Film #92: Reds

Still pretty charming even now, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis arrived on TV in 1959. This black- and-white sitcom revolved around Dwayne Hickman as the girl-crazy title character, smitten most obsessively with blonde high school heartthrob Thalia Menniger (Tuesday Weld). And, for six episodes in 1960, on came this handsome dude playing Milton Armitage, Dobie's alpha dog rival for Thalia's attentions. This kid, named Warren Beatty, showed little promise of his future idiosyncratic rise through Hollywood ranks. But he would himself become the film industry's top lothario -- a 1970s tabloid favorite. And he would one day surprise everyone by winning a deserved Academy Award for his direction of a contentious, touching, money-losing epic centered on an avowed American communist--one of only three U.S. citizens buried in the Kremlin. With his detailed probe into the life of John Reed (the author of Ten Days That Shook the World, a snug, blow-by-blow spin on the 1917 Russian revolution), Beatty left some agog, others infuriated and others even simply somehow unmoved. But, then, nothing--not even 1967's boundary-smashing Bonnie and Clyde, which Beatty produced while going mano-y-mano with Warner Brother Jack Warner himself (who was angrily perplexed about the film's success)--has ever gone really according to plan for Beatty's movies. But so what? Time has spoken and, viewed now, Beatty's cinematic biography of John Reed reveals itself as an ageless and unique opus.

I now recall my grandfather, who in December of 1981 was real active in the bootlegging of video and audio cassettes (I think anti-capitalist Reed would've liked this). Being an avid fan of history, my Papa nonchalantly handed me a videotape recently shot (quite well) by a theater projectionist. He knew I was a precocious 15-year-old movie lover, so he happily let me watch the tape (as well as a bootlegged copy of Pennies from Heaven, which he vehemently despised and I still think is genius). Now that I recall, I pretty sure Reds was the first movie I'd ever watched on VHS and, to boot, my grandfather had given me an expertly transferred, letterboxed version. Actually, this is how I learned what letterboxing was; Reds looked better than any movie I'd ever seen on TV and I knew and felt it was because the screen was finally theatrical-movie-shaped.

At any rate, upon giving me this ill-gotten bootleg, my grandfather sniffed haughtily and said he didn't think much of the Commie movie. But I wasn't surprised by that, because we often disagreed about films. I didn't know it then, but each generation largely fails to understand the tastes of all others. Our particular, mercifully small schizm lived in my view that Papa was early-20th- Century-born and that meant he would never really get 1970s Hollywood-Renaissance moviemaking. I, meanwhile, was thankfully growing up with 1970s movies; the only other great times to grow up with the movies were the 1920s and the 1950s (and we're still waiting for another renaissance that I fear may never come). True to form, when Reds finished, I marveled inside at how my father's father could be so intelligent, yet so unthinkingly dismissive o this passionate movie. I then knew this schizm of ours wouldn't be disappearing any time soon (it still hasn't, I reckon). Also, strangely, to this day, and -- who knows? -- maybe because of my memory of this important TV viewing is still so positive, I still haven't seen Reds unspool onto the big screen. I fervently wanna correct that.

Before I popped this VHS tape Papa gave me into the bulky top-loading machine that was state-of-the-art back then, I had become tremendously excited about Reds through my favorite publication, Variety. Outspoken anti-communist and one-time Democratic-leaning Screen Actors Union head Ronald Reagan had just been elected to the Oval Office, so 1981 was exactly the wrong time for Beatty to be hawking such a movie. For that reason, before its release, Reds was getting a lot of press in the trades. Beatty had been working on the film since 1978, when he garnered four Oscar nominations for Best Actor, Best Screenplay, Best Director (with Buck Henry) and Best Picture (he was the sole producer) for an fun, elegant remake of Heaven Can Wait (also a Beatty film ripe for re-evaluation). Remember, this was a feat that was only precedented by Orson Welles and Citizen Kane back in 1941! Plus Heaven Can Wait, unlike Welles' film, was one of the biggest box-office hits of the year. So everyone in love with the medium of movies was on the razor's edge, wanting to know all about Beatty's $35 million (now $130 million) filmic obsession. Movie watchers were almost to a man preparing for Reds to be a leaden boondoggle; in pre-release hype and upon-release acclaim, it was the Titanic of its day, but finally and immeasurably sooooooo much greater than Cameron's blockbuster, even though it took in about 1/100th of Titanic's box office cash.

