunction with Adrian Lyne’s JACOB’S LADDER and even [William Peter] Blatty’s world-weary EXORCIST III one begins to gain a sense of awareness where more 1990s horror movies could have taken audiences: to an excavation of the human spirit and human heart after a particularly restless and avaricious span in our history.” He also calls the horror-lite GHOST “a horror movie about America’s inevitable – but delayed – return to reality; about a national awakening from the corrosive yuppie values that so many people believed in and lived by in the Age of the Gipper.” SCREAM and I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER are a return to this theme, focusing not on the reformed yuppies but rather on the younger members of Generation X. Copycats missed the subtext that made these films resonate… at least until 1999, when there was a kind of moralist horror renaissance in films like THE SIXTH SENSE, STIGMATA, THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT and STIR OF ECHOES. Muir also points toward Guillermo del Toro’s modern myths of the early 2000s… fodder for Horror Films of the 2000s.

What this batch of reviews does is help to redefine the horror genre’s lost decade as “the last age of innocence,” a time when reflective and inward-looking horror had a few days in the sun “before real-life terror took a firm hold in America’s rattled psyche” and torture porn became the order of the day. Viewed in that light, I must say I’m feeling a bit nostalgic for some of the comparatively mild horror fare of the 1990s. There’s a soft spot in my heart for silly flicks like STEPHEN KING'S GRAVEYARD SHIFT, PROM NIGHT 3: THE LAST KISS, RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD 3 and TALES FROM THE HOOD. Muir has his own favorites, and he's got me thinking about viewing some films I never thought I'd go back to: DR. GIGGLES, RAISING CAIN (which he describes as “a satire exposing the schizophrenic, contradictory messages sometimes sent by our culture to men of the day” – which sounds like a completely different film than the one I saw when I was a teenager), TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 4, THE CRAFT, THE FAN and THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU.

He also provides an impressive list of the best of the decade – a surprisingly varied assembly of films that deserve to come out of hiding: CEMETERY MAN (DELLAMORTE DELLAMORE), DUST DEVIL, THE REFLECTING SKIN, THE VANISHING (SPOORLOS), NIGHTWATCH (NATTEVAGTEN), THE ADDICTION, TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME, LOST HIGHWAY, THE NINTH GATE, FROM DUSK TIL DAWN, THE DEVIL’S ADVOCATE, SLEEPY HOLLOW, etc. The list proves that this is a decade worthy of reevaluation, and Horror Films of the 1990s proves that John Muir is a master of explaining why horror films remain vital.

To order, visit www.mcfarlandpub.com or call 800-253-2187.

Yosemite

2011-10-31T15:41:00.000-07:00

… the mighty Sierra, miles in height, reposing like a smooth cumulous cloud in the sunny sky, and so gloriously coloured, and so luminous, it seemed to be not clothed with light, but wholly composed of it, like the wall of some celestial city.
- John Muir, The Mountains of California (1894)

Nowhere will you see the majestic operations of nature more clearly revealed beside the frailest, most gentle and peaceful things. Nearly all the park is a profound solitude. Yet it is full of charming company, full of God's thoughts, a place of peace and safety amid the most exalted grandeur and eager enthusiastic action, a new song, a place of beginnings abounding in first lessons on life, mountain-building, eternal, invincible, unbreakable order; with sermons in stones, storms, trees, flowers, and animals brimful of humanity.
- John Muir, Our National Parks (1901)

It has been said that “it is not easy to describe in words the precise impressions which great objects make upon us.” I cannot describe how completely I realized this truth. None but those who have visited this most wonderful valley can even imagine the feelings with which I looked upon the view that was there presented. The grandeur of the scene was but softened by the haze that hung over the valley – light as gossamer – and by the clouds which partly dimmed the higher cliffs and mountains. This obscurity of vision but increased the awe with which I beheld it, and as I looked, a peculiar exalted sensation seemed to fill my whole being, and I found my eyes in tears with emotion.
- Lafayette Bunnell, Discovery of the Yosemite and the Indian War of 1851 Which Led to That Event (1880)

It is beyond the power of language to describe the awe-inspiring majesty of the darkly-frowning and overhanging mountain walls of solid granite that here hem us in on every side, as though they would threaten us with instantaneous destruction, if not total annihilation, did we attempt for a moment to deny their power. If man ever feels his utter insignificance at any time, it is when looking upon such a scene of appalling grandeur as the one here presented.
- James M. Hutchings, Scenes of Wonder and Curiosity in California (1860)

I found it impossible to work here, or even, to talk fluently or forcibly on what I knew about the Yosemite. The theme mastered me. I noticed that there were few signing-birds about, and was told by an old guide that they, with most animals, were afraid of the valley. Poetic thoughts and gay fancies seem struck with a like fear. You are for a time mentally unnerved; but you feel that in your powerlessness, you are gaining power; in your silence, more abundant expression…
- Grace Greenwood, “Eight Days in the Yosemite” (1872)

Here was the one adequate symbol for all that California promised: beauty, grandeur, expansiveness, a sense of power, and a sense – this in the geological history – of titanic preparation for an assured and magnificent future. As scenery, as a physiography that was deeply symbolic, Yosemite offered Californians an objective correlative for their ideal sense of themselves: a people animated by heroic imperatives. Its configuration of mountain and valley was a grand paradigm of California’s geography as a whole. From the Valley floor, standing on the banks of the Merced River and looking up at the great cliffs, one was in full possession of limits, and yet these limits were of grandeur and an inaccessibility beyond even the suggestion of intimacy…
- Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream

TOP 10 HORROR FILM LOCATIONS IN AND AROUND L.A.

2011-10-20T16:48:00.000-07:00

When I moved to L.A. in October 2006, one of the first things I did was drive to Pasadena to hunt down the shooting locations for John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN. Ever since then, I’ve been discovering the greater Los Angeles area by exploring filming locations. Some of my favorite sites are related to horror movies. With my favorite holiday looming, I thought I’d make a list for fellow genre fans that want to plan a Halloween-themed day trip.

1) SOUTH PASADENA

I confess I had a cheat sheet for the HALLOWEEN shooting locations in Pasadena. Sean Clark’s “Horror’s Hallowed Grounds” website offers an obsessively detailed rundown on where to go and what to see.

While you’re in the area: You might also visit the town center of Sierra Madre, which doubled as Santa Mira in the original INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS. (For more INVASION locations, check out Jerry Schneider’s website.) Just down the road is the Los Angeles Arboretum, where portions of Jack Arnold’s CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON and Roger Corman’s ATTACK OF THE GIANT LEECHES were filmed.

2) HOLLYWOOD

No Halloween tour is complete without visiting the Doyle and Strode houses, sitting opposite each other on N. Orange Grove Ave. in Hollywood. A few blocks away, on Genesee Ave., you can also see Nancy and Glen’s houses from the original A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET. (“Horror’s Hallowed Grounds” has also done an extensive episode on ELM STREET, which will take you to Lincoln Heights and Venice Beach and quite a few places in between.) One place you might not think of stopping is the Max Factor Museum at the intersection of Hollywood and Highland, but fans of SILENCE OF THE LAMBS really should go – to see the prison corridor set where Clarice Starling first met Hannibal Lector.

While you’re in the area: Visit the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, where Tom McLoughlin made ONE DARK NIGHT. Further south, in the Hancock Park neighborhood, is the home of the Hudson sisters, from WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE?

3) UNIVERSAL CITY

This is a no-brainer. The Universal backlot is home to “Little Europe,” where many of the classic monster movies were shot, as well as the house from Alfred Hitchcock’s PSYCHO… If you’re a horror fan, you have to go. Take the tram tour, or buy tickets this week for Halloween Horror Nights, and walk the grounds of the Bates Motel among zombies and masked murderers. (The PSYCHO set is part of the SCREAM 4 exhibit.)

4) GRIFFITH PARK

On the south side of the park, you can visit the famous Bronson Canyon – where countless sci-fi and horror flicks have been shot over the years. This is where Dana Wynter became a pod person in the original INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, just moments after fleeing an alien mob at the nearby corner of Beachwood and Belden. A few blocks away is Frank Lloyd’s Wright’s immortal “Ennis House,” a.k.a. the HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL. The house isn’t open to the public, but you can get a pretty good look at it from the street.

Inside the park proper is the merry-go-round from BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER (the movie, not the TV series) and the Old Los Angeles Zoo, which doubled as a Transylvanian crypt in Albert Band’s ZOLTAN, THE HOUND OF DRACULA.

5) DOWNTOWN

In one of the oldest neighborhoods in Los Angeles, you’ll find a street full of the Victorian houses that were once so popular here. Just about any house on Carroll Ave. would be perfect for a gothic horror movie, but the one that drew my attention was the zombie house from the end of MICHAEL JACKSON’S THRILLER. On the other side of the 101, on Aliso Street, you can visit the church from John Carpenter’s PRINCE OF DARKNESS.

6) THE COAST

For me, the movie highlights of the Malibu coast are the sea caves at Leo Carillo Beach, where Roger Corman made ATTACK OF THE CRAB MONSTERS (among others), and the Santa Monica Pier, home of THE LOST BOYS. The vampire cave from THE LOST BOYS is further south, off the coast of Palos Verdes, near the site of the old Marineland amusement park. If you’re going to go that far down the coast, you should also stop in Long Beach and visit the Queen Mary.

7) SIMI VALLEY

You may not think it’s worth it to drive all the way out into Simi Valley to see the house from POLTERGEIST, but there’s something truly compelling about the way this house’s sloped roof makes the place appear forbidding even on the sunniest day in the middle of summer. (Or maybe it's just my impressionable imagination...) I like to drive by the house after a hike at the old Iverson Ranch or Corriganville Park, where countless b-movies were shot between the 30s and the 60s. Very often, you’ll catch glimpses of these two movie ranches while watching studio era b-movies. Just recently, I recognized the Garden of the Gods at Iverson in a sequence from THE MAN THEY COULD NOT HANG with Boris Karloff.

8) ANTELOPE VALLEY

In my mind, Antelope Valley is Rob Zombie’s playground – mainly due to his use of two popular filming locations: the Four Aces diner/motel in HOUSE OF 1,000 CORPSES and Club Ed in THE DEVIL’S REJECTS. Four Aces was also used as the motel in the supernatural thriller IDENTITY. The rockier hills of Antelope Valley doubled as the desert home of the giant ants in THEM!

9) MOJAVE DESERT

For those who are willing to travel a little further from L.A., I recommend a drive along the edge of UFO country, to re-live scenes from films by Jack Arnold and Wes Craven. Start in Victorville, where aliens landed (near the Rainbow Bridge) in IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE, then continue on to Apple Valley, where the U.S. military confronted a giant spider in TARANTULA. Further east is Lucerne Valley, where Craven shot the original THE HILLS HAVE EYES. Veer south on 247 toward Pioneertown and Joshua Tree, where much of THE HILLS HAVE EYES PART 2 was filmed. There's also a "Skull Rock" in Joshua Tree shaped like Michael Berryman's head!

While you’re in the area: Continue east to the sleepy town of Amboy, where C. Thomas Howell has some questionable diner food with madman Rutger Hauer in THE HITCHER. (If you really want to go all out, check out Harry Medved's book Hollywood Escapes, which outlines a HITCHER road tour from Death Valley to the Imperial Sand Dunes.)

10) NORTH ON THE I-14

If you really want a change of scenery, you can drive two hours north of L.A. and visit ancient Egypt. Hagen Canyon (on the west side of I-14 in Red Rock Canyon State Park) served as the home Universal’s THE MUMMY. Portions of JURASSIC PARK were also shot in the park, on the opposite side of I-14. For details, see Richard J. Schmidt's field guide to Red Rock. This one is a bit of a drive, but it’s worth it – the landscape is stunning, and you’ll feel like you really have entered another world.

While you’re in the neighborhood: If you take the I-14 from L.A. to Red Rocks, be sure to stop by Vasquez Rocks. This is another location that has been used in hundreds of films and TV shows, including the original Universal DRACULA, where the rocky outcroppings served as the foreground of the Borgo Pass.

You can map out your road trip here.

Happy Halloween!

CLASSIC HORROR / HALLOWEEN TREATS

2011-10-12T19:20:00.000-07:00

This is my favorite season… Something about it always makes me feel alive. Maybe it’s the inherent threat of death that exists in the chilly air and changing leaves (... though there’s much less of this autumn weather in southern California than there was in the mountains of Virginia where I grew up). Every year, I ritualistically celebrate October by watching my favorite horror movies… and a few new ones.

This year, I find myself gravitating toward the classic Universal monsters. Those old black and white myths have never been my favorite part of the horror genre, but I find that I appreciate them more with each passing year – because they are such a striking contrast with the comparatively un-philosophical horror films of today. I appreciate their emphasis on pervasive, carefully-crafted atmosphere over simplistic jump scenes, mythic storytelling over naturalism, black and white chiaroscuro over the arbitrary use of color.

In his book Horrors! (The awful truth about the monsters, vampires, werewolves, zombies phantoms, mummies, and ghouls of literature – and how they went Hollywood), Drake Douglas explains the appeal of those old Gothic yarns: “The [current] films have lost the dark creeping spirit of true horror, dealing as they do with shock and sensationalism rather than with the more cerebral and human aspects of the classics.” Jeremy Dyson, author of Bright Darkness: The Lost Art of the Supernatural Horror Film, adds: “At its best the supernatural horror film is capable of exploring and illuminating the interior conflicts of the psyche – repression, the denial of strong emotion, a fear of madness and the disintegration of the personality – elements that we have seen were present in embryonic form in Whale’s FRANKENSTEIN and its sequels, and them more clearly developed in THE WOLF MAN, CAT PEOPLE, I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE and DEAD OF NIGHT. These films […] articulate something of what it is to exist in a mysterious and opaque universe, reminding us that mankind is not the be all and end all, and that there is something larger than ourselves, be it as plainly evident as KING KONG or as intangible as the forces that are able to keep the desiccated remains of a wayward Egyptian priest alive.”

With this last phrase, Dyson is making reference to CAGLIOSTRO – a script by Richard Schayer and Nina Wilcox Putnam that eventually morphed into the classic Boris Karloff vehicle THE MUMMY (after an extensive rewrite by John Balderston, based on his own experiences as a reporter at the opening of King Tut’s tomb in 1922). Dyson describes CALIGIOSTRO as a story about “a 3000-year-old Egyptian magician who has kept himself alive using scientific rather than supernatural means,” utilizing “radio waves to murder his victims.” When I read this description, I thought it made CAGLIOSTRO sound more like some of Karloff’s later “mad scientist” films than THE MUMMY. Thanks to author Philip J. Riley, I had a chance to find out for myself by reading the original script.

Riley is a serious fan of classic horror – so serious that he has written a book on Lon Chaney and edited a comprehensive set of Universal Horror film scripts. More recently, he unearthed some unproduced scripts from Universal’s heyday and published them through Bear Manor Media. The resulting series – “An Alternate History for Classic Film Monsters” – is a treasure trove for horror fans. In addition to CAGLIOSTRO: THE GREAT IMPOSTER, there are four titles:

DRACULA STARRING LON CHANEY features a detailed treatment by Louis Bromfield. The treatment was intended to entice actor Lon Chaney to tackle the title role. Riley says that the producers “knew that Chaney was always more involved when the screenplay was close to the original novels.” Accordingly, the treatment closely follows Bram Stoker's novel, featuring many of the more effective scenarios that were left out of Tod Browning’s 1931 film with Bela Lugosi (e.g. warnings at the inn; the vampire brides seducing Jonathan, Dracula climbing the castle wall like a spider; Mina at Lucy’s window; the extermination of Lucy; the climactic race to Castle Dracula). All things considered, Bromfield’s vision is quite a bit bolder that the Browning's film. Also included in this publication are the first few pages of the script by Bromfield and Dudley Murphy, a work in progress that was cut short by the death of Lon Chaney. In lieu of a full script, Riley’s book offers subtitle transcripts for F.W. Murnau’s NOSFERATU (1921) and Browning’s DRACULA (1931), as well as Lon Chaney’s only known attempt at autobiography. Bottom line: this is a collection that any serious horror fan should own.

ROBERT FLOREY’S FRANKENSTEIN is a more threadbare publication - serving mainly as proof that the irreverent tone of the 1931 FRANKENSTEIN film didn’t come entirely from director James Whale. Most of the iconic scenes and lines (including “Now I know what it feels like to be God!”) are present in this early script by Florey (who was originally slated to direct the film… as well as a prospective sequel in which Henry and Elizabeth join a traveling circus!) and Garrett Fort (who received the main writing credit on DRACULA’S DAUGHTER).

JAMES WHALE’S DRACULA’S DAUGHTER presents a story that is very different from the filmed sequel to DRACULA. The treatment by John Balderston, who had earlier adapted Stoker’s novel for Broadway, parallels the action in Stoker’s novel. It begins and ends at Castle Dracula (Van Helsing goes to finish off Dracula’s wives… and, later, his daughter), while the central action is set in London. Balderston’s stated goal was a faster tempo, and increased excitement and tension. “In the three horror pictures with which I was associated as original playwright or scenarist,” he says, referring to DRACULA, FRANKENSTEIN and THE MUMMY, “the last one third of each dropped badly.” He maintains that the third act of DRACULA’S DAUGHTER “must top everything,” and he proposes that this film, by using a female vampire, can do so by “playing up SEX and CRUELTY legitimately.” The result is an excellent example of how to take a successful formula and amp up the horror so that a followup is less repetition than reimagination. The ensuing script by R.C. Sherriff, which Whale “camped up” with elements of S&M and homoeroticism, begins as a prequel: a brutal origin story for Dracula and his adopted daughter, with plenty of opportunities for Bela Lugosi to chew the scenery. It progresses slowly into a battle between Van Helsing and Countess Szelenski – who, in this version, is a far more delicious, far less pitiable villain.

THE WOLF MAN VS. DRACULA is perhaps the least worthy entry the Alternate History series. It comes from a later period in the Universal horror cycle, when the classic movie monsters were being transformed into kiddie fare. This script by Bernard Schubert, apparently set sometime after FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN (1943) and HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1944), was designed to match Lugosi’s Dracula against Chaney’s Wolf Man by utilizing pre-existing sets from earlier films, and a very minimal supporting cast. Long story short: Dracula and Lawrence Talbot cross paths in familiar territory from the earlier monster mashes, and end up lusting after the same hangman’s daughter. Unfortunately, the hangman's daughter is a thinly developed character and the dialogue written for the monsters is uniformly unimaginative. All in all, it’s a depressing outing for characters that should be larger than life. Be glad this one never got made.

Not satisfied to simply read about classic horror movies, I’ve also been watching a few. Until this week, I wasn’t aware that two of Boris Karloff’s best films of the 1930s were made for Columbia. Sony’s “Icons of Horror” collection features the Gothic gem THE BLACK ROOM (1935) and the quirky sci-fi quickie THE MAN THEY COULD NOT HANG (1939). In THE BLACK ROOM, Karloff plays aristocrat twins – the gentle Anton and the sadistic Gregor – who are tormented by a family curse that pits them against each other. It’s a story as old as Cain and Abel, but bolstered by some surprising plot twists, plenty of atmosphere, and solid evidence of Karloff’s range as an actor. In contrast, THE MAN THEY COULD NOT HANG has very little atmosphere to speak of. It’s a straight-ahead, modern-day morality play that will be familiar to anyone who’s seen FRANKENSTEIN. Nevertheless, it’s worth watching the film for Karloff’s performance in the third act – a scenario similar to Vincent Price’s routine in HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL (1958), with just as much gleeful sadism. The characterization of this not-so-mad scientist may be a little hard to swallow, but the actor manages to maintain his dignity and likability throughout the show.

Also on my playlist this week: THE MUMMY’S HAND (1940) and THE MUMMY’S TOMB (1942). These first two films in Universal’s “Kharis series” are not as well known as the 1932 MUMMY film starring Karloff, but they have a very devoted following. In fact, I think it’s safe to say that the plotline of the Kharis series is more resonant than THE MUMMY.

