Ken Adam: Divine by Design

It was thanks to Ken Adam that I got to hold an Oscar in my hands, and exclaim (as everyone does), “It’s so heavy!” Adam, who passed away on March 10 at the age of 95, is best known as the production designer for many of the early James Bond films, as well as for the bravura sets of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. He loved dreaming up fantastic lairs for bad guys (like Goldfinger’s creepy hideout in Fort Knox), explaining to an interviewer that “to me, designing the villains’ bases was a combination of tongue-in-cheek and showing the power of these megalomaniacs.” None other than Steven Spielberg once told him that his sleek and sinister War Room for Dr. Strangelove was “the best set that's ever been designed.” 

Slightly later in his career, Adam turned down the chance to work with Kubrick again on 2001. But they were to reunite for Barry Lyndon. For that film, Adam’s re-creation of the eighteenth-century English countryside, full of manor houses with elegant drawing-rooms, won him his first Oscar in 1975. (That’s the one that sat on his mantelpiece when I visited his home in Santa Monica Canyon.) He ultimately won a second golden statuette for 1994’s The Madness of King George.  

The reason I got to meet Adam was because I had been assigned to write a magazine piece on a bold cinematic experiment called Pennies from Heaven. This 1981 film, directed by Herbert Ross and starring Steve Martin, Bernadette Peters, and Christopher Walken, was based on a British television series. It tells the bittersweet story of a dreamy sheet music salesman in Depression-era Chicago whose fantasies of love and fortune turn into full-blown musical numbers. This blending of realism and make-believe, combined with the opportunity to make the first film musical  in twenty-five years on the fabled MGM lot, drew in such talents as cinematographer Gordon Willis (The Godfather) and costume designer Bob Mackie, making his move away from television. Adam himself was billed as the film’s “visual consultant,” and had much to say about the way it should look.

In the original BBC series the shift from reality to fantasy had an amateurish look that was part of its charm. But Adam insisted that this would never be acceptable in an MGM musical. That’s why the design team worked toward total authenticity in the realistic scenes and a lavish sense of completeness in the let’s-pretend sequences. Major sets included a working diner (modeled after Edward Hopper’s famous painting, “Nighthawks”), a bar room, a flop house, a country schoolroom—in which all desks suddenly convert into miniature grand pianos—and the replica of a swank dance floor (costing $40,000) from an Astaire-Rogers duet. One of MGM’s largest soundstages because a white marble bank lobby 50 feet high, while another was transformed into a nearly full-scale reincarnation of the Chicago Loop.

When I met Adam, I did not at first realize that by birth he was not British but German. Much like director Mike Nichols he’d been born in Berlin, but was forced to flee the Nazis at an early age, relocating in London with his family. During World War II, he courageously joined the Royal Air Force as a fighter pilot. After some years in California, he returned to England to live, ultimately being knighted for his service to queen and country, the first production designer so honored. Having made his peace with post-war Germany, he in 2012 handed over his entire archive to the Deutsche Kinemathek, a gracious gesture from a most gracious man.. 

Hannah Arendt, "Son of Saul," and Other Glimpses of a Dark Time

This year’s Oscar for best foreign-language film went to Hungary’s Son of Saul. It’s a movie I didn’t see. I wish I had seen it, but—to be perfectly honest—it’s not something I’ve truly rushed to check out. There are only so many Holocaust movies my overloaded brain can handle.  And the makers of Son of Saul have gone out of their way to emphasize that their work (which focuses on an Auschwitz resident forced to lead his fellow Jews to the gas chambers and then later dispose of their remains) is far tougher than any earlier Holocaust film. Clearly, Son of Saul is not a fairytale about survivors or rescuers. In contrast to Schindler’s List, it promises no inspirational message.

I thought about my failure to see Son of Saul while reading a colleague’s impressively researched and written biography of a woman who grappled with the fallout of those terrible years. Anne C. Heller published Hannah Arendt: A Life in Dark Times in 2015, as part of the Icons Series put out by Houghton Mifflin in conjunction with Amazon. (Other books in the series include short works by leading scholars on such wide-ranging cultural figures as Jesus, Stalin, Van Gogh, Alfred Hitchcock, J.D. Salinger, and St. Paul.) Though Amazon was in part responsible for creating the series, the Internet retail giant never quite got around to publicizing it, so these books languish—but are very much worth discovering. Heller’s brief volume introduced me to a woman of almost maddening complexity. I won’t be forgetting her anytime soon.

