The Boys in the Boat: A Triumph of the American Will

Amid all the excitement about Michael Phelps, Simone Biles, and Usain Bolt, I suspect most Rio Olympics fans are not aware of the gold medal just won by the U.S. women’s eight crew. In fact, they are a dynasty unto themselves, having won eleven straight Olympic and world championships. Not with the same rowers, of course. A changing cast of smart, strong young women (8 wielding oars and 1 coxswain with a megaphone) has made sure the tradition of American dominance in women’s crew continues. The average armchair sports buff, though, is probably not paying attention.

 But I’ll bet Daniel James Brown is thrilled. Brown is the author of one of the most exciting books I’ve read in a long time, The Boys in the Boat. Its subtitle: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The “boys” were a hardscrabble team from the University of Washington, who had to overcome many hurdles on their way to Germany. Brown, a Seattle resident, was lucky to stumble upon their story, and to get to know the few surviving teammates. His book is an inspirational story of survival through grit and pluck, set at a perilous moment in world history.

The top Oscar-winner from 1981 was Chariots of Fire, a stirring real-life tale about runners at the 1924 Paris Olympics. Its focus was on two outsiders on the British men’s team—a Jewish immigrant’s son and a devout Scottish Christian—who struggled to find acceptance among their aristocratic teammates, most of whom hailed from Britain’s elite (and snooty) universities. In The Boys in the Boat, there’s something of the same social tension. It’s the Depression era, and the Pacific Northwest young men, the sons of lumberjacks and dairy farmers, are having a tough go just coughing up their school fees. But hard times have honed their desire to win, and a brilliant coach named Al Ulbrickson proves to be a master at shuffling line-ups and making sure these tall, sometimes awkward collegians function as a unit. There’s also a master boatbuilder with the charming name of George Lyman Pocock who sees the poetry of rowing, and is able to impart it to rough-hewn young stalwarts with more practical matters on their minds.

 On the road to Berlin, Ulbrickson’s team first had to defeat their arch rivals at the University of California. Then it was on to the east coast, where they felt abashed in the company of well-heeled Ivy Leaguers, for whom rowing was a longstanding tradition. If they were intimidated by American bluebloods, they felt even more so when competing against powerhouse British teams. This was all good practice for their arrival in Berlin, where Hitler and his Nazis was determined to prove Aryan superiority through sport. Brown details the spectacular venues provided by the host nation, as well as the efforts made by Nazi Germany to hide its racist ideology and put out the welcome mat to athletes from all over the world.

Rowing sports were a huge deal in that era, and fans near and far gathered in front of radios to hear the outcome of the men’s eight. The stands were packed with enthusiasts, and Hitler himself sat in the VIP box to cheer his country’s crew team on to victory. But it didn’t happen. Somehow the scrappy Americans overcame all obstacles to eke out a win. German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, who’d been assigned to document the 1936 Olympics for posterity, captured the race with her cameras. But in her classic 1938 documentary, Olympia, the victory of the American crew had no place.  

The Boys in the Boat has been optioned by the Weinstein company for filming, but there are still no concrete details about an upcoming production. I do know a young actor, also a gifted rower, who’d be perfect for a major role. (Josh Pence, I’m looking at YOU!)  Meanwhile, we can watch bits of Riefenstahl’s footage on YouTube, as in this little documentary, made to inspire female rowers.

"Superbad": A Long Way from Andy Hardy

I’m much too young for the Andy Hardy movies, which flourished just before and during World War II. Andy (played by Mickey Rooney) was an amiable small-town adolescent. He was always getting into scrapes involving money and girls, then afterward learning the error of his ways through chats with his father, the kindly but upright Judge Hardy. This was an adult’s-eye view of what growing up ought to be.