THE MUMMY’S HAND begins with the backstory of an Egyptian prince named Kharis, who steals the secret of eternal life (a secret involving forbidden tana leaves) to resurrect his lover Ananka. He is buried alive as punishment, but only after he has been granted eternal life. For centuries, Kharis’s tomb is protected by the priests of Karnac. Only they know the secret: three tana leaves will make Kharis walk again, and kill anyone who dares to enter the tomb of his beloved; more than three tana leaves will turn him into an uncontrollable “monster.” Leave it up to a few clueless American archeologists to wander into “the most dangerous region in the whole of Egypt” and test the legend…

Dick Foran plays Steve Banning, the hero of THE MUMMY’S HAND. I don’t see how anyone could possibly watch the Kharis series today and not see him as the forerunner of Indiana Jones. Perhaps that’s why Universal’s 1999 remake of THE MUMMY has more in common with Spielberg’s adventure series than with the Karloff monster movie. The finale of THE MUMMY’S HAND is pretty lackluster (not to mention Tom Tyler’s performance as Kharis), but the film on the whole boasts some amusing characterizations, a good sense of mystery, and a laudable respect for the main theme of classic Gothic fiction: “There are some things in science which should be brought to light; there are others which should be left alone.”

THE MUMMY’S TOMB is not as dynamic, despite a slightly better mummy (Lon Chaney Jr. made up by Jack Pierce). The sequel takes place 30 years later, and the action is transplanted from Egypt to small-town Massachusetts, where the next generation of Bannings falls victim to the Mummy’s curse. The plotline is an unimaginative redux of THE MUMMY'S HAND, but that’s what makes the film so intriguing to me. Watching THE MUMMY’S TOMB, I felt like I was discovering an early template for the boilerplate slasher sequels of the 1980s. The Mummy kills with Jason Voorhees-like crudeness, visiting the sins of the father on the children with Michael Myers-like regularity. Unfortunately, this by-the-numbers plot merely leads to another lame finale. The angry mob from FRANKENSTEIN descends on modern-day Massachusetts, and the Mummy tries to escape by fumbling up a rose trellis. After this, I couldn’t bare to go on and watch THE MUMMY’S GHOST (1944) and THE MUMMY’S CURSE (1944).

It’s worth adding that the definitive Boris Karloff biography was released earlier this year. I haven’t had the time to start this impressive 568-page tome yet, but it’s waiting on my bookshelf. I’ve also pre-ordered the Criterion Collection’s release of the original ISLAND OF LOST SOULS. This one has been a long time coming! ISLAND is one of the very best classic horror films and the whole horror-loving world should be thrilled that Criterion, a distributor that is always devoted to excellence, has pulled this one off. The street date is October 25, by which time I also hope to have my copy of John Kenneth Muir’s new book, Horror Films of the 1990s, a film-by-film examination of the decade of darkness that I grew up in.

More to come…

Thoughts for Desperate Writers

2011-10-07T15:15:00.001-07:00

In the other gardens
And all up the vale,
From the autumn bonfires
See the smoke trail!

Pleasant summer over
And all the summer flowers,
The red fire blazes,
The grey smoke towers.

Sing a song of seasons!
Something bright in all!
Flowers in the summer,
Fires in the fall!

- Robert Louis Stevenson

MOVIES MADE ME #35: Bergman's Faith Trilogy

2011-10-07T10:38:00.000-07:00

"The truth is that I am forever living in my childhood, wandering through darkening apartments, strolling through quiet Uppsala streets, standing in front of the summer cottage and listening to the enormous double-trunk birch tree. I move with dizzying speed. Actually I am living permanently in my dream, from which I make brief forays into reality." - Ingmar Bergman, 1994

MOVIES MADE ME #34: A Weekend in SIDEWAYS Country

2011-10-04T19:51:00.000-07:00

“The sun felt warm as we climbed out of the car and stretched our limbs and drank in the unspoiled view. We were at the foot of the Santa Ynez Mountains, imposing hills carpeted in native grasses and dotted with gnarled oaks. After L.A., with its incessant automotive noise, putrid air, and constant congestion, the vista was positively invigorating… The soothing quiet of our surroundings was broken only by the intermittent melodies of unseen birds, the faroff rise and fall of a dog’s barking, and the wind rustling the leaves of the giant oaks. It all seemed to transport me to another realm, if only for a fleeting moment.” – Rex Pickett, SIDEWAYS

FRIDAY

FIRST STOP
Coming up the 101 from Los Angeles, this is an ideal first stop. Take exit 139, just south of Buellton, and turn left onto Santa Rosa Road. This little country country lane hugs the Santa Ynez Mountains for a few miles, offering a beautiful view of the fall colors and a selection of several different wineries. Miles and Jack opted for Sanford Winery, which has a quaint and charming tasting room full of pinots and chardonnays. Miles, you might recall, has a thing for pinot. He calls it “the one varietal that truly enchants me, both stills and steals my heart with its elusive loveliness and false promises of transcendence.” Taking his passion one step further, he adds, “I can’t date a woman who doesn’t like Pinot. That’s like getting involved with someone who’s disgusted by oral sex.”

In the book, Miles and Jack kick things off with the La Rinconada Pinot Noir. In the film, they start with Vin Gris (produced from the same grape). More words of wisdom from the not-so-famous author: “The reason this region’s good for Pinot is that the cold maritime air off the Pacific flows in at night through these transverse valleys and cools down the berries. Pinot doesn’t like to be hot all the time. It needs temperature variances and a slow growing season to develop its acids. And it despises humidity because it’s thin-skinned and susceptible to disease and rot. A finicky, elusive, but rewarding varietal.”

BUELLTON
You have a few different housing options on this journey, as Miles explains in the book. There’s The Windmill Inn (“your basic no-frills square crib”), the Marriott (“Higher end. Nicer rooms, better pool.”) and the Ballard B&B (“Quaint Victorian. Probably not the best place to be stumbling into from an all-day wine-tasting spree.”). The Ballard Inn is not actually in Buellton. It's about halfway between Solvang and Los Olivos, so maybe save that one for another trip. If you need a third housing option in Buellton, I can vouch for Andersen’s Inn, across the street from The Windmill (so you can still walk to karaoke night at The Clubhouse, if you so desire) and next door to the Marriott.

If you stay in any of these hotels, you’ll be less than a mile away from the recommended dining options. Miles gives top marks The Hitching Post: “At first glance, the Hitching Post resembles any other chophouse with its cheerless décor and typical fare. But on closer inspection one realizes that they’ve incorporated the local wine milieu into their operation, marrying all those slabs of beef with a variety of artisanal Pinot Noirs. The wines are overpriced for what they are – thin, lacking in strength – but where else can you get a decent glass of wine and a hamburger in a small town?” If hamburgers aren’t your thing, the Hitching Post also serves a mean ostrich burger. (... grown on the ostrich farm next door. No kidding.) If you’re feeling even more daring, and your taste in wine is not as refined as Miles’s, you can go down the street to A.J. Spurs, “a tacky tourist barbecue joint that serves huge portions to mostly huge diners.” This is where Jack picked up a mostly married waitress. Finally, if you'd prefer your wine with greasy fast food, there’s also a McDonald’s. (For the record, Miles never stooped quite that low. He drank his ’61 Cheval blanc at Orcutt Burger in Santa Maria.)

SATURDAY

Start your day at Ellen’s Danish Pancake House, where Miles and Jack fueled up for their first marathon tasting tour (in the book). Or, if you want a little more cultural immersion with your meal, you can drive over to the Danish village of Solvang, where Miles and Jack ate breakfast in the film (at Solvang Restaurant). In the off-season, Solvang is genuinely charming. In spring and summer, it gets a little claustrophobic. Either way, you could probably spend an entire day here indulging yourself on a mindboggling variety of savory foods. Best to head north as early as possible.

FOXEN CANYON ROAD
The backbone of Santa Barbara Wine Country is Foxen Canyon Road, a scenic stretch of road that boasts a dozen high-profile wineries. If you take the 101 and exit at Alisos Canyon Road, you'll land right in the middle of the action. In the book, Miles and Jack turned left to hit Byron (where Miles raves about the Sierra Madre Pinot Noir), Rancho Sisquoc (“Their wines were so uniformly wretched that we left without finishing the lineup.”) and Foxen (“a quality producer of Pinots, Cab, Cab Francs, Chards, Syrahs, an even Mourvedre and Grenache… a small operation but wildly ambitious”). Miles waxes poetic about the Foxen tasting room, noting that the ramshackle roadside barn (featured as the first stop in the film’s Foxen Canyon montage, where our guides sneak an extra pour while their server is away) is “a refreshing change from the sterility of most tasting rooms.” This is where the guys met Tessa (Stephanie).

To the right, there's Fess Parker and Firestone, among others. Firestone gets a breezy dismissal from our patron saint of pinot, who calls it “a mediocre local winery that values quantity over quality.” Fess Parker warrants a visit, though you may hate yourself in the morning. Miles sets the scene as follows: “Fess Parker Winery is a monument to kitsch: a large, wood building nestled amidst manicured lawns and manicured vineyards and gravel paths bounded by blooming flowers. My idea of a winery tasting room is a small, clapboard toolshed with open windows, buzzing flies, stinky cheeses, and serious wines. Fess Parker’s was designed to look like the lobby of a resort golf club, complete with wine pourers wearing identical monogrammed Izod golf shirts and flashing trained smiles.” For obvious reasons, the owners of Fess Parker didn’t want their establishment presented as an unholy mecca in a big Hollywood movie. They were happy to let the filmmakers stage Miles’s breakdown on their lobby floor as long as the filmmakers used a different name. Director Alexander Payne renamed Fess Parker “Frass Canyon”... “frass” being a cute word for bug shit.

LOS OLIVOS
By now you’ve probably had enough booze for one morning, so it's time to continue south on Foxen Canyon Road and turn left on 154 toward the charming town of Los Olivos. This is where Miles and Jack had their first double date in the film, at the Los Olivos Café… where Miles emphatically refused to drink any fucking Merlot (“almost always a bland, characterless wine”). In the book, the guys also visit a few other local eateries: a sandwich shop called Pannini’s, Skorpios ("a quaint Greek cafe") and Brothers Restaurant (“an unpretentious gourmet restaurant”). Not ones to neglect their primal bacchanalian urges, they also hit up the Andrew Murray and Richard Longoria tasting rooms (“Both are excellent local vintners – Murray specializing in Rhone varietals and Longoria in Burgundian.”).

SANTA YNEZ
In the book, Miles and Jack take their dates to an unnamed “trendy restaurant” in Santa Ynez - probably The Vineyard House, Dos Carlitos or Trattoria Grappolo. In the film, this is also where they meet Stephanie – at the Kalyra Winery. Miles is mostly unimpressed with their product, especially with the “flabby, overripe” Cab Franc. As an alternative, I heartily recommend Blackjack Winery on Alamo Pintado Road between Los Olivos and Mission Drive, not far from the Ballard B&B. The tasting room is featured briefly in the film’s Foxen Canyon montage: Miles gets a whiff of their Maximus Syrah and chirps: “That’s a big one.”

SUNDAY

In the book, Miles and Jack eventually decide to clear their heads and explore California's Central Coast. They take the 101 all the way up to Morro Bay, which Miles dismisses as “a coastal retirement town pockmarked with cheap motels and bric-a-brac shops.” I have to disagree with this bit of snark, as Morro Bay is a beautiful place to unwind. Miles is just as dismissive of Hearst Castle, saying, “As we paraded from one high-ceilinged room to another, walking over priceless Italian terra-cotta, floating past decadent Baroque artworks, our group finally ending up encircling the fabled, mosaic-inlaid indoor pool, I reached the prosaic conclusion that one could be unhappy anywhere... Or was I just projecting?” By the time he and Jack turn back toward wine country and find themselves at Jalama Beach (Gaviota in the movie), Miles is so depressed that he privately regards himself as “a thumbprint on the first-floor window of a skyscraper, a smudge of excrement on a tissue surging out to sea along with millions of tons of raw sewage, a squirrel eating a nut as a car bore down on him.” So, yes… he was just projecting. Take the day trip to Morro Bay and Hearst Castle.

From there, you have two options. Option A: You can go back the way you came, passing through Buellton for one more tasting. In the book, Miles and Jack finish their tour at Babcock Winery & Vineyard on highway 246. Here, Miles forsakes his beloved pinot for the Black Label Cuvee, “an inky, almost biblical, 100 percent Syrah with truckloads of ripe fruit and brambly tannins." Somewhat guiltily, he admits, "We had abandoned the subtlety of Pinot for the pure unadulterated lust of Syrah.”

Option B: Head north to Paso Robles, where that lovable hedonist Jack finally succumbed to married life. There, you'll find 141 more wineries to explore.

In vino veritas.

MOVIES MADE ME #33: MANHATTAN

2011-09-24T18:00:00.000-07:00

I was a freshman in college the first time I saw Woody Allen's MANHATTAN. At my school, freshmen weren't allowed to live off campus or to keep cars on campus. I found this a little maddening, because while I got along fine with the people in my dorm, I didn't really have much in common with them and I didn't want to have to spend every waking hour with them. I wanted to be around people that I liked. So on Friday night, when everybody else went out, I often stayed in and watched movies. One night I rented MANHATTAN. I don't remember why I picked it out, but I remember that the film hooked me from the very first scene. It immediately dropped me into a world that I wouldn't want to leave.

The opening of MANHATTAN is a powerful reminder of just how beautiful black and white cinematography can be. New York City never looked so good. With the images set to Gershwyn's "Rhapsody in Blue," it never sounded as good either. This opening sequence is probably one of the reasons that I spent so many evenings in college watching Hollywood classics on TCM and AMC. Late at night, there's something profoundly reassuring about black and white. Black and white movies have a kind of purity and simplicity - not necessarily simple-mindedness, but a kind of earnestness belonging to an earlier time - that effectively draws the viewer away from real life and into a dream. I realize this is an over-generalization, but it's often how I feel. I think Woody Allen does too, because he uses the black and white cinematography in MANHATTAN to underline his character's romantic view of the world.

Isaac (Allen's onscreen alter ego) is not a simple-minded romantic. He's high-strung, cynical, sarcastic, self-righteous and painfully self-aware. Nearly everything that happens around him and to him seems at odds with the kind of ideal romance he yearns for... the type of thing he sees in Humphrey Bogart movies. I make that particular reference not because I'm a Bogart fan (and an even bigger fan of Lauren Bacall and Ingrid Bergman) but because Woody Allen is a Bogart fan. He made his idolization well known in the earlier film PLAY IT AGAIN, SAM (1972), which finds much of its comedy in the differences between idol and idolizer.

I have a soft spot in my heart for PLAY IT AGAIN, SAM but I prefer MANHATTAN because it's a Romantic comedy instead of a romantic farce. Isaac believes in Beauty with all the philosophical zeal of Plato, and in Love with the blind faith of a relatively inexperienced college freshman. Jaded as he is, he can still rattle off a long, sincere list of things worth living for: Groucho Marx, Willie Mays, the 2nd movement of the Jupiter Symphony, Louis Armstrong's recording of "Potato Head Blues," Swedish movies, "Sentimental Education" by Flaubert, Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, Cezanne's "Still Life with Apples and Pears," the crabs at Sam Wo's... and, belatedly, the face of young Mariel Hemingway, who plays Isaac's love interest in the film. Although he spends much of the film convincing himself that he has more in common with a neurotic version of Annie Hall, Isaac can't escape the fact that he's in love with Tracy. For him, she is God's answer to Job: "I do a lot of terrible things, but I can still make one of these."

Roger Ebert says that MANHATTAN is a film about "what lovers need: an ability to idealize the other person." Tracy has it; Isaac doesn't... at least, not until the end of the film. When Isaac finally realizes that he's in love, Ebert says, it comes too late - making MANHATTAN a film that is "not really about love in the present, but love in the past." Or, more to the point, "not about love, but loss."

Of course it's easy to idealize something in the past, easy to see it purely in black and white. With that in mind, the critic argues that Isaac and Tracy's love is already gone - nothing more than a blissful memory. He supposes that Isaac realizes this too, in the final scene in the film. Hence his bemused smile. Maybe Ebert is right, but that wasn't my assumption when I saw the film for the first time. I was enough of a romantic to figure that true love has to last. Whatever the future for these two characters, MANHATTAN culminates with a reprisal of the same cinematic ode to the stunning sights of New York and the same celebratory swell of Gershwyn -- proving that, for the filmmaker, the ideal still exists. It exists in the ideal landscape of Isaac's imagination and in the real woman who proposes that love is as simple as having "a little faith in people." The way she says it, you have to believe it's true. That's what makes MANHATTAN something worth living for.

Beyond the Auteur Theory

2011-09-21T16:27:00.000-07:00

In his 1968 book The American Cinema, Andrew Sarris popularized the notion of the film director as auteur. The problem (as Harlan Ellison has pointed out most colorfully) is that Sarris’s theory is now routinely applied to ALL directors and ALL films – rather than just to those inspiring cases when a director’s vision unifies and defines a work by making the whole magically greater than the sum of the parts. No one sets out to deny that film is a collaborative art form, but we often – for the sake of expediency – refer to films as the work of their directors alone. That’s why Ken Dancyger’s book The Director’s Idea (Focal Press, 2006) made such an impression on me. Dancyger reminds us of what the auteur theory proposes, and when a director deserves the title.

Dancyger’s thesis is that directors must have a “director’s idea” – a pivotal theme that informs their work. Martin Scorsese explores “the gap between the inner life of a character and the lives of the character’s surrounding family, community, or society.” Michael Mann presents “life as a test.” Francis Ford Coppola views “the narrative events of each film not as believable but rather as an opera.” Woody Allen breaks down the third wall between performers and audience. “How good a director will be,” the author says, “depends upon how far the director goes in his realization of the director’s idea.” (This is assuming, of course, that the director HAS an idea. Dancyger concerns himself only with directors who are, at the very least, competent storytellers.) The director’s idea, the author says, informs his or her Voice.

“Voice” seems like an unfortunate choice of words, which muddles the issue. In my mind, there’s a difference between Voice and Vision. Voice is the domain of the writer and the actors; they actualize the story. Vision is the domain of the director, the cinematographer, the art director and the editor. They visualize the story. To his credit, Dancyger qualifies his argument by saying that the director should oversee and influence all aspects of Voice and Vision to determine the attitudes of the characters in the film and create a unified perspective and tone in the narrative. This process begins with the director’s selection of a script (ideally, the selection is made for personal reasons rather than simply monetary ones) and continues as he develops the subtext that interests him, thereby internalizing the story. In pre-production, he works to clarify the narrative and character motives / arcs, then casts the picture according to instinct and intuition, and ultimately guides the performances according to his director’s idea.

Above and beyond all of this, the director must visually bind plot and scenery, words and faces, subtext and lighting, delivery and pacing… When you stop and think about everything that comes to rest on one person’s shoulders, it’s amazing that films ever get made, let alone turn out to be works of art. At the same time, it’s not hard to understand the necessity for someone to exert decisive control. Committee meetings quickly become problematic when you’re spending thousands of dollars a day. More to the point, the Voice and the Vision must be coherent; all parts must enhance the whole or the story simply won’t work.

Dancyger notes that Scorsese’s “active, searching, moving camera” reflects the interaction between his characters and the world they live in: “The energy is the desire, the moving camera the hope, and the lighting the anxiety that hope will be dashed and desire will be disappointed.” He analyzes Michael Mann’s film COLLATERAL to show how visual context heightens dramatic intensity: “Max and the hit man are often shown in close-up with the camera placed close to them, as if they were the only two men in the world. The environment, on the other hand, is objectified, the camera distant… The point of view only shifts when Vincent is doing his job or during an impending crash of the cab. At those points, Mann shifted into subjective motion and camera placement.” He uses the Coen Brothers film O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU? to illustrate how performance and art direction can make all the difference in storytelling: “This fable-like idea requires exaggerated performances, exaggerated text readings, and a visual style that connotes the opposite of realism – let’s call it the fabulous.” Finally, he acknowledges that the editor has the power to transform the meaning of a story by rearranging everything that’s come before. He agrees with critic Sigfried Kracauer’s assertion that “of all the technical properties of film the most general and indispensable is editing,” and he pays obligatory homage to director/editor Sergei Eisenstein. (A short visit to www.thetrailermash.com could effectively make the same point.)