I expected one thing when I took in the picture's first images. But I got something so much more. Reds begins not with a glittery image of Beatty or one of his fellow stars, but with starkly-photographed documentary footage of elderly people desperately trying to dredge up their memories of Jack Reed. At 15, I had never before seen old people look so handsome on film. And the creaking, ancient tones of their voices were so superlatively captured--my God, the feeling of first seeing Reds now once again surges through me. These seniors were, according to the final credits, The Witnesses. I now want to pay tribute to them by discovering who each of them were, to the best of my ability (thanks to the good people over at Wikipedia). Among them:

* Roger Nash Baldwin (founder of the ACLU)
* Andrew Dasburg (painter and former lover of Louise Bryant)
* Will Durant (Philosopher, historian, and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer of the 11-volume The Story of Civilization)
* Hamilton Fish III (the grandson of Ulysses S. Grant's Secretary of State and, in 1981, one of America's oldest-living Congressmen; he's the one that humorously speculates as to whether Reed was a Communist)
* Adele Gutman Nathan
* Blanche Hays Fagen (these are the two ladies filmed together who are so, SO amusing in their comments)
* Dorothy Frooks (Author, publisher, military figure and actress)
* Hugo Gellert (Illustrator and satirist)
* George Jessel (Legendary actor, singer, songwriter, radio star, movie producer, and "Toastmaster of the United States")
* Henry Miller (Writer of Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, The World of Sex, Nexus, Plexus, and Sexus; the one-time lover of Anais Nin, he's the one that says, of course, "You know, I think there was just as much fucking going on then as there is now, only then, there was a little bit of heart to it.")
* Scott Nearing (Conservationist, peace activist, educator and writer)
* Adela Rogers St. Johns (Journalist, novelist, and screenwriter)
* Dora Russell (Feminist and progressive campaigner; second wife of Bertrand Russell) and Rebecca West (Feminist and writer) (they appear together in the film)
* George Seldes (Investigative journalist and media critic)
* Jessica Smith (Editor and activist)
* Arne Swabeck (American Communist leader)
All, and more, appear as themselves, eyes shining brightly as Beatty, behind the camera, implores them to remember anything, anything at all about John Reed and his lover Louise Bryant (their bare recollections at the beginning feel like a long-dormant engine being revved for the first time in an age). In the 25th anniversary DVD commentary (one of the best commentaries ever recorded), Beatty says that he filmed hundreds of hours of interviews with these historical figures, starting in 1979; some of them were long dead by the time his epic finally hit the theaters.

The Witnesses act as a buoyant Greek chorus for this gargantuan story that follows John Reed from his rabble-rousing as a 1913 Greenwich Village journalist to the beginnings of his love affair with ambitious Oregonian journalist Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton), whom he met upon visiting his mother in Portland in 1916. It's Reed's relationship with the insecure Bryant that's at the center of Reds, and the boundless sensitivity with which it treats this clearly passionate love affair is what makes the movie the enduring epic that it is.

Bryant, smitten with Reed, follows him to New York, where they quickly become an item among the Village intelligentsia. But, as portrayed in the movie, Bryant feels overcome by Reed's progress in this arena. The fact that she's inexperienced and barely been able to make an NY dent with her writing becomes a big bone of contention between the two, and the subject of a few monsterously raucous scenes where they literally spar about their relationship, their ambitions, and their politics, always at the same time. Reds impresses with these scenes that gallantly balance heady subject matters while driving home the enormous emotion with which these two artist/journalists were grappling (Reed once proclaims "Louise, I love you," to which she replies "No, you love yourself! Me, you FUCK!")

