Steve Jobs: Farewell to the King of the Computer Nerds

I’m saddened to learn of the death of Steve Jobs. There’s no question that his creative mind touched my life, as well as the lives of those around me. Not that I’m an early adopter, by any means. Back in the 1980s, when we were shopping for our very first personal computer, I could imagine myself buying a Apple product, because the little icons that dotted its screen made sense to me. But my husband, the engineer, vetoed the purchase. A fan of complex technology, he decided the user-friendly Mac system was “too simple.” So I became an IBM gal, now and forever—but one who has succumbed to the lure of an iPhone and (yup!) an iPad.

Jobs was a rare combo of technological savvy and showmanship. There’s no question that his Apple brand revolutionized Hollywood, starting with a groundbreaking commercial directed by Ridley Scott that aired in 1984 during the third quarter of the Super Bowl. Look at what Pixar (acquired by Jobs in 1986) has done to change the face of American animation. For better or for worse, the hand-drawn animated features that made Disney’s name have been almost entirely stamped out by the advent of Toy Story and its ilk. On a smaller scale, every ambitious kid can now use his or her home computer to make, edit, and distribute movies—and most of those creative types prefer Macs. The Apple brand soon became invaluable for creating cheap campaigns too. Which is why a Roger Corman underling, Michael Amato, quickly became a Mac expert.

Amato was named Concorde’s head of marketing in 1993, at a time when the company’s direct-to-video sales were in decline. Corman’s solution was to make ever more films on ever slimmer budgets. With only one assistant, Amato was asked to crank out ad campaigns for thirty-six movies a year, while also handling promotional materials for the major film markets. (By contrast, Concorde’s main competitor at the time, Trimark Pictures, released twenty-two in a year, and its marketing staff numbered eleven.) At first each of Michael’s campaigns cost about $4,000, mostly for the hiring of freelance graphic designers. Then Corman decided to slash costs by using cut-and-paste methods. When told that modern advertising required computer technology, he sent Amato to his house to create ads on his son’s home computer. They weren’t great ads-—but to promote Corman’s sex-and-violence cheapies they were surely good enough.

Since I’m hardly passionate about technology and business affairs, when I think of Steve Jobs dying at the age of 56, my mind goes elsewhere. First of all, I remember all those Hollywood weepies in which the focal point is an attractive person who dies young. (To me, let’s face it, 56 seems youngish.) Hollywood was practically founded on such movies. Like Camille and Love Story, where beautiful young heroines become even more beautiful as they succumb to dreadful, but flattering, diseases. And the many films (Dead Poet’s Society and a host of others) in which a sensitive young man dies because he can’t survive the harshness of the real world. Yet Steve Jobs, for all that he was a visionary, was very much a part of the world of today. And he was less an ethereally beautiful young person than a bespectacled computer nerd. In fact, in his black turtlenecks and jeans, he managed to make nerd-dom chic. In the movies and TV shows of today, nerds are frequently viewed as heroes. Maybe Steve Jobs should get credit for that as well.

Cary Grant's Daughter Tells All

How glamorous is it to be the child of a Hollywood celebrity? My good friend’s late father was a noted character actor. He played featured roles for Frank Capra, Roman Polanski, and Martin Scorsese, then co-starred in a long-running sitcom. Along the way, he married six times, and fathered six daughters.

My friend was fascinated by her dad. For years she’s been digging up tidbits about his career, hoping to write his biography some day. She once shared with me a long-ago photo of the two of them, laughing uproariously. When I saw this treasure, I was moved to comment that this token of their relationship made me wistful. I’d loved my own father, but had no picture that captured our connection with such immediacy. Look again, my friend said. Her photo certainly looked candid, but both father and little daughter were well-groomed and well-dressed. And the photo itself was a sharp 8x10 glossy, with somebody’s name embossed in the corner. In other words, this was a photo op: a photographer had been hired to get some at-home publicity shots. The father-daughter intimacy I envied was not entirely bogus, but it was on-again, off-again, depending on where he was in terms of his career, his marriages, and his life.

