Food for Thought at the Movies

‘Tis the season to be eating. If you’re a Christian, you’ve probably just scarfed down a big Easter ham, or at least – let’s be honest – some marshmallow goodies brought by the Easter bunny. If you’re Jewish, you’re eating matzoh (and more matzoh). And down the street from me, the food trucks are blooming. These days L.A. is becoming a true moveable feast, with Korean BBQ trucks vying for space with vehicles vending Indian roti, Hawaiian spam-on-a-stick, kimchi quesadillas, and Philly cheesesteak. Today I even spotted a truck touting Trailer Park cuisine. You wait for your order (for Chicken & Waffles or Frito Pie) on an Astroturf rug, surrounded by plastic pink flamingoes. John Waters would definitely approve.

Food and movies just seem to go together. If you attend stage productions, even toting a water bottle to your seat seems like a violation of etiquette. But at the movies you’re expected to chow down, maybe with a tub of popcorn and a supersized cola. Some upscale cinema venues will even deliver to your seat a small meal, or perhaps a cocktail. All that chewing could prove distracting to the person beside you, especially if you’re watching a film about starvation, like The Pianist. And if you’re munching on a meat pie, you’re certainly adding a new dimension to someone’s enjoyment of Sweeney Todd.

Most of us find cooking magical, especially when someone else is doing it. If that someone is trained in the culinary arts, the effect can be poetry in motion. That’s why there’s a long history of movies about the expert preparation of food. Ang Lee’s Taiwanese film about a master chef and his lovelorn daughters, Eat Drink Man Woman, was so scrumptious that it spawned two knock-offs: Tortilla Soup and Soul Food. Equally mouth-watering is Stanley Tucci’s Big Night, involving Italian-American brothers trying to save their foundering restaurant by serving up, for one night only, a spectacular feast. Speaking of feasts, I can’t overlook a tantalizing Danish film, Babette’s Feast, in which a poor French refugee eking out a frugal life in an austere Danish village comes into a sum of money, and puts it toward the preparation of a magnificent repast

Food can be sexy too, never more so than in Chocolat, where Juliet Binoche (playing a mysterious candy maker who wafts into a small French town) proves that the best way to a man’s heart is via his sweet tooth. (I suspect that Julia Child will never be considered a sex symbol, but Meryl Streep certainly kept movie spouse Stanley Tucci happy in Julie and Julia.)

But for me the yummiest, yuckiest, wackiest food movie of all time is Juzo Itami’s Tampopo, which was described in press releases of the day as Japan’s first ramen western (akin to a spaghetti western – get it?) The plot involves two drifters who come upon a desolate roadside eatery and get involved in the life-or-death quest to create the world’s best noodles. But we cut away at times to odd vignettes involving food (and sex), food (and social class), food (and kinky fetishes). The movie ends, as I recall, with a lingering closeup of a young mother nursing her baby in a public park. After all the eating oddities that precede it, an infant’s hungry sucking has never seemed more profound.

Writing this has made me hungry. And it has also given me a lucrative idea. How about a kosher-for-Passover food truck featuring matzoh brei and stewed prunes?

For Hilary Bienstock Grayver, who is devoted to feeding her family, in any season, by any means necessary.

James Cameron Goes On and On

It’s tempting to say that James Cameron gives his fans that sinking feeling. After all, he recently descended to the bottom of the Marianas Trench, in a submarine of his own devising, to explore the ocean at its deepest point. And his very biggest hit – one of the most popular movies of all time – is his dramatization of the sinking of the Titanic. With a new 3-D version of Titanic now coming into theatres, it seems high time to remember where Cameron’s career began. With, of course, Roger Corman.

I never met Jim Cameron, but I’ve spent many hours with Randy Frakes, an effects specialist turned screenwriter who had been one of Cameron’s college pals. The two wangled their way onto a Corman low-rent sci fi epic, Battle Beyond the Stars (1980), by promising to build a front projection camera rig for inexpensive special effects shots. When the gizmo was finished, Roger declared himself unconvinced, but Jim rebounded into the position of model maker, then became the film’s art director, devising sets out of little more than foamcore, hot glue, gaffer’s tape, and spraypaint. He had everyone collecting Styrofoam containers from McDonald’s hamburgers: when spraypainted silver, these certainly looked impressive lining the walls of a spacecraft corridor. But if an actor happened to turn around carelessly, the whole thing would crumble. Then it was back to McDonald’s for more Big Macs.

