They Could Have Been Contenders: The Hollywood Blacklist

I’m just back from a week in Washington, DC. To my surprise, the nation’s capital currently seems a lot more bipartisan than I would have guessed. Yes, there were giant Trump portraits hanging from some prominent government buildings. But I also saw a major Washington boulevard shut down on behalf of a wild and crazy Gay Pride festival. And overt dissent was on display nearby: outside a tent manned by some dedicated anti-Trumpers, I spotted a large placard that gave MAGA a new definition: Make Algae Great Again.

 Washington’s wonderful Smithsonian museums (open daily and free to all comers) seemed as welcoming and as even-handed as ever, pointing up our nation’s failings but also its glories.  Some of the city’s private museums, though, were clearly interested in viewing today’s deep political divide in the context of past eras that were equally contentious. That certainly seemed part of the reason the Capital Jewish Museum is now hosting an exhibit called “Blacklisted: An American Story.” Its focus is on the era—starting in 1947 and lasting until the early Sixties—when the House Un-American Activities Committee was terrorizing Hollywood, forcing the major studios to remove from their ranks anyone (Jewish or otherwise) who had ever been sympathetic to the Communist party. (The only way to return to the film industry’s good graces in that era was to dish up the names of others whose politics were—or had ever been—suspect.)

 As part of this exhibit, the museum showed a series of film clips relevant to the blacklist period. Two of the films were directed by Elia Kazan. Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) makes a brave argument against the built-in anti-Semitism of that era; the clip from On the Waterfront (1954) shows Marlon Brando as a longshoreman and would-be boxer climatically choosing to risk everything by bringing a mob boss to justice. Because Kazan was infamously known as one of those who “named names” to save his own career, many in Hollywood never forgave him. Orson Welles, for one, disparaged the latter film as “a celebration of the informant.”

 Three films written by Dalton Trumbo are also included in this montage. Two are from 1960, when the once-disgraced Trumbo was finally able to resume getting on-screen credit for his work. After writing Spartacus, he was championed by star Kirk Douglas, to whom he said, “Thanks, Kirk, for giving me back my name.” On earlier Trumbo films that appeared during the blacklist era, Trumbo had had to submit each of his scripts under a fictive monicker, or that of another writer. The screenwriting Oscar he won in 1954 for crafting under an assumed name the delightful (and totally apolitical) Roman Holiday was not awarded to him until 1993, almost three decades after his death.

 The exhibit also focuses on the sad example of John Garfield, one of many actors whose careers (and lives) were destroyed during the blacklist years. Garfield (born Jacob Garfinkle on New York’s Lower East Side) was a longtime supporter of liberal causes. He began appearing in major Hollywood films in 1938, usually in blue-collar roles, and was twice nominated for Oscars, notably for his lead role in the 1947 boxing film, Body and Soul. But his refusal to speak against his wife (once a member of the Communist Party) as well as his unwillingness to provide the House committee with the names of other Hollywood “Reds” ultimately destroyed him. He died of a heart attack in 1932 at the age of 39, just after a dream project in which he was to star was abruptly cancelled.

Despite it all, Happy 4^th of July!

John Garfield, with quote from his daughter

                            

 

Very Hush-Hush: ”L.A. Confidential”

Los Angeles is a movie town, and so it’s not a surprise that the L.A. Conservancy, which since 1978 has been working to preserve the city’s architecture landmarks, has a special affection for old movie theatres. The Conservancy’s Last Remaining Seats celebration, held every year, allows Angelenos to enjoy a wide variety of classic films in vintage movie palaces. This spring you could see Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, Hitchcock’s thrilling North by Northwest, or a Mary Poppins family singalong, all in historic showplaces along Downtown L.A.’s Broadway. I recently trekked to 1931’s 2000-seat Los Angeles Theatre—where the French Baroque décor may be a bit shabby but still dazzles—to watch a very L.A. movie, 1997’s L.A. Confidential.

 The Conservancy has always spiced up its screenings with treats like brief stage performances, fashion shows featuring period-appropriate wardrobe, and special guests. For L.A. Confidential, the Conservancy brought in James Ellroy, author of the novel on which the film is based. Ellroy, born in L.A. in 1948, became famous as a writer of hard-boiled crime fiction. His focus on brutal crime is perhaps not surprising, because when he was ten years old his mother was raped and murdered. Her death gave him an obsessive interest in the Black Dahlia murder case, and his works of fiction, like The L.A. Quartet, cast a dark light on the city of his birth.

 The film version, effectively directed by Roger Corman alum Curtis Hanson, is perhaps less wild and crazy than Ellroy’s original, but Ellroy calls it “a proficient movie,” one that successfully taps into his own fascination with “bad men in love with strong women.” It also visually captures the L.A. of the 1950s, a time when dreams of happy families enjoying backyard barbecues are undercut by a city—and a police force—rife with crime. At the center of the film are three LAPD cops. “Hollywood Jack” Vincennes (a slick Kevin Spacey) lives to hobnob with celebrities on the set of a Dragnet-like TV crime show. Curiously, Hanson found two other key actors Down Under. Guy Pearce (coming off his role as a drag queen in Australia’s Priscilla, Queen of the Desert) plays Edmund Exley, a straight-arrow police sergeant who gradually succumbs to the moral ambiguity of those around him. By contrast, Russell Crowe’s Officer Bud White first seems to be a thug in cop’s clothing, but reveals a gentler side when he falls in love with a call girl who’s a Veronica Lake lookalike, played by a memorable Kim Basinger. (This was the film that essentially marked the start of Crowe’s distinguished American movie career.)  Danny Da Vito, David Straithairn, and James Cromwell also have key roles. If, back in 1997. you had just become aware of Cromwell as the kindly Farmer Arthur Hoggett in Babe, you would surely be surprised to see his turnabout here.

 L.A. Confidential is frank in its depiction of a town essentially run by racists, pimps, and drug dealers. So it’s no surprise that there will be blood—lots of it. No one we see on screen is entirely good, but there’s a sort of moral justice at work, and we come to care about those who manage to leave the City of the Angels for a better life elsewhere. That’s exactly what James Ellroy himself did. He now makes his home in Colorado.

 The film was nominated for 9 Oscars, including Best Picture, but won only two—for Basinger’s performance and the film’s adapted screenplay. After all, this was the year of Titanic.

