The Naked Truth About “Showgirls”

Recently the L.A. Times posted a fascinating interview with a 72-year-old writer and entrepreneur named Pamela Redmond. As a novice stage performer, trying to find the right format for a solo recounting of her own eventful life, Redmond has devised something called Old Woman Naked. In it, she narrates her own life story, while gradually removing her clothing, stripping down (as it were) to the bare essentials. Why this? As she told the Times, “I wanted to show people what an older woman’s body actually looked like, Young women take their clothes off all the time, they’re scantily dressed onstage or using their body and their sexuality as part of their art. But older women—it’s just not seen. Or it’s seen as ugly. I knew right away: this is intrinsically different and kind of radical.”

 Redmond’s quote hit me hard because I had just watched the notorious 1995 film, Showgirls. Written by Joe Eszterhas and directed by Dutch auteur Paul Verhoeven, the duo who had previously collaborated on the erotic megahit Basic Instinct, Showgirls became famous for the amount of money it lost and the number of Golden Raspberry Awards it collected. Its big (for its time) budget and its NC-17 rating garnered Showgirls a great deal of attention. Unfortunately, it was almost universally hated. Today, however, viewers who watch it on video can decide for themselves if it has a redeeming sense of humor and if it can be taken not as a serious drama but rather as a satire of showbiz aspirations. For a growing number of fans, it’s now considered a cult classic.

 Personally, I found it all a bit dull. True, moving this tale of a young woman with stars in her eyes to Las Vegas gave the filmmakers a chance to put their own offbeat spin on the usual story of showbiz aspirations. Las Vegas is definitely an eye-catching place to film a movie, and we all savor sagas in which an attractive protagonist claws her way to the top.  Because of the Las Vegas setting, the plot features dancer Nomi Malone’s ascent from  a strip club—and semi-brothel—called Cheetah’s to the mainstage of the Stardust Hotel, where she finds a spot in a production featuring a live volcano and lots of bare breasts.

 Does this sound erotic? It is, for a moment or two. As Pamela Redmond so rightly noted, in the Stardust’s “Goddess” revue, taut bodies and explosive sexuality are being used as a form of art. The women onstage (not to mention the young men who scramble all over them) are beautiful to look at. And these people REALLY can dance. Part of the problem is that the many dance routines we see in the film start to look pretty much the same, whether they take place at a tawdry strip club, in a lavish hotel showroom, or in more private surroundings. Everyone seems to be sexually in heat, and more and more (especially in the film’s one actual sex scene) the emotions struck me as totally bogus.

 The headliner in Showgirls is Elizabeth Berkeley, a one-time child actor who was reportedly asked to give an over-the-top performance. To her credit, she’s a dynamic character—sometimes surly to the point of viciousness, sometimes girlishly overjoyed by small successes. Naturally, she’s got some secret traumas to get past, though we only learn about them late in the game. Her older (and not necessarily wiser) rival is Gina Gershon, whom I always find worth watching. Wholesome-looking Kyle MacLachlan is around too. Needless to say, he’s as warped as everyone else.    

 

 

Thelma Ritter -- Meeting the Star of “The Mating Season”

The unstoppable Richard Orton, he of the keen eye and the passion for movie art direction, just sent me two screen-shots proving that in 1951 Paramount Studios used the same fancy set of decorative archways in two very different films. One was George Stevens’ powerful romantic tragedy, A Place in the Sun. This film starring Montgomery Clift as a young man on the make, also featured Elizabeth Taylor, Shelley Winters, and murder most foul. The other film, completely unknown to me, was a screwball romantic comedy, The Mating Season. Dick helpfully advised me that’s possible to see The Mating Season, completely free of charge, on YouTube. The film’s above-the-title stars are John Lund and the gorgeous Gene Tierney. But it was when Dick told me that The Mating Season is considered one of Thelma Ritter’s best performances that I decided to check it out.

 Thelma Ritter (1902-1969) was never anyone’s idea of a romantic lead. Diminutive, with a  gravelly voice and a strong New Yawk accent, she was born to play tart-tongued women of the working class. Making her uncredited screen debut as a frustrated shopper in 1947’s Miracle on 34^th Street, she collected her first Oscar nomination—for the supporting role of Margo Channing’s maid—in 1950’s All About Eve. The Mating Season won her a second nomination, and she went on to accumulate four more noms (for With a Song in My Heart, Pickup on South Street, Pillow Talk, and Birdman of Alcatraz): it’s a supporting-actress record that has neve been broken. Only problem: none of the nominations resulted in a gold statuette. It’s an omission I wish we could somehow rectify, because Thelma Ritter—whether appearing in wacky comedy or a tough-minded drama—was one of a kind.

 For sure, The Mating Season would be dead in the water without her. It’s the story of an eager young businessman (the blond and rather bland Lund) who falls for the sophisticated daughter of a former U.S. ambassador (Tierney). They marry, but rivals on all sides are rooting against the pairing. While Lund, trying to advance his business career, moves his bride into a swanky apartment, rivals in his firm are working against the marriage as well as his career prospects. I won’t go into all the complications that arise, but Ritter plays Lund’s salt-of-the-earth widowed mom, the good-hearted proprietor of a hamburger stand that’s in financial trouble. When she learns that her son and new daughter-in-law are trying to throw an elaborate dinner party for friends and business associates, she shows up to take over the kitchen, without ever revealing the family relationship.  Of course she triumphs, both at the stove and with the grateful new daughter-in-law who at first doesn’t realize who she is. Eventually, there evolves a showdown of sorts with a new arrival, the bitchy and self-serving snob who is Tierney’s mother. She’s played by Miriam Hopkins, once a bright Hollywood leading lady herself but by this time quite convincing as an obnoxious older woman. Remarkably, Hopkins is billed above Ritter as a supporting player, when by rights Ritter should have had star billing, in a story that clearly revolves, from beginning to end, around her funny, feisty character.   

 I’d love to convey how poignant Thelma Ritter can be, when she’s victimized in films like Sam Fuller’s noirish spy thriller, Pickup on South Street. But her acerbic wit shines through as the nurse looking after James Stewart in Rear Window, and in so many of her other roles. .Give this gal an Oscar! Too bad it’s too late for that.  

 

 

Baby Jane Grows Up

Well, none of us is getting any younger. And Hollywood actresses, who’ve always relied on youth and beauty to fuel their careers, know better than most that ageing is tantamount to career suicide. Ten years ago, Amy Schumer went so far as to join with gal pals Tina Fey, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Patricia Arquette in a darkly comic video short, all of them desperate to stave off the approach of their so-called “Last F**kable Day.”    

 But things were perhaps even worse in Old Hollywood. When Audrey Hepburn, still under 30, was romantically paired with fifty-six-year-old Gary Cooper in 1957’s Love in the Afternoon, this confirmed the basic Tinseltown understanding that—for women, at least—the freshness of youth was everything. As for those talented actresses who weren’t as young as they used to be, they had to accept that they were now considered by studio honchos to be damaged goods. And so it happened that two of the Golden Age’s most revered stars suddenly had to accept lesser projects to fill up their dance cards.