Cameron’s ambitious sets for Battle Beyond nearly killed him, because he micromanaged every detail. Randy remembers, “He hardly ever slept for six weeks straight.” Afterwards, Jim and Randy tried pitching script ideas, but their concepts were always too grandiose for the low-budget Corman environment. Still, because Roger admired Jim’s ability to think on his feet, he was invited to direct second unit (including a “maggot rape scene”) for Galaxy of Terror, and went on to make his directing debut with Piranha II.

At New World Pictures, Jim Cameron found a career, and also something more. During the frantic pre-production days for Battle Beyond, work went on at Corman’s Venice studio nearly around the clock. One day assistant production manager Gale Anne Hurd was going over costs and schedules with Jim, the new art director, when they heard a piercing scream. It seems a crew member kneeling on the floor had stuck a matte knife in his pocket, its blade protruding. A second man had tried to step over him, but the unseen blade caught his leg, severing his femoral artery. Blood spurted dramatically; he was convinced he was going to die. Gale told me, “Jim had the presence of mind to take his shirt off, make a tourniquet, tie it, and we both drove him to the hospital.” Jim’s low-key heroics obviously caught the attention of this capable young woman. A few years later, the two were married.

As a couple they collaborated on a futuristic film of their own, The Terminator. Gale also produced such later Cameron films as Aliens and another watery epic, The Abyss. Somewhere along the line, the two deep-sixed their romantic relationship. But they remain friends, and also fans of Roger Corman. When Jim accepted his slew of Oscars for Titanic, Gale was disappointed he didn’t single out Roger in his thank-yous. Wouldn’t a talent like Cameron have succeeded without New World Pictures? As Gale insisted to me, he “wouldn’t have gotten a foot in the door, I don’t think. To go from being a guy building spaceship models to art director to second unit director in those three steps, that doesn’t happen anywhere else.”

Starbucks and Big Bucks for Screenwriters

Some weeks ago, a friend with ties to the film industry wrote to me, very upset, regarding a new Starbucks policy she’d read about online. She sent me the article in question, which opened with the news that “Starbucks, the international coffee company, announced today that it is banning all screenwriters from its 19,435 locations worldwide, effective immediately. The move comes after a study commissioned by the company revealed that screenwriters not only spent the least amount of money at their coffeehouses, but they also have ‘a depressing and desperate air about them that spoils everyone else’s experience.’” Screenwriters are also prone, apparently, to stealing packets of Sweet ‘n’ Low. The piece went on to quote Chris Keyser, president of the Writers Guild of America, who vowed to fight the ban on his union’s behalf.

My friend expressed her outrage at the unfairness of it all: “I have to wonder about the study methodology. Did they do an exit poll asking for a WGA membership card from the screenwriter with bulging pockets of Sweet ‘n’ Low?” Her point, I gather, was that it’s wrong to lump together card-carrying screenwriting professionals with wannabes who hang out at Starbucks. At least where I live, it’s hard to find a Starbucks table occupied by someone who’s NOT working on a screenplay.

Then there’s me. I don’t write screenplays at Starbucks. But I read scripts, comment on student scripts, prepare for talks about screenwriting, and sometimes huddle with filmmaker-types to work on projects. Meanwhile, half the people around me seem to be wrestling with character arcs and second-act turning-points. The rest are probably eavesdropping on one another’s chatter, trying to come up with dialogue that sounds fresh and real. And in a town where so many waiters are struggling actors (you should hear them emote while reciting the nightly specials!), it’s easy to assume that a good percentage of the baristas – while whipping up your half-caf extra-hot soy latte – are simultaneously trying to compose a snappy logline.

Doubtless most of these Starbucks-based writers are not WGA members. But that doesn’t mean they have no (extra) shot at success. At New World Pictures, back when Roger Corman was a WGA signatory, we all learned how to dodge around Writers Guild regulations to save money. In my Concorde-New Horizons years, the idea was to hire only non-union writers, but many WGA members were so desperate for a paying gig that they’d happily write a Corman quickie under an assumed name. One up-and-coming writing team combined their middle names into a catchy pseudonym to affix to the thrillers they cranked out for Roger. There was a time when “Henry Dominic” earned far more money writing for Corman than the duo did on their mainstream projects, but that was long ago. Like such Corman nobodies as Robert King and Paul Haggis, they've since gone on to fame and fortune. My point? Don’t count anyone out.