In New York, Bryant begins a cuttingly combative relationship with Emma Goldman (Maureen Stapleton). This stern, commanding actress delivers an astounding performance as Goldman, the avowed feminist and at one time Communist sympathizer who holds a low opinion of Bryant's intellectual abilities. Goldman, ironically against her truest personal beliefs, demeaningly and unfairly sees Louise as another of Reed's air-headed "girls," denying her the chance to excel that Goldman's long been fighting for all women to obtain. But Reed, deeply in love, sees so much more in Louise (which makes him more of a feminist than Goldman!!). Always in search of new horizons, she and Jack abandon New York and take up with a band of beach-combing artisans in Providencetown, MA. There, Bryant begins a friendship with Reed's best buddy, playwright Eugene O'Neill (Jack Nicholson). As Reed is off beginning his political "career" most of the time, much to Louise's disconcert ("Taxi's waiting, Jack..."), she turns cavalierly to the adorous alcoholic O'Neill for romantic comfort. This dynamic provides Reds with some of its most electric moments--Nicholson's few scenes with Keaton are tremendously involving (Nicholson was nominated for a Supporting Actor Oscar for his few minutes here). When Reed returns to Massachusetts, lonely and in need of his lover (who needs him, too), O'Neill is devastated, and his emotions overspill in vivid fashion. ("If you were mine, I wouldn't share you with anybody or anything," he says. "It'd be just you and me. We'd be the center of it all. I know it would feel a lot more like love than being left alone with your work.")

It's here that the marriage of Reed and Bryant takes over in Beatty's screenplay with Trevor Griffiths. Their retreat into upstate New York leads to a swell domestic life. But Reed cannot abandon his political hopes; his need to affect the world with more than his writing commands his passion, so much so that he has to abandon romance and agree to being the Communist Party's American representative on the Russian Comentern, just as the country's break from the Czar is taking hold. What he finds overseas--and what he is disappointed by, both with and without Bryant as companion / collaborator--forms the largest portion of this uncanny 3hr16min film.

After I joyfully finished with Reds that first time, I was in a cloud-touching daze, the sort of which always seizes me after seeing a monumental movie. Beatty's work instantly represented the sort of history lesson my teachers never even touched on in class, and I was immediately suspicious that much more alluring events were going on in the world than I was being let in on. It was here, I think, that I garnered my lifelong interest in REAL history--not that crap to us shoveled out of tired textbooks, but the kind of history that sparkled with humanity, love, sex, longing, and death. Since seeing Reds, I have been a voracious consumer of historical fact, which I am convinced goes in directions that no fiction can replecate (I very, VERY rarely read fiction; I get what fiction I take in from movies).

Reds, nominated in 1981 for a then Ben-Hur-tying record of 12 Academy Awards (which only Lord of The Rings: The Return of the King and Titanic have matched)--pops with mammoth factual figures. Besides the obvious, there's V.I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Woodrow Wilson, early Libertarian and editor of The Masses Max Eastman (Edward Herrmann), hard-hearted Bolshevik #2 man Grigory Zinoviev (played by Being There author Jerzy Kozinski, whose scene lecturing Reed while consuming a scurvy-fighting lemon and onion sticks surely in my memory), and Industrial Workers of the World founder Bill Haywood, played briefly by Dolph Sweet. Then we have Gene Hackman as one of Reed's magazine buddies, Paul Sorvino (apoplectic as a rival communist representative), the rarely-seen George Plimpton as a slimy New York editor, William Daniels as another harried communist activist, and cameos by M. Emmett Walsh, Kathryn Grody, Cheers stool-warmer John Ratzenberger, and Max Wright (better known as the dad on Alf). There are a lot of familiar faces in Reds.

