Listing All-American Movies

In the wake of this historic (and very unusual) 4^th of July holiday weekend, news outlets have been vying with one another to publish articles that are relevant to the story of the United States. This past Sunday, film critics at the Los Angeles Times joined together to produce a feature titled “10 Must-Watch Movies That Capture America in Times of Profound Change.” Here are their topic choices: (In every category there are also a few alternate suggestions.)

(1)   THE GREAT DEPRESSION: The Grapes of Wrath (1940)

(    (2)   POSTWAR OPTIMISM: The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)

(    (3)   CAPITALISM, UNCHECKED: There Will Be Blood (2007)

((  (4)   POST-VIETNAM/WATERGATE CYNICISM: Nashville (1975)

((   (5)  MEDIA DOMINATION: Network (1976)

(6  (6)  GENTRIFICATION AND RACIAL TENSIIONS: Do the Right Thing (1989)

(7  (7) RISE OF THE YUPPIES: They Live (1988)

( ) (8) ‘80s WOMEN IN THE WORKPLACE: Working Girl (1988)

(9 (9)  DIGITAL ALIENATION: The Social Network (2010)

(1 (10) POST-9/11 ANXIETIES: Team America: World Police (2004)

 To me this is, for the most part, an excellent list. I would certainly put The Grapes of Wrath, The Best Years of Our Lives, Network, and Do The Right Thing on any best-film list I was compiling. By the same token, I wonder about the criteria at work here. Why is the 19^th century (especially the Civil War) so completely ignored? Why does this list contain not a single work made in the turbulent 1960s? I am particularly passionate about a seminal film year, 1967, which captured for a mass audience the tensions both between races and between generations. (Here are four of the five Oscar Best Picture Nominees for that year in film: Bonnie and Clyde, Guess Who’s Coming to  Dinner, In the Heat of the Night, The Graduate). Every one of these very distinctive films, screened in a turbulent year, has something vitally important to say about the differences that keep Americans apart.

 I also don’t see on the critics’ list any representation of films shot in the 1990s. That was a period  that balanced social optimism with the belated acknowledgment of the scourge of HIV, especially as it applied to the nation’s gay community. Remarkably, it was America’s favorite Everyman, Tom Hanks, who starred in a mainstream Hollywood movie that  finally looked with compassion on the plight of a gay man dying of AIDS. Hanks’ willingness to take on this role, especially after other leading men had turned it down, marked a new era for audiences and for the motion picture community, which honored Hanks with his first Oscar for this acting challenge. (Just one year later, he won again, for the very different Forrest Gump, which contained—in many people’s eyes—its own much more subtle AIDS reference.)

 Another film I think should be noted was also made in the Nineties, and also starred Tom Hanks, who seems to have a special talent for representing what’s on the minds of his fellow Americans. The 1995 film Apollo 13 (perhaps the seminal achievement of director Ron Howard) is a celebration both of American technological excellence and of the brave astronauts who are vaulting us into the world of the future. Apollo 13 was made, with the full cooperation of NASA, to showcase the story of a near outer-space disaster that, happily, turned into a human triumph. It’s surprising indeed to me that the L.A. Times critics seem to have nothing to say about American technological mastery. Social media (as shown in such listed films as The Social Network) has certainly changed all of our lives, but our relationship to our planet has also certainly evolved, right? 

 

Confronting “The Beast in Me”

Since around the time that my Roger Corman biography came out, I’ve been part of a lively group called Biographers International Organization. This group, officially founded in 2010 by the indefatigable James McGrath Morris and some of his biographer peers, is devoted to the art and craft of biography. BIO’s advisory council has included a who’s who of famous biographers (including Pulitzer Prize winners like Debby Applegate, Robert Caro, Ron Chernow, and Stacy Schiff), but anyone who finds biography of interest is welcome to join for a nominal fee. Perks include an annual conference, an informative monthly newsletter, and Zoom gatherings galore. And, of course, a Facebook group in which biographers from around the globe trade info, cheer one another on, and generally stay in touch.   

 I bring this up here because of a hot recent topic on the BIO Facebook page: the limited Netflix series called The Beast in Me. The dauntless biographer Carl Rollyson (who’s credited with almost as many books as Heinz has varieties) was, I believe, the first to encourage his fellow members to check out the eight-part series. It’s a cracking good thriller, featuring two of filmdom’s finest, Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys. Danes plays Aggie Wiggs, a best-selling author grieving the loss of her young son in an accident involving a drunk driver. Rhys (a Welsh actor who speaks flawless American English in this series) plays Nile Jarvis, a wealthy entrepreneur notorious in the press because of the mysterious disappearance of his wife.