Visiting Southern California, my friend asked to be driven to one of L.A.’s scenic canyons, where we hunted for a particular street address. This was where her father had been living with his last wife at a time when my friend -— then a young divorcee with a small child —- had fallen seriously ill. In desperation, she wrote her dad asking for $500. He prepared a check for $350, then held it for a week before sending it with a note that read, “The bond market is down and my financial status is not secure.” This despite the fact that his TV series was in worldwide syndication. As my friend stared at the spacious canyon home where her dad had been ensconced while she was sick and broke, her sadness was contagious.

Which brings me to Jennifer Grant’s new memoir, Good Stuff: A Reminiscence of My Father, Cary Grant. Though Grant married five times, Jennifer was his only offspring, born during his late-in-life marriage to Dyan Cannon. Jennifer’s book about her father, who died when she was twenty, is a “Daddy Dearest,” in the very best sense. Through her pages we learn that Cary Grant -— so charming, and funny on screen —- was very much the same in daily life. He was also so thoroughly besotted with his daughter that he took extraordinary pains to give her a special childhood.

Jennifer got many celebrity-kid perks: riding lessons, a Malibu beach house, trips to Monaco to attend the circus and hobnob with Princess Grace. But Grant also clued her in to practical matters. Remembering his own days of genteel poverty, he taught her how to appreciate money, and how to handle it. (She was signing her own tax returns from an early age.) He taught her to be generous toward those less fortunate. Most valuable of all, she got her father’s undivided attention. Having retired from the screen just before her birth, he devoted himself to educating his darling daughter in the ways of the world. The depth of his affection is seen in the book’s photos and snippets of transcribed audiotape. Grant saved everything connected with Jennifer’s life, treating mementos of their time together as precious relics.

Only one problem for Jennifer Grant: she hints that no adult male can compete with her father’s memory. It’s hardly surprising that her heart belongs to Daddy.

The King and the Queen of “The Good Wife”

The Good Wife, the much-honored CBS dramatic series, has just kicked off its third season with a provocative new poster of star Julianna Margulies. A few weeks ago, Margulies picked up an Emmy for her role as a politician’s wife who returns to her legal career after her husband is disgraced in a sex scandal. Among the nominees in the Outstanding Drama Series category were the show’s creators, Robert and Michelle King. I know them both from my days at Concorde-New Horizons. Funny how working for Roger Corman can prepare you for bigger and better things.

Robert King’s association with Roger Corman started back in 1988. Robert’s entry into the Corman world began with The Nest, a film produced by Roger’s wife Julie that featured no-name actors battling a slew of killer cockroaches. (I’m still saving one of those plastic cockroaches that served as our special effects.) Robert got involved with The Nest after another writer was fired. Production was due to start in six weeks, and Julie was in a frenzy. King, who had never before earned a screenwriting credit, showed up at the Concorde office, thinking he was going to pitch his concept. Instead he was hired on the spot, for the princely sum of $3000, and hustled into a room where he was asked to crank out a story outline. In that same room, someone was casting body doubles for Big Bad Mama II, and another staffer was on the phone trying to round up a flock of chickens. For King, this first day epitomized Concorde: “an insane place where no one paid attention to you . . . . Everybody did their own thing and it was a creative hotbed, but no one took it very seriously.”

On the strength of The Nest, Robert was hired by Roger Corman to crank out Silk 2 (a Manila quickie about a sexy lady cop) and Bloodfist (a well-crafted rip-off of Jean-Claude Van Damme’s KickBoxer that was later remade by Concorde at least four more times). It wasn’t long before Robert moved on to big studio projects. One was the ill-fated Cutthroat Island, a box-office flop of historic proportions. He was also a writer and fledgling producer on Vertical Limit, a popular thriller about mountain-climbing, before finding his biggest success in television. Though Robert has moved far beyond Corman-level budgets, he insisted to me that the Concorde experience was formative for him as a writer: “I procrastinate right up to a deadline, and then force the deadline to keep me creative. That’s a very big Corman technique, which is—we need it now! Go do it!” Robert is convinced that he does his best work with his back against the wall, relying on raw panic to free him of rules and expectations. Still, though Concorde taught him practical filmmaking, he explains he was never able to use his Concorde features as industry calling cards: “You don’t show the cockroach script; you don’t show the cockroach movie. You take what you learned, and go on from there.”

