Rita Moreno: SAG Honoree, Survivor, Sucker?

When I was in high school, Rita Moreno was an icon to all of us. In the hugely popular film version of West Side Story, she played the character that we girls most admired. Few of us would want to emulate Natalie Wood’s Maria, who was a little too nice and a little too sad for our tastes. Moreno’s Anita, though – that was a woman!  She danced up a storm in those terrific ruffled dresses, sang passionately about her mixed feelings for “America” (we had mixed feelings too), and had the best-looking on-screen boyfriend, bar none. Moreover, you had to love her spunk. No wonder she won the Oscar for best supporting actress of 1961. And no wonder SAG is giving her its 2014 lifetime achievement award.

Born in Puerto Rico, Moreno was the rare member of the West Side Story cast who actually matched the ethnicity of her role. (By contrast, George Chakiris  is Greek American, and the late Natalie Wood had Russian roots.) The perfect embodiment of the Latin-American spitfire, Moreno often found herself in roles that reinforced the familiar stereotypes. (For instance, she played Señorita Delores in a 1958 episode of the Red Skelton Show titled “Clem the Bullfighter.”) Which is why I was later surprised to realize she’d also played very different parts, including significant roles in two of Hollywood’s best musicals. In Singin’ in the Rain, she was Zelda Zanders, a cute but thankfully non-ethnic starlet. Four years later, she played Indochinese  as the tragic Tuptim in The King and I.     

After her Oscar win (followed by an Emmy, a Grammy, and a Tony award), Moreno never got offered another film role that was worthy of her talents. I remember her making a brief appearance in Carnal Knowledge, and playing the lurid part of a drug-addled stewardess in one of my least favorite movies of all time, The Night of the Following Day. In this turgid 1968 film, a young heiress flying to France is kidnapped by a chauffeur -- the bizarrely blond-haired Marlon Brando -- and taken to a beach house where some ill-assorted thugs do unspeakable things to her and to one another. I will not reveal the twist ending (though I’m not sure why I should be so kind to a film so annoying). Suffice it to say, I was sad to see Moreno in a role thoroughly lacking in dignity.  

Her appearance in that film made slightly more sense when I glanced at her eponymous 2013 memoir, which devotes many pages to her tempestuous eight-year affair with Brando. When she met him, at age 22, she fell hard: “To say that he was a great lover --­ sensual, generous, delightfully inventive --­ would be gravely understating what he did,  not only to my body, but for my soul. Every aspect of being with Marlon was thrilling, because he was more engaged in the world than anyone else I’d ever known.” So deeply was she in thrall to Brando that she endured countless infidelities, plus an illegal abortion. She tried dating others (including Elvis!) in a vain attempt to make him jealous. Ultimately, when he abandoned her to marry his Tahitian co-star from Mutiny on the Bounty, she tried suicide. The Night of the Following Day came much later, briefly rekindling a relationship that seemed doomed from the start.

Given that she continues to perform with élan on stage and screen, I guess you can say she’s the ultimate survivor. Sorry, Rita. I’d much rather salute you for your achievements than read about you degrading yourself for someone who never recognized your worth.

Peter and the Starcatcher Take Up Recycling (just like Roger Corman)

As a fan of live theatre, as well as someone who grew up loving J.M Barrie’s Peter Pan, of course I didn’t want to miss Peter and the Starcatcher. This stage adaptation of a popular children’s novel is a prequel of sorts to the Peter Pan story, showing how the boy who didn’t want to grow up landed on a island paradise, and how an ornery pirate came to fear a ticking crocodile.

It’s a lovely show, one that makes full use of the imaginative possibilities of live theatre. The one-dozen actors play many roles, and the audience needs to stay focused in order to appreciate the play’s inventive language and exuberant stretches of mime. But during the annual Broadway awards season, it was the technical crew who captured the Tonys. At the 2013 ceremony, there was a rare unanimity among Tony voters: Peter and the Starcatcher was honored for its sound design, lighting design, costumes, and scenery.