That said, I have to wonder: In cases where the camera work or the lighting or the art direction or the editing – or any other technical aspect, taken in isolation – is the most memorable or effective part of a film, why should the director receive the main credit? Purely and simply: Because most audiences don’t consider these contributions in isolation. We (the audience) generally experience films as a whole, rather than a collection of parts. That’s part of suspending our disbelief so that we can get immersed in a fictional world. With truly great films, all aspects of the storytelling cohere around the director’s idea, and we can safely say that the experience of the whole is a credit to the director. Such films are easy to watch and appreciate.

Viewing the work of lesser filmmakers takes more work... but there's a fine art to it, and plenty to be gained. In essence, the viewer completes the vision of an imperfect film in their imagination. I love getting immersed in a story… so much so that I forget I’m watching a movie and not living it. I don't need a perfect (or even a near-perfect) film in order to do that. In fact, most of my favorite films are far from perfect. The secret to viewing imperfect films, I think, is being receptive to ideas, intellectual or emotional, that aren’t fully supported by all aspects of the production. Since imperfect films vastly outnumber the perfect ones, I’d love to see a follow-up book to The Director’s Idea, about those ideas that exist above (or in spite of) the film as a whole. Title suggestion: Everyone Else’s Ideas.

MOVIES MADE ME #32: BLADE RUNNER

2011-09-07T20:11:00.000-07:00

The view from the lobby of the Marriott Marquis in Atlanta got me thinking about this film – specifically, the way it transports the viewer to another world. That’s an overused phrase, of course. All worthwhile science fiction films transport the viewer to another world… but not so many of them present that other world in such exquisite detail. I think of the way that Peter Jackson’s LORD OF THE RINGS films capture the encyclopedic minutiae of Tolkien’s Middle Earth, or the way that James Cameron’s AVATAR thoroughly immerses viewers in the 3D environment of Pandora. Ridley Scott’s BLADE RUNNER not only makes it possible to believe in Philip K. Dick’s dystopian future, but nearly impossible NOT to believe in it. Like the Replicants in the story who are built to be “more human than human,” the world of BLADE RUNNER often seems more real than reality.

I think that’s why the film made such a strong impression on me when I first saw it on home video. The visceral experience felt real enough to obsess about, and my friend Ben and I obsessed plenty. Back in the quaint days of Usenet, we used future technology to collect information about alternate versions of the film. The main debate on the Usenet boards: Was Deckard himself a Replicant? The “director’s cut,” released in 1992, fueled the debate. Ridley Scott provided no clear-cut answers, but that was all for the best. Mystery means that there are still more secrets to be discovered, and that’s what makes life (artificial or otherwise) interesting. When the soundtrack by Vangelis was finally released on CD in 1994, I promptly bought a copy and played it on repeat while I slept at night – hoping, I suppose, for dreams that were as wild and elaborate as BLADE RUNNER.

Ridley Scott once said, “To me, a film is like a seven-hundred layer cake… Every incident, every sound, every movement, every color, every set, prop or actor, is all part of the director’s overall orchestration of a film.” Scott’s process began with what he calls “pictorial layering,” as he imagined the post-nuclear dystopia of Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (The title “Blade Runner” actually came from an unrelated script by William Burroughs, and Scott’s film dispensed with the novelist’s idea that the ultimate status symbol, in the postapocalyptic future, was ownership of a live pet.) Scott‘s agenda was very specific: He sought the tone of Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks” painting, the energy of Jean Giraud’s work for Heavy Metal, and the retro quality of Syd Mead’s Sentinel.

The tone of “Nighthawks” comes across in the opening sequence of the finished film. An eyeball reflects the desperate landscape of 2019 Los Angeles, a city of eternal night, lit only by neon and exhaust flames. Fans call it the “Hades landscape” (and would later see a facsimile of it in the cult hit THE CROW). We don’t know whose eye is watching this landscape, or if the watcher is human… and maybe that’s the point. Right away, there’s a certain coldness about Scott’s storytelling. It’s all about the object seen, not so much about the seer. Scott effectively disembodies us, as viewers, in order to draw us into a world where people are isolated and alienated.

Flying into Los Angeles in 2011 can fill a person with similar sensations. The greater L.A. area is so sprawling and so densely packed, yet so neatly divided into hundreds of smaller communities along invisible lines. Within most of those communities, there is even more division. Last week I wrote about a brief exchange between characters in the war film THE THIN RED LINE. One soldier asks, “Do you ever get lonely?” The other answers, “Only around people.” It’s astounding to think that, in a city of roughly four million people, anyone could ever get lonely. But I think it’s probably easier to get lonely in Los Angeles than in a small town. (In all fairness, it’s probably also easier in L.A. to distract yourself from that loneliness.) I’m likewise reminded of the scene in Michael Mann’s film HEAT, when Robert DeNiro looks out on the city from an apartment balcony above Sunset. Instead of seeing the light as human life, he sees “iridescent algae.” The woman he’s with astutely follows up with a (rhetorical) question: “Are you lonely?” In a city this size, it’s hard not to feel insignificant.

In a way, Philip K. Dick is asking the same question in his novel. His main character, Deckard, is becoming desensitized to human emotion. While hunting androids, he becomes an android himself, according to Dick’s definition. “In my mind,” the author says, “android is a metaphor for people who are physiologically human but behaving in a nonhuman way.” Deckard is a remorseful killer – like a World War II veteran sorting through the moral ambiguities postwar film noir, or a Vietnam veteran among soulless yuppies in Reagan’s America.

Screenwriter David Fancher says that he always intended BLADE RUNNER to be a rebuke of the “cruel politics” of Ronald Reagan, whose presidency marginalized the poor and promoted class conflict. With this idea in mind, Fancher offered his own take on the dynamic between Deckard and the Replicants: The “hero” became a cold-hearted enforcer while the “villains” became sympathetic. Producer Michael Deely went so far as to equate Deckard with “a heartless Nazi commandant” who falls in love with “his beautiful Jewish prisoner” (Rachael). To Scott, the Replicants were more than beautiful prisoners – they were super-humans, an evolutionary leap forward. The visuals of the film reflect a related sense of hope for a future which is frightening yet inspiring. I've always felt that the ultimate human emotion is awe, and BLADE RUNNER certainly conjures a sense of awe.

It has been remarked that Scott’s emphasis on visual storytelling, to say nothing of his apparent admiration for the purity of the Replicants, makes the film seem cold and clinical. On one level, BLADE RUNNER is a story about a man falling in love with an android. At the same time, that man is made to look contemptible by comparison to the androids. He’s slower, weaker, more bigoted, less ethical, and ultimately less interesting. It’s not hard to understand why Harrison Ford found himself at odds with Ridley Scott during the making of the film. BLADE RUNNER tramples his heroic Indiana Jones persona. It even tramples his anti-heroic Han Solo persona. Though Deckard is supposed to be the human at the center of the story, he sometimes seems like the least human character in the film. (Then again, to be fair, MANY of Ford’s subsequent roles have been even more emotionally vacant than Deckard… so I’m not inclined to place the blame entirely with Ridley Scott.)

In the theatrical cut, Ford has to deliver the following line of narration: “Sushi – that’s what my ex-wife called me. Cold fish.” It’s meant to be a self-effacing joke in the slightly misogynistic tradition of film noir detectives but it seems more like a filmmaker’s condemnation of his main character. Deckard IS a cold fish. Even when he puts the moves on Rachael, he’s so unnecessarily aggressive that he seems to hate himself for it. When he shoots Zhora in the back, he seems more dazed than remorseful.

By comparison, Rutger Hauer is all too human. He is Nietzsche’s superman, who willingly plays the role of God – killing his creator with his bare hands, but not without a sense of profound loss for this liberation. He knows that he has done “questionable things,” but he accepts responsibility, and with a sense of whimsy. The actor confides, “The best trick Ridley played with Roy and the other replicants was that he told us early on – the androids, that is, Daryl Hannah and Joanna Cassidy and Brion James and myself – to relax and be comfortable. To have fun and to make the replicants likable. And we did. That, I think, is their underlying appeal.” As a result, the Replicants – especially Hauer’s Roy Batty and Daryl Hannah’s occasionally childlike Pris – are truly more human than human. It is Batty who teaches the “hero” about ethics (“Not very sporting to fire on an unarmed opponent… Aren’t you the Good Man?) and the value of life.

Hauer’s partially improvised “tears in rain” speech remains the coup de grace of the film. This living creature with a heightened intelligence understands, in his final moments, what few humans are willing to acknowledge: All of the unique moments that we witness, in the particular way that we experience and understand them, will die with us. In essence, part of the world dies with us. Part of the world dies every day. Every second. The converse is also true. The world is constantly being reborn. That’s why Batty saves Deckard. In the process, he makes Deckard a better human being. It is an android who teaches the human to recognize the beauty of life.

That, says Ridley Scott, is the only worthwhile jumping-off point for a sequel (which, according to Hollywood rumor, is currently in the works): “If Deckard was the ‘piece de resistance’ of the replicant business – ‘more human than human,’ as Tyrell would say – with all the complexities suggested by that accomplishment, then a Nexus-7 would, by definition, have to be replication’s perfection. Physically, this would mean that the Tyrell Corporation would be prudent in having Deckard be of normal human strength but extended lifespan – resistance to disease, etc. Then, to round off their creation, the perfect Nexus-7 would have to be endowed with a conscience. Which would in turn suggest some kind of need for a faith. Spiritual need. Or a spiritual implant, in other words.”

[All quotes are taken from Paul M. Sammon’s remarkable book FUTURE NOIR: THE MAKING OF BLADE RUNNER. If you have any interest in the film, you owe it to yourself to check out this book.]

MOVIES MADE ME #31: THE THIN RED LINE

2011-08-29T12:27:00.000-07:00

I’ve been thinking for weeks about what I want to say about THE THIN RED LINE. Not just thinking, but taking copious notes… Enough notes for a very substantial essay that I don’t really have the inclination to write. Here’s the thing: THE THIN RED LINE is not just one of my favorite films. It is also, in my opinion, a perfect film – a film that demonstrates what the medium is truly capable of. That makes it a very intimidating subject for a casual blog.

I saw THE THIN RED LINE for the first time without really knowing what I was getting into. I knew of Terrence Malick, the director of BADLANDS and THE DAY OF HEAVEN who famously fled the moviemaking industry because he couldn’t muster the resources to translate the visions from his head to the movie screen in the exact way he intended. THE THIN RED LINE ended his self-imposed exile and, although he has already made two subsequent films, I can’t imagine that he’ll ever top this one.

Let’s start with the clichés: THE THIN RED LINE is NOT just a war movie. I read a review once that said “This is a war film the way that THE ILIAD is a war poem.” That seems like a fair assessment. The first time I had to describe the film to someone who hadn’t seen it, I settled on calling it an “existential tone poem.” That still doesn’t quite do it justice. Invoking the word “existentialism” makes most people think “bleak and pretentious.” (Of course, most people have a very limited knowledge of the great existentialist philosophers.)

As it happened, I was taking a college course on existentialism when THE THIN RED LINE was released. The course was my introduction to Martin Heidegger, Terrence Malick's favorite philosopher. A number of critics have written that Malick based THE THIN RED LINE on Heidegger’s work (especially “Being and Time”), but I have to admit that I did not consciously find any parallels between the two works – in spite of the fact that I was actively studying Heidegger.

I think that's partly a testament to Malick's skill as a filmmaker. THE THIN RED LINE is not a philosophical treatise translated to film. It is an immersive experience that washes over the viewer, fully engaging the senses and emotions and leaving one with a FEELING of truth instead of an IDEA of truth. Malick’s film expresses a complicated philosophy about being and time, but that philosophy is not presented in an intellectual way. The storytelling is not dialectical; it’s meditative. It’s not methodical; it’s impressionistic. The philosophy of THE THIN RED LINE is simply this: The whole is more than the sum of the parts.

I say this is a perfect film because it uses every aspect of the mixed media to transplant us in another world, to give us the Now-experience of the characters by making us feel like one of them. The filmmaker allows us to see through their eyes and forces us to experience life from multiple perspectives, complete with contradictions and obfuscations and a kind of faith that transcends all. There are no easy answers… and yet, to a certain degree, Malick helps us to turn questions into answers.

There are dozens of captivating characters in the film, played by some of the best actors alive today… An entire book could (and should) be written about the words and deeds of all these characters. For the sake of getting this blog written, I’m going to confine myself to the three characters who affected me the most: Witt, Welsh and Bell.

James Jones’ source novel THE THIN RED LINE focuses on three new recruits (Fife, Doll and Bell), but Malick’s film hones in even more on the character of Witt. According to interviews on the Criterion DVD release, this character (played by Jim Caviezel) became the focus of the film only during production. Malick was so impressed with the footage of Witt among the Melanesians that he decided to make this sequence the emotional core of the finished film, and Witt consequently became the hero. In post-production, Malick added a scene in which Witt remembers a pivotal moment from his childhood, and (in voiceover) contemplates the major issue that defines him as a human being. This seems to be Malick's way of grasping for the meaning of the film:

“I remember my mother when she was dying. She was all shrunk up and gray. I asked her if she was afraid. She shook her head, no. [But] I was afraid to touch the death I seen in her. I couldn’t find nothing beautiful or uplifting about her going back to God. I heard people talking about immortality, but I ain’t seen it. I wondered how it’d be when I died, knowing that this breath was the last one you was ever gonna draw. I just hope I can meet it the same way she did – with the same calm. Cos that’s where it’s hidden, the immortality I hadn’t seen.”

There’s another brief flashback that stayed with me, where Witt as a young boy is baling hay with an older man (presumably his father). There’s no context – it’s just a fragment of a memory – and yet it lodged in my own memory. In my mind, this is the soldier at war yearning for the innocence of childhood, when life was simple and beautiful. Witt works hard, in spite of his circumstances, to recognize the same beauty as an adult. That’s how he survives the trials of war.

At the opposite end of the philosophical spectrum is Sgt. Welsh, played by Sean Penn. Welsh is stoic at best and nihilistic at worst. Early in the film, he advises Witt to stop dreaming about “the beautiful light” and protect himself from the undeniable ugliness of life: “We’re living in a world that’s blowing itself to hell as fast as everybody can arrange it. In a situation like that, all a man can do is shut his eyes and let nothing touch him.”

Welsh embodies author James Jones’ central message - that war destroys the best men it employs, robbing them of their souls. Welsh still has some shred of his humanity (he displays mercy, at least, when one of his brothers is dying in agony on the battlefield), but he says he’d rather be completely numb. He’d rather not see fleeting glimpses of beauty, because he can't cope with its absence. Unlike Witt, he hasn't learned to embrace the Now-moment; he is always anticipating when it will be taken away. When Witt asks him if he ever gets lonely, Welsh says only around people.

For my money, the most poignant scene featuring Penn’s character comes when sarcastically addresses his dead friend Witt: “Where’s your spark now?” This scene always gets me because Malick answers the question in a very subtle way – with a flicker of natural light on the side of the actor’s face. Welsh doesn’t notice it, but the filmmaker obviously did, and in that fleeting moment he reinforces his own affinity for Witt's transcendentalism.

The middle ground between these two philosophical perspectives belongs to Private Bell, played by Ben Chaplin. Throughout his tour of duty, Bell is constantly dreaming of the wife he left behind. She is the embodiment of his connection to the world. More to the point: She is the ONLY embodiment of his connection to the world, or so it seems. She makes him feel alive, and she also makes him unafraid to die. When his wife betrays him, Bell is lost. He doesn’t have Witt’s sense of a larger connection to nature and he doesn’t have Welsh’s protection against the cruelties of life.

In the theatrical cut, Bell simply drifts away after reading his wife’s goodbye letter. The Criterion DVD features a deleted scene in which Bell meets with his commanding officer (played by George Clooney). It’s clear, from this scene, that Bell has not completely turned away from his belief in love. He tells Clooney that he still wants his wife to receive military benefits if he is killed in battle. He is obviously still wounded by what’s happened, but it has not made him bitter or callous. Clooney, for his part, seems genuinely moved. “Why do we do this to ourselves?” he asks, rhetorically.

That’s another way of asking the looming question at the heart of Malick's film – a question posed by a faceless character in the very first scene: “What is this war at the heart of nature?” One by one, the individuals who have joined the brotherhood of war answer in their own ways, based on their own beliefs and experiences. Captain Staros (Elias Koteas) sums up Malick's answer when he says goodbye to the men who served with him: “You live inside me now. I’ll carry you wherever I go.” The intentionally faceless narrator offers the same answer: “Maybe all men got one big soul that everybody’s a part of. All faces of the same man.”

For Malick, it seems, life is about the search for connection, to each other and to the natural world. The fear of death forces us to search, and that makes death a meaningful part of life. Without death, we take life for granted. Without war, we take peace for granted. Without darkness, we take light for granted. “One man looks at a dying bird and thinks there's nothing but unanswered pain, that death's got the final word. It's laughing at him. Another man sees that same bird [and] feels the glory, feels something smiling through it.” In the Now-moment, all things shine.

There is a state of mind, known to religious men, but to no others, in which the will to assert ourselves and hold our own has been displaced by a willingness to close our mouths and be as nothing in the floods and waterspouts of God. In this state of mind, what we most dreaded has become the habitation of our safety, and the hour of our moral death has turned into our spiritual birthday. The time for tension in our soul is over, and that of happy relaxation, of calm deep breathing, of an eternal present, with no discordant future to be anxious about, has arrived. Fear is not held in abeyance as it is by mere morality, it is positively expunged and washed away.
- William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

Thoughts for Desperate Writers

2011-08-26T10:00:00.000-07:00

The moving finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: Nor all thy piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all thy years wash out a word of it.
- The Rubaiyat

I have heard many years of telling,
And many years should see some change.

The ball I threw while playing in the park
Has not yet reached the ground.
- Dylan Thomas

MOVIES MADE ME #30: Early Coen Brothers

2011-08-16T17:54:00.000-07:00

BLOOD SIMPLE (1984)
If Edgar G. Ulmer had made THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE...

RAISING ARIZONA (1987)
True Crime Confessions a la Looney Tunes...

MILLER'S CROSSING (1990)
THE GODFATHER meets TWIN PEAKS

BARTON FINK (1991)
SPIDER BOY (Carl Van Vechten, 1928 - look it up) as slasher movie...

THE HUDSUCKER PROXY (1994)
MR. DEEDS meets HIS GIRL FRIDAY... you know, for kids...

THE HUDSUCKER PROXY: Movie Trailer The Hudsucker Proxy, Tim Robbins

Thoughts for Desperate Writers

2011-08-12T18:37:00.001-07:00

I think damned near anything you want to say, you can say in genre. It's much easier because you can be a little more obvious, you don't have to be quite as eloquent. You can make anything happen that you want to happen, so you can illustrate almost any point. I just think it's great. It's like parables, those little tales in the Bible. I think you could pick out anything, any scene that intrigued you or you felt passionate about, and figure out a way of telling it in a fantastic manner.
- George A. Romero

MOVIES MADE ME #29: BEING THERE

2011-08-07T12:55:00.000-07:00

I’ll keep this one short since, as BEING THERE proves, brevity is the soul of wit. It would be easy to talk about this film within the context of the remarkable career of director Hal Ashby… or actor Peter Sellers… or even actor Melvyn Douglas. I could compare and contrast the film with Jerzy Kosinski’s source novel. I could write about the film as an illustration of Marshall McLuhan’s media theories. (If TV is cool, Chance is Miles Davis…) It would be just as appropriate to examine the film in light of contemporary American politics. I love BEING THERE because it is a technically brilliant piece of nuanced storytelling that offers insight on a wide variety of topics… but, most importantly and above all, because the character at the center of all this sound and fury is so calm and quiet, and always in the present moment.