On The Good Wife, marriage doesn’t fare so well. But I’m happy to report that some marriages do work out. When I first met Michelle King, she was trying to land a lowly job as Julie Corman’s assistant. But somewhere along the line, she and Robert began to write together, and the rest is television history. How nice that a romantic partnership sparked a creative partnership that has paid big dividends.

Punctilious about Punctuation

I’ve just been informed that September 24 was National Punctuation Day. Who knew? When I got the word, it was too late to throw a party, so I’m celebrating belatedly. Though I write about movies and moviemaking, I started out as an English major. And, as fans of Garrison Keillor are well aware, we English majors are a sensitive breed. (We may not be employable, but -- when it comes to English usage -- we never swerve from the path of linguistic correctness. What, never? Well, hardly ever.) So here’s my tribute to the role played by punctuation, and proofreading in general, within Hollywood.

It was my good fortune, as a UCLA doctoral candidate in English, to be hired by Roger Corman to assist in the making of exploitation films. Needless to say, Corman’s subject matter was rather different from what I encountered in graduate seminars on Macbeth and Moby Dick. (Or maybe not so different. Sex, violence . . . it’s just that Shakespeare and Melville used much fancier language.) My job as story editor included readying scripts for production. That’s when the English major in me took over. Of course I understood about dialogue: that characters need to speak colloquially, even idiosyncratically, to convey their essence to the audience. But I insisted that, when it came to stage directions and descriptive passages, everything be grammatically impeccable. And, of course, correctly spelled and punctuated.

Some of the writers with whom I worked balked at my insistence that their scripts be error-free. Writer-director Jim Wynorski (responsible for Chopping Mall and such later masterpieces as The Bare Wench Project) griped that since “you don’t shoot punctuation,” there was really no need to stress out about verbal correctness. Maybe so. But I would remind Jim that scripts (even Roger Corman scripts) are widely circulated. They are read by actors, agents, managers, directors, producers, and distributors. At least some of these folks were English majors too, once upon a time. Several Hollywood players have told me that when they spot a language error in a script submission, it’s like a red flag. When they come across two or three, they stop reading.

Punctuation exists in the first place to promote clarity. Otherwise, a phrase like “Let’s eat Grandma” is easily misunderstood. It’s especially counterproductive when a gaffe involving punctuation or spelling gives a reader the giggles. I still recall a letter in which a prospective Corman writer tried to interest me in a Vietnam War drama that climaxed in “a scene of wonton destruction.” All I could picture was American grunts and Viet Cong on the field of battle, pelting one another with Chinese dumplings. Ooops! And a spell-checker would never have caught that error. Nor, of course, the misplaced apostrophe in the slippery homophones its and it’s.

I urge my readers to check out the National Punctuation Day site, which offers many entertaining features. Meanwhile, I’ll just contemplate my secret desire to slip into a mask and tights, then -- as the Apostrophe Avenger -- invade shopping malls at midnight to correct badly-punctuated signage. I’ll admit, though, that while serving as Concorde’s resident intellectual, I once deliberately wrote an apostrophe error into a script. It involved a scene description: two salt-of-the-earth characters were living in a cozy mountain cabin decorated with one of those little wooden signs proclaiming “The Daltons.” I added an apostrophe before the “s,” shocking the author, who knew this was incorrect. Yes, I said, but these characters were exactly the type who would make that egregious goof.

Drive Me Crazy (on the streets of L.A.)

What could be more L.A. than a film about driving? I just saw Drive, the new Ryan Gosling flick that won a major award for director Nicolas Winding Refn at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. Drive, a somewhat curious blend of brutality and sentimentality, doesn’t always make sense, but it’s riveting, nonetheless. I’m certain what the Cannes judges liked about Drive is its unerring sense of style. I myself responded strongly to Refn’s vision of my hometown in a film-noir mood.

Gosling’s role is that of an über-driver, a master of the road who can fix cars, do movie stuntwork, and moonlight as a getaway man who helps nogoodniks elude the cops. That last job of course requires special talent. I recently tried to link up with a fellow biographer. Accustomed to tooling around Nashua, New Hampshire, this savvy woman found herself completely baffled by L.A.’s geographical sprawl. For her the distances between such SoCal destinations as Woodland Hills, Santa Monica, Rosemead, and Long Beach—not to mention the complexity of our freeway system and the vagaries of rush-hour traffic—must have seemed thoroughly daunting. Who can blame her? My knowledge of L.A. driving habits ramped up the pleasure I took in watching Gosling effortlessly maneuver through the city’s mean streets, with never a wrong turn or wasted motion.