 One reason Rollyson and other serious biographers are keen on The Beast in Me is because Aggie’s fame comes from her publication of a non-fiction book about her late father. When the series opens, she’s struggling to move ahead on a joint biography of two recent Supreme Court justices, Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who were both courtroom adversaries and personal friends. A fertile topic for a book, perhaps, but maybe not one that Aggie’s equipped to handle. So when her new neighbor, the cheerfully sinister Nile Jarvis, proposes himself as her new biographical subject, she pays attention. Next thing you know, they’re having long tête-à-têtes in which, while proclaiming himself innocent of serious crimes, Nile Continues to find ways to get under Aggie’s skin.

 The series is riveting, though maybe its wrap-up is not quite as effective as it might be. It’s exciting to see Danes (who surpasses even Keri Russell of The Diplomat in looking worried and disheveled) struggling to know how to handle the disarmingly chummy new next-door pal she’s pledged to present to the world on the page. As Carl Rollyson has pointed out to his fellow authors, biography can also be seen as autobiography. The way a biographer approaches his or her subject is very much a secret glimpse into that biographer’s own psyche. Aggie, for instance, must ultimately admit to seeing in herself something resembling Nile’s cold-blooded approach to the world.

 I agree completely. I’d even say that my three books reveal to the reader three very different aspects of my own path through life. Writing about my longtime boss, filmmaker Roger Corman, I was something of a cynic: sassy and even snarky. My Ron Howard bio brought out the optimist in me. Suddenly I was hopeful about the human capacity for goodness. My 2017 study of The Graduate, officially titled Seduced by Mrs. Robinson, saw me as a member of a youthful generation  hugely influenced by this smart little comedy, but also—fifty years later—as someone who had learned a great deal about life as the decades wore on.

 

 

 

Proclaiming Eleanor the Great

When you’re successful as an actor, suddenly you start wanting to direct.  Even the fabled silent star Lillian Gish tried it, in a film now lost. Warren Beatty won a 1982 Oscar for directing (as well as starring in) Reds, a tale about the Russian Revolution that also featured Jack Nicholson and the late—and very much lamented—Diane Keaton. Robert Redford, who like Beatty was perhaps eager to escape pretty-boy roles, made an impressive directorial debut in 1980’s Ordinary People. He had no acting role in this taut family drama that went on to be a huge financial and critical success. Ordinary People racked up six Oscar nominations and four wins, including Best Picture and Best Director. Buoyed by this success, Redford directed ten films in all, winning kudos particularly for Quiz Show, a mordant examination of the headline-making TV scandal of the 1950s, with John Turturro heading the cast.

 Ron Howard became a TV and movie star at the ripe old age of 5, thanks to regular appearances on The Andy Griffith Show and in such movies as The Music Man. But, as I discovered when researching Ron Howard: From Mayberry to the Moon . . . and Beyond. Howard had always wanted to direct. For one thing, he liked being in charge, as he was at age sixteen when he directed his father, his brother, and his future wife in a “A Deed of Daring-Do,” a short that marked his entry into a Kodak contest for youthful filmmakers. (He won second prize.) And, as he admitted after shooting scenes for Willow atop the snowfields of New Zealand, another advantage of directing is that you can dress for the weather and never worry about how you look.

 Recently Scarlett Johansson became the latest Hollywood megastar to try her hand at directing. Her vehicle is Eleanor the Great, a script by Tory Kamen about an elderly woman who finds herself in a highly awkward situation. At a time of great emotional distress, she has “admitted” to a support group of Holocaust survivors that she is one of them. Calling upon the horrific memories shared with her by her closest friend, now deceased, Eleanor spins a long, moving saga of her brother’s death at the hands of the Nazis. To her consternation, her story attracts the attention of an eager NYU journalism student who has suffered her own grievous loss, and Eleanor suddenly finds herself on the brink of being a media sensation. 