“Being there” is Chance’s secret. It’s the secret of his charm, his success and his happiness. It’s the secret of Peter Sellers’ comic timing in the best role of his career. It’s the secret of Ashby’s film itself – which delivers a smart and often cynical message with so much childlike innocence and so much heart that it’s impossible for the viewer NOT to be swept away. Life (as Jack Warden’s bumbling President says at the end of the film) is a state of mind, and so is cinema. When I watch BEING THERE, I find myself laughing and smiling almost in spite of myself – because I’m purely and simply thrilled to be present in the moment with these characters. Movies just don’t get much better than this.

A few words from the filmmaker:

"My philosophy is what I like to call preoccupation with the 'human condition,' which can, of course, mean a lot of things. It's basically the relationship between people. I like to do that with entertainment. I just can't get into the idea of pure entertainment. If something is really good, even if someone approaches it with pure entertainment in mind, I think it will have an underlying theme. If I'm dealing with characters that I don't particularly like, I try to be kind with them. If I like the characters, I'm very hard on them."
- Hal Ashby to Tay Garnett (1977)

"I was blessed, very early on - I don't know what it was, but I always had the capacity to see through things real fast, to sit and think about things - that's all it requires for any amount of empathy or compassion, if you sit and think for two minutes about the position of anybody in the world other than yourself, and what they might feel like."
- Hal Ashby to Jordan R. Young and Mike Bruns (1980)

Last week – on a trip to Ashville, North Carolina – I paid a brief visit to the Biltmore Estate, where Chauncey Gardner made his rounds. Here are a few photos: (1) of the front of the house, photo taken from the spot where the funeral scene was shot; (2) of the porch where Chance and Eve have an intimate moment the morning after their... er... intimate moment; (3) view of the Appalachian Mountains from the porch; (4) the conservatory and rose garden (where, as Chance promised, there was plenty of growth in the spring...)

I didn't get a photo of the Spring Garden, but that's where the final scene - in my mind, one of the most memorable scenes in recent film history - was shot. If you haven't seen BEING THERE, stop reading now and go rent it. For the rest of you, here's the director's explanation of how that final scene came to be:

"I had another ending, which I shot. It worked very well. Shirley MacLaine goes after Peter Sellers when he leaves the funeral and goes into the woods. She finds him and says she was frightened and was looking for him. He says, 'I was looking for you, too, Eve.' And they just walk off together... But I was working one Sunday with a writer by the name of Rudy Wurlitzer, who was really interested in the film, and we progressed in the afternoon to talking about it. I said that because of the way Peter was playing this film, I knew what we were going for was a childlike kind of thing. And when Rudy asked me how it was going, I said, 'Rudy, the way it's going with these characters and what's happening with them, I could have this guy walking on water at the end of the film.' Then I said, 'Well, I think I will have him walking on water at the end of the film.' So that's what I did.... One guy in the crew said, 'You can't have him walking on water.' I said, 'Why?' He said, 'Well, you know the only person that walks on water.' I said, 'Jesus, or maybe some other godlike figure?' He said, 'Yes.' And I said, 'Well, what is wrong with childlike innocence being godlike?'"
- Hal Ashby to James Powers (1980)

MOVIES MADE ME #28: DONNIE DARKO

2011-08-03T11:12:00.000-07:00

Like most children of the 80s, I grew up fascinated by the idea of time travel. I'm not sure if I was introduced to the concept when my neighbor gave me a scene-by-scene description of THE TERMINATOR (which I wrote about last week) or when I saw BACK TO THE FUTURE. Whatever the case, it was years before I learned that these stories had antecedents, and there was whole subgenre of time-travel narratives. BACK TO THE FUTURE owes quite a bit to H.G. Wells' breakthrough novel THE TIME MACHINE (first published in 1895), and THE TERMINATOR bears striking similarities to Harlan Ellison’s short story “Soldier." Ellison hated both movies. In a January 1986 movie review, he summed up his thoughts on BACK TO THE FUTURE as follows:

With such Wells of invention inherent in even the shallowest of time travel stories, with such fecundity of imagination born into the basic concept, it would seem impossible for a filmmaker ladling up riches from that genre to produce a movie anything less than fascinating. Not even forty-five years should run it dry, right? If one thinks so, one has not seen BACK TO THE FUTURE (Universal), a celluloid thing as trivial as a Twinkie and, like so much of the recent Steven Spielberg-presented product, equally as saccharine.

Ellison was later ridiculed by Forrest Ackerman as the only person on earth who was callous enough to dislike BACK TO THE FUTURE, but of course there are some solid reasons to criticize the film. What's most surprising about Ellison's rant is that it doesn't even bother to point out how un-scientific the film is. For that criticism, you can check out physicist Brian Greene’s 2004 book THE FABRIC OF THE COSMOS: SPACE, TIME AND THE TEXTURE OF REALITY (pp. 452 – 458 of the paperback edition). Greene dissects the plot of the movie and concludes that Michael J. Fox’s dilemma about being “erased from existence” is negligible: “If you time-travel to the past, you can’t change it anymore than you can change the value of pi.” I understand Ellison’s contempt for the sentimentality of Steven Spielberg movies and I admire Greene’s expert analysis of the science behind the film, but I still love BACK TO THE FUTURE.

So, apparently, does filmmaker Richard Kelly - who, roughly a decade later, made DONNIE DARKO - a more psychologically complex time travel film for the generation that grew up on BACK TO THE FUTURE. A fellow blogger (I won’t name any names) recently included the film on his list of MOST OVERRATED HORROR MOVIES, saying, “This is an amusing picture by a writer/ director who read Stephen Hawking and thought he understood it… [It’s] the kind of movie people like to say they love because it makes them sound really smart.” This is far from a Harlan Ellison-style attack (in all fairness, the blogger is criticizing the audience more than he’s criticizing the film), but it nevertheless got me thinking: Is DONNIE DARKO actually a “smarter” movie about time-travel?

In his book THE FABRIC OF THE COSMOS, Greene sets up the scientific foundations for the theory of time travel as follows:

To accept special and general relativity is to abandon Newtonian absolute space and absolute time. While it’s not easy, you can train your mind to do this. Whenever you move around, imagine your NOW shifting away from the NOWS experienced by all others not moving with you. While you are driving along a highway, imagine your watch ticking away at a different rate compared with timepieces in the homes you are speeding past. While you are gazing out from a mountaintop, imagine that because of the warping of spacetime, time passes more quickly for you than for those subject to stronger gravity on the ground below. I say ‘imagine this’ because in ordinary circumstances such as these, the effects of relativity are so tiny that they go completely unnoticed. Everyday experience thus fails to reveal how the universe really works, and that’s why a hundred years after Einstein, almost no one, not even professional physicists, feels relativity in their bones…

As if building on this very passage, DONNIE DARKO begins with a scene in which the title character wakes up on a peaceful mountaintop, where life is slowed down to a crawl. The opening credits roll as he bikes home, and the filmmaker alternately speeds up and slows down the footage of him returning to his family and resuming his daily life. (Echo and the Bunnymen, meanwhile, rhapsodize about fate on the soundtrack.)

When the narrative proper begins, we learn that Donnie is medicated for “emotional problems” that basically stem from the loss of time. He’s experiencing routine blackouts at night. He sleepwalks and, in the process, does things that he can’t control or account for. As a result, Donnie is filled with dread about “forces in the world” that he can’t predict or explain. To him the world is a mystery, and the only way he can explain the mystery is by applying the concept of time-travel. He becomes convinced that he has super powers that allow him to create wormholes (hypothetical shortcuts through space and time). Ultimately, he uses this super power to re-write the past.

Does the storyline hold up to scientific scrunity? Certainly there's more science in DONNIE DARKO than there is in BACK TO THE FUTURE... IF we assume that, in the end, Donnie does not re-write the past but rather becomes aware of a parallel alternate universe. (This is exactly why I believe that the director’s cut, which gets more bogged down in the science of the science fiction, is a weaker version of the film than the theatrical cut.)

The big “what if” in the story is Donnie’s super-power. Greene says that time-travel would require technology far in advance of what we have now. The major obstacles to the reality of time travel are (1) opening a wormhole, (2) creating a time machine that can travel at nearly the speed of light, (3) protecting the human body from the damage that would be caused by traveling at the speed of light.

Greene theorizes on how a wormhole might be produced: “We know that space responds to the distribution of matter and energy, so with sufficient control over matter and energy, we might cause a region of space to spawn a wormhole…” Richard Kelley proposes that Donnie can conjure this power at will. Based on the "many worlds theory" of parallel universes, Donnie can use this power to connect with an alternate reality where he has control over his own fate.

Admittedly it's a pretty wild idea... but no wilder than Stephen King's Carrie or David Cronenberg's Scanners, which also have their basis in unproven science. Like those films, DONNIE DARKO shouldn't have to stand up to careful scientific scrunity because the narrative is not simply about the scientific ideas. Ultimately, the film is NOT really about time-travel (or, at least, time travel as we understand it based on years of time-travel fiction), but about one character's sense of reality. It's a coming-of-age film about someone who is beginning to feel relativity in his bones. The most revealing aspects of the film are Donnie’s “emotional problems”:

First of all, he’s hearing voices – a classic symptom of schizophrenia. And what is schizophrenia if not a psychological equivalent of experiencing parallel universes? The voices make him feel, at times, like he’s possessed… He’s not quite Linda Blair in THE EXORCIST, but oftentimes he’s not himself. In this particular universe, sometimes he’s God. At first, he has no power – he can’t accept that he is the source of this new power, so he fearfully denies it. Later he has too much power (he’s concerned about moving outside of “God’s channel”), and he’s reluctant to take control and create a new reality... For that, he needs some kind of reassurance that he is not "evil."

Donnie's biggest fear is of dying alone, and the only thing that counterbalances his descent into madness is falling in love. The final message of the film is that only through love (and the self-sacrifice that comes from it) can he satisfactorily answer the crushing question about whether the world would be a better place if he weren't part of it. Donnie’s dilemma is actually pretty basic coming-of-age stuff. In order to feel alive, he has to create or destroy… and he’s trying to figure out what his own true nature is: creator or destroyer? It takes him most of the movie to recognize that this choice hasn’t already been made for him. It’s his choice to make, and his manipulation of time is just a gimmick in a heady parable about becoming a responsible human being. Ultimately, what he's learning is how to deal with his own creative/destructive potential.

As the film suggests, by having Donnie attack Jim Cunningham's simplistic philosophy (which reduces life to two basic emotions: LOVE and FEAR), that's not an easy road to travel. Understanding and choosing between creation and destruction, particularly when you're young, engages "the whole spectrum of human emotions." Sometimes it's not even entirely clear which one you've chosen... as the final sequence in the film illustrates.

I'm not sure how conscious Richard Kelly was of all this when he made DONNIE DARKO. Maybe, instead of working out all of the details in a thoroughly scientific manner, he simply felt this story his bones. Whatever the case, I think the results speak for themselves... Many viewers seem to feel this movie in their bones. DONNIE DARKO resonates, I think, not because of the science fiction elements but because of the coming-of-age story that’s hiding behind the brain-busting idea of time travel. Donnie’s actions at the end of the film leave me thinking not so much about the theory of parallel universes, but about what it would feel like to KNOW that parallel universes exist.

If each of us does in fact exist in “many worlds” beyond space and time, then all of those worlds (and all of the decisions and actions that distinguish them from each other) matter. The mere possibility fills me with a profound sense of both freedom and responsibility.

MOVIES MADE ME #27: THE TERMINATOR / ALIENS

2011-07-21T22:41:00.000-07:00

I could write at length about both of these films... but I won't. John Kenneth Muir recently celebrated the 25th anniversary of ALIENS with an in-depth post that I can't expect to top. I imagine he'll be equally thorough in his forthcoming post on THE TERMINATOR, due the week of August 8th as part of his summer-long celebration of filmmaker James Cameron. Instead of repeating his analyses, I'm simply going to reminisce...

I became aware of THE TERMINATOR shortly after it was released into theaters in the fall of 1984, but not because I saw the film or even the previews for it. Instead, I heard the entire plot -- scene by scene -- from a teenage girl in the neighborhood who used to babysit me and my brother when we were kids. I remember sitting in a makeshift "fort" (an old table with a huge blanket tossed over it) in the basement of my childhood home, listening intently while Samantha spun a wild yarn about a robot from the future who travels through time to carry out a violent abortion. She had just seen the movie the night before, and she spared no detail... But I didn't believe a word of it.

It was a great story. No question. I think I held my breath the entire time, eager to hear what came next. But I didn't believe that she'd actually seen all of this on a movie screen. I figured she had to be making it up... I thought the story was WAY too far-fetched to be an actual movie.

Years later, when I finally saw THE TERMINATOR, I was amazed that the film lived up to the hype I'd generated in my own brain. What really blew me away was the final act, when the Terminator sheds his Schwarzenegger skin and becomes a stop-motion animated skeleton (an upgrade on the old Ray Harryhausen movies)... I remember being utterly horrified by the thought that this thing simply could not be killed. That final act was a nightmare, pure and simple... There was no logic, no reason, no hope.

Watching THE TERMINATOR the New Beverly Theater a few nights ago, I realized how much it has in common with Cameron's subsequent film ALIENS. Both take place almost entirely in the dark (the noir aspect), both revolve around a super-human threat, and both feature androids (which get ripped in half at the end). In ALIENS, the android is benevolent... so you could perhaps view ALIENS as, among other things, a test run for TERMINATOR 2.

The first time I saw ALIENS was on the small screen. My father rented the home video a few years after it was released. This was a big deal for me because I was still too young to watch R-rated movies. I was surprised that he had picked it out. I think he might have had a thing for Sigourney Weaver, though I never asked. Whatever the cause, I wasn't complaining. Dad rarely wanted to watch the kind of movies I was interested in (action, horror, sci-fi), so the memory of that lazy summer afternoon stays with me.

As I saw it, he had Sigourney Weaver and I had Bishop. Lance Henriksen's character is the kid in the story. The story focuses mostly on Newt, the surrogate daughter for Sigourney's character, but I didn't care about her because she existed only to serve the Ripley's arc -- to set off her mothering instincts. Bishop was a self-contained character. He wasn't part of the tribe. He was the one who was trying to prove himself, trying to earn the approval of the adults around him. I could relate to that, and watching the movie with my dad made the experience even more poignant.

It's different watching the movie as an adult... I still identify with Bishop more than the human characters, but now it seems to me that he shouldn't have to try so hard. From the very beginning, he's more human than the humans. When the New Beverly screening was over, I was left wondering how James Cameron was able to make the leap from the Terminator to Bishop in just two films, spaced only a year apart. In the first film, the technology of the future is a source of profound fear. In the second film, the technology of the future is the light in the dark. Watching these two films back to back, it seems like there's an evolution going on in the storyteller's mind - like he's learning to trust hope. Or maybe that was just me.

MOVIES MADE ME #26: Five Easy Decades (A Tribute to Jack Nicholson)

2011-07-15T07:07:00.000-07:00

There's something about Jack. This week, I read Dennis McDougal's biography Five Easy Decades: How Jack Nicholson Became the Biggest Movie Star in Modern Times. It adds a few years worth of detail onto Patrick McGilligan's two-decades old biography Jack's Life, but doesn't add much insight. McDougal presents Nicholson as a perpetual adolescent who takes responsibility only for his own desires... which leaves one wondering: Is that why we love him? Is Jack Nicholson our collective Id?

I prefer director Hal Ashby's assessment: "... basically there's an honesty to Jack that comes through. But then again, it's on an ethereal level. People aren't watching the film and saying, 'Gee, I like his honesty, and that's why I like to see his films.' That's just not the way it happens; people feel a kind of electricity, an attraction to this person to watch him and see what he does, because you're never exactly sure what he is going to do, and I think that's the kind of thing that's fascinating."

For each of his five decades, Nicholson has starred in at least one undisputed masterpiece... as well as a string of films that chart his personal and professional evolution. He is always worth watching, and I'm astounded to realize just how many of his onscreen appearances are burned into my brain. It would take another book for me to attempt to do justice to all of his noteworthy films, so I'm just going to point at five personal favorites...

THE SIXTIES

Auspicious beginnings, indeed. One of Jack's earliest roles was a walk-on in Roger Corman's cheapest film, LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (1960). The actor didn't even get to finish acting the scene before the notoriously stingy director pulled the plug and moved on... but Jack still made the most of every second of screen time. The guy exudes raw, manic energy.

Most of Nicholson's noteworthy work in the sixties came out of the Roger Corman school of filmmaking. He had a supporting role in THE RAVEN (1963) opposite Vincent Price, Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre, followed by a leading role in the inexplicable horror film THE TERROR (1963), which also starred Nicholson's first wife Sandra Knight. He helped conceive two existential westerns for Corman regular Monte Hellman, RIDE IN THE WHIRLWIND (1965) and THE SHOOTING (1968), and penned Corman's ode to LSD, THE TRIP (1968). There's a rumor that he also suggested the title for Corman's first biker film THE WILD ANGELS, and was rewarded with a leading role in HELL'S ANGELS ON WHEELS (1967). After playing a prominent role in Richard Rush's PSYCHO-OUT (1968), the actor's familiarity with bikes and drugs led to his breakthrough role in EASY RIDER (1969).

THE SEVENTIES

After ten years in the business, Nicholson knew when he was on the cusp of stardom and he chose his next film carefully. His role as the spiritually and sexually restless Robert Dupea in Bob Rafelson's FIVE EASY PIECES (1970) shows him at his most confident, charismatic, clever and confounded.

FIVE EASY PIECES created a Jack Nicholson persona - fiercely independent, mildly misogynistic, always simmering on the verge of explosion - which carried over into CARNAL KNOWLEDGE (1971), THE LAST DETAIL (1973), CHINATOWN (1974) and ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST (1975). Subtler performances in THE KING OF MARVIN GARDENS (1972) and THE PASSENGER (1975) were mostly overlooked. At his peak, Nicholson turned back to westerns, but THE MISSOURI BREAKS (1976) and GOIN' SOUTH (1978) were busts.

THE EIGHTIES

As a writer I naturally have a weakness for Stanley Kubrick's THE SHINING (1980), even though it is completely unfaithful to Stephen King's novel. For a while, when I was writing fiction, I would put a sign on my office door reading "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy"... a kind of warning. Writer's block has never been so liberating.

THE SHINING is the moment when Jack embraced over-the-top self-parody. He was critically acclaimed for more restrained character roles -- in REDS (1981), TERMS OF ENDEARMENT (1983), IRONWEED (1987) and BROADCAST NEWS (1988) -- but the eighties were, after all, the decade of excess. And nobody does excess like Jack Nicholson, as the devil in THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK (1987) and The Joker in BATMAN (1989).

THE NINETIES

For every mainstream success that Jack made in the nineties (A FEW GOOD MEN, WOLF, AS GOOD AS IT GETS), there was a deeply personal indie film (THE TWO JAKES, HOFFA, BLOOD AND WINE). Sean Penn's THE CROSSING GUARD (1995) falls in the latter camp, and showcases one of Jack's boldest performances. The actor lets it all hang out... from man-tits to temper tantrums that make his character dangerously close to completely unsympathetic. It works only because Jack does everything with singular style, and that's something we can't help but envy. Penn and Nicholson followed up with the equally challenging THE PLEDGE (2001).

THE NEW MILLENNIUM

Nicholson moved confidently into the new millennium with a very uncharacteristic role in ABOUT SCHMIDT (2002), a brilliantly paced film that Nicholson himself refers to as "a Hal Ashby road movie." It proves beyond a doubt that he is one of Hollywood's most talented actors. The actor suggests that Warren Schmidt is who he might have become if he hadn't found acting. I'm not sure if he's laughing at himself or at the rest of us... That's part of his mystery.

For those who thought that maybe Jack had hit his last high note, he followed up a few years later with the central role in Martin Scorsese's THE DEPARTED (2007). You can't help wondering why this volatile Buddha with the cheshire cat smile will come up with next. THE BUCKET LIST (2007) supposedly emerged from plans to make a sequel to THE LAST DETAIL, featuring Morgan Freeman in the Otis Young role. There have been rumors for years about a sequel to EASY RIDER (in which the three bikers return from the dead!) and the completion of Jack's projected CHINATOWN trilogy (according to Dennis McDougal, "the third film would chronicle an aging Gittes in 1959, witnessing the unholy marriage of freeway and urban sprawl"). More likely, the actor will do something completely unexpected. Like Ashby said, that's why we can't stop watching.

