The Play’s the Thing: Why Tom Stoppard Lost It At the Movies

 The deaths, alas, just keep on coming. (In today's news, it's the great Frank Gehry, an architect blessed with rare skill and imagination.) Over Thanksgiving weekend, I read of the passing of one of our greatest playwrights, the Czech-born English man of letters, Tom Stoppard. A fascinating individual as well as an extraordinarily talented wordsmith, Stoppard had premiered his last play (at the age of 83) in 2020. Fittingly, Leopoldstadt was both a brilliant dramatic achievement and a belated exploration of his own Nazi-era Jewish roots. Like most of his plays, it is very much a work tailored to the stage, and will not be coming to local cinemas anytime soon. Which doesn’t mean Stoppard is adverse to film, as I discuss in a 2021 Beverly in Movieland post that I’m repeating here as a Stoppard tribute.  

“Inside any stage play there is cinema wildly signalling to be let out.” This Tom Stoppard quote, from the impressive (and weighty) new biography by Hermione Lee, hints at the famous playwright’s complex attitude toward the movies. From his youth onward, Stoppard was a fan of movies, starting with Disney’s Pinocchio, which he saw at the ripe old age of four. As an adult he loved everything. from Marx Brothers laff-fests to European art films to such popular Hollywood fare as The Graduate. (He and its director, Mike Nichols, turned out to have much in common – including early lives disrupted by Nazis – and later became close friends.)

  But Lee’s biography makes crystal-clear the gulf between writing for the stage and writing for movies. As the successful playwright of such works as The Real Thing and Arcadia, Stoppard revels in prestige and power. It’s not simply a matter of custom: the legalities of the theatre world stipulate that the text of a play cannot be changed for the purposes of stage production without the author’s consent. Some playwrights are probably shy about exerting their will, but Stoppard is not among them. Although unfailingly polite and collaborative, he insists that any changes to the text of a play be made by him. He also demands consultation on production matters, which means that he’s present not only at rehearsals but also at auditions and meetings of the technical staff. The performance of a Tom Stoppard play is, first and foremost, a Tom Stoppard production.

  At the movies, though, it’s the director, not the writer, who is king. (Or, I guess, queen, though female directors continue to be rare indeed.) A major director can hire and fire screenwriters at will, and can even have two writers toiling on the same project without being aware of one another’s existence. Other members of the production team often chime in with their own ideas, and stars have been known to contribute (and sometimes insist on) their own rewrites. This should not be a world in which Stoppard would want to operate, except for the fact that movie gigs are so very lucrative, and Stoppard’s lifestyle is so very lavish.

  Stoppard has been credited on several major movies, including the Oscar-winning Shakespeare in Love. He has also directed an ambitious though modestly budgeted 1990 screen version of his own earliest hit, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead, reasoning that only he would have the audacity to ruthlessly re-focus his own much-admired play. He quickly discovered that he was fundamentally NOT a filmmaker: his instinct was always to focus on dialogue, at the expense of camera movement. Afterwards he acknowledged that a filmmaker, though not a playwright, can change the frame. “In the theatre you’ve got this medium shot, fairly wide angle, for two and a half hours. And that’s it folks.”

 Aside from his several screenplay credits, Stoppard has become invaluable to such major directors as Steven Spielberg, because they trust him for smart, honest assessments of their pending projects. For Spielberg, he tried to tamp down the soppy elements that ended the romantic 1989 film, Always, but he also was insistent that Steven Zaillian’s final draft of Schindler’s List not be ”improved” upon. Sometimes Stoppard beefed up dialogue scenes, without screen credit but for serious sums of money. See, for instance, his sparkling work on the key father/son scene between Sean Connery and Harrison Ford in Spielberg’s third Indiana Jones film, which ends with Connery’s Henry Jones telling his long-neglected son that “you left just when you were becoming interesting.”