My husband the engineer mentioned at a dinner party that a Hughes Aircraft colleague was an aspiring screenwriter. For years this fellow had been taking classes, reading how-to books, writing spec scripts. Eventually he quit Hughes to try to make it in Hollywood. We all smiled at such naïveté, until the would-be writer’s name was mentioned. Then a Corman friend of mine gasped, and noted that the former engineer was now getting the big bucks for writing well-engineered TV dramas.

That Starbucks ban on screenwriters? I have a strong hunch it was somebody’s early April Fools joke. Now excuse me, please -- I’ve got a date with a for-here tall non-fat extra-foamy latte.

Curtain Going Down on Hollywood’s Stages

It’s curtains for some historic Hollywood soundstages. L.A. has been abuzz with the news that a West Hollywood movie lot dating back to 1919 is about to undergo extensive renovations. Slated for immediate demolition at the former Warner Hollywood Studio are some venerable wooden office buildings and sound-dubbing stages erected in the time of Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford. In their place will rise glass and steel structures that are far more efficient, though far less picturesque. Such is life in the movie capital of the world.

I’ve spent some time at this particular Hollywood outpost. Known first as Pickford-Fairbanks Studio, it went through a variety of names (United Artists Studio, Samuel Goldwyn Studio) before being unimaginatively rechristened “The Lot.” I was there strictly for meetings, and caught no glimpse of the excesses of the old days, when Errol Flynn would legendarily sneak through a secret tunnel to have a drink at the intriguingly tawdry and only vaguely Chinese Formosa Café across the street.

Of course I came on the scene too late to truly experience the years when a movie lot was a small city populated by actors walking around in outlandish get-ups. When I was growing up, 20th Century-Fox’s huge New York Street (erected for Hello, Dolly) could be easily glimpsed from busy Pico Blvd., less than a mile from my home. And I got a whiff of the old studio era while writing a magazine piece about the making of a rather bold experiment, 1982’s Pennies from Heaven. This musical about a Depression-era Chicago sheet-music salesman who retreats into the fantasy world of pop tunes was staged in the old style, on richly detailed sets constructed inside several of MGM’s fabled soundstages. As I wandered across the lot, passing peroxided chorines on their way to lunch in the commissary, I felt I had traveled back in time. Too bad Pennies from Heaven cost (and lost) a small fortune.

Roger Corman once had a studio too. The overwhelming success of Star Wars (1977) convinced Roger that he should try an outer space epic, Battle Beyond the Stars. Prior to 1980, Corman movies had always been shot on practical locations, rather than on sound stages. It was with science fiction in mind that he set about buying the old lumber yard that became his Venice, California studio facility, sending attorney Paul Almond to negotiate with the ageing hippies of the California Coastal Commission who would need to give their approval of the sale. Paul’s hilarious description of the outcome is a highlight of my Corman biography. (See Excerpt #2)

Roger’s ramshackle studio proved unforgettable to those of us who spent time there. The stages were never properly soundproofed, and because the studio was directly in the flight path for L.A. International Airport, it was a challenge, when shooting a period piece, to avoid the sounds of jets and motorcycles. Ambulances too, because in this slightly unsavory neighborhoods there was sometimes real shooting going on. When it rained, the roof leaked. And Venice derelicts were apt to wander in, along with baffled customers who –- seeing the still-existing Hammond Lumber sign –- came by to purchase some 2x4s.

The late writer-director Howard R. Cohen told me that he and Roger once happened to be standing amid piles of scrap material when one of those lumber-seeking do-it-yourselfers drove onto the lot. Explaining that the lumber yard was now a movie studio, Roger sent him on his way. But then he had second thoughts, quipping to Howard, “You know, I could have made a few bucks off that guy.”

Steve Martin, who starred in Pennies from Heaven, is of course a comedian, actor, author, playwright, and master banjo-player. He's paying tribute today to the late Earl Scruggs, and I join him in mourning the loss of a great bluegrass legend.

A World Without Hollywood Endings (Spoiler Alerts Ahead!)

I didn’t realize what a creature of Hollywood I am until I checked out two of this year’s Oscar nominees for Best Foreign-Language Film. No question: they are worthy examples of international filmmaking, but both left me frustrated. The problem, I realized, is that neither has a Hollywood ending.

A Separation is the first Iranian film ever to win an Oscar. Not only was it nominated in the Best Foreign Film category, but it also earned a nomination for its original screenplay, a rare honor indeed for a film made in a foreign language. By no means overtly political, A Separation tells the intimate story of two married couples, whose destinies become intertwined. Still, in the course of telling a small personal story, A Separation touches on the social, political, and religious issues that are roiling Iran today.