 Bette Davis, who arrived in Hollywood in 1930, had some rough years before she triumphed in the powerful role of a slatternly waitress in a screen adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage: it led to a unique write-in Oscar nomination. Thereafter she made her mark in a series of historical and romantic dramas, including Jezebel (1938); Dark Victory (1939); Now, Voyager (1942); and the wonderful All About Eve (1950): she ultimately won the Best Actress Oscar twice, and was officially nominated a record ten times.  For years she was Warner Bros.’ most bankable star, specializing in bold, uncompromising portrayals of strong women.

 Joan Crawford, started out as a Broadway dancer, then in 1925 was signed to a contract at classy MGM, where she first specialized in playing flappers and then working girls who made good. Depression audiences loved her, and she was a marvelous hussy in The Women (1939), but eventually she wore out her welcome at MGM and moved to Warners in 1943. The noirish Mildred Pierce (1945) revived her career and won her an Oscar, but sharing the Warners lot with Queen Bee Bette Davis was a challenge.

 By 1962, Davis and Crawford (both in their fifties) found their careers had essentially dried up. That’s when someone got the bright idea of pairing these two fading stars in a Grand Guignol-style horror movie, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Their fabled real-life feud made audiences run to see them play two sisters who were once stars of the silver screen and now live together in a mansion where bad things happen. Someone has said that on film Davis is the quintessential sadist and Crawford (with her tremulous expressions) the quintessential masochist. In this film, so it plays out. Davis’s character, once the golden-haired kiddie star Baby Jane, is a drunk with a skewed view of reality. Crawford plays her sister, formerly a leading lady but now confined to a wheelchair after a mysterious accident that is explained (in a way that thoroughly baffled me) at the end of the film. Both are essentially grotesque, but Baby Jane revived their popularity, and Davis (though not Crawford) thereby racked up one more Oscar nom.

 Sad, though, that two fifty-year-old actresses needed to stoop to such trashy material. Happily, at least one great actress today still has her pick of roles. Everywhere I turn, I see photos of Meryl Streep, at 77, looking devastatingly glamorous in ads for The Devil Wears Prada 2.  Yes, she plays a sort of villain, but a gorgeous one.

Dreams and Reality on “Revolutionary Road”

Revolutionary Road strikes me as a curious name for a novel, or a movie . . . or a street address. When I think of its implications, I conjure up a battlefield, with a lot of Minuteman types carrying muskets and wearing their hair in a pigtail. But Revolutionary Road is the title of the 1961 debut novel by Richard Yates that has nothing overt to do with the American Revolution of 1776. Rather, it’s a domestic drama set in the leafy suburbs of Connecticut circa 1955. The young couple who decide to start their family in a big white house on Revolutionary Road are hardly revolutionary in the military sense. Nor are they, really, American patriots. But after some thought I’ve come to see Frank and April Wheeler as yearning for their own private revolution, one that will raise them high above their earthbound suburban neighbors.

 Once the novel was in print, Hollywood came calling, and a screenplay emerged. But for many years no one came forward to produce this morose story with its grim ending. Then British actress Kate Winslet, always ripe for challenging roles, fell in love with the project and became determined to play the female lead. Fortunately for her, she had a husband, Sam Mendes, with his own Hollywood cred. Primarily a stage director, he had won an Oscar for helming his debut film, 1999’s American Beauty, which like Reluctionary Road took an intimate look at the collapse of an American marriage. Since that time he had won more acclaim, particularly for his very dark and poignant Road to Perdition (2002). When 2008 rolled around, he was releasing a movie that starred not only his wife but also her close friend and one-time on-screen love, Leonardo DiCaprio.

 Also culled from the Titanic cast was Kathy Bates, who had once played Molly Brown on that ill-fated voyage and was now asked by Mendes to play a local realtor who befriends April and Frank. The key supporting role of her truth-teller son was taken by Michael Shannon, a character actor who ended up with the Academy’s single acting nomination for Revolutionary Road. In all it was nominated for three Oscars (including Best Costumes and Best Production Design), but won none of them. Most recently the versatile Shannon has played the martyred President James Garfield in TV’s Death by Lightning and a key judge in last year’s Nuremberg.

 What is revolutionary about Revolutionary Road? It focuses in on a married couple determined to live a life of their own choosing. April, a frustrated local actress, is the one who comes up with the plan for her husband to quit his workaday job so the family can move to Paris and discover their bliss. Frank at first resists his wife’s urging but soon comes to accept the idea that in Paris he’ll intuit how to really put his undefined talents to use. They make plans and tell all their neighbors . . . but reality gets in the way. And the couple eventually discover that their thinking is not so in sync after all. The ending, when it comes, is tragic, and the final scene gives the family (and us) little solace.

 Which is probably why the film, well-made as it is, did not drawn in audiences. In Titanic, Jack and Rose were a couple madly in love, until an iceberg destroyed their dreams of romantic bliss. Here the same actors show romance crumbling because of their own unrealistic goals. Ironically, Winslet’s own eight-year marriage to Mendes didn’t last much beyond the film’s release.

 

 

 

Laughing It Up with George Schlatter

I was delighted to see, on the People magazine site, an article about George Schlatter. George who? It seems there’s a brand-new documentary, Sock It to Me: The Legend of George Schlatter, now coming onto the market to celebrate Schlatter’s 96^th year.  Back when I was a college kid, Schlatter was the producer of a little sketch comedy show called Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In. As a one-off TV special that aired on  September 9, 1967, the show generated such buzz—especially among young audiences—that it returned as a weekly series, replacing the once-huge Man from U.N.C.L.E, at the beginning of 1968. It ran until July of 1973, when its youthful sexiness finally ran out of steam. 

 I take all this personally partly because Laugh-In was must-see TV where I lived. Its inspired brand of silliness (Goldie Hawn frugging in a bikini and a lot of flower-power tattoos; Arte Johnson as a dirty old man constantly being whacked by Ruth Buzzi’s handbag; Lily Tomlin as precocious little Edith Ann proclaiming “That’s the truth!” and blowing raspberries) will always stay with me. At a time when public life seemed increasingly fraught, it was a joy to laugh at bad  jokes and sketches performed by talented showbiz newcomers.

  Hawn and Tomlin, in particular, have certainly gone on to major Hollywood careers. But the show was also so trendy that it attracted guests with high star-wattage. When Schlatter and his writers unearthed Dewey "Pigmeat" Markham’s goofy “Here Comes the Judge” routine, Sammy Davis Jr. started showing up regularly in a judicial robe and powdered wig to increase the hilarity: I’m not exactly sure why we laughed so hard, but it was awfully funny. (Briefly there was even a car model on the market called The Judge, meant to capitalize on the show’s catch-phrase.) There were also frequent guest appearances by major social and political figures. Early on, one of the show’s recurrent gags was for a cast member to say, “Sock it to me,” and then get doused by a pail of water. Pretty soon, there were quick cuts of celebrities—including presidential candidate Richard Nixon—reciting variants on the “sock it to me” line. (Nixon was all innocence, quizzically asking, “Sock it to me?) 

 The other reason I’m delighted to learn of George Schlatter being alive and well is that, as a long-ago budding journalist, I got to do a sit-down interview with the guy.  It was late 1968, I think, and I was writing on entertainment for the UCLA Daily Bruin. With Laugh-In such a money-maker, Schlatter was launching a new and even more adventurous show. Called Turn-On, it was intended to make creative and humorous use of computer technology. But critics hated it, and audiences did too. By the time my article was published, Turn-On had been turned off by the network, after a single episode hit the airwaves. It’s still considered one of the biggest fiascos in TV history.