 

  

One DiCaprio After Another

Leonardo DiCaprio, who’s been making films since 1991, was first introduced to audiences as an appealing young teen. Over the years he’s scored in a wide range of roles, playing everyone from Romeo to the young Howard Hughes (The Aviator) to J. Edgar Hoover to Jay Gatsby. His choices have been remarkably diverse, but many of his best roles have been marked by two characteristics that I suspect are shared with DiCaprio himself: energy and shrewdness. Perhaps my very favorite DiCaprio role is that of real-life conman and charmer Frank Abnagale Jr. in Spielberg’s delightful Catch Me If You Can. That’s the 2002 crime film wherein he bamboozles pretty much everyone he meets.

One thing I’ve discovered about DiCaprio’s recent roles: he’s not afraid to look foolish. As an over-the-hill TV star in Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), he escapes death at the hands of the Manson gang by sheer luck. In 2023’s Scorsese-directed Killers of the Flower Moon, he’s downright stupid, unable to see that his uncle’s clear intention is to kill his own beloved wife as a way to steal her family’s fortune. From what I’ve read, DiCaprio—involved with the project from the start—was originally slated to play an early FBI agent. Thomas Bruce White Sr. was a key heroic figure in David Grann’s book, an historical account of the Osage murders and their aftermath. But when DiCaprio and longtime mentor Scorsese decided to focus the film version on the plight of the oil-rich but highly vulnerable Osage, DiCaprio agreed to play the distinctly non-heroic Ernest Burkhart, who genuinely loves wife Mollie but is blind to what’s being done to her.

Now, in Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, DiCaprio is a man good with things that go boom. but not exactly smart about the world around him. Paul Thomas Anderson’s epic film is very loosely based on a 1990 post-modern novel, Vineland, by Thomas Pynchon. If I’d realized going in that Pynchon’s world-view was the basis for Anderson’s film, I would have been far less confused at the start. Pynchon’s writings about America capture the ethos of various eras in a comically exaggerated fashion. This particular novel is about the Reagan era, but Anderson has updated it to reflect the upheavals of today, particularly the militaristic treatment of the undocumented. But here’s the thing: no one is particularly virtuous. Certainly not the military (led by Sean Penn’s crazed Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw), but also not the wildly brutal rebels who confront the Armed Services with their own weapons of major destruction. (Their leader is Teyana Taylor’s unforgettably angry Perfidia Beverly Hills – yes, there are some bizarre names here.) With leaders like these, for which side should the viewer root?

DiCaprio, as “Rocketman” Bob Ferguson (in the course of the film he has several noms de guerre) is Perfidia’s lover and loyal follower, but there’s no real sense that he has any idea about the commitment he’s made to her cause. True,  he’s a dedicated rebel, but against what? In the film’s later innings, after she’s been captured and disappeared, his numbe-one interest seems to be lying on his living-room couch and smoking a lot of weed. But he has another interest too: looking after the feisty teenage daughter who may or may not be his.   

Before I saw this film, I was unclear about what genre it fell into. I heard it was violent; I heard it was very funny; I heard it had meaning for today. All true, but don’t expect to like any of the characters very much.  
 

 

Juliet . . . & (eventually) Romeo

Methinks that every generation has its own Romeo and Juliet, in which the tragic lovers reflect the concerns of the day. The 1936 film directed by George Cukor came out in the midst of the Great Depression. This was a time when young people going the movies craved glamour and sumptuous production values, things they couldn’t find in their own daily lives. Cukor’s MGM-based production featured major (though overaged) stars. Leslie Howard, as Romeo, was in his forties, and Norma Shearer, who played Juliet (and was married to studio honcho Irving Thalberg), was about 34, more than double the age of Shakespeare’s teenage heroine. The film was shot decorously, on elaborate sets, and given the full prestige treatment, complete with splashy roadshow engagements where illustrated programs were sold. (Yes, my mother bought one, and saved it for many decades)

