Ferreting Out The Best Films I’ve Never Seen

While looking for something completely different at my local library, I came across a book I couldn’t resist. It was written by journalist Robert K. Elder, as a follow-up to his 2011 volume, The Film that Changed My Life. For that book, which garnered respectful reviews from film geeks like Leonard Maltin, Elder interviewed working directors about the films that had helped mold their own aesthetic.  In 2013, Elder was back with a sequel of sorts, The Best Film You’ve Never Seen. Talking mostly to those directors he had featured in his previous book, Elder here sussed out a list of obscure films that (for whatever reason) we movie lovers should know better.

 Part of the fun of The Best Film You’ve Never Seen is discovering movies about which we have little or no prior knowledge. The always perverse Todd Solondz (Welcome to the Dollhouse) makes a good case for an obscure indie called The Honeymoon Killers. And John Waters, the celebrated purveyor of deliberately skanky films like Pink Flamingos, argues persuasively that the Elizabeth Taylor/Richard Burton misfire known as Boom! can be a source of viewer delight.  The book has also alerted me to the dubious joys of Killer Klowns from Outer Space.

 Some of the directors’ choices are surprising. Several selected big studio productions from bygone eras. The late Peter Bogdanovich, who always had a passion for the stylistics of long ago, endorsed a 1932 Ernst Lubitsch gem, Trouble in Paradise. I’ve seen this frothy film about con artists and thieves, and can vouch for its charm. (Notably, it was selected in 1991 for inclusion in the National Film Registry.) I guess its age makes it obscure to most of today’s moviegoers, but what about Richard Curtis’s selection, Breaking Away? This amiable coming-of-age comedy about bicycle racing in Bloomington, Indiana, won an Academy Award for its Steve Tesich screenplay, and was nominated for four other Oscars, including Best Picture. I enjoy realizing that Curtis, known for such very English romantic farces as Four Weddings and a Funeral and Love Actually, is enamored of Tesich and Peter Yates’ cozy slice of Americana.

 It's fitting, I guess, that Bill Condon—best recalled for splashy Hollywood musicals like Chicago and Dreamgirls—would endorse Bob Fosse’s first screen directorial effort, Sweet Charity. But who would have guessed that Kevin Smith, the outrageous indie director of Clerks, would have a thing for Fred Zinnemann’s (and Paul Scofield’s) 1966 Best-Picture winner,  A Man for All Seasons? It seems that Smith’s Catholic school education, and the efforts of one particular nun, have made him passionate about Sir Thomas More’s doomed efforts to save the One True Church back during the reign of Henry VIII. Smith has high praise for the filmmaking as well as the subject matter, which he expresses in very Kevin Smith fashion. Book author Elder asks the question; “You’ve said that A Man for All Seasons is ‘porn for somebody who loves language.’ How does it differ from regular, missionary-position dialogue in other movies?” And here is Smith’s reply: “Because every line of dialogue is a close-up jizz shot to some degree or a really great close-up on double penetration.”  (You can’t get much more eloquent than that.)

 Reading this book has made me eager to check out some films I’ve only heard of, like Frank Perry’s The Swimmer and Vincente Minnelli’s Some Came Running (produced in the same year as his great triumph, Gigi).  And I’ll be pondering Henry Jaglom’s take on his friend and mentor Orson Welles’ F for Fake, which Jaglom tantalizingly calls “the most autobiographical of Orson’s films.”

 

Filmmaking That’s Fast, Cheap and Under Control

When I first saw a primer on indie filmmaking called Fast, Cheap and Under Control: Lessons Learned from the Greatest Low-Budget Movies of All Times, I was eager to find out where Roger Corman fit into the narrative. And when I discovered that the opening section was devoted to Roger and his protégés (soon-to-be famous directors like Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich and Jonathan Demme). I was keen to know whether author John Gaspard had consulted my Corman biography. Turns out he had—and credited me as the source of a key Corman-related quote from indie writer/director John Sayles. So I can give Gaspard credit as a guy who does his homework. He reads what’s out there to be read, and has also spent countless hours personally interviewing indie filmmakers, along with those who’ve gone on to bigger and possibly better things. Like Steven Soderbergh, whose major Hollywood career was sparked by the dramatic Sundance success of his indie chamber piece, sex, lies, and videotape.

 True to the nature of its subject, this is a low-rent book. Let’s put it this way: the book is so cheap that my copy lacks page numbers. And, though Gaspard gives thanks to a copy editor, there’s an egregious grammatical error on the very first line of the very first page. So English majors like me might feel some dismay. Still, there’s a very good education to be had within these covers, both for those who want to make low-budget films and those curious about the kind of wildly inventive cinema that doesn’t require millions. Happily, Gaspard has a great appreciation for small films, whether they are classy stylistic experiments (John Cassavetes’ Shadows) or gruesome horror flicks (The Night of the Living Dead) or outrageous comedies that make a virtue out of cheapness (e.g. the clopping coconut shells that simulate horse hooves in Monty Python and the Holy Grail). One section is devoted to science fiction on a budget, another to mock-documentaries like The Blair Witch Project, a third to the growing field of digital “filmmaking.”

 I particularly enjoyed the tips from ambitious upstarts like Kevin Smith (Clerks) and Jon Favreau (Swingers), who explain in detail the writing and directing choices they needed to make in order to stay on schedule and within budget. For instance, Smith’s one-set film takes place in daylight hours in a rather seedy convenience store. But early on, a leading character who plays the counter man gripes that the store’s blinds are stuck shut, which means that, along with other workday annoyances, he has to do his job in semi-darkness. There’s a reason for this: Smith was actually shooting after the store closed for the night, and didn’t want to give away the fact that there was no sunlight outside the windows. In Swingers, Favreau (directing himself) looks longingly through a batch of photos of a lost love, instead of the usual Hollywood flashback to happier times. Such necessary measures often breed creativity. Longtime indie director Henry Jaglom (Someone to Love) quotes to Gaspard a lesson he learned from the great Orson Welles: “The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.”

 I was pleased at the inclusion of Dark Star, a USC student film that gave John Carpenter a start as a Hollywood director of sci-fi and horror by using such inventive tricks as making an ordinary beachball into a space alien. My future husband worked on that film, creating a good-looking space console out of plastic junk. Carpenter borrowed $50 from Bernie and promised screen credit. Eventually he got neither. That’s another way to save money.