Wow, there's so much I love about this movie. How Keaton, being called out on her reconciliation with Beatty, nervously pours Nicholson's O'Neill another scotch, spilling it on the floor ("Your abilities as a bartender seem to have gone downhill," O'Neill sneers). How Stapleton--1981's Oscar-winner for Best Supporting Actress--quickly reconsiders her opinion on the commitment of Keaton's Bryant upon seeing her in Russia, as Bryant lovingly comes to Jack Reed's aid (there's an on-screen embrace between Stapleton and Keaton that's unexpectedly touching). How the tipsy, red-faced Gene Hackman appears out of nowhere to give Reed hell for abandoning journalism. How George Plimpton flusters about while trying to get Keaton in the sack. How Beatty's Reed and Stapleton's Goldman have a firey debate in Russia on the worth of Communism as it's being perverted by the maniacal Lenin.

And this: I was not aware of this until I heard Beatty's rare DVD commentary, but Reds was filmed in London (and many more British locales), California, New York, Massachusetts, Finland, Sweden, and Russia; I find this spectacular (just imagine the nightmare it must have been editing this movie--I wager the original cut was six freaking hours long). I find it funny when Keaton--who, given her character's transformation, really delivers the film's most fetching performance--defiantly responds to FBI agents barging into her Croton-on-Hudson home (veteran character actor R.G. Armstrong gruffly states he's looking for "agitators," to which Keaton replies "Well, why don't you look around and see how agitated you get?"). I cherish the gentle, unobtrusive background music by Broadway legend Stephen Sondheim (his only movie score) and jazz legend Dave Grusin (On Golden Pond, My Bodyguard, The Milagro Beanfield War). And I will never, ever EVER forget how the film's final ten minutes first easily wrestled tears of romance, joy and sadness from my eyes.

And, perhaps most of all, I adore Vittorio Storaro's varied, incomparable photography--the gentle pastels of the Providencetown scenes; the harshly-lit Communist Party debates; the reds, yellows and tans of Greenwich Village; the blinding snow whites of the Finland sequences (which led to some critics unjustifyably comparing Reds to David Lean's fine-but-still-inferior romantic/historical epic Doctor Zhivago); the expansive Lean-like vistas following Reed's escape from a demolished Communist train; and especially the colorful, black-backdropped footage of The Witnesses (that's the first thing that I think of when I think of Reds, and the inclusion of this invaluable documentary footage is what provides it an edge as one of the cinema's finest products). Storaro possesses the starriest career one can hope for, acting as lighting master for Italians Dario Argento (The Bird With The Crystal Plumage, The Spider's Stretegem), Bernardo Bertolucci (1900, Last Tango in Paris, The Last Emperor, The Sheltering Sky) and Francis Coppola (Apocalypse Now--for which he also won an Oscar in 1979--and the misunderstood One From The Heart). But his first movie for Beatty--this non-Italian, for whom he also photographed the blazing colors of Dick Tracy--eclipses his stellar former works. With Reds, you get to see EVERYTHING that Storaro can do. And it is an unrivaled gallery of achievement.

I've made my case (and I could continue on and on). Even if you don't like Warren Beatty (as a lot of movie lovers say they do not, which I can understand), Reds accomplishes what few historical films do-- even the undisputedly essential but sometimes confusing and intentionally distant Lawrence of Arabia. Beatty and company take you around the world, to another time, putting you there, in the mix, while clearly explaining serpentine political notions through the prism of complex human emotions. Reds entertains with a parade of Hollywood big-shots, but not so much so you fault it. And it takes a fresh bent on history, writing large a little-known historical side-story--one that unfolded very much as portrayed (another historical film rarity). I think--I know--Reds is a masterpiece. I realize that M-word gets bandied about a lot, but here it truly applies. Even while watching it as a voracious 15-year-old, I was sure Reds deserved that prized moniker. If you haven't seen it, you really don't know what majestic things movies can do for your soul.

Film #89: Max

In this interview, conducted by the excellent Dark City Dame at Noirish City (where she's kindly invited me to discuss my thirty favorite movies of the 2000s all throughout the month of November 2008), we talk about the incredible film Max.

Dean: Hi, Dame!!

DarkCityDame: Hello! Dean, I’m glad that you’re able to join me for day 3 of our look at your countdown to number one of your 30 best films of the 2000s.

Dean: Sure. It's our little project together!