At the heart of A Separation is a middle-class couple, not especially religious, who are on the brink of divorcing because she wants to give their eleven-year-old daughter a better life in America and he feels an obligation to his elderly father, caught in the grip of Alzheimer’s disease. When wife Simin moves out, husband Nader hires a housekeeper – a devout chador-wearing young woman – to tend his father while he goes to work. Complications, including a miscarriage, end up embroiling two families in a series of lies, half-truths, angry outbursts, and appeals for legal justice. Without giving away all the twists and turns of the plot, let me simply say that the film ends with a young girl asked to decide with which of her two parents she wants to live.

I waited breathlessly for her answer. I didn’t get one. The film was over. Which is probably terrific in prompting post-film discussions, but I went alone.

Footnote, from Israel, is as visually inventive as A Separation is austere. The story of father-and-son Talmudic scholars may sound dry, but there are moments of great wit here, as well as a profound understanding of human nature. Eliezer Shkolnik is a zealous researcher, and a curmudgeon with little use for his fellow Talmudists. These include son Uriel, a much more expansive thinker, as a well as guy who's quite comfortable shmoozing his fellow academics. With a major prize at stake, all hell breaks loose. At base, Footnote is an exploration of the intricate bond between father and son. It climaxes just as the big prize is about to be awarded. We in the audience know who is going to receive the prize, and who really deserves it. The characters know it too.

I was certain the film was moving toward a satisfying twist that would right all wrongs and end in a heartfelt reconciliation. So much for my Hollywood expectations. Footnote simply left the viewer hanging. I waited through the credits, all in Hebrew, hoping SOMETHING would resolve itself. Nope!

The one foreign film nominee I saw that conformed to my Hollywood expectation of a happy (or at least a tidy) ending was In Darkness, a Holocaust drama from Poland. It’s the true story of a small group of Jews, facing Nazi extermination, who are hidden beneath the streets of Lvov by a Polish sewer worker who seems to have mixed motives. There are horrors aplenty, but the film ends with the survivors emerging at last into sunlight. The joy with which they’re greeted by their former neighbors is pure Hollywood, though this film would have been heartbreaking without it. The ending’s not entirely upbeat, though. A caption tells us about the real-life fate of that good-hearted sewer worker – not so Hollywood after all.

Paris Past and Present, Afternoon and Midnight

“We’ll always have Paris.” That’s what Rick says to Ilsa just before their final parting in Casablanca, the movie classic now celebrating the 70th anniversary of its release. It’s a reminder that the memory of love can be sweet indeed, and also that the City of Lights is a fabulous backdrop for a love affair. As movies are forever proving, Paris is for lovers, and a romance in the shadow of the Tour d’Eiffel makes everyone slightly Parisian.

So many of my favorite romantic movies are set in Paris. And so many of them star the lithe and lovely Audrey Hepburn. Remember her romancing Fred Astaire in Funny Face? And Cary Grant in Charade? I recently watched Love in the Afternoon, writer-director Billy Wilder’s salute to the frothy romantic comedies pioneered by his idol, Ernst Lubitsch. Gary Cooper plays a wealthy American lothario, who enjoys trysting with available (and not-so-available)Parisiennes, with the help of champagne, a suite at the Ritz, and a discreet gypsy orchestra to set the mood. Maurice Chevalier is all Gallic charm as a private detective who’s on to Cooper’s wiles, but appreciates them nonetheless. And Audrey Hepburn is Chevalier’s cello-playing daughter, innocent but hardly stupid. She becomes infatuated with Cooper’s roguish reputation, appears on his hotel balcony to save him from a jealous husband bent on revenge, and finds herself swept into a romance that can’t be controlled. He’s so intrigued by her quirkiness that by the final fadeout he’s ripe for the plucking. Which means – in true Hollywood fashion – that he’ll marry the girl, change his wandering ways, and live happily ever after.

Love in the Afternoon, Funny Face, and Charade share a filmed-on-location Parisian backdrop. They also share the fact that in each of them the adorable Audrey finds happiness with a man old enough to be her father. For me, imagining a vibrant young Hepburn going gaga for leathery 56-year-old Gary Cooper was definitely a stretch. But her on-screen connection with much older men (let’s not forget Sabrina) does make for a handy segue into the films of Woody Allen. Needless to say, the Woodman has long seemed to have a penchant for sweet young things, in life as well as in films like Manhattan. It’s interesting to speculate what Allen would do with a film adaptation of Lolita. Fortunately, his most recent work has left the teenagers alone, and concentrated strictly on (nominal) grown-ups.