                               French Baroque Ladies' Room 

                                Los Angeles Theatre (1931) 

 

Touched by a Blue Angel

The fame of The Blue Angel and Marlene Dietrich’s seductive Lola Lola are so intertwined that it’s surprising to see that the 1930 film put only one name—that of male star Emil Jannings—above its title. I was also bemused to discover that this film, made in Germany by German director Josef von Sternberg, was simultaneously shot both in German and in English, to appeal to international audiences. It seems von Sternberg, by this time under contract to Paramount, was asked to return to Paramount’s German sister-studio, UFA, to direct Jannings in his first sound film. The then-unknown Dietrich was not the original choice to play a sexy nightclub performer, but was discovered by von Sternberg when he saw her singing in a cabaret revue. He quickly hired her, determined to groom her into the woman he knew she could become. It clearly worked: in an eerie parallel to the action within the film, Dietrich became an overnight star, while Jannings faded into oblivion.

 It’s also worth noting that von Sternberg ultimately became sexually involved with Dietrich, resulting in a nasty scandal involving his then-wife, Riza Royce. Following their contentious divorce, he and Dietrich would end up making six Hollywood films together between 1930 and 1935. (Blonde Venus and The Devil is a Woman were some of the titles.) But none of them garnered as much international acclaim as The Blue Angel, the archetypal story of a proud man brought to his knees by an ill-considered love.

 Jannings’ Professor Immanuel Rath is a rather prissy middle-aged Shakespeare scholar who looks down on the rowdy high school boys he teaches. Shocked when his students all seem obsessed with a certain visiting nightclub performer (they pass around suggestive postcard images of a scantily clad Dietrich), he heads for the club called The Blue Angel to see for himself what the fuss is about. When he hears her sing “Falling in Love Again,” he is thoroughly smitten. Somehow, after imbibing heavily, he ends up spending the night in Lola’s bed, and by morning he’s out of a job. Undaunted, he proposes marriage, and Lola—clearly a gal who can’t say no—first bursts into peals of laughter and then graciously accepts. Both at first seem delighted with their new marital state, but their life together hinges on traveling with the nightclub act. Lola remains the star, while the once-dignified Rath is transformed into a clownish sidekick to the show’s resident magician. When the troupe returns to the town where Rath once terrorized his students, audiences are eagerly awaiting them. To make matters worse, Lola now seems attracted to another swain. After all, in the words of her theme song, she “can’t help it.”

 Aside from the vivid performances, von Sternberg uses some of the tricks of German Expressionism to keep the audience enthralled. Sets depicting quaint German towns are stylized, and small plot details—like the early death of Professor Rath’s pet canary—are used with maximum symbolic effect. A sad clown seen backstage as part of Lola’s performing troupe foreshadows the professor’s own diminution into a clownish figure, a butt of jokes, when the magician cracks eggs over his head as spectators burst into gales of raucous laughter. Lola’s signature “Falling in Love Again” is heard twice in the film. Early on, it sounds wistful and girlish; near the film’s end the same song is delivered in a way that comes across as thoroughly heartless. In all, The Blue Angel is a bravura achievement, and one that von Sternberg (who later famously taught Jim Morrison at UCLA) sadly never equaled. 

 

The Shadow of a Doubt

I have no doubt that Harvey Weinstein deserves his long prison term for multiple sexual offenses  It’s shocking to me that a man with such a strong creative vision could behave so badly toward women over whom he had professional power. I would never ever dream of campaigning for his early release. Still, I look back fondly on the glory years of Miramax, the production and distribution company named after his and brother Bob’s parents, Max and Miriam. Miramax (which was founded in 1979 as an independent company but later became part of the Disney empire) took artistic chances on films that were thoughtful and sometimes bold. Like, in the early days, Pulp Fiction; sex, lies, and videotape; The Crying Game; Heavenly Creatures; and the Oscar-winning Shakespeare in Love. Today I miss the richness of popular English-language films like these.

 A later Miramax hit was Doubt (2008), based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning play by John Patrick Shanley. The 2004 stage play, set almost entirely within the walls of a Catholic church and parish school, featured only four actors. As the film’s director, Shanley opened up the story to include the down-to-earth Bronx neighborhood in which St. Nicholas is located. And he enlisted four of Hollywood’s finest actors: Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, and Viola Davis, all of whom were subsequently recognized with Oscar nominations for their roles. Shanley was nominated for his adapted screenplay too, but the Doubt won not a single statuette. (It was the year of Slumdog Millionaire, Benjamin Button, The Reader, and Milk. And Doubt, for all its artistic merit, was perhaps not a film that generated love.)

 Doubt (the stage version is titled Doubt: A Parable) is at base a clash between two powerful opposing figures. Father Brendan Flynn (Hoffman) is a youngish and liberal-minded cleric who’s respected within the church community. His take-no-prisoners adversary is the school’s principal, Sister Aloysius (Streep), who is zealous in enforcing her version of the truth. Prim and grim, she is a far cry from Streep’s glamorous Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada (2006), though in both films she wields power with an iron fist. (Miranda Priestly would not be caught dead wearing that terrible Sisters of Charity bonnet.) The clash between Sister Aloysius and Father Flynn evolves out of the priest’s apparently unorthodox friendship with the school’s single Black student, a young boy named Donald Miller. Aloysius sees nothing but evil in this boy-and-priest connection, and passes her suspicions on to the innocent but eager young nun played by Amy Adams. The highlight of the drama on both stage and screen is a confrontation between Sister Aloysius and Donald’s mother (Davis), who turns out to have her own unexpected reasons for accepting her son’s connection with the priest, whether or not it violates social and religious taboos.

 In some ways, Doubt is a story of the dangers of zealotry. Sister Aloysius herself admits that “in the pursuit of wrongdoing, one steps away from God." This view is reinforced by a late-in-the-film revelation that makes us further question Aloysius’s dominant role in this community. That being said, this is a work that (appropriately enough) ends with questions, not answers. I’ve read that the original 90-minute stage version generated an informal “second act” in which exiting theatregoers argued with one another about their interpretation of the events they’d seen play out on stage. The ending of the film is equally ambiguous—and well worth discussing.

 Too bad I can’t feel ambiguous about the guilt of Harvey Weinstein. But he surely knew how to produce a damn good movie.

 

 

 

Besson’s Fifth

Until recently, I was not aware of a Luc Besson sci-fi epic called The Fifth Element. Then, while listening to a local radio quiz program, I heard this flick enthusiastically mentioned. The premise of Go Fact Yourself is that each contestant chooses several areas of expertise, then is quizzed in detail about one of them. A recent contestant selected this film, praising it for getting her family through the stay-at-home months of the pandemic. Though science fiction is hardly my favorite genre, her passion for The Fifth Element got me interested. And I become even more so when a youngish friend admitted to having seen the film, during his growing-up years, at least six times.