 As Turn-On was being readied for that fatal first airing, Schlatter was delighted to be interviewed by a young college journalist. He was cordial and funny. After the Turn-On debacle and the publication of my interview, he took time out from licking his psychic wounds to write me a thank-you note. After all these years, I’d have a really hard time digging out either the published interview or his response. But I remember I had quipped that he—then almost forty—relied in conversation on a “predictably with-it vocabulary.” He answered back, “At the risk of exhausting my predictably with-it vocabulary, your piece is a gas!” 

Keep on trucking, George!  

 

Bloody Good Show: The Godfather, Part II

It’s been a long time—easily 50 years, in fact—since I saw the second Godfather film. I know that, snob that I was, I didn’t see the first Godfather when it debuted, because I was too arty back then to be interested in crime dramas. It wasn’t until a friend with impeccable intellectual credentials told me that The Godfather was essential Americana that I discovered for myself the brilliant picture that Francis Ford Coppola had given us of the underside of the American dream. As it turned out, Godfather II would be a feather in the cap of my former boss, Roger Corman. It won six Oscars, including several for Corman alumni. Francis Ford Coppola , who got his start fresh out of film school as Roger’s assistant, took home statuettes for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay, while Robert De Niro (who’d been featured in Corman’s Bloody Mama) was honored with the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for playing the youthful Vito Corleone. Moreover, Corman graduate Talia Shire became a Best Supporting Actress nominee for her role as the godfather’s sister. 

 I returned to The Godfather Part II in part to savor the work of the late Robert Duvall, who plays it close to the vest as Tom Hagen, the godfather’s indefatigable fixer and adopted son. But I was also curious to see how a film could be both sequel and prequel to what had gone before. Honestly, I don’t think Godfather II (the first sequel ever to win a Best Picture Oscar) is quite as strong as its predecessor; by cutting between two stories set in two very different eras Coppola sometimes weakens the film’s throughline, and the ultimate conclusion doesn’t pack the wallop of the earlier film. Still, there’s much to admire. I was strongly impressed by De Niro’s work in the Sicily scenes, and the Lower East Side sections of the film allowed us to see his evolution from eager immigrant to godfather-in-the-making. And Coppola clearly had a marvelous time filming massive period crowd scenes, letting us in on the local color of New York’s Little Italy in all its tawdry splendor.

 By contrast, there’s the rustic but tony compound of Michael Corleone and family at Nevada’s Lake Tahoe, where they hole up while he’s busy deal-making with Las Vegas honchos. And we also get glimpses of both Miami and pre-Castro Havana. It is striking watching Al Pacino’s Michael becoming, in this film, more and more his father’s imperious son, the master of all he surveys. Pacino never won an Oscar for playing Michael in three Godfather films Though he earned Oscar nominations for the first two, it took him until 1993 (and the semi-interesting Scent of a Woman) to take home the golden statuette. But when I checked out the dates, I was struck by the fact that less than a year after Godfather II hit the screen, Pacino gave another masterful Oscar-worthy performance in a favorite film of mine, Dog Day Afternoon. That heist film, based on a true story, had Pacino as Sonny, a hapless young man determined to knock over a Brooklyn bank to finance his lover’s sex-change operation. If you see Dog Day Afternoon not long after Godfather II, I suspect you’ll be surprised that Pacino suddenly seems much younger, much shorter, and much more inept than in the previous film. That, of course, is what acting is all about.

 I should also mention that both Godfather II and Dog Day Afternoon also feature the gifted John Cazale, an ominous-lookng character actor who died much too young. 

 

Hailing Mary (and Wes Anderson)

Over the past weekend, I watched two movies that made a strong visual impression on me. At a massive local cineplex, I saw Hollywood’s very welcome new Netflix blockbuster, Project Hail Mary. At home on my couch, I enjoyed re-watching what is probably Wes Anderson’s most significant film, 2014’s The Grand Budapest Hotel.

 Project Hail Mary was of great interest to me both because there are several engineers (and an engineer-to-be) in my life and because many of my current screenwriting students—a group with a wide range of aesthetic tastes—are enthusiastic about this film. I have not read the novel on which the film is based, and I admit that the scientific (and pseudo-scientific) aspects of the plot leave me completely boggled. But it boasts a bravura solo performance by Ryan Gosling as a reluctant astronaut stuck in space, as well as an eclectic score I often found enchanting. Beyond this, Project Hail Mary enjoys the advantage of a wonderful visual sense. Even when I had no idea what was going on, I enjoyed basking in the glow of the film’s otherworldly cinematography.

 Project Hail Mary is, of course, very much about the future: about a possible grave danger to our solar system, about the exotic inter-terrestrial discoveries that may save us all, and about the non-human being with whom our hero allies in the course of his eventful mission. By contrast, The Grand Budapest Hotel devotes itself to the past. In a story that is probably Anderson’s most ambitious ever, we move between several different twentieth-century eras. The film starts in 1985, with the visit of a  young woman to a snowy European cemetery. There, holding a thick book titled The Grand Budapest Hotel, she pauses at the shrine of the book’s once-famous author. We then flash back to the author’s 1968 visit to the sadly-faded hotel, where he hears the story of its origins from its now-aged current proprietor. This whisks us back to 1932, the heyday of this majestic structure set among Alpine crags and reached by a charming funicular. The 1932 version of the hotel—with its celebrity guests and suave omnipresent concierge (a delightfully debonair  Ralph Fiennes)—looks like a huge pink wedding cake, complete with Roman baths and every other amenity man can devise.

 But nothing can outlast the onward rush of history, and we see for ourselves how manners and mores change over time. World War II of course takes its toll, as do other more personal tragedies, and the glamour of the 1930s gives way to Soviet-style utilitarianism and even further indignities. (We gather that as of 1985 this grand hotel is gone for good.) What makes the film so fascinating is Wes Anderson’s unforgettable flair for non-realistic visuals. The exterior of the hotel as we see it looks very much like an elaborate dollhouse, and the staging of the film’s actors  (many of them celebrated Anderson veterans) emphasizes their unreality too. While  Project Hail Mary makes the far corners of Outer Space look thrillingly real, The Grand Budapest Hotel ensures that all of its people and all of its places look like artifice. Which has a certain undeniable logic. When we think of the past—even just one or two generations back—it often turns into a candy-coated fantasyland. And Wes Anderson is just the writer-director to convert Tilda Swinton, Adrien Brody, Saiorse Ronan, Jeff Goldblum, and Bill Murray (among others) into living paper dolls. Which leaves me wondering: how would Anderson, with his acute visual sense, handle a movie set in outer space?

 

 

Gobbling Up the Ham in “Spamalot”

Lovers of outrageously silly comedy all know about Monty Python. This zany troupe was founded in 1969 by six talented Brits who were all graduates of Oxford or Cambridge. The British taste for low humor had previously given birth to The Goon Show (a 1951-1960 radio broadcast that launched the career of Peter Sellers, among others) and Beyond the Fringe (a slightly more satirical revue that gave the world Dudley Moore and three other talented chaps).  The Pythons were formed in 1969, first starring in a BBC sketch comedy that lasted until 1974. Their first movie, And Now For Something Completely Different, was a compilation of comic sketches that hit the big screen in 1971. Next they decided to try on a film that had something of an actual plot. The much-loved English legends of King Arthur seemed ripe for spoofing, and so Monty Python and the Holy Grail was launched (to the sound of coconut shells being clapped together) in 1975.