MOVIES MADE ME #25: CARNIVAL OF SOULS

2011-07-10T06:00:00.000-07:00

Many of the best ghost movies are firmly rooted in a specific location. Hill House is the soul of THE HAUNTING (1963), The Overlook Hotel is the main character in THE SHINING, and The Great Saltair is the wandering spirit of the 1962 cult classic CARNIVAL OF SOULS. In fact, director Herk Harvey conceived CARNIVAL on a late afternoon drive along the outskirts of Salt Lake City, when he saw the abandoned pavilion silhouetted in the setting sun. He called up his writing partner John Clifford, who invented an intricate story about a church organist who suffers a near-fatal car accident, and subsequently leaves her hometown of Lawrence, Kansas, for Salt Lake City. There, she is inexplicably drawn to the old “bath house” on the banks of the lake, and haunted by a ghoulish, pasty-faced stranger.

I first saw the film in the mid-1990s on a cheap public domain DVD, where it was paired with the equally impressive HORROR HOTEL, a Lovecraftian chiller starring Christopher Lee. (I note that the film was originally released on a double bill with THE DEVIL’S MESSENGER, starring Lon Chaney Jr., but I haven’t seen that one.) The film stayed with me the way many episodes of the original TWILIGHT ZONE (rerun every afternoon on a UHF station in my childhood home) stayed with me… like a half-forgotten dream. A few years later, I saw the restored version released by The Criterion Collection and began to think of CARNIVAL OF SOULS as a film in the same league with Val Lewton’s films at RKO and George Romero’s breakthrough NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. Despite some pretty abysmal acting, CARNIVAL has atmosphere to spare - enough for for two or three movies. I attribute much of this to The Great Saltair itself.

Saltair first came to life in 1893, when Mormon investors completed their family-friendly version of Kubla Khan, and it quickly became the Coney Island of the West. Business was booming, until a fire destroyed the pavilion in 1925. In less than a year, Saltair was completely rebuilt, using roughly the same designs and incorporating the world’s largest dance hall. In the following years, it continued to be plagued by bad luck. Fires in 1931 and 1933 were followed by a long drought that left Saltair high and dry, necessitating the construction of a railway to carry visitors from the pavilion to the lake.

After World War II, the owners added a rollercoaster and a carousel (which I like to imagine played Gene Moore’s alternately playful and funereal score), but Saltair never quite rebounded and was finally closed to the public in 1958. It had been abandoned for a few years when Herk Harvey re-discovered it, and turned it into a magnet for lost and lonely souls. Roughly ten years later, the second Saltair burned to the ground, only to be rebuilt for a third time (with less extravagance) in the 1980s.

It’s not at all hard for me to imagine being drawn to this place. In fact, when I was planning a recent trip to Salt Lake City, the first thing I wanted to see was Saltair. Why? Perhaps for the same reason that Mary is drawn to it… The same reason that any of us are drawn to crumbling reminders of the past… There is a sadness in their beauty. Once upon a time, Saltair was the most popular resort west of New York. Just imagine all the families that spent their vacations on its shores… and all the happy memories that outlasted the first two pavilions. I’d venture to guess that the third reincarnation of Saltair exists because of those memories. Someone simply wasn’t willing to let the place die.

That also seems to be Mary’s problem in CARNIVAL OF SOULS. She isn’t willing to die, or isn’t aware that she’s dead. Her “carnival of souls” is a kind of limbo between dimensions, the pasty-faced stranger is her guide through the underworld, and the Great Salt Lake is her River Styx. I could go on about the appropriateness of this metaphor, given the lake’s reputation as the Western World’s “Dead Sea,” and probably tie in some Mormon beliefs about resurrection, but I don’t want to get too heavy-handed.

What’s significant to the story is the fact that Mary doesn’t seem to hold any religious beliefs. She says that the church is “just a place of business” and that playing the organ in church is “just a job.” She is even more isolated from the world of the living due to her lack of interest in physical intimacy. At times, she reminds me of Catherine Deneuve’s character in Polanski’s REPULSION. Both women fearfully imagine being smothered by ghoulish attackers. But Deneuve’s problem is purely psychological; Mary’s is spiritual. Deneuve turns homicidal while Mary cowers and pleads, “I don’t want to me left alone!” She can’t assert herself, which makes her a figurative ghost as well as a literal one.

In the years since THE SIXTH SENSE was released, many viewers have cited CARNIVAL OF SOULS as its forerunner. I tend to think of it more as a descendant of Charles Williams’s excellent novel All Hallow’s Eve. In my opinion, the novel has one of the best opening chapters in the history of horror. It follows a London woman to the realization that she has been killed by a plane crash during the WWII Blitz. Lacking any beliefs about the afterlife, she wanders the city in desperate confusion. Like Mary, she finds that the living often cannot see or hear her. Her reality is tenuous and her psychological isolation is maddening. For that reason, you could also say that CARNIVAL OF SOULS is a forerunner of “rubber reality” horror movies, in particular LET’S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH (1971) and JACOB’S LADDER (1990).

What makes CARNIVAL resonate for me is not just the technical achievements of the filmmakers and the haunting history of Saltair, but also the oblique religious message. I can’t help feeling that the final scene – when Mary goes to Saltair to meet her fate – is as disturbing as the finale of THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON’T THEY? In both films, the characters are utterly defeated by the world they live in, and their horrific "dance of the dead" seems never-ending.

My own take on the film is rooted in a revealing line of dialogue delivered early in the film. One of the characters says of Mary, “If she’s got a problem, it’ll go along with her.” This echoes a passage from one of T.S. Eliot’s earliest poems:

This word is true on all the paths you tread
As true as truth need be, when all is said:
That if you find no truth among the living
You will not find much truth among the dead.

MOVIES MADE ME #24: Vegas, Baby, Vegas

2011-06-30T06:00:00.000-07:00

As I head for Las Vegas today, I thought I'd post my five favorite movies made in Sin City...

SWINGERS (1996)

What it's about: Two would-be Hollywood players struggling valiantly to make the scene in Vegas and L.A.

Why I love it: The movie starts out with Jon Favreau wallowing over a recent breakup with his girlfriend. Vince Vaughan drags him out of his despondency and drives him to Vegas to shack up with a couple of bored cocktail waitresses. That is the very definition of true friendship. Favs screws up the plan, of course, but his buddy is undaunted. I remember watching this movie repeatedly after a breakup and the antics of these two characters always took my mind off of it.

Favorite scene: when Favs hopelessly leaves a litany of desperate late-night messages for a woman he doesn't even know. It hurts so good.

VERY BAD THINGS (1998)

What it's about: Four repressed men and Christian Slater cut loose in Vegas, only to accidentally kill a hooker. After that, their weekend just keeps getting worse and worse and worse and (when you think they've finally reached rock bottom...) worse.

Why I love it: My roommate in college rented this one night. I didn't want to watch it because I thought it looked like a frat boy movie, but I got sucked in. After a while, I couldn't believe what I was seeing... The humor just kept getting darker and darker, until the final scene had me laughing so hard that I was actually in pain. I know there are a lot of people who don't see the humor in this movie. In fact, I think I might even be glad that a lot of people don't see the humor in this movie... but nevertheless I love it, because it has the balls to go so much further than THE HANGOVER.

Favorite scene: This one's cumulative, so the final scene is the comic coup de grace.

FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS (1998)

What it's about: Two drug-addled freaks trying to outshine the larger-than-life absurdity of Vegas itself.

Why I love it: When I was in college, I read everything by Citizen Gonzo. One drunken night, my friend Dave and I even wandered from party to party, prompting friends and strangers to read passages from FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS. (How I wish I still had that recording.) What has always amazed me about Hunter Thompson is the way he invented himself. In The Proud Highway, his first volume of personal letters (written while he was still formulating his future as Gonzo), he writes: “You can either impose yourself on reality and then write about it, or you can impose yourself on reality by writing.” He started out doing the latter, and moved on to doing the former... Eventually, Hunter Thompson became the story. Terry Gilliam's adaptation of the writer's most famous work is ridiculous, grotesque, occasionally mean-spirited, always self-indulgent, simultaneously brilliant and overblown... and that's exactly the point. Visually, it's a feast for the eyes that's meant to be regurgitated. I can't explain it any better than that... It's gonzo.

Favorite scene: This is a tough one... but I'm going to have to go with the scene where our fear-full reporter cowers in front of his beastly lawyer, while under the influence of "adrenacrome." Johnny Depp perfectly captures the cartoonish side of Hunter Thompson, with his wildly exaggerated movements and animal-like noises. The actor didn't simply become the character - he was consumed by the character. Think about it: Depp hasn't played a role since FEAR AND LOATHING that didn't have a touch of Thompson's eccentric mannerisms. (On a side note: I can't help wondering what Bill Murray would have done in the role. If only he'd made WHERE THE BUFFALO ROAM later in his career...)

FOOLS RUSH IN (1997)

What it's about: Rom-com with Matthew Perry and Salma Hayek as a mismatched couple who try to turn one night in Vegas into a lifelong commitment.

Why I love it: I'm not really sure. I usually hate romantic comedies. I especially hate the designation "rom-com," and the fact that I used it above. That said, I have an occasional weakness for a handful of them. A while back, I joked to my friend John Muir that I was going to write an entire blog on my favorite romantic comedies. He warned me not to do it, saying that I'd alienate whatever readership I have... and he's probably right. Just the same, I'm going to admit that this one is a guilty pleasure. Of course, there's the obvious appeal of watching Salma Hayek for two hours. But I also genuinely like her character, the way she incorporates her cultural beliefs into everything she does. I can understand not only why Matthew Perry falls in love with her at first sight, but why he remains in love with her - despite and because of how different they are. Also, the idea that Salma Hayek could fall so deeply in love with Matthew Perry gives us all hope.

Favorite scene: where Matthew Perry comes home to find his minimalist suburban tract house transformed into a southwestern art music. His reaction to the giant crucifix always gets me.

GO (1999)

What it's about: A group of friends whose lives criss cross in Vegas and L.A., where they get away with the kind of shit you can only get away with when you're young and immortal.

Why I love it: Like the friends in VERY BAD THINGS, the characters in GO are constantly getting into deep trouble... but, unlike the guys in VERY BAD THINGS, they always manage to escape unscathed. That's part of the youthful spirit of this film. Watching this movie is sort of like getting high and doing everything that pops into your head, with total impunity. It's what a night in Vegas should be... an experience that leaves you with stories that you can only share with the people you experienced them with.

Favorite scene: where Nathan Bexton, tripping on ecstasy, communicates telepathically with a cat. It reminds me of this one time when I was hallucinating characters from the Fat Albert cartoons... but that's a story for another day...

MOVIES MADE ME #23: VANILLA SKY

2011-06-28T11:40:00.000-07:00

It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of Cameron Crowe. I’ve already written about three of his films this year (FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH, SAY ANYTHING and ALMOST FAMOUS) and I can’t resist doing one more. VANILLA SKY is not as highly regarded as some of the filmmaker’s other work. The film wasn’t a huge money-maker (at least, for a Tom Cruise vehicle budgeted at $68 million) and it got mixed reviews. I know a few people who really love this film, but I can name a few who hate it. Personally, I think VANILLA SKY illustrates exactly what’s so great about Crowe as a filmmaker. To quote the guitar hero of ALMOST FAMOUS, he's all about the “little things.”

VANILLA SKY was Crowe’s followup to ALMOST FAMOUS as well as his second film with Tom Cruise (after JERRY MAGUIRE). The director says that the project began with a private screening of Alejandro Amenabar’s ABRE LOS OJOS at Cruise’s house. The actor already loved the film and had bought the rights to remake it. When Crowe saw it for the first time, he was equally captivated. He decided it would make a perfect “contemporary” successor to his intensely personal period piece ALMOST FAMOUS, and he was eager to reassemble his company of players from that film. He knew he had a great band (so to speak), so he re-assembled them and set out to perform an elaborate “cover song.”

"Cover song" is an appropriate designation, considering the way that Crowe made ABRE LOS OJOS his own. Often, VANILLA SKY is a scene for scene remake… but there’s never any question that it is Crowe’s film. ABRE LOS OJOS is mostly cerebral. The remake is more emotional. In visual terms and in terms of story, VANILLA SKY has a warmer palette. Of course, that may be part of the problem for some viewers…

Amenabar’s source story – about the journey of a man’s sleeping brain inside his cryogenically frozen body – plays out like an episode of THE TWILIGHT ZONE. ABRE LOS OJOS is enigmatic, haunting and often forbidding. The colors are muted, the silences are tiring, and the characters never quite connect with each other. It’s an arthouse thriller. VANILLA SKY is more like a Ray Bradbury story… the sci-fi elements are still there, but the emphasis is on the human drama. (Think JERRY MAGUIRE in THE TWILIGHT ZONE.) That human touch comes from Crowe’s major contribution to the story: “the lucid dream.”

One of the characters in the film describes the lucid dream concept as “the cryonic union of science and entertainment.” Not only will your body be preserved after you die, but your mind will be sustained in an evolving dream, controlled by your subconscious. For Cruise’s character, that means that “reality” is comprised entirely of the things that he loves – his favorite movies (JULES AND JIM and TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD feature prominently), his favorite songs (Bob Dylan, Radiohead, etc.), his favorite magazine covers (including a Rolling Stone issue with Katie Holmes on the cover…) and a healthy, long-term relationship with the woman he loves (Penelope Cruz). Sounds too good to be true, right? That’s what Cruise’s subconscious mind figures… and his dream-come-true slowly turns into a bad acid trip. His mind finally rejects the artificial reality… the same way that humans rejected the perfect world matrix in THE MATRIX REVOLUTIONS. Cruise’s character, inundated by pop culture, yearns for something real.

On one hand, Crowe seems to be pointing out the dangers of getting too immersed in pop culture. At the same time, VANILLA SKY is a celebration of pop culture and its ability to meld with our memories. When Cruise's ideal world eventually turns sour, that doesn’t mean that Bob Dylan’s music isn’t still a vital part of his real identity. If a person “wakes up” from a lucid dream, they’ll still love the same things. That’s an idea that resonates with me. Hell, I could have called this blog LUCID DREAM instead of MOVIES MADE ME… Both phrases are getting at the same idea. Pop culture is part of who we are.

Cruise’s character is always part of an “electronic crowd scene.” One critic referred to VANILLA SKY as Cameron Crowe’s White Album, but I prefer to think of it as his Sgt. Pepper – with Tom Cruise standing in for the allegedly dead Paul. Tonally, this is something very different from ABRE LOS OJOS… because the familiar pop culture sights and sounds in VANILLA SKY draw us into a warm cocoon, instead of alienating us in the twilight zone.

Crowe’s biggest inspiration for this particular project was filmmaker Billy Wilder. He revered Wilder so much that he tried to cast him as Cruise’s “coach” in JERRY MAGUIRE. Wilder turned him down flat, so Crowe wrote a book about him instead. Reading Conversations with Wilder, one realizes that Crowe sees his cinematic hero not as a cynic (though many critics have labeled him as such) but a romantic. Wilder’s formula is simple: The sweet is never as sweet without the sour. That is also the essence of VANILLA SKY. Sometimes the film gets very dark and depressing and sometimes it also gets syrupy sweet… but these extreme highs and lows exist for a reason. The main character is living heightened experiences… We’re seeing his life (the greatest hits collection) flash before our eyes, and Crowe has to convey the emotional intensity of a lifetime of intense experiences in just under two hours of screen time. It makes sense for the viewer to feel overloaded. It took me several viewings to distinguish and appreciate the “little things” that make this movie so special.

The first time I saw VANILLA SKY, I thought Tom Cruise was simply playing a caricature of himself. On repeat viewings, I started to see his vulnerability. As in JERRY MAGUIRE, Cruise truly reveals himself only when he holds that camera-ready smile so long that the veins in his forehead start to protrude, and the smile begins to look like a plea for help. (I’ve often thought that Cruise and Julia Roberts suffer a similar affliction… and that their smiles will one day be the death of them.)

On first viewing, his character’s downfall seemed to be to be result of callousness. On repeat viewing, I realized that his downfall comes out of his intense fear of being an irredeemable jerk. That’s why he chooses to get in the car with Cameron Diaz – not because he sees an opportunity to sleep with her, but because he doesn’t want to be a bad friend. With the subtle addition of a single line of dialogue (“You never have time for your friends until after they’ve given up on you”), Crowe makes his version of the main character more human than the main character in ABRE LOS OJOS.

Penelope Cruz reprises her role from ABRE LOS OJOS, but in VANILLA SKY she’s much more endearing. I can rattle off a litany of minor details that distinguish the rebooted character from the original, and make her so lovable: the oversized coat, “the saddest girl to ever hold a martini,” her reaction to Cruise’s nickname, the way she flips her laundry into the laundry basket with her foot, her celebratory outburst when Cruise leaves her apartment, her optimism (“every passing second is a chance to turn it all around), her whimsy (“I’ll tell you in another life, when we are both cats”), her sensitivity (“Well… your ears are in the right place”), and of course her mole. All of these things are part and parcel of the chemistry between the two leads, who light up onscreen like a couple of teenagers falling in love for the first time.

That’s one movie. Then comes the twilight zone stuff – which, when it finally rolls around, probably pissed some viewers off. I can hear it now: It was a sweet little movie until the writer dropped acid and decided to turn Tom Cruise into Quasimodo. In some ways, the second half of the movie reminds me of Luis Bunuel’s THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE (another personal favorite). Bunuel’s film casts two actresses in the same role, to convey the enigmatic quality of the woman at the center of the piece. One is the sophisticated, almost regal French actress Carole Bouquet. The other is the comparatively wild and earthy Spanish actress Angela Molina. The leading man (Fernando Rey) is never able to get close to the object of his desire, because she literally keeps changing. The same thing happens to Tom Cruise in VANILLA SKY, when Penelope Cruz keeps turning into Cameron Diaz. (If you ask me, he should just go with it… There are worse problems to have in life… but let’s not get off track…)

All of this culminates on the rooftop of a New York City skyscraper, under a dreamy Monet-like vanilla sky. (You might get this kind of sky on a particularly smoggy evening in Los Angeles, but in New York it’s a surefire sign that you’re hallucinating.) The final scene is greatly extended from ABRE LOS OJOS. The most obvious change is the addition of the pre-9/11 skyline of New York – a perfect backdrop for the mixed feelings of the main character. VANILLA SKY was released in the fall of 2001, and there was some debate about painting out the World Trade Center in the background. The filmmakers decided not to (why, they rationalized, would anyone with the option of erasing September 11th from their memory not choose to do so in their lucid dream?). Cruise’s leap of faith also carries a lot of additional dramatic weight for anyone who remembers the day… As viewers, our subconscious plays its own role in the lucid dream.

This is where the movie wins me over every time I watch it – for several reasons. First of all, the scene showcases all of Crowe’s strengths as a storyteller. Unlike the characters in Amenabar’s film, the characters in VANILLA SKY are fully fleshed out and self-aware at this point. Cruise’s character moves beyond disillusionment to peace and acceptance. Cruz’s character remains a distinct personality, rather than just an obscure object of desire. (This reflects the main character’s evolution as well, since he has partially invented her.) Kurt Russell also has a chance to shine as Cruise’s father-figure... Even though he's not "real," we can't help but feel his loss.

As in all of Crowe’s films, the right music enhances everything. This final sequence features two memorable songs by the Icelandic band Sigur Ros, and the track that plays over Cruise and Cruz’s farewell, “The Nothing Song,” could not be more perfect. The song is a benediction and a valediction that literally goes beyond words. According to Wikipedia, "The Nothing Song" is sung in "Vonlenska, also known as Hopelandic, a constructed language of nonsense syllables - technically glossolalia – which resembles the phonology of the Icelandic language... It has been said that the listener is supposed to interpret their own meanings of the lyrics.” I don’t think it’s a stretch to suggest that viewers are supposed to do something similar with the final scene in VANILLA SKY… We’re meant to transfer our own memories and feelings, our own loves and lives lost, onto the final scene. If successful, this is when all of the “little things” coalesce.