 Besson, French-born, earned his spurs in the film industry via action hits like 1990’s La Femme Nikita. He released the (mostly) English-language The Fifth Element in 1997, using primarily American and British actors. Obviously it has attracted serious fans, but many critics were not impressed. In Variety, Todd McCarthy called it “a largely misfired European attempt to make an American-style sci-fi spectacular.” David Edelstein of Slate was even more emphatic: “"It may or may not be the worst movie ever made, but it is one of the most unhinged."^[

 Well, yes. With its comic-book sensibility, The Fifth Element may be wonderful to look at, but don’t expect it to make any sense. There are deeply mysterious scenes set (à la the Indiana Jones adventures) in a remote desert cavern, as well as glimpses of 23^rd century New York City, where taxicabs fly through the air, dodging gigantic office towers. In the middle of all of this is the effortlessly macho Bruce Willis as a sadsack cab driver who used to be a major in Earth’s Special Forces. Also on hand is the always interesting Gary Oldman as the sinister industrialist Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg.  Despite his very French given name, he speaks with a hushpuppies-and-magnolias accent, like that of Daniel Craig’s Detective Benoit Blanc in Knives Out, leaving me to wonder if distinguished British actors have a thing for the Deep South. Ian Holm is around as an enigmatic priest, as is Chris Tucker as an ultra-flamboyant talk show host.

 And we can hardly forget the Ukraine-born Milla Jovovich, playing a sort of outer-space creation who speaks no earthly language and wears very few clothes. She is, I’ve got to say, exactly the sort of symbolic extraterrestrial that a teenage boy might invent. Which makes sense, because Besson apparently dreamed up this entire story at age sixteen, although he had to wait twenty-two years to put it on  the big screen. The few females who populate the film—playing mostly flight attendants and MacDonalds employees—barely speak, but they have fabulous bodies set off by suggestively revealing costumes. (There’s only one woman with any real clout, and she’s a “big bruiser” type archly named Major Iceborg.)

 The Fifth Element is a great movie to watch on a widescreen TV in the wee hours. The plot hardly matters, verbal wit is rare, and if you drift off to sleep you basically won’t miss much. Suffice it to say that in this film the world is on the brink of disaster, but it all ends as happily as you would expect, with Willis and Jovovich pairing up to lead the heroics. Just exactly what a sixteen-year-old boy would want.

.Speaking of which, this is the second film I’ve recently seen in which the director ended up canoodling with the leading lady in real life. Which perhaps tells you something about directors.

 

“ANNE HATHAWAY IS ON BROADWAY”: The Overlap of Stage and Screen

Is Anne Hathaway, the Oscar-winning star of such beloved films as The Devil Wears Prada, really appearing in a current Broadway show? Well, not exactly. But this is the eye-catching headline on the back cover of a recent Playbill. It’s a clever ad campaign for a Broadway pop musical, & Juliet, in which Shakespeare’s much-neglected wife—also named Anne Hathaway—plays a featured role. The joke works because most theatregoers are also movie enthusiasts. And there’s frequent overlap between the two industries, as screen stars try on major Broadway roles, and the stage’s most beloved performers hope to immortalize their talents on film.

 Once upon a time, hit Broadway shows quickly wended their way to Hollywood. There they became even bigger hits because—by transferring their essence from stage to screen—they could draw upon much bigger audiences. Musicals enjoyed perhaps the biggest advantage from this stage-to-screen metamorphosis, partly because they could transport the viewer visually to a spectacular new place. Just think about the difference between The Sound of Music as play and film. I happen to be genuinely sorry that the Robert Wise/Julie Andrews movie adaptation of the Rogers and Hammerstein hit cut two important satirical songs that examine the Austrian mindset under the rise of Nazi ideology. Still, no stage version can possibly live up to the breathtaking grandeur of the Austrian Alps, as seen in the 1965 film. It of course was shot on location, all the better to show off the hills that are so fully alive in the hearts of our central characters.

 These days, though, a curious reversal is taking place. Original Broadway musicals are largely being supplanted by shows that have already proven their box-office potential by being based on hit films. (The idea, I suppose, is to add music, then stir.)  One of this year’s four Tony nominees for Best Original Musical was The Lost Boys, a musicalization of a kinky little 1987 film about young vampires on the prowl in Santa Cruz, California. On my recent trip to the Big Apple, I could not afford a pricey ticket for that apparent extravaganza. But I did manage to drop in on Death Becomes Her, now moving toward the end of a two-year run. The original Hollywood black comedy, about a magic potion that keeps vain women forever young and beautiful, was directed by Robert Zemeckis and headlined by Meryl Streep, Goldie Hawn, Bruce Willis, and Isabella Rossellini, It was a macabre triumph, thanks to its star power and some colorful special effects. And how was the stage musical? My fellow audience members seemed to love it, and it landed seven Tony nominations, including two for stars Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard. To be sure, it took home only one statuette, richly deserved, for its wildly imaginative costumes. But I found the music forgettable and the cast mostly trying much too hard to amuse us with their audacity. It seemed, in short, something of a spoof of a spoof. My advice: stick to the movie.

 One curious sidenote: Flower Drum Song, one of Rogers and Hammerstein’s lesser hits, opened on Broadway in 1958, and was filmed three years later. Boasting an all-Asian cast, it is set in San Francisco’s Chinatown where different generations struggle to reconcile their ancient traditions and modern American ways. Long regarded as potentially offensive, the show’s book has always seemed in need of a rewrite. Now it has one, by Chinese-American playwright David Henry Hwang, and it was a joy for me to see this charming musical (staged by L.A.’s East West Players) on stage once again. 

 

“Life Without Reservations”: Carlyn Frank Benjamin and the Ambassador Hotel

Yes, I remember the Ambassador Hotel, the noble L.A. edifice that dominated 24 acres just off Wilshire Boulevard from 1921 to 1989. I was there at least twice. When I graduated from junior high school, some of the more adventurous fourteen-year-olds took their dates to watch Louie Prima and Keely Smith sing and swing at the world-famous Cocoanut Grove supper-club. Then, in June of 1968, my parents and I thought it would be fun to drop in on Robert F. Kennedy’s campaign headquarters, just after he’d won big in the California presidential primary. The world knows what happened that night. RFK’s assassination has tainted our memories of the Ambassador ever since. It doubtless contributed to the hotel’s demise, and its ultimate replacement by a large public community school dedicated to Kennedy’s memory.