 The movie was a true Python affair, with members Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Erric Idle, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin all playing multiple roles. The two Terrys directed a script in which all the Pythons had a hand. The major thread was Arthur and his knights on a grail quest, but there were frequent digressions into silliness of many kinds: a Trojan rabbit that fails spectacularly to transport the knights into a castle; a Black Knight who is determined to keep fighting after all his limbs have been cut off; a Las Vegas-style Camelot; a nonsensical encounter with a band of Knights Who Say "Ni,” and an appearance by God. The film was shot in Scotland (so cheaply that the clapping together of coconut shells was used to replace the on-screen appearance  of actual horse hooves). Despite its low-rent style, The Holy Grail was a huge hit, first in Britain and then among comedy lovers everywhere.

 I bring this up because, back in 1975, the movie gave rise to a stage musical wittily dubbed Spamalot. Python’s Eric Idle had a lot to do with the show’s songs and book, and Mike Nichols was the original Broadway director. Over some 1575 Broadway performances, the show was cheered by more than two million theatregoers and raked in many millions. I saw it years ago, and now it’s back at L.A.’s fabulously art deco Hollywood Pantages Theatre, updated a bit by Idle (there’s quite a funny George Soros joke).

 The fun of the musical is that it combines some of the old familiar moments (like that cranky French sentry) with some satirical exploitation of musical-theatre tropes. The Lady of the Lake belts out sexy songs in a wide range of keys, and the overlong second act has a great deal of fun gently mocking the convention that musical theatre attracts performers who are either Jewish or gay—or maybe both. The song “You Won't Succeed on Broadway” (Without Jews) was a highlight with the Pantages audience, especially when that George Soros gag was worked in. Shortly afterward, attention turned to a gay bridegroom-to-be who successfully outed Sir Lancelot the Brave (as well, I gather, as Sir Robin, the-not-quite-so-brave-as-Sir-Lancelot).

 The show ends with audience participation, including a singalong of a Python classic (from the Jesus satire, The Life of Brian) : “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.” At the Pantages, over two thousand playgoers joined in. Given the state of today’s world, looking on the bright side is about the best we can do. A big thank-you to Eric Idle and the Pythons for making it possible.

 

 

Seeing Double: “Cat Ballou”

I loved running across the factoid that Michael B. Jordan’s performance(s) in Sinners marked the second time that a Best Actor Oscar went to someone playing twins. (The  most famous literary work featuring two lookalikes is Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, in which Sydney Carton nobly sacrifices himself to the bloodthirsty mob because of his close physical resemblance to French aristocrat Charles Darnay. Several film adaptations have been made, notably the 1935 epic starring Ronald Colman, but I gather no actor has ever played both roles.)

 Once I read that the only previous Oscar-winner playing twins was Lee Marvin in 1965’s Cat Ballou, I felt obliged to check it out. A huge hit, it racked up five Oscar nominations. Several of them related to the film’s rollicking score and to the comic ballad used to narrate the proceedings. (It was sung on-screen by the delightful duo of Stubby Kaye and Nat “King” Cole, the latter of whom died of lung cancer shortly before the film’s release.) There was also recognition for the adapted screenplay and film editing. But the only win on Oscar night belonged to Lee Marvin, who took on the wacky dual roles of Tim Strawn, the tin-nosed hired assassin who threatens Cat and her gang, and Kid Shelleen, the legendary gunslinger who’s only effective when he’s drunk. The two men are eventually revealed to be brothers, though not necessarily twins, and its’ clear that Marvin relished every moment of his time on-screen.

 The film’s story is something of a masterpiece of silliness. The title role is played by Jane Fonda. Though she was still in her twenties back then, it was her ninth film, and she was firmly in the ingenue phase of her career, making movies like Barefoot in the Park and Barbarella in which she showed emotion by opening her eyes very wide. (For me her true acting breakthrough was in 1969’s grim They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?) In Cat Ballou, Fonda starts out as an innocent finishing-school grad traveling west. Through a series of mishaps she discovers love and bad behavior, ending up as the leader of an outlaw gang which of course is a good deal more virtuous than the honchos of the little prairie town in which the action mostly unfolds. Other actors along for the ride include the agreeable Michael Callan and impish Dwayne Hickman (much loved by young folk for his goofy TV role as perennial teenager Dobie Gillis, and here having fun as a pretend preacher). 

 But how did Marvin, whose dual roles are not particularly large or challenging, ever manage to win that Oscar? I can only conjecture. First of all, at the ceremony held in 1966, the big winner was The Sound of Music. The Sixties were difficult years, politically speaking, and I think voters liked supporting something that was musical and upbeat, despite its inclusion of Nazis threatening Austria. (Other Best Picture nominees included Doctor Zhivago, Ship of Fools, Darling, and one wry comedy, A Thousand Clowns.) Among that year’s Best Actor candidates were two Serious Thespians from Britain, Richard Burton (The Spy Who Came in From the Cold) and Laurence Olivier (Othello). Also nominated were towering dramatic performances by Oskar Werner (Ship of Fools) and Rod Steiger (The Pawnbroker). I think audiences in that era needed a laugh, and only Lee Marvin supplied one. It didn’t hurt that he was in Ship of Fools too, as an over-the-hill baseball player.

 Disappointingly, in Cat Ballou Marvin’s two outrageous characters are never on screen at the same time. Kudos to Sinners for seamlessly accomplishing that feat. 

 

In Network

I first decided to re-watch the 1976 film, Network, in tribute to the late Robert Duvall. Of course I (like pretty much everyone) had seen the movie when it first came out. This dark satire of the television news industry—written by Paddy Chayefsky and directed by Sidney Lumet—was a major hit in a very good year for movies. When Oscar nominations were revealed, Network was up for nine awards, including best picture. The top winner turned out to be Rocky, but other big films of that year included All the President’s Men, Bound for Glory, and Taxi Driver, so the competition was clearly fierce. Network won for its original screenplay, and also nabbed three of the four acting awards: for Beatrice Straight as a cast-off wife, for Faye Dunaway as a TV exec who’ll do anything to manufacture a hit show, and (most memorably) for Peter Finch. Finch, playing the newscaster whose firing because of low ratings sends him mentally ‘round the bend, was the first star ever to win an Oscar posthumously. He suffered a heart attack in January 1977, just after a TV talk-show appearance to promote the film, and died at age 60.

 Finch’s big line in Network—”I’m as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!"—is still with us. And so, of course, is the idea that TV execs (like the one effectively played by Duvall in the film) are more concerned with ratings than with quality content. But in many respects, Network surprised me. First, of course, is the fact that television today is far from what it was in the 1970s. Back then there existed a limited number of major networks: CBS, NBC, ABC. Much of the American public got its news from respected anchors like Walter Cronkite and John Chancellor. The film invents a fourth network, UBS, for dramatic purposes: when its longtime anchorman goes berserk and starts hollering out of windows, a large slice of the nation pays attention. Today, by contrast, our news sources are so widespread and so splintered that it’s hard to imagine public attention being focused on a single individual in quite the same way.