For me, this rooftop scene played out like a kind of epiphany when I saw it for the second or third time on home video. (When I saw the movie for the first time in the theater, I was simply overwhelmed… I couldn’t decide whether I liked it or not. I was left with too many things to sort out in my mind, and I felt like maybe the filmmaker hadn’t made enough decisions.) I couldn’t help remembering where I’d been and who I’d been with on 9/11, and thinking of a very intense relationship that ended a few weeks later for reasons I couldn’t quite sort out in my mind. All at once, watching the end of VANILLA SKY, the reasons didn’t matter. It occurred to me that, in the final moment when your life flashes before your eyes, maybe love can outweigh all the other stuff. The information overload - the thousand points of light - become one giant wave of emotion.

A lot of viewers remain baffled by VANILLA SKY, but the filmmaker defines it as a story about “a guy who learns that humanity lives in every little thing, and not to take that for granted.” Simple enough, and powerful.

Thoughts for Desperate Writers

2011-06-24T18:52:00.000-07:00

Ah, my Belov'ed fill the Cup that clears
To-day Past Regrets and Future Fears:
To-morrow!--Why, To-morrow I may be
Myself with Yesterday's Sev'n Thousand Years.

For some we loved, the loveliest and the best
That from his Vintage rolling Time hath prest,
Have drunk their Cup a Round or two before,
And one by one crept silently to rest.

And we, that now make merry in the Room
They left, and Summer dresses in new bloom
Ourselves must we beneath the Couch of Earth
Descend--ourselves to make a Couch--for whom?

Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,
Before we too into the Dust descend;
Dust into Dust, and under Dust to lie
Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and--sans End!

Alike for those who for To-day prepare,
And those that after some To-morrow stare,
A Muezzin from the Tower of Darkness cries
"Fools! your Reward is neither Here nor There."

Why, all the Saints and Sages who discuss'd
Of the Two Worlds so wisely--they are thrust
Like foolish Prophets forth; their Words to Scorn
Are scatter'd, and their Mouths are stopt with Dust.

Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument
About it and about: but evermore
Came out by the same door where in I went.

With them the seed of Wisdom did I sow,
And with mine own hand wrought to make it grow;
And this was all the Harvest that I reap'd--
"I came like Water, and like Wind I go."

- The Rubaiyat

MOVIES MADE ME #22: HEAT

2011-06-18T09:10:00.000-07:00

When Michael Mann’s HEAT was released in December 1995, I saw it four times in the theater, including once on Christmas Eve. (I joked that since movies were my religion, it was the most appropriate way to spend the holiday.) I was accompanied by three friends: Ben, Chris and John.

Like me, Ben was a die-hard movie geek. He was captivated by the “Two Actors Collide” trailer that promoted HEAT as the onscreen collision of Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro. We’re talking about the Al Pacino of THE GODFATHER, SCARFACE and CARLITO’S WAY – an actor so much larger than life that he could only play larger than life characters. (In HEAT, his character is prone to restless outbursts – suggesting that he has a bit of a coke problem. Not quite on par with Tony Montana’s coke problem, but still…) We’re also talking about a larger-than-life Robert DeNiro… the Bobby DeNiro invented by Martin Scorsese in MEAN STREETS, TAXI DRIVER, RAGING BULL, GOODFELLAS and CASINO. A formidable threat (in high school, we used to refer to beat-downs as “doing a little Bobby D.”) before he resorted to self-parody in bullshit like ANALYZE THIS and MEET THE PARENTS. For a movie geek like Ben, HEAT was a mythic clash of the titans. On top of that, Ben fully recognized and appreciated that the film had a stellar supporting cast, excellent cinematography and a pitch-perfect soundtrack. HEAT was action movie high art.

Chris was also a fan of Pacino and DeNiro (probably moreso DeNiro, since DeNiro was in THE DEER HUNTER and Chris was a war movie buff), but I think for him the action was the juice. He was just as interested in the guns as in the actors. A future military man, Chris was drawn to the professional codes of Pacino’s cops and DeNiro’s criminals. In both cases, there is a loyalty among brothers. In both cases, there is a need to live a life stripped down to basics, so you can travel fast and light. In both cases, the characters don’t pull any punches. Like the guys in the movie, Chris is the kind of guy who won’t hesitate to fire or to take a bullet for something he believes in, so he connected with the world of HEAT on that level.

John was the first person I ever met who thought of himself as an “entrepreneur.” At 17, he had dropped out of high school and was setting up his own Internet business. He had his own apartment (with a fully stocked bar) in a trendy section of town, he drove a brand new Ford Explorer, and he always wore a suitcoat wherever he went. Somehow, he managed to not come off like a kid playing dressup. He came across more like a guru at a self-actualization seminar… a young Robert Kiyosaki, pretending that he’s Tom Cruise. John’s favorite films were RISKY BUSINESS and THE COLOR OF MONEY… because the main characters in each film were players. John thought of himself as a player. I remember one time we were having dinner and he said to me: “How much money would you like to have at the end of this year?” At the time I was working for minimum wage as a bag-boy at a small town grocery store, so I thought it was a stupid question. But John honestly believed that an intelligent person could accomplish anything if they put their mind to it. “Just commit to a number,” he said. “And then what?” I asked, “Rob a bank?” He shrugged. “That’s one way…”

I suppose you could say that Ben, Chris and John were my “crew” (though I was certainly not the Pacino or DeNiro of that bunch), which is maybe the main reasons that I liked HEAT so much. In high school, I felt that my own identity was inextricably linked with the identities of my friends, so I could appreciate a film all about crews. Pacino and DeNiro are the headliners – they are the only characters, in writer/director Michael Mann’s estimation, who are “self aware” – but they wouldn’t have been anything without their crew… just ghosts.

DeNiro obviously has the more charismatic crew – a veritable who’s who of mid-90s badasses: Val Kilmer (who earned his stripes as Jim Morrison in THE DOORS and Doc Holliday in TOMBSTONE), Tom Sizemore (the irascible Jack Scagnetti in NATURAL BORN KILLERS) and Danny Trejo (a one-man army in DESPERADO). Even his second string is beyond reproach. Jon (DELIVERANCE) Voight does a great impersonation of crime writer Eddie Bunker (perhaps best known as “Mr. Blue” in RESERVOIR DOGS) and Dennis Haysbert gives a powerfully subdued performance as Michael… a step up from the actor’s voodoo-obsessed batter in MAJOR LEAGUE, and a precursor to his role as the President David Palmer in 24.

Pacino’s crew isn’t as glorious… They’re the good guys, after all, and the good guys are never as glorious. Still, this is a solid group of cinematic tough guys: Mykelti Williamson (shaking off his role as “Bubba” in FORREST GUMP so mightily that he’d next get cast as one of the heavies in CON AIR), Wes Studi (a Michael Mann favorite who made an indelible impression on my young psyche in LAST OF THE MOHICANS, and later played Geronimo for Walter Hill), and Ted Levine (who also made an indelible impression on my young psyche as Buffalo “tuck and hide” Bill in SILENCE OF THE LAMBS).

The supporting cast of HEAT also includes William Fichtner, Henry Rollins, Tone Loc, Hank Azaria, Jeremy Piven, Bud Cort and Tom Noonan (best known as Francis Dollarhyde in MANHUNTER). And we haven’t even gotten to the leading ladies yet!

Diane Venora, a classically trained actress who can give Shakespeare a run for his money (she went on to play Juliet’s mother in Baz Luhrman’s ROMEO + JULIET and Hamlet’s mother in Kenneth Branagh’s HAMLET) gives Al Pacino a run for his money as a high-maintenance wife. Ashley Judd is the perfect combination of classy and trashy – smart, sexy and a little bit duplicitous… just the right combination of elements to keep Val Kilmer simultaneously addicted and frustrated. NYPD BLUE veteran Amy Brenneman is also perfect as DeNiro’s reluctant love interest… a lonely woman who can’t buy into the lonely world he lives in. (Brenneman got the part because she told Michael Mann that she didn’t like his hyper-masculine script.) And then there’s Natalie Portman, whose role in THE PROFESSIONAL had already established her as an actress wise beyond her years.

After reeling off this long list of names, I’m realizing again just how epic this film truly is. It’s built on the reputations of all of these great actors… and, even more than that, on Michael Mann’s experience as a filmmaker and the experience of several people that he’d met over the course of 20 years while he was developing the script. It would take a pretty comprehensive book to do justice to Michael Mann’s evolution as a filmmaker, but for the sake of brevity we can trace the origins of his undisputed masterpiece HEAT to the 1982 film THIEF, which was itself the culmination of Mann’s years of writing for TV crime shows like STARSKY & HUTCH and POLICE STORY (not to mention an early draft of the Dustin Hoffman movie STRAIGHT TIME).

If you haven’t seen THIEF… shame on you. Michael Mann grew up in Chicago, so this film is his tribute to the criminal world of Chicago. I recently worked on a documentary on the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and the field producers got to go on location in Chicago with a couple of mob insiders… and visit some of the same locations where THIEF was filmed. Mann obviously did his homework, and he made the city its own separate character. You could say he did the same thing for Miami in MIAMI VICE and for Los Angeles in L.A. TAKEDOWN. The latter also now looks like a template for HEAT. You just can’t escape the idea that HEAT was the perfection of a form the filmmaker had been chasing for years. In fact, the main characters in HEAT – Vincent Hanna (Pacino) and Neil McCauley (DeNiro) – were inspired by a real life cop and criminal that Mann originally encountered in Chicago.

The cop was Chuck Adamson, a Chicago PD homicide detective. The criminal was the real-life Neil McCauley, a professional thief who was in fact killed by the bullet of his rival. In real life, as in the film, these two men were flip sides of the same coin. Both are instinctive hunters. Both are self-aware (which is to say they don’t lie to themselves about what they do and why they do it). Both have a fully-developed personal code of ethics. But one, as Mann explains, is ego-centered and the other is ego-centric. One is a protector and the other is a sociopath. The distinction is made, in HEAT, by Al Pacino’s dream speech in the diner. The protector dreams about the death of innocent victims with black eyeballs. The sociopath dreams only about his own death, drowning in a black ocean.

If you want to go back even further to trace the origins of HEAT, I’d recommend checking out the 1939 western film JESSE JAMES, starring Tyrone Power, Henry Fonda and Randolph Scott. The same duality between cop and criminal exists in that film. In fact, the cop and the criminal in JESSE JAMES even love the same woman. There’s a scene were Tyrone Power’s outlaw and Randolph Scott’s sheriff come face to face, and it’s a lot like the diner scene in HEAT. Scott knows that Power is a criminal. Power knows that Scott knows. But each lets the other man go his way. There is a kind of mutual respect that goes beyond words. They understand each other and, up to a point, respect each other as “men’s men.” That said, both are professionals and they will not hesitate to kill each other under different circumstances. The same themes are what make HEAT, in my opinion, a modern-day western. I’ve never heard that that was a conscious idea on Michael Mann’s part, but it’s so glaringly obvious to me that I find it hard to believe that any “self-aware” storyteller wouldn’t recognize it as such.

JESSE JAMES and HEAT both culminate with a bank heist gone awry and a shootout in the streets. For me, the shootout in HEAT was so overwhelming the first time I saw it, I swear I held my breath for twenty minutes. Today, I can’t visit downtown Los Angeles without thinking of he way that gunfire echoed off of the buildings on those strangely hollow streets. This scene too is a culmination of Mann’s work… In many of his previous projects, and in every scene prior in HEAT, the filmmaker strives to capture the essence of the city of Los Angeles. There are people who balk at the idea of “Michael Mann’s L.A.” (they love to point out that he mistakenly sainted the Vincent Thomas Bridge in Long Beach), but I am not one of them. In my estimation, he captures it perfectly… a kind of beautiful vacancy.

Los Angeles is a dream landscape – a semi-real city built on elaborate lies and illusions, many of them simultaneously alluring and grossly deformed. Mann captures the surreal, noir aspect of L.A. from the first scene where DeNiro gets off the blue line train to the final scene at LAX airport. These landscapes aren’t real… The art department had to place all of the red and white cargo boxes that Pacino and DeNiro use to play cat-and-mouse at LAX… and, simply put, nobody rides the train in L.A. (It’s worth noting that Mann’s film COLLATERAL ends at the same train station… which, to me, underscores the idea that COLLATERAL is comprised mostly of reheated leftovers from HEAT, the blue flame of HEAT’s intensity turned into the autumnal orange palette of COLLATERAL…) When I first saw HEAT, I fell in love with Mann’s Los Angeles… with DeNiro’s austere, glassed-in Malibu apartment overlooking a black ocean, and especially with Amy Brenneman’s Sunset Plaza apartment overlooking the night lights of the sleepless city. That scene, and DeNiro’s speech about iridescent algae, still gets me -- because I’ve always understood one thing about Los Angeles: Only in a place this bright and busy can you feel so isolated.

If you’ve watched the behind the scenes features on the HEAT and COLLATERAL DVDs, then you know Michael Mann chooses his filming locations carefully. When Pacino is chasing DeNiro down the 405 freeway, he uses brief shots of the 105 freeway because the twisted architecture of the overpasses suggests something about the complexity of the situation. (Oh, what a tangled web… etc.) When DeNiro and Brenneman pass through a bright white tunnel on their way to LAX at the end of the film, the setting itself seems to be granting DeNiro’s character an insight. This is exactly what I mean about turning the city into a character. Mann’s Los Angeles is alive – constantly communicating in whispers to the characters (and to us, the audience) even when the characters aren’t communicating explicitly with each other. There’s something absolutely brilliant about that… something that Mann manages to achieve at least once or twice in all of his films, but which really shines through in HEAT because the acting and the characterizations have the same depth, complexity and nuance… because the characters are usually communicating with each other in the same subtle ways.

In all of my rambling, I haven’t said anything about the soundtrack to HEAT, which also deserves praise. I listened to the soundtrack for months after I saw the film, and it still casts a spell on me today, especially the final track. For four teenage guys watching the film in the theater on Christmas Eve 1995, Pacino and DeNiro’s denouement set to Moby’s “God Moving His Face Over the Waters” was a borderline religious experience. I don’t hesitate in the least to call this film a classic.

MOVIES MADE ME #21: LOST IN TRANSLATION

2011-06-07T10:58:00.000-07:00

In the late summer of 1999, I went on a trip to the mountains of Bolivia. I mentally prepared for the trip by watching Ron Fricke’s film CHRONOS almost every night for a couple of months. For those who don’t know, CHRONOS is a 45-minute IMAX feature using time-lapsed photography to contrast the pace of life in urban Western civilization with the pace of life in the natural world. I remember especially the shadows. Shadows moving across the faces of ancient Greek statues seem to change expressions of pride and accomplishment into expressions of loss and acceptance. Shadows of clouds rolling through the deserts of the American Southwest look like the ghosts of dead Indians, united with the land.

It’s almost impossible to watch the film without reflecting on one’s own mortality, with alternating feelings of invigoration and sadness… and, above all, a profound sense of awe. To me, Fricke’s other (better-known) films, KOYAANASQATSI and BARAKA, are a little more cerebral. They engage the brain, whereas CHRONOS mostly engages the senses. Breathtaking visuals and haunting music (by Craig Stearns) fully convey the impression that words are obsolete.

A few years ago, when I was preparing for a trip to India, I watched Sofia Coppola’s film LOST IN TRANSLATION with a similar devotion. Coppola obviously thinks in images and vignettes rather than words. This was apparent in her debut film, THE VIRGIN SUICIDES, which forgoes the idea of having a single narrative voice in favor of a chorus of voices and a medley of characters. This style is even more apparent in her most recent film, SOMEWHERE, which plays like a long series of moving snapshots. Her films are all about the need for inspiration, but I believe LOST IN TRANSLATION works best because it’s characters are so believably “lost” and so believably inspiring.

I don’t think there’s a single frame of LOST IN TRANSLATION that doesn’t resonate for me emotionally. Bill Murray’s mid-life crisis is apparent from the first scene, where he’s in a cab, staring out in dreamy, jetlagged disbelief at the neon skyline of Tokyo…

... only to bump into a billboard of himself staring back, boldly expressionless.

When I watch it now, I think of Lance Henriksen’s comments about what he calls jetlag movies: “Your body is there, but your soul is still asleep.” The absurdity of Murray's life as a famous actor is repeated again and again: in the shower, in the elevator, and especially in the television studio where he’s making commercial for Japanese whiskey. This is the aging actor as Falstaff, a tragi-comic clown. (One could write an entire book about the actor’s evolution from SNL humor to the soulfulness of THE RAZOR’S EDGE and GROUNDHOG DAY, the situational humor of RUSHMORE and LOST IN TRANSLATION, and finally the self-aware humor of COFFEE & CIGARETTES and ZOMBIELAND.)

Scarlett Johanssen’s quarter-life crisis is equally apparent from a series of images where she’s perched, half-naked, in a window above the sprawling city of Tokyo. Another filmmaker might feel compelled to make her tell us what she’s thinking as she sits there, but that would be self-defeating. It’s better if we put the pieces together for ourselves: She’s young and aimless and lonely in a restless city of roughly 13 million people who speak another language.

In a way, she’s not so different from those ancient statues in CHRONOS. When she’s surrounded by other people (even Bill Murray, at first), she appears proud and accomplished. When she’s alone in that window sill, she’s fading. (On another self-indulgent sidenote, I have to say that I miss this vulnerable side of Scarlett Johanssen. Maybe I just haven’t been watching her best movies, but it seems to me that her recent sexbomb roles are much more depressing than her quarter-life crisis in LOST IN TRANSLATION. She's watched, instead of watching.)

The beauty of the film is that Bill Murray’s mid-life crisis and Scarlett Johanssen’s quarter-life crisis are somehow a perfect match. Even though these two people are complete strangers whose lives could not be more different, they recognize each other as fellow carriers of the "midnight disease" (to borrow Michael Chabon's term from WONDER BOYS)… and, what’s more, they are able and willing to give each other hope in the future. The first time I saw the film, I couldn’t help thinking of my favorite line from George Orwell’s 1984: “Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as understood.”

To me, that’s what LOST IN TRANSLATION is about. When you slow down your life to the pace of the natural world, the everyday sound and fury may seem futile… but it doesn't change the fact that lost souls intuitively understand each other, and in that realization there is hope. We’re not entirely alone on this overpopulated rock. Like HAROLD & MAUDE, LOST IN TRANSLATION emerges as more than a love story. It’s a tone poem about spiritual intimacy… and I’m not going to waste any more time trying to explain how or why the best scenes in the film are able to capture that intimacy (though I could easily ramble enthusiastically about a dozen or more scenes), because at a certain point words are inadequate… This is a fact that Sofia Coppola acknowledges beautifully in the final scene in the film.

Just watch.

MOVIES MADE ME #20: WONDER BOYS

2011-05-30T17:27:00.000-07:00

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 ingénue 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

MOVIES MADE ME #19: JENNIFER EIGHT

2011-05-27T10:25:00.000-07:00

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.

Thoughts for Desperate Writers

2011-05-08T00:01:00.000-07:00

I’m willing to agree that twice-two-makes-four is a thing of beauty. But, if we’re going to praise everything like that, then I say that twice-two-makes-five is also a delightful little item now and then.
- Fyodor Dostoevsky

Free Comic Book Day!

2011-05-07T00:01:00.000-07:00

If yesterday's post piqued your interest, here's a perfect opportunity to see what's new in comics...

Use the FCBD store locator to find a participating store in your neighborhood, and get out from in front of your computer NOW...

Seriously.

Get going.

(If you're in the Los Angeles area and you want to share your appreciation with two of the men responsible for the limited edition of NOT BAD FOR A HUMAN, you can pay a visit to publisher Steve Niles and artist Mike Mignola at The Comic Bug in Manhattan Beach, California.)

Horror & Comics

2011-05-06T00:01:00.000-07:00

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.