 A young girl named Carlyn Frank was hardly a casual visitor to the hotel. During perhaps its most glorious era, from 1921 to 1938, she lived on the premises while first her grandfather and then her father served as general manager. Her home from babyhood to age 17 was an idyllic bungalow, dubbed Rincon, that stood on the hotel grounds. (Doting hotel staff constructed a child-sized playhouse, so she and her sister could make cocoa in a tiny kitchen.) For 17 years young Carlyn explored every nook and cranny of the glamorous hotel, much as the legendary Eloise roved New York’s Plaza Hotel in the picture books of Kay Thompson.

 Carlyn’s Ambassador years marked the era when Los Angeles came into its own as the home of the American film industry.  The Ambassador was adjacent, after all, to the original Brown Derby restaurant, and located not far from major studios like Paramount. And so the hotel cultivated a glamorous image, one that attracted both Hollywood legends and wannabes. Carlyn’s father, Ben Frank, brought to the Ambassador such innovations as a zoo, a pitch-and-putt golf course, and an actual sand beach next to the swimming pool. Both he and her grandfather, Abe Frank, also loved staging special events that attracted the starstruck. One of Abe’s innovation at the Cocoanut Grove was the weekly Star Night, for which an onsite artisan crafted wax dolls closely modeled on the features of the female celebrity being honored. The beautifully dressed and coiffed dolls adorned every table, and each went home at evening’s end with a lucky guest.

 I know all this because, as an adult, Carlyn Frank Benjamin began writing a memoir, Life Without Reservations, that covered (along with her own growing-up years) the Ambassador and its legendary guests. These included in the early days Marion Davies, who rode a horse through the lobby, and Zelda Fitzgerald, who set her wardrobe on fire after a jealous row with Scott. Carlyn was too young to remember such antics, but did meet Charles Lindbergh, watched Olympic champions train in the hotel pool, and frequently (while eating her own lunch) glimpsed a hungover Bing Crosby munching a turkey sandwich in the hotel coffee shop. The memoir was left behind when Benjamin passed away in 2017; she considered it incomplete, but it also chronicled her adult life as the wife of a famous Hollywood talent agent who brought celebrities like Laurence Olivier into their Brentwood home for casual fun and games. Daughter Lisa Benjamin Gilmour has fulfilled a promise to finish the book, adding scores of vintage photos and her own memories of her vibrant and civic-minded mom. Life Without Reservations: Growing Up at the Famed Ambassador Hotel 1921-1938 is a fascinating record of a time and place that now seem far, far away.

 The book’s photo-rich website is www.lifewithoutreservations.net, and of course it’s available through Amazon.

 

 

“No People Like Show People”: The 2026 Tony Awards

Like most people with Hollywood ties, I love theatre. Since I’ve been old enough to sit through a full-length play, I’ve always adored that moment with the stage curtain opens and the magic begins, right before my eyes. That’s why I’ve always had mixed emotions about the televised Antoinette Perry Awards, which for 79 years have been saluting the best that Broadway has to offer. It fascinates me that this elaborate broadcast, traditionally staged at the legendary Radio City Music Hall, takes pains to invite hosts and presenters whose credentials are more screen than stage. This year’s host, the pop singer Pink, was hardly an exception. She candidly admitted that she herself has never trod the Broadway boards, although one of her songs does show up in the jukebox musical & Juliet. Pink’s hosting skills during the Tonys were certainly acceptable—she modeled elaborate costumes and performed a fancy high-wire stunt emulating the famous Mary Martin version of Peter Pan—but she brought to the evening nothing truly special.  

 It wasn’t just presenters (like Billy Crystal and Paul Rudd) who seemed to need Hollywood cred to be noticed. TV cameras consistently picked out such audience members as Annette Bening for close-ups. But of greatest concern is the fact that the majority of the nominees for Best New Musical were derived from screen hits. Musicals used to be the lifeblood of Broadway theatre, drawing in visitors eager to tap their toes to original showtunes. These days, though, most musicals make it to Broadway because they have had a previous incarnation as a cinematic hit. That’s the case with the much-nominated The Lost Boys, the present-day vampire story that ended up with four Tonys, notably for a spectacular set design. The winner in this year’s Best New Musical category turned out to be Schmigadoon!, a wacky parody of traditional musicals that owes much of its plotting to (of course) Lerner & Loewe’s  Brigadoon, in which two modern travelers stumble upon a village that time forgot. (From what I could see of the featured number on the Tony broadcast, Schmigadoon! can also claim Meredith Willson’s beloved The Music Man as an important musical inspiration.) Claiming her statuette, one of Schmigmadoon’s Broadway producers explicitly thanked Apple TV+, which had introduced the parody-musical as a wacky series back in 2021. It played on Apple TV+ for two years, accruing many fans. But a potential third season was cancelled, allowing the show’s creators to head for Broadway and the evening’s most hyped award.

 In the Best New Musical category, a third candidate was Titanique, not a stage version of James Cameron’s megahit film, Titanic, but rather an outrageous spoof of it, in which the familiar songs of Celine Dion are featured and Dion herself becomes a participant in the action. In the course of a peripatetic history, Titanique first surfaced in Los Angeles, then crossed the country for a successful Off-Broadway run before sailing on to the West End and finally Broadway. But it sank, alas, at the Tonys. The fourth and final Best New Musical contender was a modest original—thank goodness!—with the intriguing title Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York).  It features a mere two actors and (for a change) brand-new music by a British writing team.

 I should also mention that the current Broadway season is big on outrageously kinky role-playing: see the revival of The Rocky Horror Show (best known for its midnight-movie version) and a drag-friendly updating of Cats subtitled The Jellicle Ball. To me, all this makes the folksy Schmigadoon! sound better and better.

 

Shooting Off My Mouth About “Young Guns”

Recently I’ve been catching up on classic films about young men in trouble. Perhaps I’ve been inspired by the spectacular new TV production of Lord of the Flies. In any case, I’ve now seen  Stand by Me (1985), River’s Edge (1986), and The Lost Boys (1987), the last of which has just become a Broadway musical hit.  Each of these flicks features young and mostly white males who are still children—or barely out of childhood—cut off from the adults in their lives and learning to cope with their world on the most violent terms.

  In 1988 along came Young Guns, which is often rather sneeringly referred to as a Brat Pack western. The designation of course refers mostly to a cluster of young actors (among them Molly Ringwald, Rob Lowe, and Demi Moore) who starred in the teen angst movies written and directed by John Hughes in this era. The young actors reportedly hated the “brat pack” designation, which came out of David Blum’s 1985 story in New York magazine in the wake of Hughes’ St. Elmo’s Fire. Emilio Estevez, who had figured prominently in the Blum piece, is the central figure in Young Guns, playing an embellished version of the Old West’s William Bonney, aka Billy the Kid.