 More than 20 years later, in 1957, a much-updated version of Romeo and Juliet became the toast of Broadway. This of course was West Side Story. The Leonard Bernstein-Stephen Sondheim musical reimagined the star-crossed lovers as recent New Yorkers from rival cultural backgrounds, with Tony as a Polish-American founder of a street gang called the Jets, and Maria, newly arrived from Puerto Rico, as naturally affiliated with the Sharks. The hit play became in 1964 a mega-hit film that gobsmacked everyone at my high school. We were much taken, in that era, with the promise of social justice for all, and the tragic story of lovers unable to transcend the enmity all around them hit us hard. (Steven Spielberg’s 2021 rethinking of the same musical has its merits, but its box-office reception was far less overwhelming, probably because the concerns of moviegoers had much changed in the intervening fifty-plus years.)

 What I consider MY Romeo and Juliet was the Franco Zeffirelli version that came out in the fraught year 1968. It was filmed on location in medieval Italian towns, and was the first cinematic version to feature actors close in age to Shakespeare’s actual characters. Zeffirelli apparently considered casting Paul McCartney and other rock gods of the era, but ended up with two unknowns, Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey, who were cast when they were 16 and 15, respectively, but aged a year in the course of filming. We college students of the era, many caught up with our own first big romances, watched this movie in a sort of swoony daze, fully understanding the erotic passions of the two young lovers.

 Leave it to Baz Luhrmann to jazz up the Shakespearean story, giving it a kind of hipster sensibility. The year was 1996, and the stars were Leonardo DiCaprio (then 21) and Claire Danes (about 17). The feuding families were played as 20^th century Miami mobster types, with the Capulets now having some Latin roots. The setting was Verona Beach, and one key scene was played in a swimming pool. There’s still some well-spoken Shakespearean poetry, but also guns and party drugs.

 I’m reminiscing about all this because I’ve just seen the L.A. stage production of & Juliet, a London and Broadway hit musical that posits Juliet (waking in the tomb beside the dead Romeo) deciding not to kill herself for love. What follows is a riotous comedy in which pop songs from Max Martin are incorporated into Juliet’s romantic adventures in Paris. (Brittany Spears’ “Oops!... I Did It Again” becomes an acknowledgement that Juliet falls for cute guys a tad too quickly.) The many teens in the house cheered for Juliet’s developing feminist consciousness and for the “woke” gay empowerment motif that predominates. Me? I just felt rather old.

 

 

Born in the U.S.A.: Indiana Jones and Asteroid City

There was a time, back in the Thirties and Forties, when Hollywood backlots stood in for all the exotic places on the globe. You needed to set your story in a Casablanca bazaar? An Irish village? An exotic palace high in the Himalayas? If SoCal couldn’t find a suitable location, perhaps you went as far away as Yuma, Arizona (where Crosby and Hope filmed Road to Morocco). Back then, Hollywood studios’ screenplays circumnavigated the globe, but their production was strictly all-American.

 How things have changed! I just saw Wes Anderson’s new Asteroid City, an all-star meditation on the difference between reality and artistic invention. Some of it is apparently set in New York, where a TV documentary captures the evolution of a fledgling theatre piece written by Broadway great Conrad Earp (Edward Norton). Most of it—showing the playing-out of Earp’s artistic vision—is set in a candy-colored version of the American Southwest, complete with a quaint filling station, a roadside café, and a bungalow court, as well as a freight train that passes through now and again. This out-of-the-way place, known as Asteroid City, gets its name from a small globule of space junk that once landed here. Now it’s the location of a modest but prestigious gathering of military brass, some “brainiac” kids who’ve won a science competition, and their eclectically assorted parents. And did I mention there’s an alien sighting?

 The locale, the cast, and the background music (lots of old western tunes that would surely make the Coen Brothers happy) all shriek Americana. So I was more than a bit surprised, in reading the closing credits, to discover that Asteroid City was shot largely in Spain, with additional production units in France and Italy. I’m sure the financing of the film had something to do with the choice of shooting locations. Anderson, who has made such films as The Darjeeling Limited, and The French Dispatch, has a great affinity for exotic locales. By choosing to shoot in far-flung corners of the globe, he’s doubtless come up with some lucrative funding sources that depend on him filming far from Hollywood, even when he’s dealing with all-American subject matter.