DarkCityDame: Okay! What is the name of the #28 film we're discussing today?

Dean: Well, it came out in 2002 and it's called Max. It was made by Menno Meyjes, who was the writer of the scripts for Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade and Empire of the Sun, two pretty good Spielberg movies from the 1980s. It's an incredible work and even though its subject matter sounds pretty downbeat, it's actually quite entertaining. John Cusack stars in it as Max Rothman, a German/Jewish WWI veteran living with his large family in Germany after the war. It's the 1930s and, having been an artist before he lost an arm in the service, he's now trading in modern art to the rich and powerful in Berlin. And during this time, he befriends a young starving artist named Adolf Hitler, played by Noah Taylor (best known for his role as the young David Helfgott in the 1996 film Shine). And it's this tenuous friendship that's at the center of the film. Cusack is great in it; it's his single best performance (though I love him in The Grifters and Say Anything). But he's warm, generous, funny, intelligent, tasteful and at the same time distasteful in this movie. And he gets to deliver a line I bet you never thought you’d hear in any movie: "Hitler, come on--I'll buy you a lemonade!" Noah Taylor, meanwhile, delivers one of most powerful supporting performances I’ve seen recently. His Hitler is jittery, deparate, nerdy, discomforted, lazy and driven to megolomania. He’s superb.

DarkCityDame: So, does Max center around Hitler as a young struggling artist? Or does it deal with his effort to gain power? While reading an article about the film on the blog site Blunt Review, Emily Blunt wonders if Hitler were a successful artist, would he have walked a different path?

Dean: Well, it follows Hitler, still a corporal in the German army, as he battles, really, two different urges: the urge to keep up with the changing times in the art world, and the urge to be a propagandist for the more radical, anti-Semitic arm of the Army he'd already given so much of his life to. One of the great things about Max is that it humanizes Hitler so that we can see what led him down the dark road that he eventually took. For this reason, the Jewish community blasted the movie before they saw it back in 2002. However, once they did see it, they were convinced it was a deeply moral film that wasn't necessarily sympathetic to Hitler, but does recognize that, despite his monsterous acts, he was in fact one of us. John Cusack, also a producer on the film, said it best: “By understanding somebody who is evil on human terms, you can understand evil a little bit more and how it happens, and prevent it from happening again. It's the exact opposite of exploiting mass murder and the Holocaust. Hitler was such a coward and a liar and repressed sexually, and all those things. He really wanted to be an artist but he didn't have the capacity to be honest with himself."

DarkCityDame: What do you think he meant when he said, "He really wanted to be an artist, but he didn't have the capacity to be honest with himself.”

Dean: In the movie, Max Rothman keeps trying to get Hitler to reveal more of his innermost fears and desires on the canvas—as any real artist should do in their work. But Hitler is just too screwed up inside to do it. He's completely repressed on all fronts--mostly due to his extreme anger at the lowliness of his economic position. But he's also obsessed with traditional German ideals of what constitutes great art--that means paintings of battles, mountainsides, animals, and other “traditionally” beautiful objects. However, in the time period in which Max is set, this is all extremely dated stuff--what Max calls "kitsch,” which basically means corny. Ironically, Max is ultimately most intrigued by Hitler's drawings of his ideal Germany--the Germany that became controlled by the Nazis, and ultimately resulted in Max's death. It's in these art pieces that Max sees Hitler's true creative potential. And, if we’re honest with ourselves, we have to admit that Hitler's designs--the structures, roads, uniforms and symbols of the Nazi party--ARE some of the 20th Century's most enduring artworks. We all like movies dealing with Nazis because the Nazis wore great Hitler-designed uniforms. The only problem is, of course, is that they still represent the onward march of abject horror and unwarrented hate.

DarkCityDame: After seeing Max, what do you think, Dean? Would Hitler have walked a different path if he had been successful as an artist? Or was Hitler just "plain evil?” Could anything have changed his horrid destiny?

