Big Bad Mama Rides Again

Not long ago, 82-year-old Angie Dickinson was interviewed by film historian Stephen Farber. When asked about her starring role in a 1974 Roger Corman gangster romp, she said something like this: “Big Bad Mama does not qualify as a classic, although I was very good in it!"

She was indeed. As a dirt-poor Depression-era Texas mom who turns to a life of crime to give her daughters a better future, Angie is spunky, smart, and above all sexy. In the course of the film she beds both a virile young stud (Tom Skerritt) and a courtly older gentleman (William Shatner), but there’s never any question that she’s the one on top. Whether delivering bootleg whiskey, robbing a bank, or plotting to hold an heiress for ransom, she’s the brains behind the operation, while also tenderly mothering her two nubile daughters. No question that the role kept her busy, but cast and crew all adored her. I should know: I was there.

Vince Rotolo and the good folks behind The B-Movie Cast recently invited me to share my memories of this New World Pictures classic. When I came to work for Roger, my colleague Frances Doel was hard at work on a female gangster story, a more light-hearted variant on Bonnie and Clyde and Roger’s own Bloody Mama. It was Roger’s practice, as a Writers Guild signatory, to get someone around the office to crank out a first draft over a weekend, so he’d only have to pay a guild member a rewrite fee. We next found a Hollywood veteran, Bill Norton (White Lightning), who didn’t realize that the script he was hired to improve had been written by the woman sitting across the desk in our story meetings. He only learned the truth when we got the giggles over his request to meet the originator of the story. At which point he very graciously insisted that Frances share his writing credit. (A modest woman, she still claims he was trying to evade taking full responsibility for the screenplay’s faults.)

Truth be told, the script is a lot of fun. It was a challenge to film, though, as director Steve Carver would be the first to tell you. We had to track down inexpensive 1930s-era locations, like a racetrack, a country church, a small-town Main Street, and a society mansion, all not far from L.A.  Vintage cars and weapons too. Somehow we found what we needed, and persuaded such Hollywood pros as Royal Dano, Noble Willingham, and a very naked Sally Kirkland to help fill out our cast. 

Yes, this was a movie that did not stint on T&A. Tom Skerritt was fine with it, but William Shatner proved a shrinking violet. (It didn’t help that Skerritt, whose character was supposed to be hostile to Shatner’s, took every opportunity to knock his toupee askew.) As for Angie, she knew that Roger expected full frontal nudity. A very sleek 43-year-old, she was comfortable in her skin, and had no hesitation in baring it for the camera. Her example was helpful to the plucky young women playing her daughters, Robbie Lee and Susan Sennett (now the wife of Graham Nash). The script calls for them to frequently take it all off, especially in a steamy ménage à trois scene with lucky Skerritt.

As production secretary I once fielded a call from Playboy, asking if the two were centerfold material. When I explained that Angie had the best figure in the film, the female caller sniffed, “Well, I hope I look as good when I’m her age.”  You wish, lady. You wish. 

The Return of Bonnie and Clyde

So cable TV is taking a crack at Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. Three networks -- History, Lifetime, and A&E -- have joined for a simulcast of the mini-series Bonnie & Clyde, scheduled to begin on December 8. In dramatizing a violent episode from America’s past, they’re hoping for the sort of ratings bonanza enjoyed by last year’s Hatfields & McCoys. The reviews I’ve seen don’t make the simulcast (starring Emile Hirsch and Holliday Grainger as the doomed outlaws) sound promising. I’m guessing it will have no more impact than a Broadway musical about the pair, which eked out a mere 36 performances in 2011.

One problem, of course, is that it’s tough to measure up to Arthur Penn’s brilliant 1967 film, which unerringly walked the fine line between comedy and tragedy. Penn’s two leading actors, Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty, were perfectly cast. Beatty was also the film’s dauntless producer, sweet-talking Jack Warner into financing his passion project and then, when Warner hated the finished film, rescuing it from oblivion and delivering it into the hands of influential critics like Pauline Kael.