 To be honest, this is not a story that can easily be tracked. But it apparently takes off from actual historic events: a young Englishman named John Tunstall came to Santa Fe in 1876 to get into the cattle business. His success as a rancher and store-owner put him at odds with local interests, and he was eventually murdered. In the film Tunstall (played by the always interesting Terence Stamp) is an older man, serving as a father figure to a number of wayward teenagers who work for him and are tutored by him in reading and social graces. After his sudden death, they dub themselves The Regulators, and are briefly deputized to take down his killers. But corrupt forces in the vicinity soon have them on the run.

 Estevez’s film role as Billy the Kid is the most interesting: he’s smart, brash, and always itching for a fight. Also memorable is Kiefer Sutherland, who—though scary indeed in Stand by Me and The Lost Boys—here plays a character with a sentimental side. (As “Doc,” he’s a gunslinger who’s also a would-be poet. Eventually he rescues a pretty Chinese concubine who’s being kept in thrall by the evil Jack Palance. Yes, it’s that kind of movie.) Smaller roles are filled by Estevez’s real-life brother Charlie Sheen, by Lou Diamond Phillips (as the all-purpose Native American in the gang), by Dermot Mulroney as the slob of the group, and by Casey Siemaszko as a love-sick gang member who makes some unfortunate choices. Some veteran actors, including Brian Keith, Terry O’Quinn, and Patrick Wayne (yes, he’s John’s son), also have key roles in the proceedings.

 As action movies go, this one has much to recommend it. There are a lot of horses, a lot of bad guys, and a lot of blood to be shed in picturesque outdoor surroundings. The climactic siege of a house to which Billy and the gang have been lured contains some dramatic moments, though it doesn’t fully match up with the actual historical episode. I was rather taken, in fact, by the filming of this episode: the up-close and slo-mo camera work here serves, I’m convinced, to glamorize violence, and to make us eager for more. Which is why there was a lucrative 1990 sequel, and talk of other sequels to come.  

 

 

Skirting the River’s Edge

At first I had River’s Edge confused with The Lost Boys, which came out a year later, in 1987. Both are set in California towns with a great deal of wild scenic beauty. (River’s Edge was shot in the Sacramento area, while The Lost Boys famously takes place in Santa Cruz, renamed Santa Carla for filming purposes.) Both involve packs of wild young men (and a few young women) who decisively turn their backs on conventional middle-class morality.  Both showcase fractured family units, and give juicy oldster roles to Hollywood veterans (Dennis Hopper, Barnard Hughes) while also featuring attractive young newcomers (Crispin Glover, Keanu Reeves, Jason Patric, Kiefer Sutherland). Both contain material that can surely be considered disturbing. Both were shot on low budgets, but made a fair amount of money at the box office.

 One big difference, though: The Lost Boys (now a musical hit on Broadway) is about vampires. The film’s supernatural element, along with some particularly eccentric characters—like the vampire-hunting Frog brothers—ensure that audiences will chuckle as well as shiver.  In River’s Edge, though, there’s no such release from the film’s built-up tension. It opens with an androgynous looking pre-teen flinging a doll into a river. (It turns out he’s figured out a great way to torment his little sister.) From there we move to another spot at the river’s edge, where a young man stands shell-shocked over the naked corpse of the co-ed he’s just strangled to death, because (as he later explained) she was talking shit.  

Though the film’s main characters are mostly male, their treatment of girls and women is central to the story. Some, like the hyperkinetic Layne (Glover) seem to have no use at all for the female of the species. Layne is overtly excited by the killing, and takes it as his mission to protect the killer. The physically and mentally wounded druggie played by Hopper cherishes a life-sized sex doll who eerily resembles the dead girl. Reeves’ character, Matt, is the only central male figure who makes a choice to do the right thing, though this leads to him being harassed—and accused of participating in the crime—by a particularly nasty local cop.

 Authority figures in River’s Edge don’t come off much better than the young. There’s that malicious cop, first of all, who is clearly a bully and a sadist. A youngish high school social studies teacher thinks he’s reaching his young charges by romanticizing the political activism of the Sixties, but he doesn’t have a clue as to what they’re thinking.  Most of the film’s young men don’t seem to have intact families, or any families at all. Matt’s mother, Madeleine, is an attractive nurse who does show some concern about the welfare of her brood, but she’s also shacking up with an idler who clearly thinks the kids are a nuisance. Madeleine, like the other parents we see, can merely helplessly shrug her shoulders when her youngsters stay out till all hours, or fail to come home at all.

 Reeves’ Matt, as the one young man with something of a conscience, is rewarded by the opportunity to hook up with the prettiest of the gang’s gal pals, played by Ione Skye. (This was her first film, and—as the daughter of the singer Donovan—she was still using her surname, Leitch, in her billing. It would be two years before she became everyone’s dream girl in Say Anything.) But even the nicest of the young people in this film are not so very nice. If you like your films dark, this one’s for you!

 

Climbing The 39 Steps

 The great Alfred Hitchcock directed his first film in 1922. He started in the silent era, and most of his early efforts have been lost. By 1935, when he premiered The 39 Steps, he was no novice, but it would take several more years before he transferred his macabre vision of life from English to Hollywood soundstages.

 I first knew The 39 Steps as a remarkably silly stage production that showed up on Broadway circa 2008 after a successful British run. The hard-working cast of four played all the roles in this espionage thriller, and elaborate scenic effects (like a working railway train) were hilariously worked into the production. But Hitchcock’s original film (loosely based on a 1915 novel) takes itself a bit more seriously. This despite the fact that the mordant Hitchcock wit is very much in evidence.

 One key fact about The 39 Steps is how much it became a template for later Hitchcock masterworks like North by Northwest. It deals with matters of life and death, but for most of the film the tone is relatively light. Except, of course, when a mysterious lady to whom Richard Hannay gives shelter in his London flat ends up dead as a door-nail the next morning, with a knife sticking out of her back. Hannay, played by the dapper Robert Donat, is very much a precursor for Cary Grant and the other actors who’ve played Hitchcock’s “wrong man” roles. Everyone thinks he’s a murderer, which is why he has to flee from London to the Scottish highlands. But in fact he finds himself more and more embroiled in a scheme that’s never entirely clear, though it seems to involve the sending of super-modern aircraft plans to an enemy nation. (The threat of impending war in Europe understandably hangs over the film.) It’s been said that this aircraft can be considered an early Hitchcock McGuffin—this being a Hitchcock-named thingumajig that everyone chases after, thus providing the engine for a film’s plot.  

