I Left My Arts in San Francisco

Yes, it’s a not-very-good joke.  But, newly returned from the City by the Bay,  I can’t resist pointing out San Francisco’s cultural riches, which include world-class art museums, a long tradition of support for the local symphony and opera company, and such unique venues as the  Mechanics’ Institute Library. The latter is a private cultural center, founded back in 1854, that can be joined by anyone who purchases a membership. Located in San Francisco’s business district, it is particularly proud of its chess room and frequent chess tournaments. There’s also a lively interest in film. My colleague Matthew Kennedy (whose upcoming book for Oxford University Press is On Elizabeth Taylor: An Opinionated Guide) curates CinemaLit, a monthly array of themed film-related events housed at the institute. At the moment, he’s expanding on the intersection of chess and cinema by offering a series called “Chess in the Movies.” A chess coach will join him tonight, January 5, for a screening of 1983’s terrific Searching for Bobby Fischer. The Thomas Crown Affair, with its sexy chess game between Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway, shows up later in January.

The first time I ever visited San Francisco, as a young teen from L.A., my family and I happened upon a film crew shooting a dramatic night scene outside a San Francisco walk-up. We were amused that we’d left SoCal, only to find that Hollywood had come to us. The movie was Experiment in Terror, and I know little about it, other than that it starred Lee Remick and Glenn Ford. As the title says, it was a thriller—and I’m sure the steep streets and dark alleys of the city added to what scares there were in the script. Steve McQueen of course starred far more memorably in another San Francisco movie. Bullitt (1968), playing a tough but non-conformist cop, took full advantage of the city’s topography, staging a breath-taking car chase up into the hills.

 The Sixties, of course, was an era marked by youthful rebellion against the status quo, and San Francisco was ground zero for stories of young runaways who came to the city’s Summer of Love to get their groove on. There’s only a tiny glimpse of San Francisco in on of 1967’s hugest hits, The Graduate: SoCal’s Benjamin Braddock—who finds only monkey mockery at the San Francisco Zoo—will pursue love and liberation from parental expectations mostly across the Bay Bridge, in collegiate Berkeley. But more typical of the era’s youth movies is a genre flick called Psych-Out (1968), from Dick Clark Productions (!) and the low-budget mavens at American International Pictures. There’s this deaf girl played by Susan Strasberg who comes to Haight-Ashbury in search of her brother. Of course she encounters lots of hippies (Dean Stockwell, Jack Nicholson), as well as a mysterious stoner (Bruce Dern in a really bad wig) whose delusions lead to disaster for all.

 As the Sixties gave way to the Seventies, some filmmakers thought of San Francisco as the perfect place to set a madcap romp. Peter Bogdanovich, riding high after The Last Picture Show, teamed big stars Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal in a Bringing Up Baby-type story about a kook and a stuffy professor who are galvanized by the mix-up of four identical pieces of luggage with wildly differing contents. The  high-speed chase involving a stolen grocery store delivery bicycle and a plunge into the bay was intended, I’ve discovered, as a wacky homage to Bullitt. (The film ends with a cheeky reference to O’Neal’s recent mega-hit, Love  Story.)

 Adieu, Ryan O’Neal! More San Francisco movies yet to come, along with a salute to the late Glynis Johns!  (Thanks to Stan Berkowitz for prompting me to correct an egregious error in this post.) 

 

Getting Down with “What’s Up, Doc?”

In the midst of a pandemic, a zany movie comedy sounds like a refreshing change of pace. And they don’t come more zany than What’s Up, Doc?  This 1972 screwball comedy helmed by Peter Bogdanovich is clearly meant to evoke such golden-age delights as Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant romping with a pet leopard in Bringing Up Baby. In line with that 1938 classic, What’s Up, Doc? features an outlandishly mismatched couple—he a stuffy academic, she a full-blown kook—who fall for each other in the course of some dizzily nonsensical adventures. In What’s Up, Doc? the leads are played by Ryan O’Neal, coming off of the seriously saccharine Love Story, and Barbra Streisand, already an Oscar winner for Funny Girl.

He’s Howard Bannister, a bespectacled midwestern paleontologist who’s come to San Francisco in hopes of a grant to research the musical achievements of cavemen striking igneous rocks. (He’s also under the thumb of a domineering fiancée, played in her feature film debut by the late, great Madeline Kahn.) The interloper who eventually unleashes his wild side is Judy Maxwell, an outrageous young woman who seems to have no other motive than to cause complete and utter chaos in Howard’s life, for his eventual betterment, of course. San Francisco plays itself, complete with cable cars, dizzyingly steep hills down which to careen, and a bay into which all the main characters will inevitably fall.

The script of What’s Up. Doc? has a remarkable pedigree. One of its credited screenwriters is Buck Henry, only a few years removed from his brilliant script for 1967’s The Graduate. Also contributing to What’s Up, Doc? were David Newman and Robert Benton, who’d written Bonnie and Clyde. So three screenwriting icons from 1967 had a hand in scripting What’s Up, Doc?, which is -- not surprisingly -- crammed full of action and wit.

So why didn’t I enjoy it more? Maybe it was my fragile mood. Still stuck in quarantine, I’m not easily amused. And though the actors played their parts with conviction, I didn’t like them enough to root for their eventual success. One particularly sour note for me was Madeline Kahn’s portrayal of the shrewish fiancée, Eunice. With her heavily lacquered hair (a wig, as we discover) and her braying voice, she is the classic stereotype of the marital shrew, from whom the red-blooded American boy-man needs to be liberated. But in watching the film, I couldn’t entirely forget how its maker, Peter Bogdanovich, had dumped his wife and longtime artistic partner, Polly Platt, for Cybill Shepherd while making his previous film, The Last Picture Show.

Bogdanovich, barely 30, was – on the heels of The Last Picture Show – the hottest thing in Hollywood. It was the era of the youthful auteur, the Boy Wonder so hip that anything he touched turned to showbiz gold. That description fit Bogdanovich (a Roger Corman alumnus who’d directed his first feature in 1968) like a glove. Not only did he aspire to write, produce, and direct—he also found a way to be a featured performer, as he was in his big Corman break-out film, Target, where he shared scenes with Boris Karloff. To put it bluntly, the guy had (and still has) chutzpah.

This is certainly revealed in the film’s trailer, in which Bogdanovich, and not his stars, is the central focus. Sure, it’s intended to be spoofy, mocking the “voice of God” narration that insists the young director is “using the camera as Heifetz uses a Stradivarius.” But Bogdanovich’s cleverness is the whole point of this over-the-top exercise. For me, anyway, enough is enough.