“The Accused”: Alumni from the Roger Corman School of Directing

One of the late Roger Corman’s many claims to fame is his knack for sniffing out talented future directors. Some of his most notable discoveries—Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich—entered Cormanville long before I did. But when I joined the staff of Corman’s New World Pictures in 1973 I met some eager young chaps who’d do just about anything for a chance to direct a low-budget genre flick. In those days Joe Dante (who’d go on to make such pop culture landmarks as Gremlins) was Roger’s trailer cutter, a quiet fellow who hardly seemed capable of commandeering a film set. And wandering the corridors of New World Pictures you’d find many a scruffy wannabe, each of them hoping for his big break.

 I especially remember Jonathan Demme, a shaggy-haired writer-type who favored brown-and-white saddle oxfords and would cruise the halls with his very tall wife in tow. (In later years he’d shed the wife and adopt a more blow-dried look.) When I first met him, he was just back from the Philippines, where he’d directed for Roger a classic women-in-prison opus, Caged Heat. Later he moved on to much better opportunities at much bigger companies, eventually winning an Oscar for directing a 1991 blockbuster, The Silence of the Lambs. I also fondly remember Paul Bartel, a wildly eccentric sometimes-actor whose 1975 directing debut for Roger, Death Race 2000, led to such indie triumphs as the hilariously gruesome Eating Raoul (1982). And then there was Jonathan Kaplan, who graduated from sexy Corman nurse movies (Night Call Nurses) to action flicks (White Line Fever, 1975).

 Kaplan’s career hit the skids after years of being offered only the same kind of projects he’d already mastered, what he described as "boy meets truck, boy gets truck, boy loses truck and boy gets truck again." But in 1988 he bounced back with a powerful drama that helped Jodie Foster win her first Oscar. The movie was The Accused, a moderately-budgeted legal thriller. The top-billed star was Kelly McGillis, who had recently grabbed attention as the beautiful Amish widow in Witness, and followed that up by  playing Tom Cruise’s girlfriend in Top Gun. In The Accused, McGillis  was a hard-driving district attorney determined to prosecute the young men who joined in the gang assault on her client, a small-town waitress. It was by no means a given that Foster would take on the role of the rape victim. Due to the film’s graphic nature, the part of Sarah Tobias was turned down by a number of rising actresses. Foster at this point had largely backed away from acting, focusing on her studies at Yale, and there were some who felt she lacked the blatant sexuality the role demanded.

 When I watched The Accused, I didn’t know quite what to expect. The film starts just after the hideous doings in the back room of a scruffy bar. Foster’s Sarah escapes from her tormentors and ends up at a local clinic, shell-shocked. It’s the opposite of the spunky performances we usually associate with Foster. But gradually, as the legal proceedings move forward, we watch her character regain her sense of self—her cockiness, her anger. The rape sequence itself is held until near the end –-as a flashback mirroring goings-on in the courtroom—and it’s clear to see what’s triggered it: Sarah boldly flaunts her sexuality, until the moment when she discovers it’s too late to say “No.” The whole grotesque business, with looky-loos egging on the perpetrators, is hard to forget. Score another triumph for a Roger Corman director-in-the-making.  

 

Hayden Panettiere: Showbiz Kid

I’m not exactly a Hayden Panettiere groupie. Truth be told, I never saw the TV series for which she was best known: Nashville and Heroes. Yes, I watched her childhood performance in Remember the Titans, but couldn’t tell you anything about it. So I was surprised by the outpouring of public grief that has followed Panettiere’s sudden death this past week at the sadly early age of 36. I read with great interest that—following a broken engagement, severe post-partum depression, and a long sad history of substance abuse—Hayden had published in May of this year a memoir titled This Is Me: A Reckoning. In it she owned up to a difficult coming-of-age and an ongoing struggle with mental health issues.

 All this meant something to me because, while writing for the Hollywood Reporter, I had interviewed a newly eleven-year-old Hayden (and her mom) for a special “showbiz kids” issue that featured the young actress as “one to watch.” We spoke on the telephone, and both mother and daughter sounded intelligent and serious about the complexities of a life lived on soundstages. Mom Lesley, once an actress herself, talked knowingly about casting sessions and about gauging her daughter’s comfort level when she was introduced to challenging material. Lesley clearly saw herself as a serious protector of Hayden’s physical and mental well-being.