 I was also surprised by the film’s shifting tone. From what I’ve read, this was quite deliberate on the part of Chayefsky and Lumet, with low-key realistic scenes at the start of the film gradually giving way to stylized moments full of manic energy. A beautifully played early scene features Finch, as the newly-fired anchorman, and the great William Holden as his longtime pal who’s now the news division president. Two veteran newsmen, they commiserate with one another about how times have changed, making jokes to cover their mutual dismay.

 But then Faye Dunaway’s Diana Christensen enters the picture, and the whole mood changes. She sees in the crazed on-air pronouncements of Howard Beal (Finch) a new direction for TV news broadcasts, and quickly turns a hard news show into “infotainment,” of a sort that (alas) would not be so surprising today. Moreover, while spinning journalism as a form of public amusement, she also captures the heart of the long-married Holden, with predictable results. Late in the film, as Diana looks for new stars-in-the-making, there are some pointed references to a group of Symbionese Liberation Army-style young radicals who’ll do pretty much anything to be featured on TV. It’s very dark and, sometimes, very funny. Though the Patty Hearst era and the near-shooting of President Ford by Squeaky Fromme seem like ancient history now, Network brings them back to those of us old enough to remember.  

 

Chuck Norris: Getting a Kick Out of Martial Arts

The passing last week of martial-artist-turned-actor Chuck Norris (1940-2026) has sent me down Memory Lane. Looking at his long filmography, which begins in 1968, I’m amused to see that Norris had a cameo as a karate instructor in The Student Teachers, a Roger Corman New World Pictures film from 1973. But his roles got bigger over the years, first on film and then on television. His Walker, Texas Ranger series ran on CBS from 1993 to 2001.In 2010, he and his producer-brother were named Honorary Texas Ranger Captains by Governor Rick Perry, who said that "together, they helped elevate our Texas Rangers to truly mythical status."

 Martial arts movies, featuring Chinese-style one-on-one combat, were popular in the 1970s. While at New World Pictures  I survived the writing and casting of 1974’s TNT Jackson, a so-called blaxploitation flick in which the bodacious Jeanne Bell plays a martial-arts cutie investigating her brother’s disappearance in Hong Kong. (As frequently happened with New World product, Hong Kong was played by Manila, and the film was directed—after a fashion—by the unsinkable Cirio Santiago.) 

 But it was when I returned to Cormanland in the late 1980s that the martial-arts-flick craze really kicked into gear. In 1988, Jean-Claude Van Damme burst onto the scene with Bloodsport. The Cannon film, budgeted at a mere $1.5 million, made him an international star, and launched the careers of copycats like Steven Seagal. Needless to say, Roger Corman wanted to get in on the action by finding a bona fide kickboxing star of his own.

 While Van Damme was riding high with Bloodsport, Don “The Dragon” Wilson got a message on his answering machine: “Hi, my name is Roger Corman.  If you’re the Don Wilson that’s the kickboxing champ, I’d like you to come in and read for my film.” Wilson, a longtime world light-heavyweight kickboxing champion, duly auditioned, and was told by Corman, “You’re going to become a big motion picture star.” They shook on a deal that gave Wilson $1000 a week for his first film and a flat $25,000 for his second.  Corman’s faith in Wilson was fully justified. Bloodfist I took in $1.7 million in limited theatrical release, while also selling 80,000 video cassettes. Bloodfist II, a hastily-made follow-up, sold 50,000 cassettes. Before long, Wilson was being paid a year-round $4000 a week to appear in six more Bloodfist films, and Corman was launching his own video distribution company. 

 Bloodfist was a conventional but effective story about a martial artist who seeks revenge in the ring for his brother’s death. Three years later, I was asked, as Roger’s story editor, to move the script’s locale from Manila to Los Angeles and change the inscrutable old Chinese mentor into a black street bum. The project came together in two weeks, to fill a Christmas-time production gap at Corman’s studio: Full Contact (starring martial artist Jerry Trimble) was released on video in early 1993.  Three months later, I helped transport the same script into outer space; this time it was dubbed Dragon Fire. A female variation, Angelfist, with Catya Sassoon in Wilson’s original role, appeared later in 1993, and at one point we contemplated a Medieval sword-and-sandal version.

 As Wilson told me, Corman “manufactured an action star.” He appreciates Roger’s shrewdness in seeking out a true kickboxing champion, because serious fans of martial arts know the difference between a genuine athlete and a wannabe. But Roger himself was hardly a purist.  Before the martial arts craze largely played itself out, he was promoting sexy Cat Sassoon as a female world champion, until Wilson advised him to desist. 

 

 

 

Riding the Rails with “Train Dreams”

Among the ten movies nominated by the Academy for Best Picture, there were a few that were unfamiliar to me. To be honest, I hadn’t kept up with some of the year’s best foreign-language films, like Brazil’s The Secret Agent. Nor did I feel much inclination to check out the Oscar-nominated racing flick known as F1. Though it didn’t, of course, get named Best Picture, it did take home a statuette for its true-to-life sound design. As I write this in my home office, I’m hearing plenty of souped-up cars racing past my window. Why on earth would I want to go to a movie and listen to more of that screeching and rumbling?

 On the Best Picture top-ten list, there was one small American art film that I did feel obliged to view. A popular Oscar preview broadcast is hosted each year by my favorite L.A. public radio station, LAist. Shortly before the Oscar ceremony, the station’s critics annually gather to weigh in on the candidates in all the top categories, after which the audience applauds for its favorites. To my surprise, a little movie called Train Dreams got a big reaction from the crowd, as well as from the critics. Some of the latter actually called it the most memorable movie of 2025. So I absolutely needed to see what the excitement was about.

 Train Dreams started out as a 2011 novella by the acclaimed Denis Johnson. Though Johnson, the son of a U.S. State Department operative, grew up all over the globe, this book represents a rich slice of Americana. It focuses on the quiet but eventful life of Robert Grainier, an orphan who first rides a train in 1893 when (at age 7) he’s sent to meet his adoptive family in Fry, Idaho, As he grows up in these rustic surroundings, he remains directionless until he meets a young woman named Gladys. They marry, build a log cabin by the side of a river, and welcome a young daughter they name Kate.

 Though Grainier yearns to live at home with his growing family, his best source of income is  helping to build the Spokane International Railway. Camping out with his co-workers, he meets kind and gentle men, but also bigots who torture their Chinese immigrant co-workers and inflict vengeance on outsiders. Grainier also takes in the natural beauty of the forest, as well as the danger always lurking in the background as men fell giant trees and handle explosives. When he decides to return home for good, he learns that disaster has stricken his loved ones in his absence. That’s pretty much the whole story, which follows Grainier up until his death in 1968, Toward the end of his life, he watches on television John Glenn’s foray into outer space, and sees the earth spread out below him from his seat in a biplane. A narrator solemnly tells us that during this ride into the heavens, "as he misplaced all sense of up and down, he felt, at last, connected to it all."

 It’s a beautifully shot movie that certainly earns its four Oscar nominations, especially the one for cinematography. It’s also slow and solemn, and definitely an acquired taste. For me the biggest surprise is that three of the four main actors—Joel Edgerton, Felicity Jones as his wife, and Kerry Condon as a forestry service worker with her own sorrows—turn out to be born and raised overseas. Only William H. Macy, playing a wise old coot, is  actually American-born. Surely there’s a good reason why Americans aren’t playing Americans. Any thoughts?