Since then, the high school years have been presented in vastly different lights. The 1950s saw the rise of teen problem films, including 1955’s Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause, that spotlighted young people who felt isolated from the world around them. Teenage characters in these films -- Sidney Poitier’s Greg Miller and James Dean’s Jim Stark among them – were viewed with sympathy, even when they misbehaved. But these films left us feeling that help for these lost souls would come through interventions from good-hearted adults, like Blackboard Jungle’s dedicated teacher and Rebel’s remorseful father. 

When George Lucas made American Graffiti in 1973, he pretty much wiped adults out of the picture of a small-town cruise night among a group of new high school graduates. The young people in this film deal with their problems among themselves, without adult interference. This approach had great appeal to the youthful viewers who were being courted by studios in the post-Sixties era. And American Graffiti has a winning frankness about the role of drinking, sexual attraction, and car culture in the lives of teenagers. Still, Lucas set his film back in time (“Where Were You in ’62?” was the film’s nostalgia-inducing catchline), and so the bad behavior we see on screen seemed slightly dated, even when the film was new.

In the 1980s it was John Hughes who captured the sense of what it’s like to be a high school student, in such widely popular films as The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Again, the focus is almost entirely on young people whose support systems among parents and teaches seem to have broken down.  The Breakfast Club, especially, concentrates on deeply troubled teens whose campus misdeeds have led to official punishment. But nothing they’ve done (pulling a fire alarm, playing a prank, skipping school) seems, to our modern eyes, all that bad.

Then there’s 2007’s Superbad, which takes the misbehavior of graduating high school seniors a giant step further. The cringe-worthy acts of the two central characters and their friends seem to have the ring of contemporary truth, maybe because screenwriters Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg started creating the project while still in their own teens, basing some of the shenanigans we see on screen on their own lives (and, I assume, their own fantasies). The seniors played by Jonah Hill (as Seth) and Michael Cera (as Evan) are not shown to be troubled in any dramatic way. Rather, they’re presented as realistically horny adolescents, obsessed with male and female body parts and stoked by the possibility of getting laid before they go off to pursue higher education. Says Seth, early on, “The point is to be good at sex before you go to college.”

As a way to pursue their goal of getting in the pants of some attractive classmates, they (and their doofus pal Fogell) get involved with a desperate scheme to stock Emma Stone’s graduation party with booze. Complications of course arise: a liquor-store robbery, some rogue cops, and teen sex foiled by drunken upchucking. My own high school days were much tamer. But I suspect my kids would feel right at home.

Barbra Streisand: A Person Who Needs (Hollywood) People

For Barbra Streisand, this may be the best of times and the worst of times. At age 74, she’s just kicked off a new national tour with an acclaimed performance at L.A.’s Staples Center. The tour, modestly named “Barbra: The Music . . . the Mem’ries . . . The Magic!”, is designed to showcase a new duets album that goes on sale August 28. At the same time, the long-gestating new Barry Levinson film project, a reworking of the Broadway musical Gypsy, has once again lost its financing, and will not be starting production in fall as planned. Which means it’s more unlikely than ever that we’ll see Streisand play the iconic role of Mama Rose.

Gypsy, the 1959 Broadway hit that combined the talents of Jerome Robbins, Arthur Laurents, Jules Styne, and Stephen Sondheim, originally featured Ethel Merman as the indomitable mother of stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. It’s a role for a powerhouse singer as well as a great actress. The Hollywood “geniuses” behind the 1962 film version chose to cast Rosalind Russell, a Hollywood legend but not someone exactly known for her musical chops. (That’s one of many reasons the movie is barely remembered today.)  In major stage and TV revivals, the part has gone to Angela Lansbury, Tyne Daly, Bette Midler, and Bernadette Peters. From what I’ve learned from Neal Gabler’s respectful new biography, Barbra Streisand: Redefining Beauty, Femininity, and Power, Mama Rose would be an ideal fit for Streisand. She certainly has the pipes for the job, as well as the combination of vulnerability and strength that the role demands.