Dean: It's hard to say. But I think it's entirely possible he would have been an acceptable man, or at least not a powerful one, had he sold a painting or two. His hatred of the Jews came from his jealousy of their deserved success in business, education, and family. Had he had a taste of achievement as a painter, I think he would have never even considered a career in politics and, of course, the world now would be a different place. One of the amazing qualities of the film is how it illustrates this so cleverly. It's the decade's greatest "What If?" movie. It totally fascinates us with the idea that, had this one little man found something to hold on to besides hate, there would have been so much misery and bloodshed averted. As you watch the movie as see, for instance, the gatherings at the art gallery Max owns, or the parties that his wealthy family throws, it's interesting to think that all the people in attendence would eventually probably be victims of this unknown artist!

DarkCityDame: Wow! That is unbelieveable!

Dean: Yeah, it's an amazingly creative movie that just had to be made. I want to point out here that the film is just as much about the intriguing, fictional character of Max Rothman as it is about Hitler. The scenes examing Max's work ethics and his masterly family life are just as riveting as anything in the film. Meyje's really get us on this man's page and convinces us to love him, with his obvious passions for modernity ("Newness really does it for me, Hitler," he says, smoking one of his many cigarettes--which if one thinks about it, is the only choice Max can make about his one-armed life on his own; smoking, drinking and thinking are the only things he can do without asking for someone's help). This is unquestionably Cusack's finest foray into film--his most complete character.

DarkCityDame: Dean, I wonder why I’ve only now just heard about this film?

Dean: Yeah, it’s very surprising that Max didn't get more notice in 2002. Not one single Oscar nomination, even though it was released in December. I think people had it out for the movie without even catching it. If they had seen it, it would have garnered a Best Actor, Supporting Actor and Screenplay nomination easily. But people largely avoided it because, again, it humanized Adolf Hitler. Then we have to recognize it’s an indie film, so maybe a lot of people just don’t know that it exists. I also think, among the ones who were aware of it, most didn't know what it was about. If it had been called Max and Adolf, then it might have made more of a splash. But then it would've sounded like a buddy movie, which in fact, it is, in a bizarre way.

DarkCityDame: Oh!

Dean: Another "what if.."!

DarkCityDame: Dean, is that it?

Dean: I think so. A good ending there.

Film #88: The Buddy Holly Story

Some people out there may see Gary Busey as a punchline these days, after his reality show appearances and much-vaunted, helmetless motorcycle accident in the late 90s. I don't because, in 1978, he garnered a well-deserved Oscar nomination as Best Actor for the unlikely achievement of embodying early rock and roll's greatest poet, and ever since, I've always enjoyed seeing him in whatever he appears in, for however long. He's always a unique presence, never more so than in Steve Rash's The Buddy Holly Story, where he donned those famous horn-rimmed glasses to play the man from Lubbock, Texas who, in his tragically short career, fooled all the radio guys who thought he was black (can you imagine that??) into putting him on the "colored music" charts.

With hits like "That'll Be The Day," "Peggy Sue," "Oh Boy," "Rave On," "It's So Easy," "Well All Right," and "True Love Ways," Holly transformed this then-young music form into something altogether more heartfelt and foot-stompin'. Though the film is not anywhere near accurate (Holly's notoriously hot-tempered producer Norman Petty never makes an appearance), it's still an enrapturing tale that takes Holly and his band the Crickets (played by Don Stroud and American Graffiti's Charles Martin Smith) from snapping out tunes at a Texas roller-skating rink to being tourmates with the likes of Jerry Lee Lewis, Sam Cooke, The Big Bopper, Richie Valens, Eddie Cochran, and King Curtis. Just look at this dynamic scene where he and the Crickets break the race barrier at New York's Apollo Theater.
There's not much of a story here; Holly's career was too short for all the normal musical bio-pic ups-and-downs (which, as unfortunate as that is, makes for a radically different film than most in the genre). Even so, Busey's ebullient aw-shucks delivery, coupled with Rash's carefree directorial style (very good period detail here, despite an obviously low budget) and Robert Gittler's like-minded screenplay, make The Buddy Holly Story one of the most watchable musicals around. It should impress any viewer that Busey, a former drummer for Kris Kristofferson, Leon Russell, Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson, plays his own guitar and sings (Stroud and Martin played their own instruments as well). The score, adapted by Joe Renzetti, took home an Oscar in 1978, too. I don't have much else to say about this simple movie--just watch it, so you can be informed on just how Busey made it up to the big time in the first place. And remember to pay homage to Holly, while you're at it. Where would rock be without him?

