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.

 

 

 

Treading Water After Watergate: "Chinatown" and "Shampoo"

Pundit Ronald Brownstein, who has been a White House correspondent for the National Journal and a political analyst for CNN, is best known for writing and talking about Washington power-brokers. But his years of connection with the Los Angeles Times as well as his lifelong passion for pop culture have helped shape his brand-new book. He calls it Rock Me on the Water, after a Jackson Browne ballad that also inspired a powerful Linda Ronstadt version. There’s an important subtitle too—1974: The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television, and Politics. In Brownstein’s view, there was a brief period of transition in which the high idealism and the political fervor of the late Sixties flowered into something quite wonderful, before movies and TV were taken over by the yen for nostalgia exemplified by Jaws (an updated “monster from the deep” B-movie) and the amiable sitcom, Happy Days.

 To my mind, the linking of this cultural shift to the twelve months of a specific year doesn’t entirely work. Still, Brownstein makes his point by way of some fascinating analysis of key media moments. In the realm of television, he pays tribute to the powerful transformation of a nation’s viewing habits through the rise of three essential TV series. The Mary Tyler Moore Show, introduced in 1970, looked like a sitcom, but also placed real people in real (and up-to-date) situations, paying particular attention to a young woman more focused on career than on finding a man. M*A*S*H, which debuted in 1972, obliquely reflected the realities of Vietnam, balancing humor with a sober reflection on the horrors of war. The hugely popular All in the Family, which ran from 1971 to 1979, took on such issues as racism, social inequality, and rape. It was America’s #1 favorite series until replaced in 1974 by Happy Days, with its cheery appreciation for a past that never was.

 At the movies, Brownstein cites two key masterworks as indicative of a nation’s mood in the wake of the Nixon era. (Both, as it turns out, hinged on the talents of Robert Towne, a Roger Corman alumnus who went on to write some of the era’s boldest screenplays.) Chinatown was—as Brownstein so wittily puts it—“Watergate with real water,” a story of political and moral corruption set in the L.A. of the past but revealing parallels with the present. Shampoo, spearheaded by writer/producer/star Warren Beatty, is a tale of aimless seduction by a Beverly Hills hairstylist who’s considered “safe” because hairdressers are stereotypically assumed to be gay. George’s romp through the beds of countless women takes place in November 1968, on the eve of Nixon’s election to the U.S. presidency. “It was in this way,” says Brownstein, “that Shampoo represented a bookend to Chinatown. Each film documented the decline in early 1970s America by exposing the corruption and decadence of an earlier era in Los Angeles. One movie is about concealment, the other about display, and yet they reach the same bleak destination.”

 Brownstein notes that it was filmmakers born before 1940 who circa 1974 were most insistent on chronicling the rot endemic to the American system. He also spends time on Robert Altman’s Nashville, the brilliant 1975 compendium of life on the country-music circuit, seeing it as one more dour reflection of the Nixon years by a man well along in his career. By contrast, says Brownstein, rising Baby Boomer filmmakers like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas turned away from politics in the 1970s to explore (in films like Jaws and Star Wars) of adventure sagas in all their apolitical excitement.  

 

 

Shampoo: Pandemic Porn at the Beauty Salon

Blame it on the fact that I need a haircut and can’t get one right now, due to the new COVID-related mandates in Los Angeles County. But last night I got a hankering to watch Shampoo, the 1975 film in which Warren Beatty—as a Beverly Hills hairstylist—uses a blow-dryer as a tool of seduction. Frankly, those scenes of soignée women buzzing around Beatty at a hair salon come across to me now as pandemic porn. And I can see the appeal of Beatty’s tousle-locked George, who makes house calls and has never heard of social-distancing. On his lips, the words, “I’d like to do your hair” sound like a love-call. Or (to be frank) a booty call.

Shampoo comes from Hollywood royalty, produced by Beatty, directed by Hal Ashby (The Last Detail, Coming Home), co-written by Beatty and Robert Towne (Chinatown). It plays like a poisoned Valentine to L.A., made by someone who hates the place while also being infatuated by it. The film certainly contains moments of wit, as when the cuckolded Lester (Jack Warden) nearly barges in on George in flagrante, but (conveniently certain that all male hairdressers are gay)  sees a blow-out instead of a blow-job. And there’s a sharply etched portrait by seventeen-year-old Carrie Fisher in her film debut as the precocious daughter of one of George’s many flames, played by the Oscar-winning Lee Grant. (Others in George’s harem include the very miniskirted Julie Christie and Goldie Hawn, all golden locks and gangly limbs. The film was made in the era when Beatty, coming off Bonnie and Clyde, was still a Hollywood heartthrob; he and Christie, who were romantically linked in real life, had previously starred together in Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller.)

