Baby Jane Grows Up

Well, none of us is getting any younger. And Hollywood actresses, who’ve always relied on youth and beauty to fuel their careers, know better than most that ageing is tantamount to career suicide. Ten years ago, Amy Schumer went so far as to join with gal pals Tina Fey, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Patricia Arquette in a darkly comic video short, all of them desperate to stave off the approach of their so-called “Last F**kable Day.”    

 But things were perhaps even worse in Old Hollywood. When Audrey Hepburn, still under 30, was romantically paired with fifty-six-year-old Gary Cooper in 1957’s Love in the Afternoon, this confirmed the basic Tinseltown understanding that—for women, at least—the freshness of youth was everything. As for those talented actresses who weren’t as young as they used to be, they had to accept that they were now considered by studio honchos to be damaged goods. And so it happened that two of the Golden Age’s most revered stars suddenly had to accept lesser projects to fill up their dance cards.

 Bette Davis, who arrived in Hollywood in 1930, had some rough years before she triumphed in the powerful role of a slatternly waitress in a screen adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage: it led to a unique write-in Oscar nomination. Thereafter she made her mark in a series of historical and romantic dramas, including Jezebel (1938); Dark Victory (1939); Now, Voyager (1942); and the wonderful All About Eve (1950): she ultimately won the Best Actress Oscar twice, and was officially nominated a record ten times.  For years she was Warner Bros.’ most bankable star, specializing in bold, uncompromising portrayals of strong women.

 Joan Crawford, started out as a Broadway dancer, then in 1925 was signed to a contract at classy MGM, where she first specialized in playing flappers and then working girls who made good. Depression audiences loved her, and she was a marvelous hussy in The Women (1939), but eventually she wore out her welcome at MGM and moved to Warners in 1943. The noirish Mildred Pierce (1945) revived her career and won her an Oscar, but sharing the Warners lot with Queen Bee Bette Davis was a challenge.

 By 1962, Davis and Crawford (both in their fifties) found their careers had essentially dried up. That’s when someone got the bright idea of pairing these two fading stars in a Grand Guignol-style horror movie, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Their fabled real-life feud made audiences run to see them play two sisters who were once stars of the silver screen and now live together in a mansion where bad things happen. Someone has said that on film Davis is the quintessential sadist and Crawford (with her tremulous expressions) the quintessential masochist. In this film, so it plays out. Davis’s character, once the golden-haired kiddie star Baby Jane, is a drunk with a skewed view of reality. Crawford plays her sister, formerly a leading lady but now confined to a wheelchair after a mysterious accident that is explained (in a way that thoroughly baffled me) at the end of the film. Both are essentially grotesque, but Baby Jane revived their popularity, and Davis (though not Crawford) thereby racked up one more Oscar nom.

 Sad, though, that two fifty-year-old actresses needed to stoop to such trashy material. Happily, at least one great actress today still has her pick of roles. Everywhere I turn, I see photos of Meryl Streep, at 77, looking devastatingly glamorous in ads for The Devil Wears Prada 2.  Yes, she plays a sort of villain, but a gorgeous one.

Tina Fey in All Seasons

I’m surely not alone in considering Tina Fey a national treasure. She has oodles of talent as a performer, and is a welcome MC at televised events. But I want to focus here on her brilliance as a writer, someone who can look at facets of our culture run amok and synthesize them into comedy gold.  

 Fey has been involved with television since her Saturday Night Live days (basically 1997-2006, though who can forget her return as Sarah Palin before the 2008 election?) In 2006 she created and starred in 30 Rock, an hilarious satire of a TV network, and she was also responsible for Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, which I found weird and funny. As a screenwriter, she made a brilliant debut with the 2004 teen comedy, Mean Girls. Who but Tina Fey would be smart enough to read a self-help book about adolescent bad behavior, sociologist Rosalind Wiseman’s Queen Bees and Wannabes, and fashion it into a hit movie?

 It helped a great deal that the film was populated by rising young stars, including Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams, Lacey Chabert, and Amanda Seyfried, along with Fey herself (in a teacher role) and best bud Amy Poehler, playing a particularly indulgent mom. This now-classic satire of high school girl-cliques has ultimately become a part of the American vocabulary, labeling self-improved and self-satisfied young women as “The Plastics” and introducing the concept of a “burn book” full of deliciously malicious gossip. (Clearly this reference is what led tech journalist Kara Swisher to publish in 2004 her Burn Book: A Tech Love Story. I’m also amused that the main non-conformist girl in the film, the one who aims to bring down The Plastics for reasons of her own, is dubbed Janis Ian, immortalizing the young singer/songwriter who had expressed her own teen angst through major pop hits like “At Seventeen.”)