 According to Gabler, Streisand’s goal was always to be an actress. She diligently studied the craft (fellow acting student Dustin Hoffman remembered her as “a hungry baby bird”), but of course it was singing that provided her with a breakthrough moment. It came with Broadway’s Funny Girl, the musicalized story of Ziegfeld Follies entertainer Fanny Brice. I learned from Gabler that director Jerome Robbins lobbied for Anne Bancroft to play the leading role. Others in contention included Broadway stalwart Mary Martin and comedienne Carol Burnett. Gabler describes Funny Girl as “a Jewish story of an outsider trying to win acceptance in a world of beauty and glamour wrapped around the story of romance doomed by a driven Jewish woman’s success.” Which made it the perfect role for Streisand, who shared both Brice’s ethnicity and her profound discomfort with her less-than-All-American looks. Writes Gabler, “Certainly others could have played Brice. But only Streisand had lived Brice.” 

The Broadway success of Funny Girl took Streisand to Hollywood, where she promptly became an Oscar winner. Thereafter she appeared in some not-entirely-suitable roles, like that of the middle-aged lead in Hello, Dolly! Gabler himself is most partial to The Way We Were, which he sees as revealing Streisand’s own personal strengths and weaknesses. The film’s failed romance with the character played by Robert Redford shows Streisand’s Katie  paying a price “for her moralizing, for her perfectionism, for her gutsiness, for her ardency,  for her stridency, for her lack of conformity—for all the things her fans had come to love about her and about her characters. She pays a price to be Barbra Streisand.”

Of course Streisand has played many other movie roles, and has been gutsy enough to defy the Hollywood system by directing herself in Yentl, The Prince of Tides, and The Mirror Has Two Faces. All have suffered critical slings and arrows, but the lady marches on. Who can forget the way she was? And we have high hopes for what she is yet to be.

Flying Down to Rio for the Olympic Games

Today marks the kick-off of the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Not that the path to these Olympics has been a smooth one. What with political turmoil, economic meltdown, crime in the streets, and garbage in the bay, the 31^st Olympiad may not exactly be a triumph. (Then there’s the Zika virus, and the Russian doping scandal, and the threat of terrorism: I could go on and on.) But why not think positive? Rio is known to be a beautiful city, despite it all, and who can resist the meeting of the world’s greatest athletes? And, come what may, I’ll always have the Rio of the movies.

The first movie I know that features at least a fantasy version of Brazil’s many charms is a 1933 pre-code musical from RKO, Flying Down to Rio. It stars (yup!) Dolores del Rio as part of a romantic triangle, but is more famous for introducing the great duo of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. When Astaire and Rogers slither through the Carioca, their foreheads touching, screen history is made. If Rio seems the home of romance in this film, it looks even sexier in a full-color romp called That Man from Rio, a lively French spy spoof featuring authentic Brazilian locations and the delightfully rumpled Jean-Paul Belmondo. Twenty years later, the city of Rio was featured in a mild American sex comedy, Blame it on Rio. (Though Michael Caine, director Stanley Donen, and writer Larry Gelbart were all involved, it didn’t make many waves.)

Brazil of course has its own active film industry. Most of the titles are unfamiliar, but some have definitely made their presence felt on the international circuit. One is a sexy comedy from 1976: Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands. This story of a woman torn between a proper gentleman and a sexy layabout (who returns to her as a ghost) made a star of Sonia Braga.

                                  

Several of the most highly regarded Brazilian films tackle life in the country’s picturesque but toxic slum neighborhoods. One is Pixote (1981), which focuses on a ten-year-old runaway struggling to survive on the streets of São Paulo. Its director, Hector Babenco, would later go on to direct Sonia Braga, Raul Julia, and the Oscar-winning William Hurt in an inventive prison drama, 1986’s Kiss of the Spider Woman. In 2002, Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund directed an even more brutal story, one that features Rio’s rival street gangs, Called City of God, it captures the toll taken on the lives of young people who grow up in a violent culture.    