Taking a gander at an article in the play’s program titled “One Person’s Trash is Another Person’s Tony Award,” I learned something fascinating. The show’s set designer, Donyale Werle, believes in using recycled and sustainable materials in her work. As a dedicated member of the Broadway Green Alliance, she tries to avoid the usual practice of building a complex set out of durable materials and then simply trashing it when a show is over. The highlight of the design for Peter and the Starcatcher is an old-fashioned gilt proscenium arch that frames the stage. True to her belief in re-purposing stuff that would otherwise end up in landfills, Werle has decorated her arch with cast-off materials collected with help from the alliance: 3500 used corks; 800 bottle caps; 300 pieces of plastic silverware; along with countless discarded kitchen utensils, broken toys, CDs, and other leavings of our throwaway culture. The same inventiveness marks the show’s costumes, especially in a colorful scene introducing Neverland’s mermaids, whose costumes feature old tablecloths, sponges, metal scouring pads, and hilariously strategic vegetable steamers.

The recycling of everyday objects into theatre sets and costumes appeals to me as someone who cares about our environment. But it also intrigues me – as a former Roger Corman person – because I well remember how Roger’s fundamental cheapness helped make adaptative re-use something of a mantra among his employees. If you worked for Roger, at either New World Pictures or Concorde-New Horizons, you knew all about re-using old scripts, old footage, and sometimes old actors. (Our casting director was well aware that once-famous thespians could be hired cheap for major roles because they no longer had their old box-office cachet. That’s how we got F. Murray Abraham, winner of the Best Actor Oscar for Amadeus, to star in our Dillinger and Capone, and the legendary Ray Walston to take a featured role in Saturday the 14^th Strikes Back ).     

Roger was especially keen on recycling sets instead of scrapping them to build something new. In 1989,  when writer-director Howard Cohen was visiting the Concorde lot in Venice, California, he saw an exterior set of a medieval castle, which had just been used for some low-budget sword-and-sorcery extravaganza. Inside the studio was an ultra-modern science lab that had played a role in a science-fiction thriller. It was a lightbulb moment. Howard announced to Roger his idea for a time-travel film that would put both sets to work. That’s how The Time Trackers was born. And Roger has also tried making two films simultaneously on the same set, one shot in the daytime and one after-hours. But that’s a story for another day.

"Mary Poppins": Flying into the National Film Registry

I have a hunch that Saving Mr. Banks is not going to be inducted into the National Film Registry anytime soon. Not that I didn’t enjoy it, especially the acerbic but layered performance by Emma Thompson. She certainly made me want to know more about P.L. Travers, a woman who apparently brought her own all-too-real backstory to her timeless fantasy creation, Mary Poppins. But the endearing film from Disney, featuring Uncle Walt genially twisting Travers’ arm in order to get her flying nanny onscreen, is probably too slight (and too self-congratulatory) to live on. The flashbacks, though beautifully wrought, didn’t entirely convince me.  And the day-to-day glimpses of the pre-production process  -- involving screenwriter Don DaGradi and the musical Sherman brothers – were candy-coated, no question. I must admit, though, that for a Mary Poppins fan like me, it was wonderful to relive the evolution of those timeless tunes, even if what I was seeing on screen added a spoonful of sugar to the act of artistic collaboration.

I mention the National Film Registry here because the end of 2013 brought the annual announcement of new inductees. The twenty-five-year-old Registry, sponsored by the Library of Congress, includes American-made films deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” enough to warrant preservation in the library’s archives. The 25 films chosen are always an eclectic lot, including Hollywood hits, tough-minded documentaries, obscure art films, and even home movies that have something important to say about the American past. Highlights of the 2013 list include Gilda (film noir at its finest), along with The Quiet Man (a rare John Wayne comedy, directed by John Ford),  and Forbidden Planet  (a sci-fi classic imaginatively based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest). The Magnificent Seven and Pulp Fiction made the list too, as did Michael Moore’s controversial Roger and Me. Among the silent films inducted, one stand-out is Daughter of Dawn, a recently discovered 1920 love story performed by an all Native-American cast. There’s also a collection of films featuring early Martha Graham dance performances, as well as The Hole, John and Faith Hubley’s 1962 Oscar-winning animated  meditation on the threat of nuclear catastrophe.