 So potent has Mean Girls been that it was reincarnated, with Fey’s help, as a 2018 Broadway musical and a subsequent 2024 film adaptation. But Fey has not been idle since. It intrigues me that her most recent project is a mini-series which has just been renewed for its second season on Netflix. Again she chose her source carefully: a 1981 film written, directed by, and starring the wonderful Alan Alda. Alda’s The Four Seasons, which (natch!) features a lot of Vivaldi on the soundtrack, chronicles three well-heeled married couples who are close friends and always vacation together. Over the course of a particularly eventual year, one husband strays in dramatic fashion, and the others begin to question their lives and their values. The cast is first-rate (Carol Burnett plays Alda’s hyper-efficient wife, and Len Cariou, Sandy Dennis, Jack Weston, and Rita Moreno are the others in the friend-group). It was nice to see, at the beginning of the Netflix mini-series, the now eighty-nine-year-old Alda in a gracious cameo role.

 The first season of Fey’s Four Seasons miniseries essentially expands on the basic concept of Alda’s film, showing mature adults—long settled into marriages and careers—suddenly re-thinking their life-choices. It’s interesting to see Fey, who essentially plays the Carol Burnett role, wrestling with being a middle-aged person. We’re so used to her focusing in her projects on teenagers and on career gals: now she’s portraying a wife and the mom of a college-age daughter, someone who has made good choices but is starting to wonder what it all means. At 55, as a wife and a mother of two, Fey is clearly beginning to contemplate the full trajectory of a mature life. And we get to come along for the ride. 

 

Shooting the Breeze about Alec Baldwin and “30 Rock”

30 Rock isn’t exactly what you’d call a brand-new show. This sitcom lampooning the NBC corporate culture and the running of a comedy sketch show lasted seven seasons, from 2007 to 2013. The creation of the multi-talented and hyper-funny Tina Fey, it trades upon Fey’s own experiences as SNL head writer. Fey also plays the role of Liz Lemon, a head writer alternately obsessed with food, liberal politics, finding Mr. Right, and keeping a bunch of misfit comedy writers in line. Throughout much of the series, her chief sparring partner is John Francis Donaghy (Alec Baldwin), a right-wing man-about-town far less interested in cutting-edge comedy than in corporate profits.

 During this pandemic, I’ve dived into 30 Rock head first. My initial takeaway is how much 30 Rock reads like an updating of a workplace-comedy classic, The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-1977). That show, of course, featured the goings-on behind the scenes of a TV news broadcast, featuring a curmudgeonly boss (Edward Asner), a no-talent star (Ted Knight), an ageing vamp (Betty White as the Happy Homemaker), and assorted wisecracking writers. At the center of the chaos was Mary Richards (Mary Tyler Moore), as the uber-capable all-around assistant who needed to constantly stick up for herself as an unmarried woman. In 30 Rock, the unmarried woman has a great deal more authority, but is still fragile as she desperately juggles the demands of an egotistical star (Tracy Morgan), a boobalicious best friend (Jane Krakowski), and a boss who thinks he’s god’s gift to humanity. And, yes, at times she obsesses over chucking it all and having a baby.

 As Jack Donaghy, Alec Baldwin knocks it out of the park as a guy you love to hate. Baldwin may have started in dramatic roles (he’s played Jack Ryan in The Hunt for Red October and Stanley Kowalski in a TV version of A Streetcar Named Desire), but comedy seems to be his true métier. There’s something so slick and sleazy about his look that it’s hard to take him wholly seriously. And he certainly called on his looks and comic flair in his years of lampooning our 45^th president. At the moment, though, he’s starring in a tragedy he never intended to make. Baldwin is a producer as well as the star of an ill-fated western called Rust, shooting outside Santa Fe,  New Mexico. On October 21, Baldwin fired a prop gun during an on-set rehearsal. Though the gun was supposed to be unloaded, it apparently discharged a live bullet that killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and wounded director Joel Souza. No one is claiming that the shooting was intentional, but it’s clear from the testimony of the first assistant director and other crew members that basic safety precautions were not being followed. That’s the thing about movies: they require huge cadres of workers who must all understand the ins and outs of their jobs, or else risk dooming the entire production.

 The recently averted strike by IATSE, the umbrella union for movie folks, was partly about safety issues. Stars and other actors tend to be respected, even coddled—but crew conditions can be slipshod at best. When I interviewed Oscar-winning cinematographer Haskell Wexler, his great cause was protecting camera personnel who worked such long stretches that some died behind the wheel on their way home from 18-hour days. This happens in Hollywood, and there’s even more danger in out-of-the-way locales where union oversight is spotty or non-existent. .My Roger Corman pals shot films in places where life is considered cheap. But no one should die while making a movie.