Bob Mackie, Naked?

I met Bob Mackie circa 1981, on the fabled MGM studio lot. We were on the set for Herbert Ross’s ambitious musical, Pennies from Heaven, starring Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters. They played dreamers who (almost) survive the Great Depression by fantasizing about living lives filled with music, dance, and luxuries like spectacular clothing. Needless to say, this was a dream assignment for Mackie, whose chief claim to fame at the time was his flamboyant duds for TV divas like Carol Burnett and Cher.

 As a big fan of the Carol Burnett Show, I asked the amiable blond Mackie (wearing a polo shirt and looking like a kid) whether he was responsible solely for the lavish gowns in which Burnett greeted her weekly studio audiences. In fact, he explained, he did everything related to costuming for the long-running weekly variety show. This meant bunny suits for the dancers, when needed, and goofy garb for Burnett in her various skits. It turns out—as Burnett herself is quick to admit—that it was Mackie who came up with the crowning sight-gag in a movie parody of Gone With the Wind that got one of the show’s all-time biggest laughs. Burnett plays Scarlett O’Hara, forced to greet a post-war Rhett Butler in a dress hastily crafted from her plantation’s green velvet curtains. When she wafts down Tara’s majestic staircase, viewers can’t help guffawing: her home-made gown still retains its original curtain rod.

 Burnett is one of many celebs interviewed by Matthew Miele for his lively 2024 documentary, Bob Mackie: Naked Illusion. Its title refers to the tantalizingly sheer sheath gowns designed by Mackie first for Mitzi Gaynor and eventually for Cher, who—with her scintillatingly slender figure—has been perhaps his ultimate muse. His glittery gowns hint at nudity but leave the wearer’s private areas discreetly covered, though oh so sexy. For Mackie, all this now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t glitz is fun to design, and has led him to costume everyone from Vegas show girls to Barbie. Another of his more unusual clients in Elton John, who encouraged Mackie’s outrageous side, allowing him to come up with a Donald Duck ensemble and an Amadeus-style frock coat, as well as a sequined baseball uniform for a sold-out concert at Dodger Stadium.

 It's clear that Mackie adores pretty women (and pretty men like RuPaul), but in fact he seems to like pretty much everyone. The documentary carefully hints at his sexual orientation, but also shows homey scenes of the now-eighty-plus-year-old Mackie (grey-haired but still boyish) cozily hanging out with his recently-discovered granddaughter and her children on a sunny patio. (His son Robin, a Hollywood make-up artist, died in 1993 at age 33 after an apparently turbulent life.) Though he dresses top stars, Mackie seems wholly comfortable—even overjoyed—to be dressing conservatively and blending into family surroundings.

 Mackie’s talent for glamour has earned him fame and fortune, as well as many accolades from his peers. (The film opens with him modestly accepting myriad awards from fellow designers and critics.) But the top Hollywood honors have eluded him. He has three long-ago Oscar nominations—for Lady Sings the Blues, Funny Lady, and Pennies from Heaven. In the documentary, Carol Burnett expresses outrage that the 1982 Oscar for costume design went not to Pennies from Heaven but to the year’s big film, Chariots of Fire. In this well-crafted period Olympic Games drama, veteran designer Milena Canonero’s cast mostly wear track suits that look like long underwear. Ah well! I guess no one can win them all. 

 

Hail and farewell to Mitzi Gaynor, an early Bob Mackie muse, who has just died at age 93

Virginia is for Lovers; Los Angeles is for Filmmakers: “L.A. Confidential” and “L.A. Story”

It’s not exactly “Virginia is for Lovers” or “I ♥ New York,” but a longtime slogan for my hometown has been “L.A.’s the Place.” It’s a catchy reminder that there’s a lot going on here: glamour, intrigue, possibility. And of course movies.

 One reason Southern California attracted moviemakers early on was because it could look like many other places. Though today location shooting is the norm, even some quintessential NYC movies were shot in L.A. Like, for instance, Martin Scorsese’s breakout film, Mean Streets. Still, L.A. over the years has sometimes had the chance to play itself. Particularly in the film noir era (1940s-1950s), L.A. sunshine was transmuted into a view of the city emphasizing dark shadows and darker morals.

 In the 1990s we saw two major films with L.A. in their titles. One, picking up on the mood (though not the look) of film noir, focused on the City of the Angels as a place of rampant corruption. The other, an outrageous comedy, focused on L.A.’s sexual hedonism before climaxing in a candy-coated embrace.