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The Angst and the Ecstasy of Catherine O’Hara

Life, as we know, is not always fair. Right now, when the world seems to be becoming a more and more daunting place, it doesn’t seem fair that we’ve just lost a lady so funny that she helps us forget our angst. In a way, angst is one of Catherine O’Hara’s personal specialties. She agonizes so hilariously over life’s vicissitudes that—momentarily, at least—we forget our own. It doesn’t seem right, frankly, that we had to lose her this past January, at age 71.

 O’Hara, Canada-born, was among the zanies at SCTV from 1976 to 1984. In Hollywood she played a number of memorable though subordinate film roles. I remember her fondly in After Hours, Beetlejuice, and as Kevin’s thoroughly rattled mother in Home Alone. Her longest lasting project was surely Schitt’s Creek,  an outrageous TV comedy (2015-2020) about an L.A. show-biz family forced to relocate, because of financial reverses, to a  Canadian town full of heart and not much else. O’Hara played opposite her good friend (and series co-creator) Eugene Levy, as Moira Rose, the snooty, multi-wigged mom who was once a soap opera star, and now can’t easily accept her much-diminished smalltown life. She seemed destined for an equally long run on Seth Rogen’s hit show, set behind the scenes in Hollywood, when death overtook her. Rogen's sweet tribute to her at the recent SAG awards ceremony is worth savoring.  

But I mostly think of O’Hara in conjunction with a trio of films directed and co-written by the remarkable Christopher Guest. Guest, an actual member of British nobility, had played rocker Nigel Tufnel in Rob Reiner’s deathless 1984 mockumentary, This is Spinal Tap. The experience led him (along with co-conspirator Eugene Levy and a company of gifted comic actors) to launch three largely improvised indies of his own. The first, Waiting for Guffman (1996) is an affectionate spoof of small-town amateur theatricals. It covers the torturous process of staging a pageant to honor Blaine, Missouri’s 150^th anniversary. (Any connection with Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is not accidental.) O’Hara and Guest regular Fred Willard play Sheila and Ron Woodard, a perky pair of travel agents who have dreams of musical-theatre stardom. Sheila is prone to drinking a wee bit too much on occasion, which leads her to put her husband in an embarrassing situation indeed.

 By general consensus, the funniest of Guest’s mockumentaries is 2000’s Best in Show, a spoof of dog shows and of the humans who dote on their pedigreed fur babies. O’Hara and Levy are featured as Cookie and Gerry Fleck, a Florida couple who idolize their Norwich terrier and enjoy recording novelty songs in Winky’s honor. Gerry is faced with the challenge of having two left feet (literally), and Cookie—who seems to have enjoyed an exuberant sex life before her marriage—keeps running into former beaus eager to resume the relationship.

 Less well known is A Mighty Wind (2003), which mocks the era when folk music ruled the airwaves. Various Guest regulars (including Parker Posey, Michael McKean, Jane Lynch, and a host of other wacky singing actors) play musicians who amusingly resemble once-legendary groups likes The New Christy Minstrels and The Kingston Trio. The premise is that these groups reunite, decades after their celebrity has faded, for a reunion concert. The stand-outs (as always) are Levy and O’Hara. They play former sweethearts Mitch and Mickey, he now something of a nut case and she a sweet soul with an autoharp and a memory of the kiss at the end of the rainbow. Hilarity of course ensues. 

                    

Hollywood History the Orton Way

I know a very nice man of my generation named Richard Orton. He lives not far from me in Santa Monica, and local history is his passion. He’s also a serious movie buff, the kind of guy who can tell you how many times the so-called Auntie Mame staircase has been repurposed for other Hollywood films. Since 2017 Dick has been emailing free newsletters that contain his research into what he calls “Ocean Park, Santa Monica, and Other Magic Places.” Now, as a service to a community he loves, he’s compiled his beautifully illustrated newsletters into a two-volume set that fans can purchase. Since the complete box-set is expensive, he has made copies available at a number of local libraries. This is highly fitting, because the project was partially financed through a 150^th anniversary micro-grant through the  City of Santa Monica Cultural Affairs department.

 In reading through Dick’s volumes, I was struck by how much the history of our region owes to the rise of the motion picture industry. Within Santa Monica’s borders there still stand many structures that have a movie association. A small neighborhood movie house called the Aero Theater was built by aerospace icon Donald Douglas to entertain aircraft workers around the clock during the hectic days of World War II. An Ocean Avenue watering-hole called Chez Jay has been described by one wag as “where the stars go to slum.” It has hosted such celebrities as Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, and Elizabeth Taylor, and most recently was used in a key flashback for George Clooney’s 2025 film, Jay Kelly. Unfortunately, the classroom building at Santa Monica High School that had a cameo in the James Dean classic, Rebel Without a Cause, was recently replaced by a more up-to-date structure.

 According to Dick Orton, the Jewish movie moguls of old (as well as those stars in unconventional living arrangements) were once not considered welcome in Beverly Hills. That’s why many built palatial homes on Santa Monica’s “gold coast,” close to the Pacific Ocean. Most are gone now, but Santa Monica still treasures the elaborate 1929 beach house once used for entertaining by actress Marion Davies and her beau, William Randolph Hearst. Given to the city by philanthropist Wallis Annenberg in 2005, it is now a treasured public playground on the sand.

 Old-timers will remember the Santa Monica Pier as the home of a post-Disneyland amusement park, Pacific Ocean Park. But even before that era, celebrities came to the pier for innocent merriment. One of Dick’s newsletters highlights a once-upon-a-time photo studio where celebs mixed with nobodies to have comic pictures taken. That particular newsletter is enlivened with  some of those photos: of Lucy and Desi, of the so-called Citizen Kane and Gilda (Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth), of Judy Garland and David Rose, of Alice Faye and Phil Harris.

 And then there are entries about the long-ago Santa Monica Canyon ranches where movies were once filmed. Like Hartville, founded in 1912, which boasted its own Indian settlement, and is considered the first modern movie studio. And the Clarence Brown ranch, which eventually ended up housing the standing set from TV’s M*A*S*H.

 Now that his book is done, has Dick Orton exhausted his subject? Not even close. I’m hoping he’ll look into the history of McCabe’s Guitar Shop, a Pico Boulevard performance venue that has launched the career of many a famous musical talent. It’s now owned by the son of screenwriter Robert Riskin and actress Fay Wray, and live albums recorded at McCabe’s are prized by collectors. So, Dick, what are you waiting for?   

 

Jessie Buckley and the Luck of the Irish

Well, it’s all over now but the shouting. The 98^th annual Academy Awards ceremony is in the books, and most viewers (me included) are rather happy about the outcome. Timothée Chalamet was gracious in defeat as Michael B. Jordan was hailed for his lead performance(s) in Sinners. (Trivia time: the only other actor who won the Oscar for playing twins was Lee Marvin for Cat Ballou.) Some of the actresses on display looked suitably gorgeous while others (I’m looking at YOU, Renate Reinsve) just seemed, well, a bit weird. Host Conan O’Brien was a hoot wearing Amy Madigan’s red fright wig from Weapons, being chased up the aisle of the Dolby Theatre by a pack of very excited kids. The glamorous and uninhibited Teyana Taylor seemed to have surgically attached herself to the leg of Paul Thomas Anderson as he strode to the stage to receive one of three long-overdue statuettes. There was real heartfelt emotion in the In Memorian segment, particularly in Billy Crystal’s tribute to Rob and Michele Reiner.