As always, there were several films whose inclusion thrilled me on a personal level. I was delighted to see Mary Poppins on the list, both because of its artistry (especially its brilliant blend of animation and live action) and because it meant so much to me years ago. When I was a high school senior, my friends and I saw this movie multiple times. I think we realized that we were trembling on the brink of adulthood. Mary Poppins allowed us to briefly hold back time and revel in the innocence that would soon no longer be ours.

On the other hand, Mike Nichols’ brilliant screen adaptation of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? introduced us young souls to the world of grown-ups in the most dramatic way possible. And as someone who appreciates the unabashed humanism of Stanley Kramer’s output, I was happy to see recognition for Judgment at Nuremberg, which takes to heart the moral issues raised by the rise and fall of Nazism.  

Then there’s “The Lunch Date,” a 1989 student film by Adam Davidson that in ten minutes (and on a very low budget) manages to say a great deal about race and class. The filmmaker is the son of L.A. theatre legend Gordon Davidson and his publicist-wife Judi, who’s a friend.  I tip my hat to the Davidsons. And a New Year salute to parents of talented children who much too rarely get the recognition they deserve. All hail! (See below, and enjoy!)   

(P.S. Steve Carver, the director-turned-photographer who's been saluted on this site, is announcing a campaign to help support his new book, UNSUNG HEROES & VILLAINS OF THE SILVER SCREEN: Western Portraits of Great Character Actors. Horst Buchholtz, featured in new National Film Registry inductee The Magnificent Seven, is one of Steve's subjects.)  

The Great Wolf of Wall Street (or Chicanery is the Father of Invention)

Leonardo DiCaprio has had a big year. In spring he starred in Baz Luhrmann’s reimagining of the classic F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, The Great Gatsby. Now he’s playing the title character in Martin Scorsese’s latest, The Wolf of Wall Street. The roles are hardly identical, but there are some fascinating areas of overlap.

Starting out as a non-descript North Dakotan lacking both fame and fortune, Fitzgerald’s James Gatz  reinvents himself as Jay Gatsby, a fabulously wealthy financier who reigns over a palatial spread on Long Island. When it comes to money, he seems to have the Midas touch, but his fancy cars and fancier parties (not to mention that pile of exquisite shirts) exist chiefly to impress Daisy, the lost love of his youth. He’s apparently done his share of underhanded deals, but at base he’s a thoroughgoing romantic. Money, for him, is simply a way to get the girl.

In The Wolf of Wall Street, adapted (apparently with a fair degree of accuracy) from the memoirs of stock-market hustler Jordan Belfort, money itself is the prize, and not simply the means to an end. Money buys girls (lots of them), as well as booze, drugs, costly toys, and -- above all -- power. I see the Jordan Belfort character as someone who gets high on living life at the expense of others. To feed his various urges, he is in a constant state of self-invention, which is why he’s so brilliant on the telephone, telling suckers exactly what they want to hear.

Another current movie about re-invention of the illicit kind is of course American Hustle. David O. Russell’s darkly funny film, loosely based on the Abscam Scandal of the 1980s, resembles The Wolf of Wall Street in that it is all about the pleasures and the profits that come from conning the unwary. I can’t resist seeing this movie’s stellar cast as engaged in personal self-inventions onscreen. Christian Bale (a wiry Bostonian in Russell’s The Fighter) metamorphoses here into a chubby New Yawker with an elaborate comb-over. The wholesome, winsome Amy Adams turns into a sexpot (boy, do her necklines plunge!) of uncertain nationality. Bradley Cooper, once People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive, appears in American Hustle as a goofy FBI agent with a bad perm. The protean Jennifer Lawrence is lightyears removed from her tough-girl role as Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games. And, in a surprise cameo, one of Hollywood’s greatest actors does something completely unexpected.