In the Oscar-winning Midnight in Paris, Allen has made the most of his opportunity to film in spectacular French locations: the Musée de Rodin, the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, Monet’s garden at Giverny. His Paris is gloriously romantic, but this is not (entirely) the story of a man who finds love with a beautiful young woman. Owen Wilson’s Gil, a successful Hollywood screenwriter, already has a beautiful fiancée (Rachel McAdams). Problem is: he’s a romantic, and she’s a material girl with zero appreciation for Paris in the rain: “What's wonderful about getting wet?” Magically, Gil time-travels to his favorite era, Paris in the Twenties, where he meets Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and the flapper of his dreams. Ultimately, he sadly concludes it’s wiser to stay in the present, a time blessed with such amenities as penicillin and novocain. But if he can’t choose his own era, he can at least choose his own locale. Henceforth, he’ll work on his novel in a city which -- past or present – exerts a special magic. At the end, a new romance seems to be blooming. But in any case, he’ll always have Paris.

(This post is for Laura Burns, diligent screenwriting student and unabashed Casablanca fan.)

Hungering for a Female Hero

The Hunger Games is coming. Struck by photos of Jennifer Lawrence -- in character as Katniss Everdeen – coolly aiming bow and arrow at her prey, I started remembering back to the bold, tough heroines favored by Roger Corman. From his earliest films onward, Roger liked women who were neither shrinking violets nor clinging vines. The typical Corman heroine is more like a cactus, soft and juicy at the center, but prickly as hell on the surface.

Take Beverly Garland in Roger’s 1956 western, Gunslinger. She played a frontier gal who put on the sheriff’s star after her husband was slain by outlaws. Naturally she did a lot of riding, shooting, and rassling, while also playing a lusty romantic scene staged, for some reason, in a tree. Alas for Garland and male lead John Ireland, said tree was home turf for a colony of red biting ants – ouch!

To make a Corman movie, especially in the early years, women had to be tough off-screen as well as on. The seven-day rain-sodden shoot was so taxing that co-star Allison Hayes, who played a conniving saloon keeper, legendarily snarled to Roger, “Who do you have to fuck to get off this picture?” But she got no reprieve, even when she fell from a horse and broke her arm. Garland described for me years later how she herself badly sprained her ankle during a scene that required her to run down a flight of stairs, then leap onto a horse’s back. The following day, with the movie’s climactic cat-fight scheduled, she couldn’t even hobble, until Roger summoned a mysterious doctor with a large syringe: “And in a few minutes I could walk, I could jump, I could do everything. And I worked all day.” Ultimately she paid the price: “I didn’t work for three or four months after that, because I couldn’t walk very well. But that’s Roger; the show goes on.”

Other Corman heroines were equally feisty and physical, with a strong penchant for taking charge. Long before Ripley kicked intergalactic butt in Alien and its sequels, Pam Grier was showing (in films like The Big Doll House and The Arena) that women are hardly the gentle sex. I was at New World Pictures when Roger persuaded Angie Dickinson to star as Wilma McClatchie, a one-woman Bonnie-and-Clyde who robbed the rich and kept the loot in Big Bad Mama. Typically for a Corman film, Wilma had her soft side (she loved her two nubile teenage daughters) and her sexy side (she loved both Tom Skerritt and William Shatner). But she was also mighty handy with a gun, and she never backed down when the going got tough. Just as our production ended, Angie won the top role on the Police Woman series: TV has never been the same since.

At Corman’s Concorde-New Horizons, we created scores of plucky heroines. Over the years we introduced strong female cops (Silk), strong female martial artists (Angel Fist), and strong female superheroes (Black Scorpion). We gave the late Lana Clarkson her signature role, as the Amazonian leading lady in the sword-and-sorcery epic, Barbarian Queen. Of course these smart, savvy females all had great bodies, and performed feats of derring-do while wearing next to nothing. When the Black Scorpion character (lady cop by day, superhero by night), found her way into a Corman-produced TV series, Roger proudly told TV Guide that “where we economized was on the Scorpion’s costume—it doesn’t cover up a lot of her.”

Corman heroines were never meant as role-models for little girls. It was definitely their big brothers we were keeping in mind.