MOVIES MADE ME #18: THE INVITATION

2011-05-05T00:01:00.000-07:00

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.

MILLENNIUM: Critical Mass

2011-05-04T00:01:00.000-07:00

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.

Lance Henriksen's Ten Favorite Westerns

2011-05-03T00:01:00.000-07:00

#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)

Lance Henriksen Goes West

2011-05-02T00:01:00.000-07:00

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!

MOVIES MADE ME #17: DARK DAYS

2011-04-30T21:18:00.000-07:00

The New York City subway opened in the fall of 1904. The first track was a turnaround loop beneath City Hall, designed to alleviate overcrowding in the Lower East Side – the commercial center of Manhattan. In the following years, the subway expanded. Workers digging tunnels on the Upper West Side are said to have found a perfectly preserved ten-thousand-year-old forest standing under the streets of New York, presumably driven into the underground cavern by a glacier during the last Ice Age.

In the aftermath of World War I, America became the world’s leading industrial superpower, and New York City was its pulse. The population of Manhattan quickly outgrew the island’s 31 square acres. For decades, the city continued to expand – into the sky, and under the ground.

By the early 1980s, New York’s homeless were seeking shelter in abandoned subway tunnels. Some transit authorities speculated (off the record) that these refugees numbered in the thousands, forming a city beneath the city. They told stories of “mole people,” who tapped into underground power lines and water mains, and built an exclusive society far from the world above.

Official reactions were muted throughout the decade, but the stories of mole people began to spread. In 1990, police raided the tunnels and removed more than 4,000 homeless people. Those who remained were driven deeper underground.

In 1993, journalist Jennifer Toth ventured into the tunnels to get firsthand stories from those who lived below. When she asked one of the mole people how he could live underground, he asked her how she could live in the world above: “How can you live in a society like that? The rules don’t make sense. They’re not based on human needs or caring. The laws and the rules, and what they call morals, are logical and warped. They are based on money, not on right or wrong. They might as well have come from a computer. No one really cares up there. Down here this is basic survival. We make our own laws. Our laws are based on what we feel, not preconceived notions of morality. We call it the ‘human morality.’ That’s what we live by.”

A few years later, aspiring filmmaker Marc Singer took up residence among the mole people. He brought his camera with him...

Music by DJ Shadow.

Thoughts for Desperate Writers

2011-04-24T09:16:00.001-07:00

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

- Wallace Stevens

MOVIES MADE ME #16: TWIN PEAKS

2011-04-23T15:10:00.000-07:00

One drug-induced night during my sophomore year of college, I cozied up to a very unusual double feature: Gregg Araki's THE DOOM GENERATION and David Lynch's TWIN PEAKS pilot. The evening made a lasting impression on me. I spent the next several weeks listening to Slowdive (a British band that is prominently featured in all of Araki's films) and reading everything I could find about David Lynch.

I've only re-watched THE DOOM GENERATION once, and it didn't live up to my memory of it. On repeat viewing, I found it more annoying than harrowing... I couldn't sympathize with any of the characters (though I was perfectly happy to watch Rose McGowan), and it seemed to me that their overbearing cynicism stifles the often remarkable subtleties of lightning and art design. That said, I remained impressed mostly impressed with the neo-noir aesthetic and the music. Araki always picks exactly the right music to convey the emotional content of his scenes.

I couldn't tell, at first, if TWIN PEAKS was a similarly mixed bag or if it was a work of freakish genius. I was certainly intrigued by it, but it left me worried that the show might ultimately provided answers I couldn't be satisfied with. (When I saw the pilot, the entire series had already come and gone on television... so mercifully I didn't have to wait long to find out.)

TWIN PEAKS is a delicate balance of Lynch's brand of horror and co-creator Mark Snow's brand of melodrama. At times, the balance is so tenuous that the show veers into random parody (a one-armed man in a TV murder mystery... really?). The soap opera elements mute some of the horror elements, creating a sense that every scene is filled with deep, dark secrets. After watching the pilot for the first time, I started reading books and articles on David Lynch like I was searching for sacred text in the Mona Lisa. I instantly understood why the question "Who killed Laura Palmer?" had been as important to some people as "Who killed JFK?" The fact is that TWIN PEAKS isn't a simple murder mystery. The question and the answer to the obvious murder mystery are one with the larger mysteries of an entire culture. The brilliance of the pilot is that it sets up that culture - the physical, emotional and psychological world of a rural town on the edge of nowhere - within the space of 94 minutes.

Because I saw TWIN PEAKS for the first time on video, I got an extra dose of things to come. The VHS version featured the 116-minute "European pilot," which included a longer version of Agent Cooper's dream sequence from the end of episode 3. The extra footage appears completely out of context - as a "solution" to the murder mystery that offers no real answers and about six hundred new questions. Bits and pieces of Cooper's dream sequence, about Mike and Bob and Mike's cousin and the dancing midget, were unraveled over the course of the series... but when I saw the pilot, I wanted to know immediately: What the hell does it all mean? This is where a viewer who needed a linear narrative and straightforward answers would have thrown in the towel... and where a viewer like me gets helplessly drawn in.

I immediately recognized some thematic similarities to Lynch's film BLUE VELVET, which had raped my unsuspecting eyeballs a few years earlier. Most obviously, the hero in both projects was played by Kyle McLachlan. In his TWIN PEAKS role as FBI Agent Dale Cooper, McLachlan seems like a wizened version of BLUE VELVET's Jeffrey Beaumont. BLUE VELVET is about the way that the hero's curiosity leads to the end of innocence. TWIN PEAKS is (at least partly) about the way that the hero's otherworldly experience might be used to protect the innocence of others. Of course, no one in the town of Twin Peaks is completely innocent. Every character in the show is guilty of something. It would be too simple to say that "everyone's a suspect" in the murder investigation. Instead, TWIN PEAKS might be summed up like this: "Everyone has a secret... some, even from themselves." Laura Palmer's murder just brings everyone's secrets to the surface.

Laura was a pretty, popular, well-liked teenager who spent her afternoons tutoring a mentally-handicapped boy and her nights freebasing cocaine and selling her body. When she'd found dead, friends and family learn that she was involved with at least two different lovers... like everyone else in the not-so-sleepy town. No one in Twin Peaks is loyal, but nevertheless all of the citizens remain likable (from a viewer's perspective) because they are all either deeply enigmatic and/or emotionally vulnerable. The fact that the show has an impeccable cast (including Michael Ontkean, Ray Wise, Lara Flynn Boyle, Sherilynn Fenn, Madchen Amick, Peggy Lipton, Jack Nance, Piper Laurie, Russ Tamblyn and Sheryl Lee) obviously helps, but what really sets the show apart from everything that came before and everything that's come along after is David Lynch's unique storytelling sensibilities... or, perhaps more accurately, his personal obsessions.

Lynch's stories, from ERASERHEAD to INLAND EMPIRE, are not so much about conventional narrative as about impressions made on his psyche. Lynch is an artist, and his canvases are filled with conflicting images and ideas: urban vs. rural environments; industry vs. nature; mechanical vs. organic; spirit vs. electricity, etc. One need not look too far to find testimony about Lynch's lifelong fascination with the rural Pacific Northwest ("Ghostwood" is an appropriate designation used in TWIN PEAKS, reminiscent of Steinbeck's story about The Dark Watchers) and with the dualism of 1950s American suburbia. Throw all these things in a blender and what have you got? Beats me... TWIN PEAKS is like a ridiculously cute suburban lawn gnome with blood-stained fangs.

Just as music holds Greg Araki's warped vision together in THE DOOM GENERATION, so the music of Angelo Badalamenti and Julee Cruise holds the madness of TWIN PEAKS together. Badalamenti's main theme is elegiac, but his other tracks alternate between bone-chillingly foreboding ambient and distinctively quirky elevator music. Cruise's ethereal vocals bring humanity to Badalamenti's warmest and most haunting creations. Lynch knows exactly how to use the soundscape to complete his landscape, always producing something that defies expectations (who else would put Cruise's ethereal vocals in a rowdy biker bar?) and reinforces the kind of mystery that doesn't come from whodunit-type plotting, but from undeniably real characters in hypnotically surreal situations. And, of course, this is just the beginning...

MOVIES MADE ME #15: UNTITLED (ALMOST FAMOUS)

2011-04-20T11:22:00.000-07:00

Some people have music coursing through their veins. That’s what makes Cameron Crowe’s film UNTITLED (the “bootleg cut” of ALMOST FAMOUS) so beautiful. Just as Crowe’s SAY ANYTHING illustrates how a single song can sum up everything important about a couple’s relationship, UNTITLED shows that rock and roll can sum up what’s really important about certain people’s lives. That’s true for every major character in this film, save one.

UNTITLED is the semi-autobiographical story of a young journalist who gets a privileged glimpse behind the curtain of 70s rock and roll and is powerless to resist its charms. I’m reminded of something Lloyd Dobler said about feeling helpless in Diane Court’s world of “food and sex and spectacle”… Infatuation is infatuation, and William Miller (the main character in UNTITLED, played by Patrick Fugit) is head-over-heels, hopelessly, uncontrollably infatuated with the entire world of rock, from the first guitar lick to the last groupie standing. The moment he steps backstage, he’s hooked…. much to the chagrin of his conservative-minded mother, played by Frances McDormand.

In any other film, McDormand’s character would be a comic relief character, nagging and out-of-touch, but here she’s humanized just as thoroughly as the other characters… because UNTITLED is not only a love poem to rock and roll, but also a slice of the writer/director’s real life. It’s a story he has to be honest about. By now everyone knows that Cameron Crowe based UNTITLED on his personal exploits as a young rock journalist (he claims that 90% of the events in the film really happened to him or friends of his). Most interviews and articles about the film focus on that aspect of the storytelling, but not many have entered into an analysis of Frances McDormand’s character, who is based on the filmmaker’s own mother.

In Marlo Thomas’s book The Right Words at the Right Time, Cameron Crowe remembers a moment when he realized that his own mother played a similar role in his life. Her message, which he took to heart, was to “value humanity with good humor and live up to yourself in the world.” That lesson is what grounds William Miller as he hurtles helplessly through a world of food and sex and spectacle. That’s the reason that he can appreciate what’s so beautiful about rock and roll, without becoming jaded or cynical about the things that aren’t as beautiful.

And she’s not his only mentor. As in real life, rock critic Lester Bangs (played by the always brilliant Philip Seymour Hoffman) instructs the young journalist to be honest in everything he says and does, regardless of what other people think or say. “The only true currency in this bankrupt world,” Bangs tells him, with an appropriate solemnity, “is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool.” This message also made a huge impression on Crowe… In fact, the original title of ALMOST FAMOUS was THE UNCOOL. It’s also the name of the filmmaker’s official website: http://www.theuncool.com/

After arming him with these two lessons, Crowe throws his alter ego William Miller into the maelstrom, where he proceeds to fall in love in every way possible. UNTITLED features a conventional love story between the wide-eyed innocent William and the worldly-wise Penny Lane (a star-making turn by Kate Hudson; this is her CACTUS FLOWER). Within a few hours of their first meeting, Penny pulls William aside and confides him (in a way, you can tell, that she never confides in anyone): “I’m going to Morocco. For one year. I need a new crowd.” When she invites him to come along with her, William can’t help beaming. His response is classic: he says yes, but with some understandable hesitation. Within the space of a single evening, Penny Lane has made him aware of a world that is roughly 1 billion times bigger than the one that he has lived in his entire life. (That’s the way love goes, isn’t it?) Also, his mother is beckoning him from a few yards away using the “family whistle.” Penny can see that he’s a little conflicted, so she says, “Are you sure?” William responds, “Ask me again.” She repeats the invitation and this time he musters utmost enthusiasm: “Yes!”

On the DVD commentary, Crowe says that actor Patrick Fugit never meant for the line “Ask me again” to be in the film. The actor felt that he had flubbed his response, and wanted to try another take so he asked Kate Hudson to feed him the preceding line one more time. Crowe, however, recognized the sincerity of the moment and used the entire sequence. In the finished film, the exchange is amplified by Nancy’s Wilson’s acoustic guitar on the soundtrack, which strikes the perfect tone of wonderment, then escalates into full-blown euphoria as Crowe widens the shot, pulling back into a high-angle, as if the God of that suddenly larger world is smiling down on William while he giddily runs toward the car. If the combination of cinematic elements in this scene don’t warm your heart to its core, nothing will.

The second love story in the film is the love affair that every true music-lover experiences. Penny Lane sums it up well: “If you ever get lonely, you just got to the record store and visit your friends.” Fairuza Balk’s character also hits the nail on the head when she talks about “loving some silly band so much that it hurts.” UNTITLED celebrates this mentality with every second of its running time, and dissects the idea in the most loving ways through its characterization of the musicians in the fictional band Stillwater.

It’s tempting to try to identify the real-world inspirations for the band at the center of the film. As a young journalist, Cameron Crowe traveled with plenty of contenders: The Allman Brothers Band, Led Zeppelin, The Eagles, The Who, etc. I believe I read somewhere that Crowe claimed he based guitarist Russell Hammond on Lynard Skynard’s Ronnie Van Zant. The role also makes me think of guitar legend Jeff Beck. Probably the character is a hodgepodge of real-life inspirations, but also something more: Russell Hammond is the main symbol of Crowe’s belief that the best rock music is based on pure instinct. In one crucial scene, Russell (played by the unassuming Billy Crudup, who has the ability to go from sweet to dangerous in the blink of an eye) explains to William that rock and roll is all about the little things – “the mistakes” – like a single “woo” at the end of Marvin Gaye’s song “What’s Happening, Brother?” Moments later, he demonstrates his theory onstage with a random guitar windmill in mid-song. It’s a simple, inspired moment of abandonment of form. A little taste of anarchy. (Fugit's "mistake" in the Morocco scene is brilliant for the same reason...)

In contrast to Russell’s character, Jason Lee’s self-effacing lead singer Jeff Bebe is mostly intellect. I remember one time when I went to a show at Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in London with an excellent saxophonist named Joe Estock. We saw a band that was technically brilliant, but not quite inspired. I vividly remember a moment about halfway through the first set when Joe turned to me and tapped his forehead and smiled. A moment later, he tapped his chest and nodded his head back and forth. I got the message: The music was all head and no heart. I’ve thought of that many times over the years, because music is often that simple. When it works, it works on an instinctive level that’s too deep for words.

The same is true in filmmaking. Very often the scenes that I remember most vividly owe as much to the music as to the writing or the acting – because music determines the tone of a scene. The right music can turns copper into gold… It’s not just a matter of choosing a resonant song; it’s a matter of choosing exactly the right song to convey a very precise emotion. It’s harder than it seems, but this is Cameron Crowe’s greatest talent as a filmmaker. UNTITLED is a treasure trove of inspired musical interludes. Crowe pays tribute to Led Zeppelin’s wistful “That’s the Way” in an on-the-road sequence that evokes a sense of nostalgia through the use of autumnal light. There are a million other examples that I could point to. The group singalong to Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer.” A “food and sex and spectacle” montage set to Lou Reed’s “Waiting for the Man.” Kate Hudson’s solo dance to “The Wind is the Song” by Cat Stevens. Penny Lane’s bittersweet birthday party (Elton John again). Penny getting her stomach pumped while Stevie Wonder’s “Cherie Amour” plays in love-struck William’s head. Billy Crudup and Fairuza Balk’s coda scene, featuring Zeppelin’s haunting “The Rain Song.” My favorite scene in the entire movie may be the heart-achingly beautiful airport scene, featuring Nancy Wilson on acoustic guitar. Everything about it is perfectly timed. There’s no escaping its emotional resonance.

Though the movie runs close to three hours, I always hate leaving the world that Cameron Crowe creates in UNTITLED. I not only wish I could go on the road with Stillwater, I earnestly wish I could have been involved with making the film, because it seems like the behind-the-camera experience of the actors was as genuine and inspiring as what their characters go through. (Check out the bonus features on the DVD, or read Jerry Ziesmer’s autobiography.) Somehow Cameron Crowe is able to evoke in his stories the feeling of being alive in the moment of a particular place and time – being so truly alive that you wouldn’t change anything about your own experiences (good, bad or ugly) for anything in the world. His characters always seem to be aware that those transcendent moments are fleeting, but the awareness never stops them from living life to its fullest, without fear or inhibition. They savor each experience as if it’s their last, and try to live their lives with honesty, integrity, good humor and an open heart. That is the true spirit of rock and roll.

MOVIES MADE ME #14: SCREAM

2011-04-13T08:30:00.000-07:00

Horror movie fans are sharpening their knives this week, in anticipation of SCREAM 4. Uncle Lancifer over at Kindertrauma does a good job of setting the stage by outlining the evolution of the genre geek’s feelings toward the original SCREAM, which single-handedly dragged the ailing horror genre out of the cinematic doldrums… if only so that it could rot in the sun for the remainder of the millennium. Fifteen years later (now there’s a sobering phrase…), it’s easy to forget how invigorating the original film was.

I saw SCREAM on opening day, because I was a die-hard Wes Craven fan. (Hell, I even saw VAMPIRE IN BROOKLYN on opening weekend… That’s devotion.) It was a matinee show and there were only fifteen or twenty people in the theater, but we were all hooked from the moment Drew Barrymore’s phone rang. When the killer started quizzing her on horror movie trivia (“Who was the killer in FRIDAY THE 13TH”?), I thought: This movie was made for geeks like me. I knew it was a trick question, and I also knew that Drew was way too cute to realize that it was a trick question. (Cute teenage girls don’t spend their time watching horror movies… or, at least, they didn’t before SCREAM came out.) The following scenes were chock full of “insider” references to the holy trinity of slasher movies that inspired Kevin Williamson’s script (HALLOWEEN, F13, ELM STREET).

Despite what most critics said at the time, that kind of reflexivity was nothing new in horror movies. Joe Dante and John Sayles did the same thing in THE HOWLING, Tobe Hooper and Lawrence Block did it in THE FUNHOUSE, and Tom McLoughlin did it in JASON LIVES! All of those films were made at least ten years earlier. What made SCREAM work was not it’s “hip” self-awareness (which only served the horror geeks… a marginal part of the audience that made the film a sleeper hit), but good storytelling – pure and simple. SCREAM works for some of the same reasons that A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET works: The milieu and the characters (played by some of Hollywood’s most talented young actors) are believable, which makes the threat seem real.

The suburban high school in SCREAM is instantly recognizable to anyone who wasn’t homeschooled – it’s sunny on the surface but dark underneath. The campus is picture-perfect, but the principal (Henry Winkler, riffing on his HAPPY DAYS fame) has some anger issues and the school janitor (Wes Craven in a familiar red and green sweater) seems a little sketchy. And the kids (led by PARTY OF FIVE’s perpetually anxious Neve Campbell) are dealing with that whole serial killer thing.

In 1996, it was not at all difficult to imagine a real serial killer preying on suburban teenagers, and it was even less difficult to imagine that those teenagers would respond by creating a community-wide party atmosphere. At first that seems like the cynical thing to do (celebrate the brutal murder of a classmate with a kegger), but it’s also a practical response. In a town where everyone is afraid to be alone after dark, why shouldn’t the potential victims gather everyone under one roof? Safety in numbers is a reasonable way of facing fear, and alcohol is a welcome distraction. The catch, of course, is that they’re potentially inviting the unknown killer to the party…

It’s the old Agatha Christie scenario that’s informed so many slasher movies. The characters know that any one of them could be the killer and therefore any one of them could be the next victim. Everyone is adrenalized not just by the hormone-fest that’s sprung up as a lucky byproduct of tragedy, but also by the possibility (however remote) that they or the person next to them might not be alive to see the sunrise. Likewise, we (the audience) know instinctively that not all of these “ten little Indians” will make it through the night. Like the best horror movies, SCREAM humanizes all of the potential victims, so that we will share their exhilaration and their fear. That’s what gives SCREAM the “lovely tragic element” that Uncle Lancifer notes on his blog.