If The Wolf of Wall Street is compared to American Hustle, it seems far less comic, and far more ferocious.  Those who’ve seen both films will understand what I mean when I say that Russell’s film is all about hair, and Scorsese’s is all about skin. I appreciated them both, but give the nod to The Wolf of Wall Street because of Scorsese’s absolute mastery of the film medium. I understand why his work here is controversial, but can’t grasp why some feel he’s glamorizing wrongdoing. By the end of The Wolf of Wall Street, DiCaprio’s character is clearly not having fun. Why can’t people see that this is, at base, a morality tale?

It is also a film that’s three hours long. Though I didn’t feel anything was extraneous, there’s no question that 180 minutes is a lengthy sit. That’s why a new app highlighted in the L.A. Times may have its uses. Www.RunPee.com advises the conscientious moviegoer of the best time to take a bathroom break, then tells you what you missed. For us aging Baby Boomers at the multiplex, this might be just the ticket.

The Rose Parade: Starting 2014 the SoCal Way

Like all good Southern Californians, I spent the first morning of New Year’s Day 2014 glued to my television set. The Rose Parade has been a January tradition for 125 years. I’m not nearly that old, but I’ve been watching the floats roll down Pasadena’s Colorado Blvd. ever since my parents bought their first Zenith. The parade represents a special kind of showbiz, one that combines sophisticated technology with the immediacy of a live event. In its razzle-dazzle beauty, it’s SoCal all the way.

The Rose Parade was founded by members of the Valley Hunt Club. They sought to promote local real estate to East Coasters who might be attracted by the San Gabriel Valley’s mild climate and genteel cultural attractions. So they paraded in horse-drawn buggies bedecked with flowers, in imitation of the rose festival in Nice, and then staged a football match. (Later came chariot races, before the Rose Bowl game was established as one of January’s premier college sports competitions.)

Spectators gathered to see the early parades. Starting in 1900, newsreel footage allowed audiences throughout the U.S. to participate vicariously. By 1947, the parade was being broadcast on a newfangled contraption called television. A few years later, the roses burst into living color. Then came the Sixties, when satellites delivered the Rose Parade to viewers across the globe. By now I suspect it’s been seen by astronauts floating through space.

Speaking of outer space, it was a popular motif on 2014 Rose Parade floats. This year’s parade, whose theme was “Dreams Come True,” featured flower-covered spacecraft, a space shuttle, and some oversized Little Green Men who spectacularly dismounted from their vehicle to explore earth’s surface. But movies were not forgotten. The float representing the city of Los Angeles paid tribute to our local entertainment industry by showcasing Universal Studios, as well as Hollywood’s Chinese Theater. Not to be outdone, the city of Burbank recognized its own role as a film production hub by depicting a movie set, on which a Perils of Pauline-style heroine is tied to the tracks in the path of an ongoing train, as an old-fashioned camera records the action. (Hollywood’s Garry Marshall sat in the director’s chair, waving to the crowds.)

If viewers of yesterday’s parade saw plenty of floral spaceships (along with several teddy bears and many cute dogs), they also saw some communications systems that would have seemed impossible even a few years back. The parade opened with a 274-foot-long entry from American Honda, depicting a string of futuristic vehicles. One boasted a long-armed camera that scanned the crowds along the parade route, then turned them into “virtual riders” on two enormous traveling video screens.

If Honda’s presence in the parade signified a triumph for high-tech mass communications, the folks in the KTLA broadcast booth were a throwback to a much earlier era. Savvy Californians know better than to watch Rose Parade coverage on the national networks, which are dominated by commercials and by hosts with little knowledge of parade history. Instead we tune in to folksy Bob Eubanks and Stephanie Edwards, who’ve been broadcasting the parade on KTLA for the past thirty years. They’re hardly youngsters: former game-show host Eubanks was born in 1938, and perky Stephanie in 1943. Stephanie’s age became a topic of much discussion a few years back when KTLA replaced her in the booth with a much younger (and more ethnic) female. Poor Stephanie was relegated to doing commentary from a grandstand, smiling gamely while getting drenched in a rare New Year’s rain shower. But now Stephanie’s back where she belongs. The tradition continues.