Nicolas Roeg and William Goldman: Hail and Farewell

It’s sad how quickly we’re losing members of the greater Hollywood community.  We can’t call them men who died before their time: each lived to a ripe old age, and enjoyed honors and accolades galore. Still, the film industry will long feel their loss.

Nicolas Roeg, born in 1928, is said to have decided  on filmmaking as a career mostly because he lived across the road from a British movie studio. He started as a tea-boy (a job that doesn’t exactly exist in America), and moved up to be a clapper-loader, which is the lowliest of cinematography jobs. Eventually he was hired as second-unit cinematographer on David Lean’s classic Lawrence of Arabia, but the relationship with Lean went south when he was fired from Lean’s equally monumental follow-up, Dr. Zhivago. He served as cinematographer, though, on films by such greats as François Truffaut (Fahrenheit 451), John Schlesinger (Far From the Madding Crowd), and Richard Lester (Petulia).

But for me Roeg’s most meaningful cinematography credit was on Roger Corman’s The Masque of the Red Death. By the time my former boss shot Masque in 1964, he had already made a name for himself by way of several features based on the eerie tales of Edgar Allan Poe. Starting with House of Usher in 1960, Corman directed and produced such chillers as Pit and the Pendulum, Premature Burial, and The Tomb of Ligeia.. But I’m not the only Corman fan who’s convinced that Masque of the Red Death is the very best of Corman’s horror epics, and part of the reason is that Roeg’s camerawork perfectly captures the kaleidoscopic yet somber mood.

Roeg of course moved beyond cinematography to put his directorial stamp on a particular kind of  otherworldly feature. His films are bleak: even the one intended for children (an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Witches) has nightmarish implications. Roeg fully exploited the dark charisma of Mick Jagger in Performance as well as the unearthly quality of David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth. Don’t Look Now (1973) was once notorious for its fairly explicit sex scene between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, but at its heart this is a film about vain hope, as played out by grieving parents.

William Goldman, who died on November 16 at the age of 87, left us a body of work that was less exotic and more down-to-earth. What stands out is his versatility: he was a novelist, a playwright, and a screenwriter, responsible for such major hits as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Princess Bride (a family favorite adapted from his own novel), Misery (based on the work of Stephen King), and the historically important All The President’s Men. (As a young writer, he bypassed a golden opportunity when he declined to work on the screen version of The Graduate.) Whole generations of screenwriters have learned from Goldman’s Adventures in the Screen Trade, with its sage insistence that in the film biz “nobody knows anything.”

Goldman sometimes went far afield from Hollywood, as when he published The Season (1969), a candid assessment of the state of Broadway in the years 1967-68. I personally treasure his 1990 memoir, Hype and Glory, about the year he judged both the Cannes Film Festival and the Miss America Pageant. Here’s one characteristically pragmatic except: “Narrative is only a piece of string and it’s where you choose to cut it that’s essential. Where you choose to cut it. I might pick a piece further along, or earlier. No one is right. There is no right way to tell a story, only your way.”

Since I wrote this post, I’ve learned of the deaths of film director Bernardo Bertolucci and actor/magician Ricky Jay. And so it goes.

Rocket Man: On David Bowie’s Fall to Earth

Elon Musk, a canny combo of Thomas Edison and P.T. Barnum, has done it again. His SpaceX has just launched from Cape Canaveral the Falcon Heavy, the world’s most powerful operational rocket. The biggest news for science geeks is that two of the three Falcon first-stage rocket boosters were successfully returned to earth, to be reused in future. But the rest of us are probably more keen on the rocket’s payload: Musk’s own cherry-red Tesla, complete with a helmeted dummy in the driver’s seat. And, yes, the car’s audio system was said to be blasting out David Bowie’s “ Space Oddity.”  Ground Control to Major Tom, indeed!

It’s a lovely coincidence that I’ve just finished reading my colleague Susan Compo’s new Earthbound: David Bowie and The Man Who Fell to Earth. Susan’s book gave me the opportunity to explore the 1976 Nicolas Roeg film that some cinéastes remember with affection, some with puzzlement, others with major annoyance. To my surprise, I learned that the film’s source novel is by Walter Tevis, far better known for a much more down-to-earth work, The Hustler. That novel, of course, inspired the award-winning 1961 classic in which Paul Newman, Jackie Gleason, and George C. Scott risk their souls in a pool hall. Though The Man Who Fell to Earth contains undeniable science fiction elements, it shares with The Hustler Tevis’s interest in men  (whether earthly or from outer space) who destroy themselves through excess. The otherworldly character played by Bowie -- an alien confined to earth because he can’t find his way back to his home planet -- is in the course of the film irredeemably corrupted by the intoxicating things (and people) he encounters in his new earthly surroundings.  

The British director of The Man Who Fell to Earth, Nicolas Roeg, was not without experience coaxing screen performances out of rock stars. He made his directorial debut with Performance, about a bizarre encounter between an East London gangster on the lam (James Fox) and a fading musical idol (Mick Jagger) bent on returning to his former glory. He also helmed an admired Australian film, Walkabout, and just prior to The Man Who Fell to Earth he made a major splash with the enigmatic 1973 thriller, Don’t Look Now. Starring Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland as bereaved parents mourning their drowned little girl, it is perhaps best remembered for its eerie atmosphere and frank sex scenes. (Sexual frankness, including no-holds-barred nudity, also marks the screen encounters between Bowie and earthling Candy Clark in The Man Who Fell to Earth.) 

A Roeg film is always visually striking. Roeg started out as a cinematographer, working second unit on Lawrence of Arabia and taking charge of the inspired cinematography for one of Roger Corman’s very best Poe films, The Masque of the Red Death (1964). Author Susan Compo, who seems to have spoken to all the living survivors of The Man Who Fell to Earth, emphasizes the impact made on the filmmakers by the picturesque state of New Mexico, where the film was almost entirely shot. As a “right-to-work” state, New Mexico was able to welcome an almost entirely British film crew without concern about union restrictions. The state’s stark landscapes, picturesque mining towns, and general sense of isolation work brilliantly, especially the use of White Sands National Monument to simulate the arid reaches of the Bowie character’s home planet. 

Still, in narrative terms the film doesn’t always make sense, partly due to Roeg’s insistence on avoiding strict chronology. Bowie, though, makes a perfect alien, with his off-camera excesses doubtlessly contributing to his otherworldly air.