 Bonnie and Clyde became a hit partly because it meshed so well with the concerns of its day. The story of two Depression-era outlaws might have meant nothing special to audiences in some other decade. But in 1967, in the wake of the JFK assassination and the escalating war in Vietnam, violence had become a national obsession. And hip young audiences were also increasingly sensitive to questions of social inequality. When I spoke to Arthur Penn in 2008, he made clear the extent to which he had added to Robert Benton and David Newman’s sexy New Wave-inspired script a social consciousness that grounded the lovers’ story in the realities of the 1930s, while also touching on issues that mattered hugely to the emerging Baby Boom generation.

Vietnam was very much on Penn’s mind. In World War II he had seen combat as an infantryman at the Battle of the Bulge. The experience quickly convinced him of the insanity of war: “It was not glorious, not organized, nothing. Nobody knew what the hell they were doing; it was just save your life and chaos.” That’s why, when he came to make Bonnie and Clyde, “I had decided not to mollycoddle the audience about shooting and death. This, after all, was wartime.”

Penn was also remembering the Kennedy assassination, which suggests itself subliminally in the way Clyde’s head is blown apart during the final ambush. Penn emphasized what he considered a fundamentally American bloodlust in the “Ring of Fire” sequence where the outlaws, including a badly wounded Buck Barrow, are surrounded by a circle of men with shotguns. The whooping and the hollering and the rebel yells as the posse moves in on its prey reveal that these representatives of law and order enjoy bloodletting as much as the criminals do.

Penn also showcases the plight of society’s disenfranchised from a Sixties perspective. He doesn’t just focus on Okies, but also positions in the background of many scenes the sort of humble rural black man who three decades later would be the focus of the civil rights movement. At climactic points in the story you can spot down-home African-Americans lounging on a bench or driving past in a truck, essentially functioning as a silent Greek chorus. Once Clyde briefly clasps a black man’s hand  in friendship, a taboo gesture in 1930s Texas. Just one more reason why young viewers in the Sixties connected so viscerally with a drama about a pair who’d lived, loved, and died thirty years before. 

It’s a strange segue from killers to a man of peace, but I want to at least mention the passing of the remarkable Nelson Mandela. Ironic indeed that a new biopic, Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, is just now coming into theatres. I gather that its focus is Mandela the saint, rather than the more complicated flesh-and-blood human being, but it seems worth attention nonetheless.

David Groves and the Magic of Storytelling

David Groves tells stories. I know him as a career journalist, a fellow member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors. But he’s also dabbled in fiction from an early age. That’s partly why he – still in his teens – connected with the young Gale Anne Hurd, who also aspired to write. Over the years they lost touch, alas, so you won’t see his writing credit on Hurd’s The Walking Dead anytime soon.

But now David’s the proud author of a powerful suspense novel, What Happens to Us. Which doesn’t mean he doesn’t have movies on the brain. Though he’s writing for the page and not the screen, he considers his new work cinematic in structure: “The protagonist is always in peril, and the viewer knows it. This keeps the viewer on the edge of the seat even when things are slow.” There’s a seemingly unstoppable bad guy, one who uses modern surveillance technology to track his victims, and the plot builds to a breathless conclusion that takes his protagonist up to the point of death – and practically beyond it.

That protagonist is a smart, tough, but deeply conflicted young woman. (In a movie version, David would consider Jennifer Lawrence dream casting. Or maybe Emma Stone.) Though she’s clean and sober when the story begins, her years of alcoholism have put a monster on her trail. Only by returning to the drinking habits of her flamboyant alter ego, Kick, can she begin to figure out why he’s so determined to chase her down. In creating this character, David did not stint on research, but he’s most indebted to Koren Zailckas’s Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood, because “what I needed was the raw, embarrassing stories from a female alcoholic’s life to teach me what the pattern was. That book spared nothing.”