 Hayden, who began her career doing commercials when she was a mere 8 months old, seemed to be thoroughly enjoying her on-set adventures. She proved herself a trouper, even when expected to perform difficult stunts like (in an historical drama called The Affair of the Necklace) jumping out of a moving carriage while carrying a heavy pretend-baby on her back. When we spoke, she seemed well aware that as she matured there would be new expectations to manage. Said she, “I’m sure when the kissing scenes come along, I’ll be very uncomfortable.” Giggling, she speculated on what it must be like to smooch in front of the cameras, with a director on hand to call the shots.

 I asked how well she fit into her home environment when she was not busy filming. She admitted that having friends was a bit complicated: “They judge me by my acting and not by me.”  Nonetheless, “I don’t think of myself as anybody special. I think of myself as just another kid.” 

 When writing my article about showbiz kids like Hayden, I consulted with Dr. Charles Portney, a psychiatrist who focused on adolescents. In his SoCal practice he treated many former young actors who were now finally able to speak for themselves. In some cases, patients who had played the role of crime victims suffered years later from “delayed onset” trauma. Another danger, he told me, was that kids might come out of their Hollywood experience “precocious and cynical. It’s too big a dose of reality at too young an age.” In the long term, they “can have problems, because your childhood is supposed to prepare you for adulthood.”

 Dr. Portney made clear that “there are many [showbiz] parents who try very hard to do a good job.” Still, you can only protect  your child up to a point. In the long run, showbiz kids are “oriented toward giving a performance, not preparing for adulthood.” When kids are too precocious, it’s at the expense of normal childhood experiences. This can affect future romantic and intimate relationships.  

 Some young actors, whether through good parenting or good luck, survive beautifully: look at Jodie Foster or Ron Howard. For Hayden Panettiere and others, though, truly adult coping skills are delayed until too late.

 

 

 

 

A Water Nymph Makes a Splash in “Nyad”

 In Nyad, you’ve got to give Annette Bening credit for having courage. Not simply the courage to portray long-distance ocean swims that showcase her exhaustion, her nausea, and her multiple near-death experiences. But also, as an actress in her late sixties, the courage to spend most of the movie’s run-time decked out in a form-fitting tank suit. Most women, including me, would at a certain point in their lives rather not be photographed in swimming attire. And this film is hardly an Esther Williams-type extravaganza with a focus on glamour (and waterproof mascara). This is the real-life story (though some have quibbled about the details) of an champion distance swimmer who—having failed to swim from Cuba to Key West at about age 30, decided at sixty to try again. It sometimes feels like a stroke-by-stroke recap of her four failed attempts and her final 2013 victory over  the waves, the sharks, the jellyfish, and her own mind. (By the end, WE’RE exhausted.) Nyad is also a character study of a woman who is almost brutal in her determination to sacrifice everything in order to meet her goal.

 Diana Nyad, as portrayed in this film, is not often gracious. So single-minded is she that she risks alienating even those who love her best and admire her most. The #1 person on that list is Bonnie Stoll, a racquetball champ who years ago dated Nyad briefly. As a strongly competitive athlete with organizational skills and a tender heart, she’s the ideal coach for Nyad, though at times she’s fully determined to walk away from what seems like a foolhardy gamble. Jodie Foster pours her heart and soul into the role of Bonnie, which has made her a nominee for multiple best-supporting actress awards. Without her feisty but tender performance, we might well find Nyad (and Nyad) insufferable. Welsh actor Rhys Ifans is also memorable as an old salt whose grasp of Caribbean waves and weather makes that final victory possible. Though Nyad is a creature of towering ego, it’s worth noting that when she lands on that Key West beach, to be greeted by cheering throngs, she speaks of her achievement not as a solo victory but in terms of the “family” of support people who made it possible.