 But I want to focus on one of the evening’s least suspenseful awards: that for Best Actress. Everyone seemed to agree from the get-go that Jessie Buckley was a lock for  playing Shakespeare’s grieving wife in Hamnet. I too loved her performance, but it made me more curious than ever about how her career evolved. I first spotted Buckley in a small 2018 film called Wild Rose. It focuses on a young Scottish single mother who loves American country music and dreams of traveling to Nashville. Buckley impressed me in that role, and I figured she was a talented young Scot with a bright career ahead of her. Wrong! Buckley is Irish, and apparently the first Irish actress ever to win a major acting Oscar. So her win was well-timed, just ahead of St. Patrick’s Day.

 As to the question of how Buckley’s career got started, I’ve discovered something quite charming. Back in 2008, at the ripe old age of 18, she was a contestant on a BBC competition show called I’d Do Anything. The show’s title came from a perky song in the musical, Oliver! (based on Dickens’ Oliver Twist) which was a massive hit in London and New York before being transformed into an Oscar-winning film. The gimmick of the TV show was that various aspiring young singing actresses were competing to win the star role of Nancy in an upcoming West End revival of Oliver!, with votes from the public making all the difference. You can find the show’s finale on YouTube, with Buckley and another singer-actress, costumed identically, each singing Nancy’s big torch number, “As Long as He Needs Me.” 

Guess what! Buckley came in second, though guest panelist Andrew Lloyd Webber passionately campaigned on her behalf. For me, looking back on the competition after several decades, Buckley was a star in the making. I am not expert enough at singing to comment on the technical prowess of the two contestants, but there’s no question that Buckley was better at pouring into this song a deep well of emotions. Clearly, she understood the lyrics. 

 The Jessie Buckley of 2008 was not exactly the woman we saw on stage at the Dolby. At 18 she was very slim with a mop of curly hair and a fair amount of makeup, not the more austere look she seems to favor these days, as a wife, a new mother, and a recognized dramatic actress. She was adorable back then, but I wouldn’t have guessed what she’d go on to do. Now, though, the sky’s the limit. Brava! 

 

 

Murmurs from the Heart: Agnès Varda in California

I fell hard for the late French filmmaker Agnès Varda when I saw her onscreen in her Oscar-nominated Faces Places (originally Visages Villages). In this late-in-life documentary, a big hit at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, the then-88-year-old Varda travels throughout the small towns of France with a decades-younger artist known as JR, snapping photos and posting giant murals of the citizenry. On screen, she’s a charming gamine: with her tiny frame, huge eyes, and mop of auburn hair, she looks like someone’s most amusing elderly aunt, still spry after all these years. (The tall, thin, bearded JR provides a wonderful counterpoint.)

 Varda was married for almost three decades to the equally creative Jacques Demy, best known for his all-musical 1964 hit, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Both gained fame as filmmakers during the rise of the French New Wave. (You can see them both represented in Nouvelle Vague, Richard Linklater’s 2025 salute to the making of a seminal New Wave classic, Breathless, directed by Jean-Luc Godard in 1960.) It’s been a very long while since I watched Varda’s much-admired 1962 movie of the Paris streets, Cléo from 5 to 7, though I remember it being very much in the seemingly impromptu New Wave style. I was not a big fan of her equally-honored 1985 drama, Vagabond. But I suspect that Varda’s real talent lies in documentary filmmaking, in finding the pulse of a place, a time, and a people.

 Always a wanderer, Varda spent part of the 1960s in California, where she reunited with an elderly relative, captured the dynamism of the Black Panthers on film, and goggled at the L.A. mural scene. For her, as the film’s off-camera narrator, L.A.’s street murals are “living, breathing, seething walls.” She considers them “as beautiful as paintings,” revealing “everybody dreaming together,” even though some of them are crude, amateurish, and marred by graffiti.

 The 1981 film she made to celebrate L.A.’s murals is called Mur Murs . Clearly fond of word play and multilingual jokes, she has adapted the French word mur (for “wall”) into a variation on the English word “murmur.” (Around the same time, she also shot a modest dramatic film that used L.A.’s murals as an occasional backdrop. That 1982 piece, Documenteur, is wittily subtitled “an emotion picture.” I watched it too, but couldn’t find much interest in observing the low-key characters go about their business. It’s as a documentarian that Varda shines the brightest.)

 In Mur Murs she introduces the viewer to some of L.A.’s major mural artists , like Kent Twitchell. It’s poignant to see Twichell’s iconic L.A. Freeway Lady captured on film, since this monumental portrait of his grandmother and a world-spanning knitted afghan no longer gazes down on the Hollywood Freeway, having been painted over in 1987. I also enjoyed the glimpses provided by Varda of several of Santa Monica’s liveliest wall paintings. And it’s lovely to see the giant blue whales someone painted on a large wall in Venice dwarfing a solemn row of live tai chi practitioners.

 But though she has an eye for aesthetic appeal, Varda also seems fascinated by the cruder murals of East L.A. She views these as continuing the tradition of Mexican artist José Clemente Orozco, who for a time lived and worked in SoCal. These dramatic works, often painted by collectives of amateur artists, are marked by deep emotion and a strong community spirit, because they tend to commemorate homeboys who have lost their lives to street violence.   

 Varda loves it all—the refined and the raw—and I love her celebration of these loud, bright murmurs. 

 

Harold and Bud: The Pre-Graduate

It’s hard for me to think of Bud Cort as old. When playing a title character in 1971’s Harold and Maude, he was in his early twenties, but (with his small frame,  big blue eyes, and early Beatles haircut) he looked to be maybe seventeen. And, of course, acted on screen like a spoiled teenager, one who hates his life and everyone in it. But now, more than fifty years later, Bud Cort is dead of pneumonia, at the not-so-young age of 77.

 When I was a recent college graduate, Harold and Maude was considered a major film for my generation. Not that the off-beat story of the pairing of youth and age was a commercial hit at the start, The film, written by UCLA film student Colin Higgins and directed by relative newbie Hal Ashby, was almost universally panned by critics and ignored by potential audiences. Gradually, though, it was discovered by young people in rebellion against their elders. Famously it became a cult hit, playing for three straight years in a Minneapolis art-house with a youthful clientele.   

 Why did Harold and Maude prove so attractive to young Americans? I realized, when watching it again after fifty-odd years, that this film has a great deal in common with the hit movie on which I wrote my last book, 1967’s The Graduate. In some ways they’re similar: a youthful leading man, a mistrust of parents; a restless rebellion against what seems like a bleak future. On the other hand, there are ways in which the two films couldn’t be more opposite. As my Seduced by Mrs. Robinson points out, recent Ivy League graduate Benjamin Braddock is a star student, a star athlete, and a Big Man on  Campus. Back home in Beverly Hills,  he’s his parents’ trophy son. Bursting with pride about his achievements, they give him expensive presents (a sportscar, a diving suit) and don’t intrude when he chooses to spend his summer lounging in the swimming pool (and in Mrs. Robinson’s bed).