Shampoo tries to rise to social significance via covert references to the politics of the era. The action begins on the eve of the 1968 election of President Richard Nixon and Vice-President Spiro Agnew. No one in the film expresses a heartfelt political opinion, but some key scenes take place at a Republican election-night fundraising soiree, so the implications seem clear. There are also frequent reminders, via radio and television bulletins, that the Vietnam War is raging all the while that oblivious Angelenos party on.

Frankly, I didn’t find any of the above terribly meaningful, though others may see in Shampoo an apt skewering of an era of self-indulgence, fostered by what a John Updike character once called “the post-pill paradise.” I will admit that the film looks fabulous, showing off both the gorgeous curves of the female characters and the glorious curves of the roadways on which George’s motorbike whizzes as he moves from Downtown Beverly Hills to Bel-Air to the Valley in pursuit of sexual gratification. Richard Sylbert, who had so successfully captured the look of L.A. in The Graduate (not to mention Chinatown) picked up another Oscar nomination for art-directing all the varieties of chic décor in the characters’ drop-dead-gorgeous houses. Another parallel to The Graduate is that this film too advertises a Paul Simon score. Alas, though a very entertaining trailer for Shampoo uses Simon’s “59^th Street Bridge Song” (aka “Feelin’ Groovy”) to set the mood, the film itself makes little memorable use of Simon. I did like, though, the number we hear under the closing credits, the Beach Boys’ wistful “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?” Their lyrics, suggesting a dream of a more mature but still romantic future,  ideally represent the boy-man Beatty plays, with his fantasy of a better life to come. Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so?   

Warren Beatty, Harry Belafonte, and the Democrats

The fact that the biggest story coming out of last week’s Republican National Convention involved Clint Eastwood and an empty chair reinforces the fact that our American political gatherings have always depended for some of their glamour on the kindness of stars. In covering this week’s Democratic shindig, commentators have been checking off which Hollywood celebrities will be present and accounted for. (Scarlett Johansson? Yup. George Clooney? Apparently not. Oprah? Missing in action.)

Steven J. Ross’s important 2011 book, Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics, makes the point that show biz figures who skew conservative are more likely than their liberal colleagues to become political insiders. The obvious examples are George Murphy, who served a term as a Republican senator from California, and Ronald Reagan, who (upon putting his Hollywood career to rest) became California’s governor and then an iconic Republican president of the United States. (A more problematic case is that of Arnold Schwarzenegger, who took advantage of the recall of California’s Democratic governor Gray Davis to vault into the governor’s office as a Republican of sorts, but ended up aggravating both parties before returning to his movie career.)

Among Hollywood’s liberal contingent, there are many shades of ardent political thought, but seemingly less inclination to be counted among the party faithful. (This puts me in mind of Will Rogers’ famous quip: “I belong to no organized party, I'm a Democrat.”) Though a number of Democratic celebs -– among them Robert Vaughn and George Clooney -- have floated the idea of running for office, they seem to prefer keeping their day jobs. Such was certainly the case with Warren Beatty, who (following his controversial release of the political film Bulworth) seriously toyed with a White House bid. Ross clarifies that in the eyes of political liberals and radicals who attended the Americans for Democratic Action dinner in September 1999, Beatty was seen as “the left’s answer to Ronald Reagan: a charismatic figure who knew how to present complex issues in an engaging and persuasive manner.” He also had campaign experience, having backed Robert Kennedy’s doomed presidential run in 1968, served as George McGovern’s chief fundraiser and media advisor in 1972, then developed a close relationship with Gary Hart, whose own White House campaign derailed so spectacularly in 1988. Beatty, however, is a man who values his own privacy, as well as his Hollywood clout. Though encouraged to run for the presidency himself, he ultimately declined.

Harry Belafonte, far more than Warren Beatty or virtually any Hollywood Democrat, was willing to subordinate his show biz career to a social and political cause. In the heady Sixties, he put everything he had into the advancement of the civil rights movement. His commitment to equality for his fellow black Americans and his personal devotion to Martin Luther King led him to embrace the presidency of John F. Kennedy, and later to join forces with attorney general Robert Kennedy. He was personally responsible for rounding up the Hollywood contingent at King’s 1963 March on Washington, and strategically brought Charlton Heston into the fold as a co-organizer because he recognized Heston’s appeal to Middle America. But the assassination of both King and Robert Kennedy in 1968 largely soured him on politics. Today he’s still an outspoken progressive, castigating others (including some black superstars) for their lack of “social responsibility,” but I get the impression he’s less interested in the Democratic Party than in the 99%. Meanwhile, the Democrats are making do with Kal Penn, who’s smart and funny, though not nearly so good at singing “Day-O.”