At the movies, of course, there are alcoholics aplenty. David mentions particularly Clean and Sober (“The lies, the bargains, the price he had to pay. He really hit bottom.”) Other films he admires include Crazy Heart, Tender Mercies, and the recent Flight, which taught him that “you have to be able to hurt or kill some of your characters if you’re going to have an impact on the viewer or reader.” He dislikes the portrayal of alcoholics in Arthur, and in such classics as Harvey, The Philadelphia Story, and even It’s a Wonderful Life, for showcasing what Hollywood has tended to consider “the funny and harmless drunk. None of them are harmless.”

When he’s not writing, David is a working magician, a member of Hollywood’s famous Magic Castle. To him, sleight of hand is not so different from what a novelist or filmmaker does: “Magic is an elaborately designed deception.  So is a novel or a film.  There is no Luke Skywalker, but Lucas convinces us he exists, if just for that hypnotic moment inside the theatre.” The secret, for both wordsmiths and magicians, lies in the power of misdirection. See below for a sample of David’s magical talents at work.

As for designing a magic act, “it’s very similar to designing a novel or a movie. What you’re manipulating is the interest of the audience, and the same principles apply.” These being: 

Start with a quick bang.

Invite the audience into your head and soul.

Make them identify with you.

Hit different notes all the time, never repeat.

Create callbacks.

Create consistent themes.

Whenever possible, include secrets and withheld information.

Whenever possible, include lies.

End with your best stuff.

Convince them the protagonist is about to fail, then let him or her succeed beyond their wildest dreams.

The Straight Skinny on “Dallas Buyers Club”

There’s much to admire about Matthew McConaughey in Dallas Buyers Club. In the role of Ron Woodroof, a cocky Texan whose HIV-positive status leads him to battle the FDA and the medical establishment, McConaughey is both powerful and nuanced. And at times extremely funny too. But virtually every review praising his performance mentions that he lost over thirty pounds (or forty, or fifty, despending on what source you read) to achieve the skeletal frame of a man dying of AIDS.  This was a far cry from his 2012 Magic Mike, in which he buffed up to play a male stripper.

McConaughey isn’t the first Hollywood star to punish his body in the service of his art. Tom Hanks also got skinny to play an AIDS sufferer in Philadelphia. For Cast Away he ate himself pudgy to portray a sedentary middle-aged guy. Then production was halted for a year of serious dieting so that he could look suitably gaunt as a man marooned on a South Pacific island. Hanks recently revealed he’s got Type 2 diabetes, a situation that may (or may not) have been encouraged by his years of yoyo-ing weight.

Other stars who’ve lost major poundage to take on dramatic roles include Christian Bale (The Fighter), Matt Damon (Courage Under Fire), Matthew Fox (Alex Cross), and Curtis “Fifty Cent” Jackson, who played a football star battling cancer in All Things Fall Apart. Michael Fassbender starved 42 pounds off his frame when portraying real-life Irish hunger striker Bobby Sands in Hunger. Another actor who whittled himself to a point of near starvation was Adrien Brody, playing a Warsaw musician hiding from the Nazis in The Pianist.

Brody won a Best Actor Oscar for his pains, the youngest man ever to do so. Likewise Tom Hanks was honored for Philadelphia, and McConaughey is considered a serious Oscar contender this year. In 2011, Christian Bale won for his supporting role in The Fighter, and Jared Leto (who also dropped significant weight to play – brilliantly -- a transsexual AIDS patient in Dallas Buyers Club) is frequently mentioned in this category. So acquiring a lean and hungry look can have its rewards. Obviously, Oscar voters are impressed by guys who go without dinner.

Women who’ve found success in today’s Hollywood of course know a thing or two about dieting. Even for those who are NOT playing cancer patients or concentration camp inmates, thin is definitely in. The web is full of blow-by-blow accounts of the workout and dietary regime that allowed the already slender Anne Hathaway to squeeze into her cat suit for The Dark Knight Rises. She went beyond slim and slinky to play the tortured Fantine in Les Miserables. For this she too won an Oscar, along with (I suspect) the adulation of teenage girls keen to latch onto her diet secrets.