Film #46: Coal Miner's Daughter

Sissy Spacek rightfully won an Oscar for her portrayal of country music legend Loretta Lynn in this smartly-produced bio-pic directed by British filmmaker Michael Apted (the man behind the 7 Up series of documentaries). The film follows her from her life as the oldest of a brood of kids belonging to a Kentucky coal miner and his wife, to her marriage at 14 to a self-assured WWII vet named Doolittle Lynn (Tommy Lee Jones, in a performance equal to Spacek's) who lovingly guides her to success as the most popular female country singer/songwriter of all time.

 It's a perfect bio-pic in that it covers only a small portion of Lynn's life, but it really hits the stratosphere because it chooses to focus on the love affair the Lynns shared together, rather than the usual music bio trappings--you know, drugs, affairs, that sort of thing (which do make small appearances here, I must admit). With the two leads at the top of their game, it's easy to believe we witnessing one of the greatest partnerships ever, filled with passion and respect. Spacek is completely believeable as both a 13- year-old and a 30-year-old woman (the makeup and hairstyling here is a very important element, though); I find her incredibly adorable in this film, particularly the scene where she makes her stage debut singing "There He Goes" at a local honky tonk. Photographed in a smoky haze by Ralf Bode, this is my absolute favorite scene in the movie, because we get the whole story here: Loretta's nervousness, Doo's confidence, and then Loretta's willingness to be the great performer she is.

Levon Helm, the former lead singer and drummer for The Band, makes a lasting impression as Loretta's stern but loving father (Helm would go on to do a few more roles, most notably as Chuck Yeager's second in The Right Stuff, but we haven't gotten nearly enough on-screen action from this amazingly natural performer). And Beverly D'Angelo also excels as Loretta's best friend Patsy Cline. Both Spacek and D'Angelo did their own singing for the film, and did so superbly (D'Angelo used to be the lead singer for a rock band back in the late 60s, and Spacek had released a solo album three years before Coal Miner's Daughter was shot, so they were both well-prepared). For die-hard country fans, the film even has cameos by Grand Ole Opry staples Ernest Tubb and Minnie Pearl. Nominated for seven additional Oscars including Picture, Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Art Direction, Editing and Sound, Coal Miner's Daughter is a must for all fans of great music and great filmmaking.

Here, we have Sissy Spacek performing the title song, with the actor playing her father, Levon Helm, at the drums. This is transcendent.

Here I Come to Save The Day: Andy Kaufman on DVD and The Problem with Bio-Pics

It's a hard thing to pull off, the filmed biography--harder than ever, probably. If a life is exciting enough to spawn cinematic translation, then I’m sure—via the number of middling bio-pics I’ve seen--that the directorial temptation is to simply, one by one, dramatize those events that made the life portrayed so special in the first place. Do this and, hey, you got yerself a movie. These “They did this, and then they did this and, oh, surely, you remember this” bio-pics are what I call “just-the-facts” films. (by the way, the correct pronunciation of the term is "bio-pic," not "biopic"--I've heard some people make it rhyme with "myopic," making it sound like a twin-eye disorder).


There’s many of them--well, for instance, almost every show business biography, from What’s Love Got to Do With It to Ray to The Buddy Holly Story (as is common with the genre, these three feature stellar lead performances, but the movies themselves are otherwise somewhat flat), La Bamba, Till The Clouds Roll By, Why Do Fools Fall In Love, Houdini, countless TV movies, and so many other theatrical titles--all of them fall victim to what should be an obvious problem: they redundantly recount the lives of pop cultural icons whose business it was to make sure that scads of people were already watching at their moments of success and failure. Let’s face it, it was easier for great biographical movies to be made when their subjects were people like Van Gogh or Pastuer, who actually achieved notoriety in times when people weren’t peering over their shoulders with a camera.


