Sharks, Sirens, and Other Hollywood Icons

 

I’m lucky indeed to live in a place where movies are part of the landscape. And I’m doubly lucky because I’m a member of the Motion Picture Academy’s new museum, which takes pride in investigating the culture of movies from every angle. Since its opening in 2021, I’ve been to the Academy Museum multiple times, exploring movies in terms of their artistry, their technological mastery, and their impact upon world culture.

 The Academy Museum hardly ignores the motion pictures that represent foreign lands. I remember an exhibit vividly showing off key clips from the audacious Spanish writer/director Pedro Almodóvar. Currently, there’s a lovely tribute to Hayao Miyazaki’s charming animated Ponyo, as well as an in-depth look at the career of Korean auteur Bong Joon Ho, the brilliant satirist behind Okja and the Oscar-winning Parasite.   

 Still, the museum is fundamentally in and of Hollywood, and so you can rightly expect that many exhibits will focus on the men and women of the Hollywood studio system. (A newish permanent exhibit highlights the building of studio lots in the still-wide-open Southern California landscape, as well as the background of the men—several of them immigrants—who arrived in town with a gleam in their eyes and began to create an industry.) And some of the museum’s most lavish exhibits delve into the making of Hollywood’s greatest hits as well as the careers of Hollywood’s most indelible stars.

 Set to close soon is an appropriately massive  exhibit on the making and marketing of Jaws. (No surprise that this blockbuster is given star treatment, given that its director—Steven Spielberg—has been a generous supporter of the museum since its inception. And the surviving 25-foot fiberglass model of the film’s arch-villain, Bruce the Shark, permanently hangs over the museum’s escalator to give visitors a quick thrill.)  It was fascinating to discover how the timely improvisation of the three central actors helped bring to life Peter Benchley’s novel, but I equally enjoyed my glimpses of the film’s global marketing campaign. It featured  Jaws foreign language posters (the one from Japan, riffing on a hugely famous Hokusai woodblock print, is particularly clever) as well as zany collectors’ items like a shark-shaped souvenir cup with a straw that looks like a hapless swimmer.

 Though Jaws is going bye-bye, there’s a new and extensive salute to Marilyn Monroe, Hollywood Icon. For those who associate Monroe solely with her sexy role in Some Like It Hot or with the gossip surrounding her connection with President John F. Kennedy, it’s refreshing to focus in on other aspects of her talents. Though she certainly nourished her siren image, the off-screen Monroe was a serious reader who worked hard to polish her dramatic skills. The exhibit includes, along with some fabulous spangled gowns, the casual streetwear she preferred when she was not in front of the cameras. By happenstance, I’d just re-watched The Seven Year Itch, the (slightly toned-down) film version of a naughty Broadway hit about a middle-aged husband—home alone for the summer—who fantasizes abut the sexy young woman living upstairs. Tom Ewell, a terrifically average-looking comic actor, was the male lead on both stage and screen. In the film version, the dream girl was played by Monroe, as a charming though slightly dizzy blonde languishing in the heat of her top-floor digs. This is the film in which her flouncy white dress billows up when she stands over a subway grate. But the museum also displays the modest pink pjs she wears when invited downstairs for a nightcap, thus crushing Ewell’s erotic expectations.

 

Japanese "woodblock" ad for "Jaws"

Marilyn's PJs in "The Seven Year Itch"  

 

Hitchcock: Man and Myth

Alfred Hitchcock is hardly filmdom’s forgotten man. Although Hitchcock passed from the scene in 1980, every year seems to bring forth another few books about his films and his life. One of the latest, from University Press of Kentucky, is A Century of Hitchcock: The Man, The Myths, The Legacy by British filmmaker Tony Lee Moral. Moral, who poses in his book jacket author-photo with a vicious-looking crow on his arm, has previously published studies of both Hitchcock’s Marnie and The Birds. This new Moral work goes back to the beginning, showing Hitchcock developing his filmmaking talents among the German Expressionist. Still, Moral spends the bulk of his time on the late Hollywood Hitchcock, especially on his fraught relationship with anointed star-in-the-making Tippi Hedren.