Much of Drive alternates between the nocturnal glitter of Downtown L.A. and the blue-collar seediness of the area surrounding MacArthur Park. It makes sense that these characters would live and work in that vicinity, and that our protagonist would be able to contemplate the downtown cityscape from his apartment window. Kenneth Turan, in his L.A. Times review, pinpointed the Big 6 supermarket at which several characters shop. Personally, I couldn’t identify many exact locations, but one of the film’s strengths for me is that its geography has clearly been carefully considered. The L.A. of Drive seems like a real place, and when Gosling gets behind the wheel I understand where he’s going.

This was my problem with another recent Ryan Gosling movie. Crazy Stupid Love struck me as a film about L.A. made by people who’ve never lived in L.A., which (given the nature of the entertainment industry) is a crazy, stupid thought indeed. Here’s my evidence: Steve Carrell as a successful insurance guy lives in a palatial suburban home with a wide expanse of lawn and some foothills in the distance. Given the size of his house and lot, coupled with the topographical features of the area, he’s got to be living deep in the San Fernando Valley. He connects with ladies’ man Gosling in a bar that doesn’t look to be far from his home, but for some reason they make an appointment to meet in Century City, near Beverly Hills. Much later, at a time of charged emotions all around, various Carrell neighbors and family members are shown driving through what looks like a well-known Beverly Hills residential intersection. Does all of this matter? Probably not for most audiences, but for me the inauthenticity of the landscape proved a major distraction. And I would argue that a film that’s sloppy about its sense of place risks giving the impression that it’s set in neverneverland.

I want my L.A. films to feel like L.A. Whether this means glamour or grit, L.A. has it all. That’s partly why the movie industry came here in the first place. Now that so many movies are shot out of town, it seems all the more important for the land of the smoggy palm to show off its own true self.

(By the way, I’ve just discovered that L.A. Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne, agrees with me on Drive. He’s published a very smart article on the film’s authentic sense of its surroundings. Enjoy!)

Historica: Made in Japan, for Fans of Jidaigeki

I’ve known Ken Takahashi since he was a mischievous three-year-old, and I was a Junior Year Abroad student rooming with his aunt in Tokyo. Many’s the weekend Ken-chan, his big brother Dai-chan, and Bebu-chan (that’s me!) would go on family excursions, romp in the backyard, and watch silly shows on TV. I never dreamed back then that both of us would grow up to make movies.

On my most recent trip to the ancient city of Kyoto, a very grown-up Ken gave me a tour of the legendary Toei Studios, where he serves as production manager. These days Toei operates its own theme park, a sort of pint-sized Universal Studios, where visitors can hang out with costumed actors on a Tokugawa-era Japanese street, watch a high-energy ninja show, and explore the origins of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. But I was privileged to go behind the scenes, discovering a self-contained world that must resemble, in miniature, the Hollywood studios of the 1930s.

Toei, which has been making film for some 90 years, has it all: a costume shop; a huge assortment of props and decorative pieces; a martial arts dojo; a staff of calligraphers who turn out appropriate signage; some beautifully-detailed standing sets. With jidaigeki (period drama) not as popular as it once was, the honchos at Toei have come to realize that taking full advantage of their facilities requires some creative thinking. Enter Historica to fill the void.

The full name of Historica is Kyoto Historica International Film Festival. Three years old, it is an ambitious combination of film screenings, talks by celebrated makers of historical dramas, and activities designed (in the words of Historica’s hosts) “to bring to Kyoto historically themed content from around the world, encompassing film, anime, games, music, dance, costumes and food.” This includes the opportunity for “cosplay,” a Japanese-English word that’s new to me: basically, you get to dress up to reflect the period of your choice, in the company of others who enjoy taking a Renaissance Pleasure Faire-style approach to the past. Toei’s picturesque Edo houses and alleyways are just the place to indulge your inner Toshiro Mifune (or Sonny Chiba).