One of my favorite shots in the entire film is the very last shot, which encapsulates the wary tone of the entire movie. With a single image, set to Moby’s elegiac “First Cool Hive” (a sharp contrast to Marco Belatrami’s pulsing score and Nick Cave’s brooding anthem “Red Right Hand”), Craven’s camera captures the morning after. The shot was actually taken at sunset (rather than sunrise) in idyllic Sonoma Valley… and maybe that’s why it works so well. Instead of suggesting that the day has come to vanquish the horrors of the night, the image subtly suggests that another nightfall is inevitable. Craven’s career-defining theme bleeds through: “Don’t sleep!” There, again, is that lovely tragic element that makes the film genuinely cathartic.

That first showing of SCREAM was, for me, a fantastic rollercoaster ride. Afterwards, all I wanted to do was get back in line and ride again. The next time I saw the movie, I went with a group of friends... male and female. Before SCREAM, I can’t remember ever seeing a horror movie in the theater with female friends. The 90s, if you’ll remember, were a pretty lousy decade for horror movies and it was no easy task trying to convince girls to go see flicks like VAMPIRE IN BROOKLYN or THE MANGLER or HELLRAISER: BLOODLINE. They were too smart for that. But SCREAM provided the theatrical moviegoing experience that I’d always wanted: It was a horror “date movie” that had a chance of ending reasonably well for the people who weren’t on the screen.

Bonus points if you can identify the scenes shot at any of the following filming locations from the film...

MOVIES MADE ME #13: HARD TARGET

2011-04-04T19:04:00.000-07:00

For American males who came of age at just the right moment in the late 1980s / early 1990s, there is a crucial question that must be answered: Seagal or Van Damme? For years, my best friend and I have argued the pros and cons. I always side with Seagal; he always chooses Van Damme. It’s just a matter of personal taste, I suppose, but I prefer Seagal’s fluid, seemingly effortless fighting style to Van Damme’s muscle-flexing bravado. Also, I really like the raw energy and grittiness of Seagal’s best movies, ABOVE THE LAW and OUT FOR JUSTICE. I will suggest, however, that Van Damme movies may be slightly more watchable overall – especially in the DTV era. (BEN: I’m not conceding this point… I’m only saying that the matter warrants further investigation.)

Here’s a theory: As Vern’s exceptional book SEAGALOGY illustrates, Steven Seagal has become the auteur of all of his films since ON DEADLY GROUND (1996). If you don’t like the Seagal persona, you probably won’t like his movies. That’s not necessarily true of Van Damme movies, thanks to a relatively high caliber of directors (John Woo, Peter Hyams, Ringo Lam, Hark Tsui and John Avildson) and co-stars (Lance Henriksen, Raul Julia, Powers Booth, Charlton Heston, Michael Rooker).

Exhibit A: HARD TARGET. Even if you don’t like Van Damme, there are still five solid reasons to love this movie….

#1. JOHN WOO
I grew up in a rural town in Virginia, where there wasn’t much to do except watch movies. Mercifully, there were three local video stores. One of them seemed to specialize in action and grindhouse movies. That’s where I picked up John Woo’s THE KILLER for the first time. That was the movie that introduced me to the concept of “balletic violence.” I’d seen plenty of adrenaline-charged action movies, but never one so beautiful. I liked it so much that I special ordered HARD BOILED, which remains my favorite John Woo movie. HARD TARGET was Woo’s next film and his American debut. Possibly his English wasn’t good enough for him to recognize Van Damme’s weaknesses as an actor (to say nothing of Yancy Butler), but there’s no question that he knows how to turn Van Damme’s lightning fast roundhouse kicks into fine art.

#2. LANCE HENRIKSEN
Every good action hero needs a good villain… and you can’t do much better than Lance Henriksen’s big game hunter Emil Fouchon. If you don’t think it’s possible for a man to ooze violence, you’ve never seen this movie. Emil Fouchon is the type of guy who holds a gun like a pool cue... Death is just a game to him. Even when Fouchon is doing something as simple as playing the piano, there is discernible rage behind Henriksen’s eyes. (One reviewer noted that he "pounds out Beethoven as if ripping fingernails from a thousand screamers.") He doesn’t lose his cool until his nemesis literally sets him on fire… and that self-restraint makes him much more powerful than any screaming tyrant could ever be.

#3. ARNOLD VOSLOO
Every good villain needs a good henchman, and Vosloo’s Pik Van Cleef (named for actor Lee Van Cleef… which adds to his coolness factor) fits the bill. He reminds me a little bit of Martin Landau in Alfred Hitchcock's NORTH BY NORTHWEST, who’s just a little too loyal to boss James Mason. Pik Van Cleef obviously has some personal issues to work out, because he’s utterly gleeful about killing innocent people. Compared to Henriksen’s smoldering intensity, Vosloo is like a kid in a candy shop… A really mean kid who steals Pop Rocks and soda and uses them to blow up his dog.

#4. “THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME” CONNECTION
Sometime after I first saw HARD TARGET, I read a review that said it was based on a 1932 horror movie called THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME. So I have John Woo to thank for the fact that I’ve seen THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME. Of course, I also have him to blame for the fact that I’ve seen SURVIVING THE GAME – which is basically the same movie with Ice-T running and Gary Busey hunting. Unfortunately, it wasn’t made in Nawlins by John Woo.

#5. SHEER QUOTABILITY
For weeks after we saw HARD TARGET that first time, my best friend and I routinely quoted this movie at not-particularly-opportune moments, always with accents. (I told you there wasn’t much to do in my hometown…) A few personal favorites:

Arnold Vosloo: “Randal, Randal, Randal. I know you didn't mean to... hurt... my feelings.”

Lance Henriksen: “You… are a fucking buffalo!”

Van Damme, when asked why he’s called Chance: “My mama… took one.”

HARD TARGET is truly one of life’s simple pleasures. Now that I’m warmed up, let’s talk about OUT FOR JUSTICE…

MOVIES MADE ME #12: THE HITCHER

2011-03-26T08:40:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, my wife and I needed to get away from it all, so we headed to a place where we could hear wind and coyotes at night, instead of traffic and car alarms. On Saturday, we aimed for the middle of nowhere and ended up in the ghost town of Amboy, California.

Amboy is known mostly for the Amboy Crater, an extinct volcano that used to be a major tourist attraction along Route 66. Ever since highway 40 was built, however, the crater marks the intersection of two old roads that don’t really go anywhere. Until 2006, there wasn’t any incentive to take a detour... and, if you did, you’d probably just get chased away by the town caretaker.

The town consists of a post office (operational), an airport (not operational), a church and a small schoolhouse (both abandoned), a quaint 50’s-style motel (closed), and a gas station / café called Roy's. Thanks to a road sign that you can see from miles away, Roy’s gets all the traffic - despite the fact that the kitchen is permanently closed. That's okay, because most of the visitors are probably just tourists who are happy to catch an authentic glimpse of American history. There are also a few weirdos like me who recognize the setting from movies.

The first time I “visited” Roy’s Café was with Rutger Hauer and C. Thomas Howell in the 1986 movie THE HITCHER. (This is where Howell pulls a gun on his pursuer, and where Hauer taunts his reluctant traveling companion by placing pennies on his eyelids.) The first time I saw the film, I was thoroughly rattled – and not just by Hauer’s staggeringly brilliant performance as the gay panic boogeyman. I grew up on the east coast, so I found the stark western landscape exotic and forbidding, beautiful and terrifying. I’m not going to say that the landscape is what makes the movie work (that would be an insult to three outstanding actors), but there’s no question that the setting is itself a character in the story. Screenwriter Eric Red says the basic idea for the movie came to him while he was driving through the desert listening to The Doors song “Riders on the Storm.” That’s all he needed… miles and miles of empty sun-baked road, and the lyric “there’s a killer on the road.”

Thankfully, the producers hired a director (former stills photographer Robert Harmon) who could capture the landscape at its best. There’s a scene in this film where Howell’s character is fighting for his life, and still can’t help stopping to stare in awe at the late afternoon sun partially eclipsed by desert clouds. The beauty of that single shot - no more than five seconds of screen time - is staggering. That moment sums up the film for me: The day is as dark as the night is long. Anyone who’s ever fallen in love with the desert understands that. THE HITCHER is both primal and poetic, and that's a rarity.

According to Harry Medved’s book “Hollywood Escapes,” THE HITCHER was shot mostly in sequence. Scene by scene, the film crew moved south through the Mojave Desert. In the film, C. Thomas Howell’s character is driving from Chicago to Los Angeles, but for some reason he takes a circuitous route from Death Valley to the Imperial Sand Dunes. Along the way, he makes stops in Amargosa (where Hauer confronts him in an abandoned garage), Daggett (where Howell meets Jennifer Jason Leigh in a greasy spoon diner), Amboy and Glamis (the truck stop, where Leigh meets her maker). By the time he reaches the Imperial Sand Dunes, there's a new killer on the road.

On the road out of Death Valley (east)

The garage in Amargosa

Daggett, with the ghost town of Calico in the distance

Amboy Crater

View of the "lava pit" in Amboy Crater, with the town of Amboy in the background

Roy's Cafe in Amboy

Truck stop in Glamis

Imperial Sand Dunes

On the road out of Death Valley (west)

For anyone else crazy enough to recreate this drive, I recommend Harold Budd's album "The White Arcades" as musical accompaniment. We happened to be listening to the track "Coyote" while we drove through the salt fields south of Amboy, and it was a perfect combination of landscape and soundscape. Since no one has uploaded "Coyote" to youtube, I'm going to conclude with a very different piece of music - from another film about an ill-fated road trip. Can you guess which one?

MOVIES MADE ME #11: THE ABYSS

2011-03-22T10:12:00.000-07:00

This past weekend, I saw my first drive-in movie. Seems strange that it’s taken me 32 years to get around to it. Until now, I’ve had to experience the drive-in vicariously through Joe Bob Briggs. I’d like to report that my first drive-in experience was a double-feature of grindhouse classics... but I’d be lying. Instead I saw THE ADJUSTMENT BUREAU, a ho-hum adaptation of a Philip K. Dick story. I didn’t realize it was a Philip K. Dick story until the end credits, because the philosophical sci-fi elements were almost entirely overwhelmed by a mildly engaging love story between Matt Damon and Emily Blunt.

The most interesting thing about the film was its basic premise: We (humans) can’t be trusted to not destroy ourselves. This theme has been done many times before – and with better results. The first example that springs to mind is James Cameron’s THE ABYSS.

At first glance, THE ABYSS is simply a variation on Cameron’s earlier film ALIENS. It’s about a group of blue-collar workers in a no-man’s land who encounter an alien life form… Except this time, the workers are underwater oil riggers instead of “space truckers,” and the alien is not the real threat. In fact, the aliens in THE ABYSS come to Earth to save us from ourselves. When the U.S. military is confronted with something it can't explain, Uncle Sam starts gearing up for a nuclear war. The only thing that can save humanity is… a broken marriage. This movie’s “heart of the ocean” is the relationship between head oil rigger Ed Harris and his estranged wife Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, two tough-as-nails characters who I have to assume bear some similarities to the Hollywood power couple that produced the film. I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say that these two characters are the saving grace of humanity, but they are certainly the saving grace of this film.

Although it’s a little slow getting started and rather heavy-handed at the end, I will always love THE ABYSS for the beauty of one particular sequence. In a last-ditch effort to save humanity from nuclear disaster, Ed Harris puts on a dive suit, consents to breathing oxygenated water (easier said than done, I imagine), and descends more than a mile into the darkness of the ocean so that he can defuse a bomb. The trip threatens to literally crush his head and drive him mad. Along the way, he becomes lost and completely disoriented in the freezing blackness. He has only one lifeline: His wife speaks to him remotely, telling him to focus on her voice as she reassures him that he’s not alone. Eventually, she brings him back from the brink of despair.

This sequence has always made a strong impression on me, because it’s a brilliantly evocative metaphor for death – the one trip that we must all make alone. Appropriately, even after Harris’s character defuses the bomb, he still has to face the inevitable. He realizes that he doesn’t have enough air to survive the ascent, tells his wife he always knew it was a “one way ticket,” and surrenders to fate. Part of me would really like the end the movie there, before the psychedelic jellyfish intervene and threaten humanity with 100-foot-high tsunamis.

Then again, I have to admit that the tsunami images made a big impression on me the first time I saw the special edition of this film. For years, I’d been having dreams about tsunamis, although I had no idea what a tsunami was. In his day and age, of course, it’s virtually impossible not to know what a tsunami is… but when I was a kid, I’d never heard the term and I did not consciously realize that ocean waves could be big enough to swallow a city. It was my dreams that introduced me to the concept and, when I saw it in THE ABYSS, I felt like James Cameron had reached into my nightmares. (Ditto for Peter Weir’s THE LAST WAVE.)

The 100-foot-high tsunami in THE ABYSS remains one of the most haunting images I can imagine (though it's been recreated with better visual effects in a dozen disaster movies), because there is nothing to do in the face of a sight like that except stare in awe. You could run, but you can't hide. I remember a passage in one of Clive Barker’s Books of Blood, where a man was about to be crushed by a giant monster. (In this case, the monster was a 100-foot-high mutant conglomeration of human bodies instead of a 100-foot-high wave.) Instead of running, he simply stared at the monster moving toward him and thought: I might as well die now, because even if I live another hundred years, I’ll never experience anything to top this. That’s the thing about “the abyss” – it is terrifying, but it is also awe-inspiring. In a moment like that, a person has to surrender to something larger than oneself. Surrender to despair, surrender to love, surrender to the unknown...

In my mind, that's what makes Cameron's film(s) so resonant. He knows that we live our lives searching for something large enough to fill the abyss. And sometimes we don’t even know we've found that something until the moment when we are facing the void. In that moment on the brink of annihilation, we’d all like to be able to confront death the way that Ed Harris’s character does… understanding and accepting that we’ve always had a “one way ticket,” being grateful for the things we've found along the way, and standing ready to confront the great unknown.

MOVIES MADE ME #10: SAY ANYTHING

2011-03-13T16:15:00.000-07:00

There’s a scene in SAY ANYTHING where Lloyd Dobler is at a graduation party with Diane Court, and this goofy-looking guy with a bad 80s haircut comes up to him and says, “How did you get Diane Court to go out with you?” Lloyd responds, matter-of-fact, “I called her up.” The other guy, still confused, adds, “But how come it worked? I mean, like, who are you?” Lloyd answers, “I’m Lloyd Dobler.” You could say that he’s playing it cool, but really Lloyd is just stating the facts. He did convince Diane Court to go out with him simply by calling her up. At this point in the movie, even Diane Court isn’t quite sure why she said yes. The goofy-looking guy, obviously stoned, takes a few seconds to fully process the information, then smiles. “This is great,” he says, “This gives me hope.”

On the DVD commentary, Crowe says that SAY ANYTHING originated with the character of Diane Court. The writer/director calls Diane a “golden girl." One of the characters in the film clarifies: "She's a brain trapped in the body of a game show hostess.” Smart and beautiful, ambitious yet humble. The problem with the script, Crowe says, was inventing a guy who actually deserved Diane Court. He was stumped, until the solution showed up on his doorstep one day – in the guise of a gentleman kickboxer named Lowell. Crowe describes his real-life inspiration for Lloyd Dobler as stoic, noble, polite and (most importantly) optimistic. That’s how he wrote the character.

But that's only half of Lloyd Dobler. Crowe admits that he wrote a sunny character, someone who is instinctively optimistic. Actor John Cusack gave the character more complexity. Cusack says he wanted Lloyd to be a true teenager of the Reagan era – someone jaded and angry about yuppie culture, and therefore very anxious about the future. It was Cusack who came up with Lloyd’s GRADUATE-esque manifesto: “I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed.” As Lloyd explains to his guidance counselor, he’s “looking for a dare-to-be-great situation.” Deep down, he's too restless to settle for anything less.

That’s why he falls for Diane. She is clearly marked for greatness. Which brings us to the main question: Why does Diane Court fall for Lloyd Dobler? That’s what the goofy-looking guy at the party – and probably a good portion of the male audience – is trying to figure out. In high school, what I personally keyed in on was the phone call. “I just called her up,” Lloyd said. Actually, it wasn’t quite that simple. He had to psyche himself up for the phone call by kicking a punching bag for a while. Once the adrenaline was flowing, he picked up the phone and dialed Diane's number. (Not just six numbers... All seven of them.)

I figured I could handle that. I went for a three mile run, then called up a girl I’d only talked to once or twice. A girl who was way too beautiful and way too smart to ever date me. She was also a year older -- and when you're a freshman in high school, that's a pretty big deal. I had no plan about what to say to her. I was 15 and had no car, so I couldn’t very well ask her out on a date.... I figured I'd just keep talking until she joined in or hung up.

Unlike Lloyd, I didn’t get the girl. But she did become one of my closest friends for the next several years. That said, I figured the random phone call had been effective enough to warrant a second attempt. The next attempt didn’t go as well. The girl and I had absolutely nothing in common. To make matters worse, she had an on-again, off-again boyfriend who liked to slash people’s tires. I figured: Third time’s the charm. By that point, I had a license so I could actually propose a date. I didn’t get a date, but I got another close friend.

It’s no great mystery why I couldn’t pull off the “Lloyd Dobler effect.” First of all, I don’t look like John Cusack. Second, I never had the guts or the charm to deliver the “friends with potential” line. Most importantly, I was insecure. That’s the one thing that Lloyd Dobler is not, and it’s the secret of SAY ANYTHING. On the DVD commentary, Cameron Crowe and John Cusack sum up the essence of the character by saying that, for him, “optimism is a revolutionary act.”

Lloyd Dobler is often frustrated and angry, and he obviously has some violent tendencies (the guy wants to be a professional kickboxer, for crying out loud), but he always restrains his urge to lash out... Even in the scene where he gives Diane his heart and she gives him a pen... Even when she comes back to him and pleads for his forgiveness. (What guy, post-breakup, hasn’t dreamed of turning this opportunity into a cruel revenge scenario?) In the worst of circumstances, Lloyd makes a conscious choice to follow his better instincts and to present his best side to the world. It took me a while to learn that lesson.

The most famous scene in SAY ANYTHING is the one where Lloyd fights for Diane by showing up outside her bedroom window, and playing Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” on his boom box. The music and the look on John Cusack's face in that scene say everything you need to know about Lloyd and the movie. Extra footage from the special edition DVD shows that this look almost didn't exist. In every other take on this scene, the look on Cusack’s face is defiantly hostile. It's clear that Lloyd wants to prove his point (that Diane still needs him) more than he actually wants her back. The scene is too much about his fragile male ego, and not enough about his love for Diane. On the other hand, the take in the final film achieves a perfect balance: Lloyd looks proud and stoic, but not petulant. Apparently, he has taken to heart his friend Cory’s advice: “Be a man. Don’t be a guy…”

The music in the scene (Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes," which became a staple on radio request shows after the movie was released) was also a near-miss. Cameron Crowe originally wanted to use Billy Idol’s “To Be a Lover." When the scene was shot the first time, he opted instead for Fishbone’s “Turn the Other Way.” Neither song would have conveyed emotional vulnerability. Again, the scene would have been about Lloyd’s wounded pride instead of his unwavering love for Diane.

Bottom line: It took at least two men to invent Lloyd Dobler… one who was maybe a little too sunny to win Diane's heart and one who was maybe a little too dark to keep it. Combine the two and you've got a story that shows we can only attain the unattainable once we’ve learned how to balance ego and selfless love, self-control and surrender. Lloyd is a character who can handle genuine intimacy. That's why he gets the girl. And that’s probably the most significant realization I ever took away from any teen angst movie... Maybe even one of the most helpful realizations I’ve ever taken away from any movie.

On a random side-note, Cameron Crowe says on the DVD commentary that the boom box scene was shot in a park opposite the 7-11 where Lloyd kicks broken glass out of Diane’s way. About a year ago, someone told me that the 7-11 in SAY ANYTHING is the one at the corner of Magnolia and Tujunga in Valley Village. As it happens, there's a huge park across the street, on the other side of Tujunga. It's hard to tell if this is the same place, but like the idea that Lloyd and Diane’s courtship might have taken place in my backyard.