 The interaction between Hitchcock and Hedren was clearly complex. Once the exquisite Grace Kelly had departed for Monaco, there to take the throne as Princess Grace, Hitchcock was casting around for a new leading lady. There’s not much discussion of why such later Hitchcock blondes as Doris Day (The Man Who Knew Too Much), Kim Novak (Vertigo), and Eva Marie Saint (North by Northwest) didn’t entirely fill the bill. But Hickock was apparently after a Hollywood newcomer whom he could mold to his own aesthetic specifications. He found Hedren, a successful New York cover-girl model, while watching a TV commercial for a diet drink. Their first project together, The Birds (1963), proved to be a physical and emotional challenge for the newcomer. But the film’s massive box-office success led to Hedren being given another opportunity, this time for the title role in Hitchcock’s Marnie. This 1964 film, with its lurid sexual subtext, earned mixed reviews and box-office earnings (though it has been rediscovered by critics since). But ultimately tension between director and star led to a break in their relationship, and Hedren never acted for Hitchcock again. In fact, she was later to claim that he actively worked to sabotage her future film career.

 Enter Donald Spoto, a young scholar and film critic who began by idolizing Hitchcock. (His first book, The Art of Alfred Hitchcock, was published in 1976).) Though, while teaching in Los Angeles,  he got to meet his idol, Moral posits that Spoto was disappointed not to be able to establish a closer connection. Ultimately, after meeting Tippi Hedren, Spoto published a sensational second book, 1983’s The Dark Side of Genius, which explores what he sees as Hitchcock’s bad behavior toward Hedren and other actresses. He was to expand on this theme once again in 2008’s Spellbound by Beauty: Alfred Hitchcock and His Leading Ladies, a study even more lurid than the previous one. Moral, after doggedly questioning Hedren and other Hitchcock cast and crew members, is deeply skeptical about what Spoto sees as Hitchcock’s warped psyche and possessive attitude toward women. (For the record, Hitchcock had a long and apparently successful marriage to screenwriter and film editor Alma Reville, who was his frequent collaborator and sounding-board on his films. He had as well as a solid relationship with daughter Pat, who plays a key role in her father’s Strangers on a Train and continues to defend him today.)

 Frankly, I was surprised by how much of this book focuses on Spoto (including an exploration of his personal sexuality and his rather arcane  religious views). But Moral does make the valid point that, in a “Me Too” era, movie fans are less forgiving of behavior that once might have seemed quite normal on a film set. Did Hitchcock really demand sexual favors of Tippi Hedren? I guess we’ll never know.

 

 

 

 

Filmmakers Living Dangerously

Three years before he came to the U.S. to shoot Witness, Australian director Peter Weir took cast and crew to Asia on behalf of a highly ambitious project, The Year of Living Dangerously. Based on a novel of intrigue and romance by Australian author Christopher Koch, it brought together an international band of players to present a story full of real-world tensions. Weir had previously directed a fascinating tale of mysterious disappearance (1975’s Picnic at Hanging Rock) and a tragic World War I epic (1981’s Gallipoli). Both stories, deriving from actual historical incidents, saw the world from an Australian perspective. By the time he shot The Year of Living Dangerously, Weir had widened his focus to include citizens of many nations. Building on a turbulent era in the modern history of Indonesia, he used the overthrow of despotic President Sukarno by local Communist forces as the backdrop for a story about love, loyalty, and journalism as a profession. (To be entirely accurate, though the film’s vivid street scenes were filmed in Manila, standing in for Jakarta, social unrest in the Philippines caused cast and crew to head back to Australia to complete the shoot.)

 At the center of the drama is Australia’s Mel Gibson, known at the time for his Mad Max films and for his starring role in Weir’s Gallipoli. No surprise—in his role as an Aussie radio journalist on his first overseas assignment, Gibson’s Guy Hamilton proves to be handsome, cocky, and more than a bit naïve. He wants to become an overnight ;journalistic superstar, but is taken down a peg or two by fellow foreign correspondents, including a particularly crass American (Michael Murphy) and some stuffy Brits. And the environment he’s in is not at all pleasant: poverty is rampant; political dissidents are everywhere; daily life is mostly chaos.

 One major compensation arrives when he is taken to an unexpectedly ritzy country club where British expats congregate. There he meets a woman who works at the British embassy. She’s played by Sigourney Weaver who—three years after Alien—has paused her fight against  extraterrestrials in order to take on a romantic role. Her Jill Bryant is smart, convincingly British, and sexy as all get-out. She’s leaving Jakarta soon to return to her homeland, and part of Guy would enjoy going with her.