Historica will unspool in several Kyoto locales from November 19 through December 1, 2011. One special four-day period (November 28-December 1) will include the Kyoto Filmmakers’ Lab, an intimate hands-on workshop for young filmmakers of all nations who aspire to make epics of the samurai sort. To be accepted for the lab, you must submit a sample of your work, and be able to communicate in English. (Whew!) Last year’s participants—who shot a period film under expert supervision—came from such varied lands as Canada, Germany, Hong Kong, Korea, Lithuania, Lesotho, Macedonia, the United Kingdom, and Vietnam. If you’re one of the lucky few who make the cut, you’ll receive partial travel expenses of 60,000 yen, and your housing will be provided too. So what are you waiting for? Applications for the lab are due by October 17. Whether you’re interested in the lab or the film festival, the place to start is Historica’s English-language website.

Ken Takahashi, whose brainchild this is, has become the point person for the entire Historica project. That’s why, at age 46, he is working on his English language skills, which have been much neglected since his school days. So far, as he’s quick to point out, he’s merely proficient in “Kenglish.” But if you have questions for him, he’ll be glad to attempt an answer.

Tell him Bebu sent you.

Straw Dogs Bark Again

I’m not in a rush to see the new Straw Dogs. Though writer/director Rod Lurie has some excellent credentials, I have no great desire to check out his take on the Sam Peckinpah original, which so powerfully illustrated the way a man can turn into an animal when sufficiently provoked. Not that I remember everything about that 1971 film. What I do remember is Dustin Hoffman—as a bookish intellectual—suddenly erupting into a murderous rage once thugs threaten his household. And I remember most vividly my mild-mannered spouse-to-be telling me, after the lights came up, that no one had better mess with us on the way home. I think he was truly frightened by the intensity of his own reaction..

I can’t help being boggled by Hollywood’s passion for do-overs. Obviously, I understand the pragmatic side of it: ever-cautious studios like their movies to be pre-sold, so they greenlight projects that audiences will find familiar. This often means combing the archives for classic films that can be given a modern spin. Sometimes the process results in a new level of meaning. Todd Haynes’ Far from Heaven (2002) started with All That Heaven Allows, a 1955 Douglas Sirk melodrama about an illicit romance, then added racial and sexual elements that gave the familiar story intriguing new dimensions. And some properties don’t seem to suffer by being updated once a generation. A Star is Born—about an actor on his way down who marries an actress on her way up—first appeared in 1937, starring Janet Gaynor and Frederic March. Judy Garland and James Mason played the roles in 1954, as did Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson (in a music industry version) in 1976. And there are rumors that a Beyoncé Knowles adaptation is on its way.

No matter how that goes, I think A Star is Born will survive. But why the eagerness to re-do Straw Dogs? Why, for that matter, did Gus Van Sant feel compelled to do a shot-for-shot remake of Hitchcock’s Psycho? And why did Jonathan Demme decide the world needed another cut at The Manchurian Candidate? As a Baby Boomer in good standing, I don’t like anyone tampering with “my” films. There was even a recent plan, involving Disney and Robert Zemeckis, to launch a 3-D motion-capture version of Yellow Submarine. Is nothing sacred? One good result of our bad economy: the project sank long before it could set sail.

Roger Corman has never been shy about plundering his own filmography for new material. When I was his story editor, I was surprised by his willingness to take movies he’d directed in his heyday (like Not of this Earth) and hand them over to bright young newcomers. Critics often praise 1964’s Masque of the Red Death as perhaps Roger’s finest directorial effort, but he had no problem commissioning a re-make in 1989. A 1995 pact with Showtime for a string of TV movies made him even more eager to exploit the contents of his film library. Director Joe Dante is still outraged by what was done with his 1978 New World feature, Piranha: “[Roger] simply took the exact same script, word for word, hired a kid to shoot it, used all the special effects from the old movie, and the only thing he didn’t do is he didn’t remind them it was supposed to be funny. And so it’s a totally straight version of a movie that was done tongue-in-cheek originally. And it’s unwatchable.”

“Unwatchable,” alas, is a word that often applies when filmmakers try to recapture the movie magic of another era.