 L.A. Confidential (1997) is a worthy follow-up to Roman Polanski’s L.A. masterpiece, Chinatown. Based on a twisty 1990 novel by native son James Elroy, it uses the year 1953 as a springboard to a world where policemen, pimps, and politicians run roughshod over ordinary folks. Perhaps the film’s number-one victim is the lovely Lynn Bracken, who has slipped from showbiz aspirations into the life of a call-girl outfitted (or, in the movie’s parlance, “cut”) to resemble Veronica Lake. Filling out the cast is a cop with a hair-trigger temper (newcomer Russell Crowe), a devious chief of police (James Cromwell), a detective who’s gone Hollywood (Kevin Spacey), and a sleazy gossip columnist (Danny DeVito) who narrates the sordid goings-on “off the record, on the QT, and very hush hush.”

 Though much admired in its day, L.A. Confidential didn’t take home the big prizes. Yes, Kim Basinger won a supporting actress Oscar for playing vulnerable but clear-eyed Lynn, and the film was also honored for its adapted screenplay. But this was the year Titanic picked up most of the marbles (11 Oscars), so L.A. Confidential was very much an also-ran.  I want to salute the late Curtis Hanson, the film’s director, producer, and co-scriptwriter, for a job very well done. Hanson, who provides thoughtful commentary on the film’s DVD, is yet another Roger Corman alumnus who made good. Debuting as a director with a cheapie Corman thriller, Sweet Kill (1972), Hanson went on to showcase his skills as a maker of genre hits like The Hand that Rocks the Cradle and The River Wild before L.A. Confidential thrust him into the spotlight. Alas, he could never quite repeat the film’s success.

 At the start of L.A. Confidential there are quick shots of the city at work and at play in 1953. There we glimpse the grand opening of an L.A. freeway. By 1991, the year of L.A. Story, freeways are a given. So are backyard swimming pools, complicated espresso drinks, the Hard Rock Café, and of course earthquakes. SoCal native Steve Martin and company have fun smirking at Angelenos’ social peculiarities, like driving to a friend’s house instead of simply walking down the block. It’s an uneven film, with some brilliant moments. Two of the best: an opening that parodies the start of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, with a giant hot dog (and not a statue of Jesus) being transported through the air. And of course Martin blithely roller-skating past the abstract expressionist canvases at the county art museum. (In real life he’s a trustee.)

 By the way, my colleague Michael Coate, whose Digital Bits site explores film history, has just posted a nifty tribute to Raiders of the Lost Ark on the occasion of its 40th anniversary. I'm quoted in chapter 10 on Deborah Nadoolman's iconic costume design for the film.

 

 

Edith Head Doesn’t Wear Plaid

You’ve got to hand it to Steve Martin. He’s game for anything, from outrageous interracial buffoonery (The Jerk) to an update of Rostand’s 19^th century classic, Cyrano de Bergerac (Roxanne). He writes plays too, including a sophisticated meditation on the meaning of genius, as seen in a confab between Pablo Picasso and Albert Einstein (Picasso at the Lapin Agile). In modern art circles, he’s known as a savvy collector and enthusiast. And, of course, he’s been acclaimed for seriously championing the blue-grass banjo.

 What works for Martin on-camera (and on-stage) is the clash between his straight-arrow looks and the visual insanity he can deliver. Sporting a well-tailored suit, and with his grey locks neatly coiffed, he looks like a banker. That’s why it’s doubly funny when, as in the priceless All of Me, he goes berserk, galloping madly off in all directions. I love that film, as well as  many others in Martin’s canon, but it took COVID (and a recent steady diet of film noir) to induce me to see Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid. That 1982 film, which also involved the talents of the late, great Carl Reiner, is a spoof of classic detective thrillers from the good old days when men were men, women were dames, and movies were black & white.

 Reiner, Martin, and company cleverly built their plot around interpolated footage from old thrillers, finding a way to have Martin’s character converse (in tough-guy detective-eze) with everyone from Bette Davis to Jimmy Cagney, from a panicky Barbara Stanwyck (in a clip from Sorry, Wrong Number) to a woozy Ray Milland (The Lost Weekend) to a stoic Burt Lancaster (The Killers). Walter Neff, the leading character played by Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity, turns out to play a key role in Martin’s case, which involves the murder of a prominent scientist and cheese-maker. And when Martin’s detective character needs extra hands on the job, he calls in Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart), who provides him with tips over the telephone.