The determination by Hollywood stars to lose weight at all costs is nothing new. Back in 1967, Faye Dunaway was cast as outlaw Bonnie Parker in Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde. Her previous film had been Otto Preminger’s Hurry Sundown, a Southern-fried melodrama in which she played the supporting role of a hearty country gal. Costume designer Theadora Van Runkle confirmed to me Dunaway’s instinctive sense that she’d need to be thinner to do justice to Bonnie’s 1930s look. She slimmed down almost overnight, strictly through will power: “I never saw her eat anything.” Which made Dunaway not the pleasantest person to have on a movie set. But what price glory?

All the above is making me mighty hungry, so I think I’ll go gobble some pumpkin pie. Happy Thanksgiving! 

A Time to be Thankful: Syd Field and Mickey Knox

As Thanksgiving approaches, I’m both thankful and sad. I’m thankful for the Hollywood personalities I’ve had the good fortune to meet, and sad that many are no longer with us. In November alone, we lost two who made a difference.

I was introduced to Syd Field at a behind-the-scenes staff event that heralded the opening of the Getty Center in Brentwood. Our meeting took me by surprise: somehow I’d never thought of him as a man, but rather as a series of screenwriting books (beginning with 1979’s Screenplay) that today’s Hollywood regards as gospel. When it comes to the arts, I’m resistant to any hard and fast rules, except for the one voiced by screenwriter William Goldman, who famously said, “Nobody knows anything. . . . Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.”

But surely Syd Field should get credit for educated guesses. His focus on the three-act structure has influenced everyone from Judd Apatow to Alfonso Cuarón. It has also influenced  young development executives who talk in Field speak and will not tolerate any deviation from the Field model when it comes to the placement of plot points. Field himself, remarkably, turned out to be low-key and modest about his place in the screenwriting firmament. One thing I’m sure of: he truly loved movies.

So did Mickey Knox. I first met Mickey in 2005 through my friend Bella Stander. He’d been a chum of her late father, the gravel-voiced character actor Lionel Stander, during the bad old Blacklist days when both were hanging out in Rome. During Bella’s L.A. visits, Mickey would end up eating at my dinner table. He gave me a copy of his 2004 memoir, The Good, the Bad, and La Dolce Vita, a rollicking and sometimes bawdy tale of a life much enjoyed.

I never knowingly saw Mickey on film. What I learned from his book was his importance behind the scenes, especially when working with legendary Europeans as a translator and dialogue coach. He supplied the English-language dialogue for Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, then worked with Leone to cast and shoot Once Upon a Time in the West. He also taught Anna Magnani to handle her English-language lines in The Rose Tattoo, which ultimately won her an Oscar. Beyond this, Mickey – like Zelig – was always where the action was. When Marlon Brando dropped trou in front of Magnani, Mickey was there. On the set of White Heat, James Cagney addressed him in fluent Yiddish. Robert Capa gave him photography tips, and Willy Shoemaker told him what horse to back. He pigged out with Orson Welles, beat John Wayne at chess and Omar Sharif at gin rummy. Shelley Winters and Zsa Zsa made passes; so did Tennessee Williams. Ava Gardner didn’t, but he got to massage her sore feet.

Did Mickey merely have a vivid imagination? His stories, wild as they are, have the ring of truth. And J. Michael Lennon’s new scholarly biography of Norman Mailer confirms that the two were the best of friends. In 1970, Mickey had already left the party when Mailer viciously stabbed his wife Adele. The next day, however, it fell to Mickey to retrieve the knife with which his pal had done the deed.

In his book, Mickey never makes excuses for his own lapses. His brash but good-natured personality comes through loud and clear. When he came to dinner, I wish I’d asked more questions.