The Eloquent Silent Message of Lily Tomlin's “Grandma”

At first, Lily Tomlin as Elle Reid (aka Grandma) is not a character you like very much. She picks fights with everyone, including the barrista whose “drip” coffee offends her palate. She snaps at family members, chases off an adoring young lover, and accuses the proprietor of a Lesbian café of being not a peaceable, matriarchal bonobo so much as a gorilla. She’s financially helpless in a crisis because she’s cut up all her credit cards and made them into wind-chimes, but she’s a terror when she wields a hockey stick. Frankly, she resembles all the curmudgeonly old coots played by male actors like Ed Asner and Clint Eastwood and Bruce Dern, except that she’s probably the most unpleasant of the lot.

Then, as the movie progresses, you realize two things. First, that this is a woman who’s been deeply hurting ever since the death of her long-time partner. Second, that she’ll do absolutely anything to help her young granddaughter in her hour of need. By the end of the movie, we’re firmly on her side. And we’re rooting for her to move on with her life.

I saw Grandma at a special screening hosted by Kat Kramer’s Films That Change the World series, in conjunction with SIGNmation and a group of fans known as “The Grandma Gang.” Kat, a passionate supporter of her friend Lily Tomlin, chose to make this screening an open-caption event designed especially for Deaf and Hard of Hearing members of the film community. (Open-caption implies the use of a print with subtitles visible at the bottom of the screen. Prints of this nature were promised decades ago by the film industry, but Grandma’s open-caption screening was in fact the first in 24 years.on the Sony lot, and the first such in decades at any Hollywood studio.) 

Part of what made the screening memorable was the presence of writer/director/producer Paul Weitz, whose many credits include About a Boy and Little Fockers. He was also responsible for American Pie, and quipped to the audience (with the help of an American Sign Language interpreter) about “the distance traveled between that and this film.” Grandma was written especially for Tomlin: it reflects her crusty but caring personality, though not the facts of her life. Somehow it was shot in 14 days for a mere $600,000, without studio participation but with the help of such major talents as Sam Elliott, Marcia Gay Harden, and Judy Greer. (Tomlin’s own ancient, oversized Dodge also played an important role.)

For Weitz, one key theme of Grandma is that “you can’t reduce people,” but must respect them in all their complexity. It’s a theme that resonates with the Deaf community, who are always looking for opportunities to show their skills in Hollywood. That’s why two guest panelists featured at the screening were a director and an actor, both Deaf, who have joined forces for an upcoming feature film, a sports drama titled The Inside Track. Jevon Whetter, a graduate of the American Film Institute, and Troy Kotsur, a veteran of Deaf West Theatre, explained how their challenge couldn’t stop them from pursuing their showbiz dreams. Poignantly, Jevon noted that his own grandmother—also Deaf—used to love silent movies. But when talkies arrived, she and others like her were shut out. 

Thanks to Jo-Ann Dean, founder of SIGNmation (and other productions for the Deaf). She’s partnered with Kat to launch “Creative Accessible Cinema & Content,” for which this screening was a pilot event. The Deaf, I’ve learned, “applaud” by shaking all their raised fingers in a kind of “jazz hands” gesture. So imagine me doing “jazz hands” for all involved with this splendid evening.

“Fallout”— Kat Kramer Out to Change the World

On Wednesday night, much of L.A.’s “cool” contingent was at Hollywood’s Chinese Theater, watching a celebrity-studded premiere of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, a highlight of the American Film Institute’s annual fest. That same evening, not far away, a handful of showbiz greats turned up to contemplate a far graver topic: nuclear proliferation. The occasion? The fifth anniversary of Kat Kramer’s Films that Change the World. Kramer was introducing to America the film Fallout. This Australia documentary charts the history of nuclear warfare, while also chronicling how Nevil Shute’s novel, On the Beach, evolved into Stanley Kramer’s hard-hitting 1959 movie.

Of Stanley Kramer’s four children, Kat (named for her godmother, Katharine Hepburn) is the one who’s come closest to following in her father’s footsteps. She told me that Stanley Kramer’s brand of socially conscious filmmaking “is in my DNA.”  He was famous for producing and directing films (like The Defiant Ones, Judgment at Nuremberg, and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner) that tackled the day’s leading issues through dramatic storytelling. But the films in her series tend to be documentaries, like Teach Your Children Well (which takes on homophobia and schoolyard bullying) and The Cove (it won an Oscar for exposing the secret slaughter of dolphins near a Japanese village). Kat emphasized to me that today it’s documentaries that “have their own voice.” Unlike Hollywood features, so often made by committee and beholden to major commercial interests, a documentary can be fearless about making a strong statement.

The evening began with the inevitable lineup of stars for the paparazzi to photograph. There were Lily Tomlin and Louis Gossett Jr. (both of whom would later address the group), as well as such where-are-they-nows? as Jerry Mathers, who used to be known as TV’s Beaver Cleaver. I was tickled to see the still-handsome George Chakiris, all black hair, black stubble, and jet-black clothing. In fact, black seemed to be the color of the evening, in Kat’s case accented with silver lamé and with the oversized earrings that are a personal trademark. It felt like your usual celebrity red carpet, until the program began, with Tomlin introducing her close friend, Dr. Helen Caldicott.

Caldicott, an Australian pediatrician and author, was inspired by On the Beach to become an activist against nuclear energy. She’s a true pit bull on the subject, though a pit bull who’s bubbling over with humor and charm. Her charm doesn’t blunt her basic message: “We get really close to nuclear war quite often.”  Such a war could come at any moment, and if it does, she predicts an impending ice age, in which “we’ll all freeze to death in the dark.” Before that happens, however, there’s also the danger posed by climate change, as witness recent disasters in the Philippines and Japan, where the tsunami-damaged Fukushima nuclear reactor is now leaking radiation into our atmosphere and our oceans.

With the present looking so grim, it was a pleasure to go back to the past through Lawrence Johnston’s documentary, Fallout. We learned that Nevil Shute, an English engineer who discovered a talent for writing, was normally relaxed about peddling his adventure novels to film companies. On the Beach, though, was a different story. In depicting Melbourne, Australia as humanity’s last stand in the face of encroaching radiation from a nuclear blast, Shute identified strongly with the nuclear engineer (Fred Astaire in the film) who blames himself and his colleagues for the destruction of mankind. Stanley Kramer’s movie is still haunting, but Shute never accepted the dramatic tweaks that an American filmmaker brought to his own singular vision of Armageddon.  

PS  A warm farewell to the fascinating Mickey Knox, actor, blacklist survivor, and buddy of Norman Mailer, who passed away this morning. More on Mickey later.