 Donat, as Richard Hannay, manages to keep things light, even while being chased by everyone under the sun. Eventually there’s a woman—Madeleine Carroll as perhaps the first Hitchcock blonde—who first rebuffs our hero and then, of course, succumbs to his charm, in the course of a priceless scene in which the two (handcuffed together by thugs claiming to be police officers) have to pose as runaway lovers at a Scottish country inn. There are also some wonderful train scenes (Hitchcock clearly adored trains), in which Hannay tries not to attract attention while the  two businessmen in his compartment discuss at length the latest styles in women’s undergarments.

 But it’s not all fun and games. There are additional threats of violence, of course, and also an extraordinarily poignant scene in which Hannay seeks shelter at a farmhouse in the Scottish countryside. His host for the evening is a cranky old coot who will put him up, for a fee, but certainly doesn’t trust him. When Hannay enters the rustic home, he sees an attractive young woman, who turns out to be not the coot’s daughter but his wife. Peggy Ashcroft, in this small but significant role, clearly longs for Hannay and the big-city world he represents. In the wee hours, as his adversaries close in on him, she helps him to escape, giving him her husband’s warm coat . . .  which leads to a clever plot-twist. But the result for her is her husband’s wrath, and a vicious slap we hear though we don’t see it. (Not everything in Hitchcock is a joke.)

 

 

Paradise Lost: “Lord of the Flies”

The British seem to have a special talent for creating TV miniseries. I was awed (as were most Emmy voters) by last year’s Adolescence. So when I heard that Jack Thorne, who had created that show along with Stephen Graham, was behind a new BBC adaptation of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, I had to watch.

 Like most in my age group, I read Golding’s 1954 magnum opus when I too was an adolescent. This story of young British boys stranded on a tropical island introduced all of us to the darker side of human nature. Lord of the Flies can be viewed as a canny parable of the fall of civilization. At first the pre-adolescent English boys, survivors of a plane crash that has wiped out their teachers and guardians, seem to have found themselves in a paradise: lush foliage, lots of fruit and fresh water, no obvious danger. But a crisis is brewing: while some of the boys, led by the sturdy and rational Ralph, are ready to accept a sensible form of self-government, others look to the mercurial Jack for leadership. And Jack, drunk on his own power, obliges by dividing the castaways into friends and enemies. Brutality ensues. (If any of this sounds like the current American political scene, I suspect that’s not an accident.)

 There have been films made of Golding’s novel, but I’ve never seen them. I’m also told that Yellowjackets, the recent Showtime miniseries, about a stranded girls’ soccer team, was directly influenced by Golding’s timeless work. What I can say is that the new BBC series, available now on Netflix, is well worth watching. Like Adolescence, it’s presented in four parts, with each episode focusing on one of the central boys. The first features the hapless Piggy who has accepted his lot in life as the butt of everyone’s jokes. Piggy, as his nickname implies, is short, pudgy, and slightly dazed-looking (he wears thick glasses that play an important role in the story). But despite the unfortunate nickname, Piggy is by no means stupid. He’s the most analytic of the boys, and one of the most generous, taking it as his obligation to look after the “littl’uns” who can’t fend for themselves. In subsequent episodes we focus on the increasingly maniacal Jack and on poor, addled Simon, who begins as Jack’s protector but then finds himself increasingly isolated. The final episode is dedicated to Ralph, a natural leader forced into an awkward and even dangerous position. Who eventually gets off the island? That’s not for me to say.

 This Lord of the Flies was filmed on location in Malaysia, and the beauty of the surroundings plays an important role in the drama. One of its most arresting elements—the fact that trees and other foliage sometimes take on eerie shades of red—turns out to be explained by practical considerations. Because of rules designed to protect child performers, there could be no filming after dark. So cameras were sometimes outfitted with infrared filters for day-for-night shooting. The result was a phantasmagoric color palette well suited to such a nightmarish tale, in which reality and fantasy become inevitably fused.

 A behind-the-scenes video suggests that the children in this cast—most of them new to professional filmmaking—came through their on-camera ordeal with their values intact. (Phew!) But it’s striking that the one cast member with a Wikipedia entry is Lox  Pratt, who will follow up his creepy performance as Jack by playing Draco Malfoy, boy bully, in the upcoming Harry Potter TV series. Clearly it pays to be evil. 

 

Biography at the Movies

I’ll soon be taking a bite of the Big Apple. The occasion is the annual conference of Biographers International Organization, a group that came into being to serve the needs of both active biographers and those interested in the field of biography. Since 2010 there have been (in addition to regular newsletters and Zoom events) annual BIO conferences, mostly in New York City but sometimes in outposts like Boston, DC, Richmond, and even Los Angeles. Some attendees merely want advice on telling family stories; others are experienced writers and even recipients of major awards. My BIO pal Amanda Vaill just won this year’s Pulitzer for Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution.

 I don’t know if there’s any hope of Angelica and Elizabeth Schuyler showing up at the movies anytime soon. (The fact that they’re both major figures in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton might surely get producer-types interested.) But I do know there’s a long tradition of concocting films about famous historical figures. Decades ago, it was considered acceptable to wrestle the biographical facts about a celebrity —whether a composer, a scientist, or a politician—to conform to Hollywood’s idea of an inspiring life story. Now I’d like to think we’re trying harder to be true to actual reality. But in any case, actors love portraying great figures of the past. If you look at lists of Oscar-winning performances, you’ll note there’s a lot of Academy love for stars able to get under the skin of the real people who helped create our world. See, in this century alone, Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill (Darkest Hour), Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Hawking (The Theory of Everything), Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln (Lincoln), Philip Seymour Hoffman as Truman Capote (Capote), and Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles (Ray).

 This enthusiasm for biographical films has paid major dividends for members of BIO. And several  I know personally have been thrilled by the care with which the motion picture industry has transmitted their work to the screen. BIO stalwart Kai Bird is probably still basking in the glow of Oppenheimer, the 2023 Oscar winner based on his and Martin J. Sherwin’s deeply researched American Prometheus. Jack El-Hai was pleased with last year’s Nuremberg, which developed out of his gripping historical study, The Nazi and the Psychiatrist. When a BIO honoree, Candace Millard, published a 2011 historical work called Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President, I  doubt she thought Hollywood would come calling. But someone at Netflix got involved, resulting in last year’s fascinating four-part miniseries, Death by Lightning, in which we follow the tragic trajectory of a nineteenth-century U.S. president, James A. Garfield, and his soon-to-be assassin, Charles J. Guiteau. This four-part series is too new to have come up for Emmy consideration, but many other awards-giving bodies have recognized the show’s excellence, with particular attention paid to lead actors Michael Shannon (as the appealingly idealistic Garfield) and Matthew Macfadyen (as the maddening and probably mad Guiteau).