Hannah Arendt, born into a comfortable German Jewish family in 1906, was a rising young intellectual at the time that the Nazis came to power. In 1933 she managed to leave Germany for Paris, and later New York City. From that vantage point, she watched the decimation of European Jewry. What she saw led her to do heroic work with war refugees; as a political theorist, she also wrote perceptively (in The Origins of Totalitarianism) of the way Nazi concentration camps were used to systematically destroy the human spirit. But many of her longtime friends were dismayed when, reporting on the genocide trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1963, she at times seemed inclined to blame the Jewish people for their fate, rather than presenting Eichmann as the monster many felt him to be. Arendt’s reasoning was always rigorous, and she certainly never shied away from controversy. It was startling to learn that—late in life—she resumed a close and respectful friendship with Martin Heidegger, a noted German philosopher (and her early lover) who as rector of the University of Freiburg had helped promote the Nazi cause.

Heller’s book on Arendt makes clear that it’s unwise to expect human beings to behave with any degree of consistency. It’s in movies, rather than in real life, that good people and bad people are easily distinguished. When we watch Schindler’s List or Ida or Life is Beautiful or The Pianist, we know where our sympathies should lie. Still, that doesn’t mean that Holocaust films need to be simplistic. It strikes me as particularly important that such films be made in the countries where Nazi atrocities actually happened. One of the triumphs of Son of Saul is that the film fund of Hungary underwrote most of its $1.6 million budget, after Germany, France, and Israel turned down the filmmakers’ request for support. At the Oscars, Son of Saul’s director said it beautifully: “Even in the darkest hour of mankind, there might be a voice within us that allows us to remain human.”   

Anne Heller will be only one of the many eminent biographers attending the 2016 conference of BIO, the Biographers International Organization, to be held June 3-5 in Richmond, Virginia. For further information contact BIO. The public is cordially invited.

Tricia Hopper: Once a Rider, Now the Writer of “Rodeo Girl”

It was a family tragedy that started Tricia Hopper on the path of becoming a screenwriter. In 1992, when her brother died of AIDS, she wrote a play about a family facing a similar ordeal, and toured it in high schools across Southern California. Then, because she’d always loved movies, she started studying the craft of screenwriting through classes in UCLA Extension’s famous Writers’ Program. (That’s where I had the pleasure of getting to know her.) Always diligent and enthusiastic, Tricia also read how-to books and took workshops, like one offered by screenwriting guru Jeff Kitchen.

Of course, fully half of SoCal’s residents are working on screenplays, as a visit to any local Starbucks will attest. But Tricia has had the good fortune to see one of her projects filmed and released. Rodeo Girl, a wholesome and inspirational script about a teenaged girl, her horse, and her estranged father was bought and produced by Vertical Entertainment. The production values aren’t all that Tricia would have wished for, but she’s a professional screenwriter now—and that’s cause for celebration.

 Rodeo Girl began as a screenplay by Aletha Rodgers, whom she’d met in Jeff Kitchen’s workshop. When Aletha asked for Tricia’s critique of her work, Tricia found herself drawn into the world of rodeo. They joined forces, meeting three times a week for over a year. Aletha showed her the importance of deeply researching the rodeo world, and she herself contributed the complex father-daughter relationship that adds tension to the proceedings. Once they’d finished, the script started getting optioned. A mere twelve years later (nothing happens quickly in Hollywood), their third option evolved into a deal with Joel Paul Reisig, a producer-director with whom she’d connected online through InkTip. He’d been looking for a horse story with a young girl as a protagonist, and Rodeo Girl nicely filled the bill.  

The story of Rodeo Girl takes place in Oklahoma, where young Priscilla (Sophie Bolen) moves past her earlier biases and learns to become a champion barrel racer, but the film was shot in Michigan. Since Tricia wasn’t present on the set, she was later surprised by a number of changes that had been made in her script. Her heroine -- who starts out as an equestrienne in a formal riding habit devoted to the world of show-jumping -- was originally supposed to be English, but the production honchos made her American. They hired a actor of some repute, Kevin Sorbo (Hercules), to play the father character: though his gruff presence in the film is effective, all of his scenes had to be shot in three days, and his salary ate up half the production budget. There was also some tweaking of important plot points, as well as the addition of a romantic interest who (though certainly a good guy) seems a tad too mature for a fourteen-year-old girl.  