But I want to end on gentler note, with an Oscar-winning film that has always symbolized Brazil for me. Black Orpheus (originally Orfeu Negro) dates all the way back to 1959. Its director, Marcel Camus, was French, but in staging the ancient Greek love story of Orpheus and Eurydice (and setting it against the phantasmagoric excitement of Carnaval), he went to the streets of Rio in search of potential actors. Interestingly, several he found were athletes. Breno Mello, who played Orpheus, was a soccer player. And Adhemar da Silva, in the key role of Death, had won Olympic gold medals in the triple jump in 1952 and 1956.

Orpheus in the Greek original was a musician, and it is the film’s music that most sticks with me now. Antônio Carlos Jobim was involved, and guitarists the world over now make Theme from Black Orpheus part of their repertoire.

Black Orpheus was the very favorite film of Barack Obama’s mother. Who knows how it helped change history?

Anyway, let the games begin!

Grey Gardens Lives On: A Tribute to the Maysles Brothers, and some others

Film at its best can confer immortality. Such is the case with Grey Gardens, a 1975 documentary by Albert and David Maysles that chronicles in direct-cinema style (closely akin to the French cinéma vérité) the daily lives of a mother and daughter who eked out a precarious existence in a decaying mansion that was once an East Hampton showplace. The startling case of Big Edie and Little Edie Bouvier Beale came to light in the early 1970s, when newspapers began reporting that the one-time socialites were living in squalor, surrounded by cats, fleas, and garbage. The story made headlines because Edith Bouvier Beale (“Big Edie”) was the aunt of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and her daughter Little Edie was Jackie’s first cousin. A large donation by Jacqueline and Aristotle Onassis helped replace the mansion’s defunct furnace and plumbing systems, but the two women continued to live in eccentric squalor until Big Edie’s death.

The Maysles brothers’ documentary gave viewers a first-hand glimpse of the two Edies, who are viewed by some as pathetic and by others as heroic in their determination to make their own life-choices. Both had artistic aspirations: Big Edie aspired to be a singer, and in the mansion’s heyday insisted on performing at parties; Little Edie, in her early years, had some success as a New York fashion model and dreamed of a Hollywood career. (She also dreamed of marrying a dashing young man of the likes of Joseph Kennedy Jr., but her brief engagement to the eldest Kennedy son was apparently one of her many fantasies.) In later years, when all of her body hair fell out due to alopecia, she adopted a headscarf look that made its own unique fashion statement.

On the  heels of the Maysles’ film, which was featured at the Cannes Film Festival in 1976, there was much additional media attention to the Beales. A 78-minute interview with Little Edie at Grey Gardens appeared in 1976. The two Beales inspired photo-spreads in magazines like Vogue, as well as additional documentaries in this century, including Ghosts of Grey Gardens. Today there’s actually a so-called Grey Gardens lifestyle legacy brand, created by a family relative. It features housewares and accessories supposedly based on Little Edie’s fashion flair in the days before she succumbed to total eccentricity.

 Grey Gardens also became a much-honored 2009 HBO made-for-TV movie, starring Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange, who won an Emmy for her role. And a Broadway musical based on the lives of the two Beales played 300 performances on Broadway, from November 2006 to July 2007. Recently revived in a new production with Rachel York and Betty Buckley, it is now playing at L.A.’s Ahmanson Theatre, where I had a chance to see it two nights ago. Its score doesn’t make you come out humming, but it remains a fascinating exploration of a symbiotic relationship that’s as mysterious as it is all-consuming. This new production pays tribute to the original work of the Maysles brothers by introducing two filmmaker characters haunting several scenes with their cameras and boom mikes, and also by incorporating what looks to be actual Maysles footage projected onto the set.

To be honest, I for one find the Beales to be disturbing rather than enchanting. But I’m glad to have gotten to know more about these puzzling but unforgettable women. By the way, Grey Gardens, the estate, is proving to have some immortality of its own. The elder Edie, though impoverished, refused to sell, but Little Edie sold it to journalism’s Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn, who’ve lovingly restored it to its past glory.