 There is one honor that Death by Lightning has already won. Each spring, since 1988, the scholars behind the USC Scripter Awards have chosen the year’s best film adaptation of a work in print. Uniquely, at an awards ceremony held not long before Oscar night, both the screenwriter and the author of the original published work gain recognition  In 2016, USC added an award for episodic television series, and so Millard was in the winner’s circle when the TV Scripter went to her as well as to screenwriter Mike Makowsky. Bravo to them both.   

 

The joys and the sadness of youth: “Stand by Me”

These days I suspect Stand By Me is best known as a song, one of those ageless ballads with which almost everyone can connect. It’s a paean to loyalty and friendship, which of course makes it perfect for campfire singalongs. It was recorded in 1961 by Ben E. King, who co-wrote it along with the invaluable popsters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. When I hear “Stand by Me,” it puts me in a mellow mood, remembering back to memories—both happy and sad—of my own past.

 Today it also revives in me bittersweet memories of the late director Rob Reiner, for whom this was an early film project, just after This is Spinal Tap (1984) and just before The Princess Bride (1987). Based on a novella by horrormeister Stephen King, Stand by Me recounts the story of four young small-town pals who set out on a trek to see a dead body. (Their town, Castle Rock, would become the name of Reiner's own production company.

 The four leads were played by talented young actors just coming into their own. In the story, they are pals largely because all of them suffer from various forms of trauma. Sensitive Gordie (Wil Wheaton) is mourning the loss of his older brother, his parents’ favorite, in an accident. Chris (River Phoenix) is used to having his natural intelligence and leadership qualities overlooked because he comes from a family of scofflaws and ne’er-do-wells. Teddy (Corey Feldman) is the oddball son of an Army vet with serious mental issues. Vern (Jerry O’Connell) is a good kid, but the doofus of the group. Most of the film details their overnight trek to locate the body of a missing classmate who apparently was hit by a train. They figure that if they announce to the world where the body can be found, they will be accepted as heroes.

 What they aren’t counting on is the gang of roving teens, led by the always scary Kiefer Sutherland, who have their own dibs on the body. Sutherland and his cronies are just one of the jeopardies the four pals need to face down. There are leeches in the local stream, and very real danger from an oncoming locomotive. The four are also grappling with impending maturity and their own challenging pasts. What happens to them in the long run is established by the film’s narrator (Richard Dreyfuss) who opens and closes Stand by Me. Once one of the four, he’s now an established writer retelling his own story.  

 One of the things that makes Stand by Me fascinating to today’s viewers is the real-life fate of those involved. Kiefer Stuherland, of course, has had a rich acting career that rivals the success once enjoyed by his late father, Donald. Richard Dreyfuss has starred in blockbusters (yes, Jaws!) and won an Oscar for The Goodbye Girl. John Cusack, who plays Gordie’s older brother in some brief flashbacks, became beloved for his romantic turn in Say Anything.

 For the film’s four main boys, career success has been a sometime thing. Jerry O’Connell has had a long career but few standout roles. Wil Wheaton now mostly limits himself to voiceover work. The irrepressible Corey Feldman still performs, at 54, but has struggled with drug and alcohol abuse. River Phoenix, a 1988 Oscar nominee for Running on Empty, died of a drug overdose in 1993, at age 23. 

 And of course Rob Reiner himself died on December 14, 2025 when he and wife Michele were allegedly stabbed to death by their son Nick. Life can sometimes be very, very sad.

 

 

 

Fame—I’m Gonna Live Forever (“The Assassination of Jesse James . . . “)

The Western has never been my favorite film genre. Personally speaking, I‘m not much enthralled by horses and guns. But when one of my screenwriting students (someone whose tastes run from science-fiction to Pixar) called The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford his number-one film of all time, my curiosity was roused.

 What I discovered is that this 2007 film, written and directed by an Aussie named Andrew Dominik, has not had an easy history. After first, things seemed to be going well.  Based on a 1973 novel,  the project attracted the attention of Brad Pitt, who served as a producer along with Ridley Scott and others, while also taking on the Jesse James part.. Casey Affleck was cast in the essential role of Robert Ford, known to history as James’ killer. Others in the cast included the noted character actors Sam Rockwell, Sam Shepard, and Jeremy Renner, along with Mary-Louise Parker and Zooey Deschanel.  (Fun fact: political maven James Carville is briefly visible as the Governor of Missouri.)  The great Roger Deakins worked his magic as the film’s cinematographer, making the wintery Old West (played in the movie by the Canadian outback) look gorgeous indeed, while evoking a grim sense of foreboding. 

 But the money men in Hollywood wanted a film with less brooding and more action; they were not about to accept a director’s cut that lasted more than three hours. When the film finally surfaced, critics were impressed, but audiences were largely not. Though there were Oscar nominations for Affleck’s performance and Deakins’ camera work, the movie was a bomb at the box office.

 I’m not sure how the DVD I watched compares to the theatrical version. Yes, the film is long (160 minutes) and it’s sometimes hard to keep track of all the complex relationships within Jesse James’ criminal band, but I was never in the least bored. One of the film’s glories is its complex characterizations, exploring men who are both violent and gentle, cocky and self-loathing, greedy and generous. The focus is on the period in which James is a national figure known for daring exploits that include train robbery and lots of killings. At times he seems a happy man, enjoying a loving family and the adulation of young admirers. Elsewhere, he appears to be restless and almost suicidal. As for the nineteen-year-old Robert (“Bob”) Ford, he is awed by James’ exploits and thrilled by the opportunity to be part of the gang surrounding his hero. That is, until he decides, for several complex reasons, to kill the great man. (Ford’s emotional state can’t help reminding me of Mark David Chapman, whose hero-worship of John Lennon led to Lennon’s shocking 1980 murder.) 

 In the film, the killing of Jesse James itself sparked all sort of questions in me. Ford’s actions are ambiguous enough that it’s not even entirely clear that he’s the successful shooter. (I watched that scene twice, and I’m still not sure exactly what happened.)  What is definitely clear is that even in death Jesse James had far more power than Robert Ford. His dead body was photographed, and copies sold to eager purchasers all over the country. After which, on a bed of ice, his corpse was shipped out for public display to a fascinated (and ticket-buying) public. Meanwhile, looking for their own slice of the pie, Bob Ford and older brother Charles (Rockwell) booked themselves into theatres where they clumsily re-enacted the shooting, in front of audiences that refused to be impressed. Both brothers ultimately reached bad ends, drawing no attention whatever from the fickle public.  