 I like Anderson’s loopy vision of the world, and it’s fun to see such major talents as Scarlett Johansson, Steve Carell, Bryan Cranston and even Tom Hanks pop up in offbeat roles. (Jeff Goldblum is billed as the alien.) The approach worked beautifully in probably my favorite Anderson ensemble flick, The Grand Budapest Hotel. (His sensitive coming-of-age romance Moonrise Kingdom is lovely but stylistically uncharacteristic.) But it certainly helps, when the canvas is so broad, if we care about the characters, and if the film is actually about something coherent. In Asteroid City, Anderson’s movement back and forth between the behind-the-scenes creation of a drama and the actual playing out of the finished version can be seen as meaningful . . . or simply aggravating. Me, I’ll go with the latter adjective.

 But of course the big news this week is about the launching of Indiana Jones and the Dial of  Destiny. Talk about Americana—and a great film with which to kick off a holiday weekend. No, I didn’t choose to brave what I hope will be big crowds at the multiplex (today’s film industry needs all the blockbusters it can get). But I rented Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, in which Harrison Ford gets to play (delightfully) against old pro Sean Connery. Indie’s crusty dad may be Scottish, but the man himself is a strong, smart, courageous All-American. July 4 doesn’t get much better than that.

 

"Jurassic Park” and “Carnosaur”: When Dinosaurs Galumph Down Memory Lane

Thirty years ago this month, the nation held its collective breath, wondering how Steven Spielberg would bring to the big screen Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, a  bestselling novel about dinosaurs running amok in the modern world. And what was I doing around that time? Along with other members of Roger Corman’s creative staff, I was patting myself on the back, overjoyed that we at Concorde-New Horizons had managed to scoop Spielberg. Not in terms of lavish production values, of course. Hardly endowed with Spielberg’s access to CGI technology. we had managed to come up with only a single tyrannosaurus. Roger decreed that it be eighteen feet tall, thus out-Spielberging Spielberg. But the ceiling of our rather make-shift Venice studio was only sixteen feet high, so the height requirement had to go.

 It all began while the Crichton novel (first published in 1990) was being transformed into a motion picture. Always quick to sense the national pulse, Roger set aside a project dramatizing the bloody L.A. civil uprising of 1992 in order to bring his own dinosaur movie to the screen. Our mandate: to get our film into theatres before Jurassic Park opened, thus luring in viewers who couldn’t wait a moment longer to watch rampaging dinosaurs First, of course, came the script. Roger purchased a novel by the Australian sci-fi novelist, John Brosnan. A man who knew how to make a buck, Brosnan had published back in 1984 a novel called Carnosaur, under the nom de plume Harry Adam Knight. I  read it in the line of duty, looking for plot ideas, but didn’t find them in the book’s turgid pages. We at Concorde noted that the initials of Harry Adam Knight could certainly stand for “hack.” This novel was hack-work, pure and simple. Without question, we needed to start from scratch. All we kept from Carnosaur was its title . . .  and maybe that chicken farm set-up.

 Roger hired a bright but spelling-challenged USC film school grad, Adam Simon, to write and direct our dinosaur movie. Perhaps influenced by the opening of Brosnan’s novel on a chicken farm, Adam concocted a story about a mad scientist, working for the mysterious Eunice Corporation, who manipulates chicken embryos into future dinosaurs, the better to undermine the human race. The plotline allowed for lots of gory footage, and we hired a big-name actor for the key role of Dr. Jane Tiptree. While in Jurassic Park young Laura Dern was running from dinosaurs, we had her mother, Diane Ladd, playing the scientist who stirs up all the chaos. I don’t know if Ladd was the first-ever female mad scientist in the movie world, but she was outstandingly creepy. It was largely thanks to her vivid performance that TV reviewer Gene Siskel gave our movie an enthusiastic thumbs-up. (His boob-tube buddy, Roger Ebert, called Carnosaur the worst film of 1993.)