 Harold, by contrast, has done nothing for his mother to brag about. (His father seems to be totally missing in action.) His very wealthy mom, played by a screen veteran with the wonderful name of Vivian Pickles, seems bent on ignoring him, so caught up is she with her salon appointments and social events. When she decides that an early marriage might cure what ails him, she insists on filling out the dating survey herself, in his name. Maybe that’s why Harold keeps coming up with increasingly gruesome ways of feigning suicide. He also attends many a stranger’s funeral . . . and that’s where he finds someone with similar tastes, almost-eighty-year-old Maude (the great Ruth Gordon).

 Despite her appreciation for a good funeral, Maude is hardly as gloomy as Harold. Instead she’s a true life force, someone who poses in the nude for artists and steals cars for fun. In her presence, Harold discovers joy, though his “Elaine” is a great deal older than Benjamin Braddock’s. All of which leads to an ending that seems surprising, but (given a few hints of Maude’s backstory) perhaps not entirely illogical. No, Harold and Maude don’t end up together on a bus, à la Ben and his beloved, but—for the young people who made this film and the young people who watched it—it still seems an ending filled with optimism and love. (And, of course, a rejection of anything to do with President Nixon and the U.S. military establishment, representing a world that the youth of my generation hardly wanted to celebrate.)

 

 

After Hours in Nighttown

Circa 1988, when I came to work at Roger Corman’s Concorde-New Horizons Pictures, a strange new script crossed my desk. Called Daddy’s Boys, it was an outrageous dark comedy about a family of Depression-era bank robbers. If it read like something that had been cranked out in a hurry, this was because it had. It seems that Roger, looking at the rather effective period sets that had been built for Big Bad Mama II, became nostalgic for those early days when he’d shoot an outlandish movie (like Little Shop of Horrors) over a weekend, on sets left over from someone else’s project. My soon-to-be buddy, Daryl Haney, wrote the weird and wacky screenplay, while also playing the film’s hillbilly lead.. And its director, making his very first feature, was Joseph Minion.

 I doubt it was accidental that Roger knew Joe Minion’s work, because Joe had written the screenplay for one of Martin Scorsese’s most unique small films, 1985’s After Hours. Scorsese, of course, was one of Roger’s outstanding protégés, having made Boxcar Bertha for Corman’s New World Pictures in 1972. But after such major artistic and commercial successes as Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980), Scorsese had hit the skids. His 1982 The King of Comedy was not well received, and a major studio had backed out of funding his passion project, based on Nikos Kazantzakis’ controversial novel, The Last Temptation of Christ. At a creative impasse, Scorsese decided to take a chance on Minion’s eccentric little script, teaming with Griffin Dunne, who also played the hapless lead.

 After Hours is not the obvious Scorsese film: no gangsters, no major production values. It’s a simple but riveting story, set on the streets and in the seedy byways of Lower Manhattan, over the course of one very long evening. Dunne plays Paul, an uptown Manhattan office worker, now heading down to artsy, scruffy SoHo at the invitation of a quirky young blonde (Rosanna Arquette) who appreciates his taste in Henry Miller novels. He finds her in an artist’s loft, where her mostly undraped roommate (Linda Fiorentino) proves challenging company. I won’t go into too many details: suffice it to say that Paul is thwarted at every turn: his last $20 bill flies out the window of a cab; a new acquaintance abruptly commits suicide; he’s drenched by a sudden rainstorm; every woman he meets quickly turns against him, to the point where he’s racing through back alleys because someone suspects he’s the burglar who’s been preying on the neighborhood. All he wants is to go back home, but somehow that doesn’t seem to be in the cards.  

 After Hours presents am increasingly phantasmagoric view of the world as the night plays out south of Houston Street. (One detail I’ll long remember: Paul fleeing through the mean streets of Lower Manhattan, chased by a Mister Softee ice-cream truck driven by none other than the late Catherine O’Hara. And then there are those strange moments involving hippie comics Cheech & Chong, as well as the papier-mâché bagel-and-lox paperweights that keep showing up when least expected.) Film scholars have some fascinating things to say about Scorsese’s borrowing of stylistic elements from surrealists like Hitchcock and Kafka, I’d add that there’s something here reminiscent of the “Circe” section of James Joyce’s greatest novel, the part that became an unlikely 1958 Broadway hit titled Ulysses in Nighttown.    

 Which hardly means this film is for intellectuals only. It should appeal to anyone who looks for a way out of a humdrum existence but finds the adventure ultimately too much to bear.  I’ve been there; have YOU?   

 

 

 

Los Angeles Plays Itself

I’ve long been convinced that Hollywood writers of romantic comedy secretly pine for their own early years in New York, when they had no money but a great capacity for love. Just look at When Harry Met Sally, You’ve Got Mail, and of course Annie Hall. On film, Manhattan often seems like a playground for lovers, who stroll through Central Park, nuzzle one another on subways, and find inspiration at the top of the Empire State Building. But if cinematic New York is for lovers, my L.A. hometown sometimes seems reserved for disasters: like earthquakes, fires, and terrorist attacks upon skyscrapers on Christmas Eve.

 The Los Angeles Times, obviously determined to show that there’s more to L.A. than Die Hard, recently published an Entertainment section devoted to the topic of “101 Best L.A. Movies.” Their sleuthing (and the follow-up section that features angry readers’ own suggestions) has served to remind me that L.A. is many sorts of places in one. It’s, of course, where movies are (or used to be) made: its agreeable weather and its amorphous nature have allowed it to pose as many other cities and countries. (Did you know that Martin Scorsese’s quintessentially New York-based Mean Streets was mostly shot in L.A.?) But a true movie fan knows that a Los Angeles location can imply many different aspects of life in the SoCal megalopolis. First place on the Times list went to Chinatown, showcasing crime, corruption, and a certain exotic flavor (“Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.”) Near the top of the Times 101 there’s also the weird fantasy world of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and, of course, the faded movie-star glamour of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. The Times’ top five also include the ersatz flair of the Beverly Hills nouveau riche (Clueless) and the futuristic nightmare of Blade Runner.

 But not every film on the Times list showcases the rich and famous. I was pleased to see the inclusion of Tangerine, Jackie Brown, and particularly Boyz N The Hood, all of which pay attention to the down-and-out, as well as to the pervasive racial tension affecting L.A.’s misfits. There’s also suburbia (Valley Girl, Fast Times at Ridgemont High) and the ethnic pockets where English is not really the lingua franca (Real Women Have Curves, Mi Vida Loca). L.A. as a place of aspirations is showcased beautifully in everything from The Karate Kid to Bowwfinger, while LA. as the land of dashed dreams shows up in movies as different as Barton Fink and Slums of Beverly Hills. And the list also covers films that dive deeply into local occupations we Angelenos would rather ignore, like the San Fernando Valley pornography biz in Boogie Nights.

 When I first beheld the Times list, I anxiously scanned it to make sure it included The Graduate. (It’s #37, capturing the soignée lives of the swimming-pool set.) But some Times readers expressed dismay at the non-appearance of such films as the Oscar-winning Crash (a slightly overwrought movie definitely attuned to L.A.’s  car culture)), the screen adaptation of Nathanael West’s classic Day of the Locust (for me it misses its mark) and the hilarious Get Shorty. My own biggest complaint is the absence on the main list of 2009’s poignant romantic comedy, (500) Days of Summer.

This film, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel, is a 2009 charmer in which a young  couple fall in and out of love while living and working in Downtown L.A. Local landmarks (the Bradbury Building!) and hidden corners are given their due. Hey, this is a “New York is for Lovers” movie set in my own hometown!