 Of course truth will out. There’s a hectic climax in which it looks as if everyone in Eleanor’s life has turned against her—and on the long-awaited day of her bat mitzvah yet! But Eleanor (marvelously inhabited by 94-year old June Squibb) is such a vivid presence that we instinctively hope she’ll come through the scandal with flying colors. And so she does, by way of a series of plot twists and turns involving a respected news anchor (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who puts her transgression into perspective and helps everyone understand the role of grief in encouraging bad behavior. It’s both heartening and a little too tidy to make for a good ending.

The actors are all fine, and June Squibb (who after a long career in supporting roles became a genuine star in last year’s Thelma) is a national treasure. I’m sorry that none of the reviews I’ve seen have mentioned the very moving Rita Zohar, a genuine Holocaust survivor playing a genuine Holocaust survivor. Director Johansson, herself descended from Holocaust victims,, has chosen a thought-provoking story as her directorial debut.  I wonder what she’ll try next.

 

 

 

Losing the Invaluable Frances Doel

 It saddens me to report that Frances Doel is no longer with us. Frances, the right-hand woman of Roger Corman for many a decade, passed away last week at age 83. Late in life she had moved from Hollywood to Lexington, Kentucky to be tended by family members who loved her dearly. Honestly, she was dearly loved by everyone who knew her.

 Roger Corman met Frances at Oxford, where she was completing a degree in literature. Always a shrewd judge of character, he concluded she was smart enough and agreeable enough to make a good assistant. And so she was—learning from scratch pretty much every job involving a movie set or a production office. Her obituary notes that she ghost-wrote the first draft of many a Corman classic, and named among her official writing credits 1974’s Big Bad Mama, starring Angie Dickinson, William Shatner, and Tom Skerritt.  I was there, and I’m happy to share how this first Frances Doel screen credit came to be.

 Starting work as Roger’s new assistant in 1973, I immediately gravitated toward the New World Pictures story department, which was Frances. Roger wanted a seriocomic rural crime thriller à la Bonnie and Clyde. Back then, he was obligated to use WGA writers, and it was a lot cheaper to hire a union writer for a re-write than for an original script. That’s why he gave Frances an entire weekend to crank out a workable first draft. Of course she came through with flying colors, devising a story about a poor but feisty mother and her two nubile daughters who take up robbery in Depression-era Texas. She slapped a fake name on the draft, and we hired a veteran screenwriter to take over.

 William Norton, a very nice guy, seemed to enjoy story meetings with Frances and me. As we worked our way through characterizations and plot points, Bill started wondering aloud about the author of  the original draft. He went so far as to ask if this “man” could come in and discuss some story questions he had. At which point, Frances and I began to giggle. Eventually we couldn’t hide the fact that Frances herself was the screenwriter in question. A true gentleman, Bill insisted that she share script credit with him. It was the start of her string of Corman writing credits, which ultimately included such low-budget classics as Crazy Mama and Sharktopus.

 Did Frances get paid extra for her weekend labors? She couldn’t recall exactly, but suspected that Big Bad Mama earned her about $100. Over the years, her earnings increased, netting her $5000 each for quickie creature-features like Dinocroc. But she never entirely earned Roger’s full respect. As she told me in 2011, soon after her retirement, “Roger got very fed up with me,” because he didn’t feel she was writing fast enough. Ten script pages a day seemed to him a reasonable amount, even though she was putting in this work solely on evenings and weekends.

 Frances stayed with Roger in various capacities for decades, earning the genuine praise of such celebrated Corman alumni as John Sayles and Ron Howard. But the time came when she got a better offer, moving on to Disney, and then ultimately joining with Corman alum Jon Davison to produce hits like Starship Troopers. Eventually she hit on hard times, and Roger—in a burst of generosity—gave her my job as Concorde-New Horizons story editor. It hurt, but I couldn’t blame Frances. She was too gracious and too special for that.   

 And I could never have written my Roger Corman bio without her.   

R.I.P. Val Kilmer (and Tombstone’s Doc Holliday)

Sometimes it seems that Val Kilmer made a specialty of portraying men who die young. At least, that’s the impression I got after watching his electrifying performances as Jim Morrison in The Doors (1991) and as a tubercular Doc Holliday in Tombstone (1992). Still, Kilmer remained very much alive as the warrior Madmartigan in George Lucas and Ron Howard’s fantasy epic Willow (1988), in which he was upstaged by tiny Warwick Davis but also chanced to meet his real-life wife-to-be, Joanne Whalley. (They fell for one another on the set, and Howard obligingly re-shot their love scenes to take advantage of the budding romance. Fairytales do tend to come to an end, however. Though they wed in 1988 and had two children together, the couple divorced in 1996.)