 Carnosaur still leaves Adam Simon with a bitter taste in his mouth. When Roger asked Simon to write and shoot his quickie dinosaur epic, Simon took the difficult assignment because he was guaranteed a $3 million budget. Then, three weeks before photography commenced, the budget suddenly shrank to $850,000, a figure Simon is now convinced was part of Corman’s plan all along. To make matters worse, when Roger (on the strength of Carnosaur’s success in video stores) spoke to the Hollywood Reporter, he bragged he’d laid out $5 million.  A humiliated Simon felt Carnosaur looked particularly shoddy if judged by the industry’s 1993 expectations of what $5 million can buy. So Simon now regards Carnosaur as a cautionary tale for fledgling filmmakers everywhere.

 

“The Fabelmans”: Close Encounters with the Spielberg Family

Over the years, I’ve had many lunches at the Milky Way, a dairy café on an ethnic stretch of Pico Blvd. in West Los Angeles. Its proprietor was, until her death at age  97, a pixie of a woman named Leah Adler. She was hard to miss, with her close-cropped blonde hair, her bright red lipstick, and het Peter Pan collars. Until old age caught up with her, she’d literally dance around the restaurant, greeting guests warmly, and making sure everyone knew which menu items were preferred by her famous son.

 The movie posters in the lobby, as well as that prominent E.T. doll, told the tale. Leah Adler was the mother of Steven Spielberg, and she wanted the whole world to know it. On one occasion, I even came close to an encounter with the man himself. We’d ordered the cheesecake for dessert, and Leah breathlessly informed us that Steven, seeing it emerge from the kitchen, had declared he was tempted to scoop up a bite with his finger. I looked where she pointed, to an area near the dining room entryway, but could see only the back of a head topped by a baseball cap. So much for star-gazing.

 Anyone aware of this unshakeable mother/son bond would be curious indeed about The Fabelmans, a memory film billed as the true story of Steven’s growing-up years. By the time I saw it, I knew something more of Leah Adler, of her musical aspirations as a young piano student, of her domestic eccentricities, of the painful moment when she broke up the family unit. As played by Michelle Williams in a bravura performance, she’s lively, creative, self-promoting, the acknowledged fairy queen of the household. When, on a family camping trip, she dances in the moonlight in her white nightgown, she wins everyone’s heart. (Mine too!)

 What I knew little about was Spielberg’s engineer father, here called Burt Fabelman, As played by Paul Dano, he’s a brilliant nerd, in love with his wife, his family, and his work on early computer technology. There’s an amiable cluelessness about him that’s a fresh take on movie fatherhood, but at the same time he reminded me of so many screen fathers –-like Chris Cooper in October Sky—who praise their sons’ intellectual drive but can’t accept their chosen professions.

 The young Spielberg clone, Sammy Fabelman, is introduced to movies by both of his parents, with his father focusing on technological achievement and his mother passionately cherishing movies as akin to dreams. When Sam starts to film his own backyard masterpieces, with his little sisters in starring roles, both parents cheer him on. But as he nears adulthood, refining his cinematographic skills and learning to shape the world that surrounds him through the lens of his camera, moviemaking becomes his retreat from the disturbances of everyday life. Ironically it also, in the film’s most crucial episode, becomes his proof of a reality he doesn’t want to face.

 My least favorite part of the film strays from the family story to show a teenage Sam enduring anti-semitic taunting while romancing a girl with a Jesus complex. The outcome of that segment reveals Sam using filmmaking as a quixotic way of handling his oppressors, but the romance—funny though it is—seems a rather cheap way of getting some laughs into the picture. For me the film’s highlight is the visit of Uncle Boris (Judd Hirsch), a rather mysterious circus performer who descends on the family at a time of tragedy. It’s he who explains to  Sam why the artist always has to go it alone.