Some of the changes, including some downplaying of the father-daughter relationship, at first made Tricia cringe, but she’s pleased that the world of bronco-busting and rodeo clowns shows up vividly on screen. Philosophically she insists that “it always feels good to accomplish something you set out to do. We all know how hard it is to get a script made into a movie.” In future, she hopes to have more control over her projects. She’s just finished her first novel, and a hotshot agent wants a look. If the book is successful and Hollywood wants to turn it into a movie, she’ll insist that a gig as its screenwriter will be part of her deal. Way to go, Tricia!

I’m always delighted to put in a plug for the good folks (and great teachers) at UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program. Courses are available either on the UCLA campus, at several other SoCal locations, or online. There’s a wide array of screenwriting courses to choose from, and spring enrollment is ramping up right now. So what are you waiting for?

 

My Afternoon at the Oscars (picking up where I left off)

When last heard from, Beverly in Movieland was sitting in a grandstand on Hollywood Boulevard, watching the rich and famous glide by. Of course I wondered just what it must feel like to be part of that glittering horde. When I mulled over my experience, three themes came to mind:

Security – We all know, alas, that the world’s not as safe as we used to imagine. Something as friendly and commonplace as an office Christmas party can turn into a death trap. And if we all need to think of ourselves as potential targets for the crazies of the earth, how much more precarious is the life of a star? Let’s not forget what happened to John Lennon: there are twisted people out there who seek notoriety (or the chance to link themselves forever with their idols) by way of cold-blooded murder. That’s why all of us nice folks in the bleacher seats had to go through background checks as well as a serious metal detector. I saw lots of security personnel around the red carpet too, and I know that many major L.A. traffic arteries were off-limits, except for the chosen few, to prevent the uninvited from creating a tragedy.

Scrutiny – Long gone are the days when Joanne Woodward could accept her statuette in an Oscar gown she’d made herself. (She won for 1957’s The Three Faces of Eve, and went up to the stage in a strapless green taffeta that she’d designed and sewn over a period of two weeks. Apparently Joan Crawford sniffed with disapproval that Woodward was “setting the cause of Hollywood glamour back 20 years by making her own clothes,” but almost everyone else admired her as a perfect Fifties housewife.) Today, looking glamorous is absolutely required—even for men—and there are scads of famous designers standing by to outfit the major nominees at no charge. One thing about global warming is that none of the women on the red carpet seemed to feel the need for a coat. Instead we saw lots and lots of skin, sometimes more than was aesthetically appealing. Cate Blanchett, fabulous in ruffled aqua with a plunging neckline, clearly knew how to strike the balance between high style and fun. (I suspect she was also trying to separate herself from her tailored Carol image.) The very petite Naomi Watt, on the arm of her spouse Liev Schreiber, shimmered in a strapless blue and purple sheath. Others, I’m afraid, were pooching out of their tight-fighting gowns, either fore or aft. That’s what made Brie Larson’s look so refreshing: she seemed to be happily sauntering to and fro in the meet-and-greet area, having a lovely time without trying overly hard to impress the fashion police.

Of course it was pleasant to see Leonardo, the crowd’s #1 idol, in tailored evening wear, instead of skins and furs. As well as surprise winner Mark Rylance in a jaunty fedora, and the cute-as-a button Jacob Tremblay of Room, everyone’s favorite Oscar mascot. They all had to look their best—even newscasters like Robin Roberts—because such snarky sites as gofugyourself were standing by waiting to kiss and diss.

Diversity – Then there was diversity, the hot topic of the moment. I absolutely agree that movie roles need to be more inclusive and that some people’s stories are not being told. But on the red carpet, VIPs came in all colors, shapes, and sizes. And (on the surface, at least) they all seemed to really like one another. I’m sure there are behind-the-scenes rivalries, but my view of the red carpet showed me a lovefest. 

Margaret Robbie, Louis Gossett

Matt Damon, back from Mars

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes?  Naomi Watts, Reese Witherspoon

Leonardo, of course

Whoopi Goldberg

Lady who's a bit too big for her dress

 Photos courtesy of Bernie Bienstock