 

The Philadelphia (and Newport, Rhode Island) Story

High Society (1956) promises fun at the movies. And it delivers. This spritely screwball musical stars Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, both of whose characters are at least somewhat in love with an elegant heiress, Tracy Lord, played by the blonde and beautiful Grace Kelly. This was to be Kelly’s very last movie role before she married a real-life Prince Charming and became Princess Grace of Monaco. Rounding out the cast are the acerbic Celeste Holm and the delightfully ebullient Louis Armstrong. The setting is ritzy Newport, Rhode Island, where the central characters live in posh mansions, surrounded by fawning retainers.  

 Armstrong’s presence is explained by the fact that there’s a jazz festival in the vicinity. He acts as a kind of narrator to open and close the film; he also memorably duets with Crosby on the up-tempo "Now You Has Jazz.” In this story, Crosby plays  C. K. Dexter Haven, a well-heeled singer/composer who is Tracy Lord’s neighbor, as well as her former husband. Though they were once deeply attached, and shared a romantic honeymoon aboard a yacht called the “True Love,” affection has turned to loathing (on Tracy’s part, at least), followed by an acrimonious divorce. Now Tracy is on the brink of marrying a staid businessman, and Dex wanders over to observe the hubbub. You see, C. K. Dexter Haven has (in his relaxed way) never quite gotten over Tracy, and he’s hanging around to check on what his former wife is up to.

 Also in residence on the wedding weekend are a magazine journalist (Sinatra) and his photographer sidekick (Holm), determined to get a scoop on this big society event. Everything goes haywire on the night before the nuptials, when Tracy gets drunk and Sinatra’s character gallantly comes to her rescue.

 The Cole Porter ditties (including the romantic hit, “True Love” and a nifty Crosby/Sinatra duet) are appealing, and there are no false notes among the performers. Still, seeing High Society again after many years, I became convinced that there was a better version of this tale to be found. And so, of course, there is. Back in 1940, the great George Cukor directed The Philadelphia Story, based on a Philip Barry stage hit that starred Katharine Hepburn. Hepburn’s Hollywood career had recently been foundering, and so she bought the play’s film rights in order to reintroduce herself to the moviegoing public. It worked magnificently well, especially since Cukor invited two of the era’s brightest male stars, Cary Grant and James Stewart, to play the main men in her life., If Hoboken’s rough-and-tumble Frank Sinatra is amusing when he romances the soignée Grace Kelly in and around her estate’s swimming pool, imagine how much funnier it is when aw-shucks Jimmy Stewart pitches woo to the imperious Hepburn. And of course Cary Grant is Cary Grant, effortlessly suave and just the fellow to tame this particular shrew. What we love about Katharine Hepburn is how wonderfully she plays a woman who is absolutely wrong about pretty much everything. Seeing her get her comeuppance is a delight for those of us who admire strong women but also place great stock in happily-ever-after.

 F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby, insisted that the very rich “are different from you and me.” To which his pal Ernest Hemingway wryly reposted, “Yes, they have more money.” Movie fans, particularly in the years coming out of the Great Depression, preferred to think that—despite all their riches—the wealthy could be as foolish as those of us with emptier pockets. The Philadelphia Story certainly proves this is so.   

 

Carlos Castaneda: Tricking the Reader and the Filmmaker

When I attended college, Carlos Castaneda was a very big deal indeed. As a student of anthropology at my very own school, UCLA, Castaneda had published The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. This 1968 book, which earned a tidy fortune for the University of California Press, was billed as a work of non-fiction, in which a budding anthropologist travels to Mexico and encounters a shaman who instructs him in how to unlock the secrets of the universe. Anyone with a mystical bent (and there were lots of those people around in the Sixties) quickly climbed onto the Castenada bandwagon. Before leaving this mortal sphere in 1998—apparently from cancer, though this was not publicly acknowledged—he published abut ten books and accumulated a large and very loyal group of followers. Some of them disappeared at the time of his demise and were never seen again.

 From the beginning, some scholars doubted the veracity of Castaneda’s claims, though the power of his storytelling was never disputed. As time passed, there was an increasing sense that his works were pure fiction—and that some of his most dramatic anecdotes were plagiarized from a variety of sources. For decades, novelist Ru Marshall has been working on a Castaneda biography with a goal of sorting out the truth of Castaneda’s eventful life. One of my favorite groups, Biographers International Organization, granted Marshall the Hazel Rowley Prize for this ambitious biography-in-progress. It’s out now, under the title American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda. Early reviews have been stellar: Publishers Weekly has praised Marshall for combining “a colorful account of Castaneda’s sly triumphs with shrewd analysis of the toxic psychodramas by which he overawed his followers. . . . In the portrait that emerges, Castaneda appears as captivating as Don Juan himself—a principal architect, for all his chicanery, of modern pop spirituality. This enthralls."

 Marshall was kind enough to send me an advance copy of American Trickster, partly because we’d both had a regrettable history with the University of California Press and partly because of my film background. It seems Castaneda had a lifelong passion for movies, particularly vampire and sci-fi flicks like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Quite surprisingly, he chose Rosemary’s Baby as the first film he ever screened for his five-year-old adopted son. He also relished chop-socky epics, with Jackie Chan and the films of John Woo being particular favorites. Hollywood, in turn, combed his writings for inspiration. George Lucas, for one, borrowed for Star Wars some of the father/son and mentor/acolyte dynamic revealed in Castaneda’s books  

 One of the most striking chapters in American Trickster involves the great Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini, whose most celebrated works (like La Strada, Nights of Cabiria, and 81/2) appeared before 1970. By the 1980s, Fellini became obsessed with the idea of filming Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan. He finally made contact with the author in 1984, and there evolved a plan to meet in the Sonoran desert for a close encounter with the shaman himself. But after elaborate preparation, a series of mysterious warning messages scared off Fellini and his growing entourage. The film was never made.

 Regarding Fellini, whom he calls “the master fantasist,” Marshall admits “some have speculated that he was the one behind the mysterious calls, the strange messages. But all the evidence points toward Carlos.”  Marshall’s conviction is that the warnings and weird demands received by Fellini and company were dreamed up by Carlos the trickster, who had no intention of allowing his most famous book to be filmed by anyone at all. 

 

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.