  It’s a triumph of film editing, as well as a project that calls on the talents of art directors and others who can bring off the look of 1940s noir. In the case of costume design, the artistic team hit the jackpot by hiring Edith Head, in what was to be her very last film. The eight-time Oscar winner, who had become famous in 1937 for designing Dorothy Lamour’s sarong, knew just how to outfit Martin and his femme-fatale client (Rachel Ward) in clothes of the era, including a snappy fedora for him and a wow of a picture-hat for her. After all, the 433 films on which Head is credited include such Forties classics as The Lost Weekend, Sorry, Wrong Number, and Double Indemnity.

 I remember once, as a UCLA grad student in the Young Library stacks, putting aside my research to speed-read Head’s fascinating 1959 memoir, The Dress Doctor. It describes her life in Hollywood, designing costumes for glamorous stars with shaky egos. To make clear she was NOT competing with her famous clients, Head smartly decided to play down her own appearance. That’s why she settled on a distinctive but drab look: huge owlish glasses, prim suits, heavy bangs. Her schoolmarmish choices for herself instantly made it clear: this lady meant business. (I also learned from the book something it’s nice to keep in mind: no celebrity, however gorgeous, is without figure flaws that must be camouflaged by clever design.)

 Today Edith Head is gone but not forgotten. See Pixar’s The Incredibles, where pint-sized designer Edna Mode is made in her image.  

 

 

Exit Laughing: A Farewell Tribute to Carl Reiner

I never met Carl Reiner, but I’ve been near-by. After a big-deal screening at the Motion Picture Academy, I sat in a restaurant booth adjoining the booth occupied by Reiner, his wife Estelle (famous for “I’ll have what she’s having”), his pal Mel Brooks, and Brooks’ wife Anne Bancroft. The hearty merriment at that table spilled over to where I sat, to the point where I wanted to tell the waiter, “I’ll have what they’re having!” (So sad that now, in the wake of Reiner’s recent death, Mel Brooks is --at 94–the last survivor of that jolly foursome.)

Reiner did it all: he was a comic actor, a writer, a director, a producer, a husband, a father, an all-around mensch. In his honor, I’ve just watched three films he directed, starting with the earliest, Enter Laughing. This 1967 flick, based on a Reiner novel that became a Broadway play, features the sweetness, the goofiness, and the Borscht Belt yucks that have marked Reiner’s work ever since. Young Reni Santoni’s role (played by Alan Arkin in the stage version) is that of a nice Bronx kid who pines to be an actor, like his idol Ronald Colman. Though his parents have decreed he should go to pharmacy school, he sneaks away from his machine-shop job to meet a shyster thespian (Jose Ferrer, dripping with pomposity). There’s an hilarious audition scene (see below) in which he triumphs over two other loser-candidates (the young Rob Reiner is one) simply because the impresario’s actress-daughter (Elaine May) finds him cute. The film’s working-class Jewish elements, including the memorable appearance of old vaudevillian Jack Gilford and a lot of schtik about a prayer shawl, seem to tie in to Reiner’s own Bronx upbringing. His debut as a movie director is hardly a polished one, but there’s a real sense of personal investment in this light-hearted trifle. 

 Reiner’s directorial career was undeniably lifted by his collaboration on four films with Steve Martin. Martin’s comic stock-in-trade has always been his WASP roots. He pokes fun at himself in The Jerk (1979) as Navin, the son of poor but lovable Black sharecroppers. Though too dense to figure out he’s adopted, he’s the one family member with no sense of rhythm, and his favorite birthday treat is a bologna sandwich on white bread with a cellophane-wrapped Twinkie for dessert. Remarkably, when he goes out into the world, his innocent invention of a device for glasses-wearers called Opti-Grab, earns him a fortune. But it all goes down the tubes when his invention turns out to make users crossed-eyed. Carl Reiner has an hilarious cameo as a cross-eyed version of himself, hauling Navin into court as part of a class-action lawsuit.

The Jerk ends with Martin’s character happily dancing up a storm with his down-home family. A ballroom pas de deux also ends perhaps my favorite Martin/Reiner collaboration, the hilarious All of Me. The inspired 1984 pairing of Martin with Lily Tomlin posits that he is a lawyer who’d rather be a musician and she is a dying heiress who plans to come back from the dead via a mystic transmigration of her soul, as arranged by a charming but pixilated Tibetan guru (Richard Libertini). Somehow, Tomlin’s spirit ends up in Martin’s body, with hilarious results. I suspect if these two Steve Martin films were released today, the political-correctness police might come down hard on them, accusing them of cultural appropriation as well as racial insensitivity. But they’re good-natured fun, something we truly need now. Thank you, Carl Reiner, for making me laugh.