 Kilmer’s “Iceman” character in Top Gun (1986) was also a survivor, living long enough to show up in the film’s decades-later sequel, Top Gun: Maverick. Still, when the sequel was shot in 2022, Kilmer’s voice was so affected by treatments for throat cancer that it had to be digitally altered to add clarity. Sadly, Top Gun: Maverick was Kilmer’s final performance. He died on April 1, 2025: at sixty-five he was by no means a youngster, but many of us had hoped for additional cinematic brilliance from him.   

 Tombstone, at its essence, is essentially the story of two gangs—a group of local Arizona lawmen (three of them brothers) versus a loosely organized cluster of cattle rustlers and horse thieves who called themselves the Cowboys. At the infamous Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, several men on both sides went down. The thirty-second shootout was followed up by later skirmishes, in which much blood was shed on both sides. Various versions of the story—which became widely known only after Earp’s death and a popular book about him—show up in a number of films, starting with 1939’s Frontier Marshal, which starred Randolph Scott and Cesar Romero. Then there was John Ford’s 1945 My Darling Clementine followed by the 1957 Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, which starred Burt Lancaster as Wyatt Earp and Kirk Douglas as his buddy, Doc Holliday.

 I suspect that Tombstone, directed by George P. Cosmatos, was intended to be the last word on the subject. Certainly, its cast is chockful of famous names.  It seems as though every red-blooded male in Hollywood wanted to take part in this semi-true tale of law-and-order on the American frontier. In addition to Kilmer and top-billed Kurt Russell (as reluctant lawman Wyatt Earp), the film features such established names as Powers Boothe, Sam Elliott, Bill Paxton, Jason Priestley, Thomas Haden Church, and Billy Zane. Dana Delany of China Beach fame is the female lead in a movie that is predictably short on women’s roles. (Yes, she plays  a gal with a checkered sexual history.) Ageing Charlton Heston , not long before his 2002 retirement from acting, takes on a small but key part in the proceedings, and none other than Robert Mitchum serves as the film’s narrator.

 Though Tombstone pits lawmen against renegades, the story is such that it’s often hard to tell them apart. Earp and Holliday seem at times no less bloodthirsty than the Cowboys. This puts me in mind of the response, back in 1967, to Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, decried then by many for its level of on-screen violence. As film scholar Robert Alan Kolker put it, “Penn showed the way: Bonnie and Clyde opened the bloodgates, and our cinema has barely stopped bleeding since.”   Now Bonnie and Clyde seems rather tame. Today, there will be blood.  

 

“American Graffiti”: Where Were YOU in ’62?

Want to feel old? Ron Howard, once cherished by American TV viewers as little Opie Taylor on The Andy Griffith Show, is now in his seventieth year. And American Graffiti, the very last movie in which Howard was billed as “Ronny,” is now celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of its release. This meandering saga of one post-graduation night in a California town effectively launched the filmmaking career of George Lucas. Lucas was then a recent graduate of the famous USC film school. His Hollywood career began in 1971 when he expanded his eerily futuristic student film into the big-budget THX 1138. After it failed to measure up at the box office, he turned to his own earlier life in the Central Valley town of Modesto, California. Thus was American Graffiti born. Its young characters, who roam the streets of Modesto in their souped-up cars, all reflect aspects of Lucas’s own teen-age years: the hot-rodding; the shaky intellectual ambitions; the dorky phase; the urge to “get out of this turkey town.” 

 When I was researching my biography, Ron Howard: From Mayberry to the Moon . . .  and Beyond, I learned how Ron (then 18 years old and about to start USC film school himself) was surprised by George Lucas’s approach to moviemaking. The movie, shot in Petaluma, California (standing in for Modesto) over the course of twenty-eight nights, cost a mere $775,000. Auditioning for a part, Howard was asked to improvise scenes with other actors. This was his first hint that George Lucas didn’t do things the Hollywood way. Lucas shot take after take in what he called “documentary style,” hoping his actors would catch him by surprise, and then cobbled his film together in the editing room. The scene in which Howard and Cindy Williams, as Steve and his girlfriend Laurie, patch up their quarrel at the film’s end was improvised and shot in five minutes, to catch the light of dawn. Since the story is supposed to take place in one night, Lucas shot more or less in sequence, a choice that Howard belatedly learned to appreciate: “As the production wore on, we became more and more exhausted. By the end we all had circles under our eyes, and we looked like we’d been up all night. Well, we had been up all night for weeks! And it showed.”