 Still, there’s his broadcasting career to consider. And there’s also an off-beat relationship he quickly comes to value. Billy Kwan is a pint-sized photographer, apparently half Australian and half Chinese, who frequently works with Australian journalist to cover the local news. Puckish, but with a strong moral code, he claims no loyalty to any particular national ideology. Instead, he cares deeply for his friends and for the underprivileged: out of sheer generosity of spirit he’s quietly supporting a local woman and her seriously ailing child. Billy, who also serves at times as the film’s voiceover narrator, is the emotional heartbeat of the story. And the casting of this role took observers by surprise.  From what I’ve read, Weir considered tiny American actors like Bob Balaban (5’5”) and Wallace Shawn (5’2”), but neither seemed right. Then through happenstance he saw a photo of an American actress named Linda Hunt. Afflicted with hypopituitary dwarfism, Hunt stood a mere 4’9” tall, and had an androgynous look. There’s nothing kitschy about her portrayal of an adult male, though her character is endowed with an otherworldliness that lingers in the memory. That’s doubtless why she beat out some of Hollywood’s finest (Glenn Close, for one) to win the Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 1982.

 

 

Treasure Island in Topanga

Recently I wrote about Hollywood’s Blacklist era, as chronicled in a special exhibit at DC’s Capital Jewish Museum.  This past weekend saw me at a place deeply steeped in memories of that difficult time. Actor Will Geer (born in 1902) is best remembered as TV’s folksy Grandpa Walton from 1972 until his death in 1978. (His passing was ultimately written into the plot of The Waltons, allowing him to be publicly mourned.) Though a lifelong actor on both stage and screen, one who was nominated for multiple prestigious awards, Geer had many other passions. Politically he was a deeply committed activist with long ties to the American Communist Party, During the Great Depression he spent much of his free time touring labor camps with close friends like folksingers Burl Ives and Woody Guthrie. He also had a great love for  botany, and earned a master’s degree in that field at the prestigious University of Chicago.

 Geer’s refusal in the 1950s to “name names” of Communist sympathizers at the behest of the House Un-American Activities Committee naturally led to his being shut out of the Hollywood movie community for a number of years. Though he starred in Salt of the Earth, a 1954 independent film about a New Mexico’s miners’ strike, he was long barred from more mainstream productions. That’s why he and wife Herta Ware built a simple performance space on their rustic property in SoCal’s folksy Topanga Canyon, which became a popular gathering spot for fellow blacklisted performers. At the same time, they began growing fruits, vegetables, and herbs as a way of feeding their growing family. Eventually, following Geer’s financial success from The Waltons, they launched a nonprofit corporation known as the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum. The many offspring of the Geer family, by then launched on their own theatrical careers, joined together to stage works by Shakespeare and others in a rustic outdoor environment. Today the troupe is still going strong, mixing seasoned professionals with newcomers just learning to tread the boards.

 I try to visit the Will Geer at least once a year. The troupe is most active in summers, and its signature production is A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare’s romantic fable for which this is the perfect sylvan setting. Other offerings for 2026 include Romeo and Juliet, along with an obscure Noel Coward farce (I hardly think of Coward as suited to a rustic backdrop, but never mind) and an inventive dramatization of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. The script for this adaptation was prepared by Will Geeer’s daughter, longtime co-producing artistic director Ellen Geer, and her own daughter Willow (also an artistic director) here plays one of the drama’s most colorful roles. As always the troupe finds creative ways to use its permanent stage area, which consists of rough-hewn wooden building facades and beautiful old-growth trees. I’m happy to say that seating has improved a great deal over the years. The audience is shielded from the summer sun by a large canopy, but those concrete benches really cry out for cushions shlepped from home. 

 If you’re planning a day or evening trip to the Theatricum Botanicum, do save time to explore the premises. There is, for instance, a small wooden shack called The Shelter. Once a hang-out spot for the visiting Woody Guthrie, it now houses a collection of historic memorabilia from the 1950s onward. There are also places to buy food and souvenirs, and some gorgeous flowering plants to admire. For the full experience, make dinner reservations at Topanga’s mostly-outdoor Inn of the Seventh Ray, a magical venue full of other-worldly vibes.