 It's an interesting film, though certainly not always an enjoyable one. Uplifting? Maybe, but I mostly came away relieved that no one was requiring me to go on a long-distance ocean swim anytime soon. And I need to point out some artistic distractions, like the frequent cutting away to childhood Nyad experiences (some of them disturbing, and not particularly well played) and also the insertion of footage from time to time of the actual Diana Nyad, who’s still very much around, pursuing a comfortable dry-land career as a radio and TV sports journalist. I also admit, from my spot on the couch, that watching Nyad give it her all was probably a good reminder to work a bit harder at my local gym.

 I’ve always admired Bening as a courageous actress. I first became aware of her in 1990’a The Grifters, in which she held her own as a con artist opposite Anjelica Huston and John Cusack. She also, in a startling moment, appeared jaybird-naked, another kind of courage. That let to her first Oscar nomination (in support). There’ve also been three Best Actress nominations for such strong films as American Beauty, Being Julia, and The Kids are All Right, but never (alas) a win.  

A long, strong marriage to former playboy Warren Beatty is a win of sorts, though.

 

 

 

The Subject Was Rape: How Hollywood Tries to Make a Difference

In recent weeks, Ava DuVernay’s When They See Us, has been the talk of Hollywood. And why not?  This four-part documentary series funded by Netflix gives faces to the five young men of color who were wrongly convicted of taking part in the brutal rape of a female jogger in New York’s Central Park in 1989. The case, which involved police coercing the accused into false confessions, is widely considered one of the great failures of the American judicial system. Members of the so-called Central Park Five served up to 15 years in prison for crimes they hadn’t committed. Clearly this was a travesty of justice. 

A new book by my colleague Christopher Johnston outlines another kind of travesty, this one involving victims of rape and sexual assault. In Shattering Silences: Strategies to Prevent Sexual Assault, Heal Survivors, and Bring Assailants to Justice, Chris uses all his journalistic skills to explore the ways our society has let down rape survivors. It’s still all too common for police officers and defense attorneys to treat rape victims with cold skepticism, implying that these women (through their dress and behavior) had encouraged the vile acts perpetrated on them, that they were somehow “asking for it.” Fortunately, a coalition of law officers, sociologists, district attorneys and others has made great strides in introducing new standards of care for rape victim and new strategies for putting their assailants away for good.

One key recent discovery has come from Dr. Rebecca Campbell, a professor of psychology at Michigan State who has done considerable research into what she calls “the neurobiology of trauma.” Campbell has clinical proof that for a person facing sexual assault, fight or flight are not the only possible responses. It’s also perfectly natural for the victim to freeze, totally incapable of resisting an assailant. That’s why a woman under duress may not fight back, and why her inability to summon up the details of the assault for investigating officers does not prove that she’s being untruthful.        

Chris’s book is filled with the profiles of men and women, mostly in Cleveland and Detroit, who’ve made great advances in helping rape victims. Many of them have been impelled by their own personal histories to come to the aid of others suffering from sexual trauma. Partly this involves learning to handle victims with kindness and respect, especially during the invasive procedure required in the preparation of sexual assault kits. What’s outrageous to learn is that these kits, which contain crucial DNA evidence capable of  putting a rapist behind bars, are in many jurisdictions ignored for decades. In Detroit, for instance, the current push to provide state-of-the-art services for rape victims began with the discovery, in 2009, that 11,341 kits were crammed into a warehouse, unprocessed.

Hollywood movies and television shows have done their share of rape-related stories. Often cheap sensationalism is involved (yes, I worked in the B-movie industry). But back in 1988 Roger Corman alumnus Jonathan Kaplan made The Accused, a film that takes seriously the plight of a woman who’s raped by some goons in a barroom. Jodie Foster won an Oscar for her gutsy performance as a rape survivor who fights back. Even more interesting to me is the fact that Mariska Hargitay, the longtime star of TV’s Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, has been inspired to take on the plight of  survivors of sexual assault, as well as abused children. Her Joyful Heart Foundation, established in 2004, is an active part of a push to test all backlogged rape kits, nationwide. See http://www.endthebacklog.org/ for more info.