 Though American Graffiti seems to be about small matters—like the klutzy Terry the Toad (Charlie Martin Smith) trying to impress a pretty but not too bright blonde (Oscar-nominee Candy Clark) and the local greaser (Paul Le Mat) stuck babysitting a gawky fourteen-year-old girl (Mackenzie Phillips)—it ultimately has more to say. Rewatching the film, I was struck by how few grown-ups are part of the story. It’s about kids trembling on the brink of adulthood. Once they leave this tiny burg and go off to college, as at least one will do, their parents will play a much smaller role in their lives. There’s also an underlying comment about this particular generation. Though they don’t realize it in 1962, Vietnam hangs over their future. The film’s famous final crawl makes that quite clear.

 The little film captured the hearts of baby-boomers, while also winning the respect of industry honchos. Though it took home no Oscars (this was the year of The Exorcist and The Sting), American Graffiti was the recipient of five nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay.  But after American Graffiti, perhaps Lucas had had enough of modest filmmaking. His very next project, in 1977, was Star Wars.

 

No Weeping for the Return of “Willow”

 Disney+ is kicking off the holiday season with Willow, a new series, based on an old movie. Back in 1988 (which I’m tempted to refer to as “olden times”), George Lucas persuaded a new young director named Ron Howard to  make a fantasy film with a little person at its core. Lucas had, while directing Return of the Jedi, been impressed by tiny WarwickDavis, a three-foot-four-inch bundle of energy who played Wicket the Ewok, among other roles. It was Lucas’s idea to star someone like Davis in a period adventure saga.

 But since Lucas was a shy man who lacked an easy rapport with actors, he  had gradually moved into the producer’s role. Howard at that time was still fairly new to movie-making on a grand scale: his Splash(1984) and Cocoon (195) had been mainstream hits, but Willow’s $50 million budget and sizable special effects demands gave him pause. Still, he was eager to work with the tech wizards at Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic. Moreover, he reasoned that his five-year-old daughter Bryce and his toddler twins (not to mention the little boy on the way) would soon be the perfect age to appreciate big-screen fantasy.

 Despite Lucas’s enthusiasm, Warwick Davis was not a shoo-in for the leading role of Willow Ufgood, who is forced by circumstance to journey far from his home among the Nelwyns, a race of little people under four feet tall. A farmer who dreams of becoming a magician, Willow suddenly finds himself entrusted with a full-sized (or “Dakini”) baby. This baby is none other than Elora Danan, whose survival spells doom for the evil Dakini queen, Bavmorda (Jean Marsh). In the course of his travels to return the infant princess to her rightful home, Willow encounters all manner of unlikely creatures: vicious deathdogs, frightening trolls, beautiful fairies, a sorceress trapped in the body of a rodent, and pugnacious brownies nine inches high who make the three-foot four-inch Willow seem like a giant. There are battles and breathless escapes aplenty before Willow uses his budding magic skills, along with his native wit, to defeat Bavmorda and restore the forces of good.

 When I spoke to Warwick Davis for my Ron Howard: From Mayberry to the Moon . . . and Beyond, he told me he was somewhat daunted by the demands of the title role. Despite all his experience on Star Wars films, here he would be without a mask and a creature suit, and the range of his emotions within the film would be huge. Howard too was worried about Davis’s suitability, because he was a mere seventeen years old. Not only did the part of Willow call for him to interact with a baby, but his character was supposed to be a loving husband and the father of two young children. Once he won the role, Davis, who had never before lifted a baby, was put through an informal training course on how to care for an infant, diaper-changing and all. Howard also arranged lessons in diction, horsemanship., and sleight-of-hand.

 Happily, Disney’s new series returns Davis to the title role. Now a 52-year-old with a long filmography to his credit, he occupies a world in which baby Elora Danan has become a grown woman and a queen, but still relies on Willow’s talents to help her fight off evil.. Long ago I wrote that the original film “is an uneasy blend of life-or-death adventure, heartfelt sentiment, golly-gee wizardry, and comic riffs.” Still, it found many young fans on video, and the well-regarded new series should bring in more.