Among the unscathed in the show-biz bio-pic genre is Tim Burton’s Ed Wood, which to my mind has an entry pass into the pantheon of great film bios like The Passion of Joan D’Arc, Napoleon, Lawrence of Arabia, Patton, Coal Miner's Daughter, Raging Bull and The Elephant Man. As in those ambitious films, Burton and the movie’s writers, Scott Alexander and Larry Karazewski showed us the truth and grace beneath their subject, beneath Ed Wood and his thankfully singular talents (see Film #11 in this blog). Unfortunately, Alexander and Karazewski were less lucky--much less--with Man On The Moon, their treatment of comic visionary Andy Kaufman’s sadly short life.


Directed by Milos Forman (who also helmed the screenwriting team’s previous picture, the somewhat more successful The People Vs. Larry Flynt), the film is so “just-the-facts” that it becomes pointless to watch--we already know he wrestled women and masqueraded as his unctuous alter ego Tony Clifton. Ya got anything else? And the whimpering, too-bad answer: nope. The movie is a Kaufman’s Greatest Hits compilation, as performed by the skilled Jim Carrey, who has Kaufman’s vocal cadence down, but not his essential sweetness. (A note here: I've often found that the best bio-pics limit their coverage of the personality; the less time spanned, the better the movie--look at Capote, which documents only about ten years of the man's life, or Good Night, and Good Luck, which chronicles even less time. Rarely does a birth-to-death bio-pic come forth successfully, because dramatizing a person's entire existence in two hours is just too much to chew.  Unfortunately, Man on the Moon makes this mistake.)


As such, Man in the Moon works better as an advertisement for the real Andy Kaufman’s groundbreaking work, plenty of which is available on DVD, and all of which lend us more intimacy with the comic’s persona than does Forman’s film. Gaze at Anchor Bay’s The Andy Kaufman Special, originally aired on ABC, as the host talks so revealingly with special guest Howdy Doody about his ongoing fascination with the marionette. As you watch, note the audience, simultaneously giggling nervously and finding themselves emotionally spellbound at this obviously meaningful personal moment for Kaufman. His sheepish attempt an unprepared talk show interview with his guest, a gloriously game Cindy Williams, is just one feature in this special that makes one realize that Kaufman’s genius lies in helping us keep our silly side alive.

Witness the excellent Andy Kaufman Plays Carnegie Hall and the moment where Kaufman-as-Clifton raucously introduces a new act he found on the road, the Partridge Family/Cowsills-esque Love Family, who deliver a cornball version of “Aquarius/Let The Sunshine In,” replete with symmetrical choreography and toothy smiles. It’s all pure kid’s stuff, as is Andy’s happily out-of-breath delivery of his opening number, “Oklahoma!” or his hand-clapping joy in listening to a special guest sing a Happy New Year song or his famous climactic milk-and-cookies stunt.


Take a gander at My Breakfast with Blassie, Andy’s bright My Dinner with Andre spoof, chronicling his morning at an L.A. Denny’s with the famed King of Men, wrestler Fred Blassie, and you’ll see Kaufman deftly toying with reality as we peer into what sometimes seems like close-circuit camera footage of his conversations with Blassie about breakfast foods, annoying fans, and post-toilet-use hand-washing. You sense Andy’s been a longtime admirer of Blassie’s just by the way he reveres the great wrestler’s flamboyantly-spoken wisdom.


And watch Kaufman jabbing at wrestler Jerry Lawler with a hilarious, playground-quality taunt/song delivered to an arena crowd in I’m From Hollywood, the documentary on Kaufman’s influential sojourn into the wrestling world, and you’ll see Andy the Kid right in front of you, being naughty and angling for a spanking from the wrestling audience, who loves nothing more than to hate their villains (especially ones who are so cowardly as to only wrangle with women). In his cajoling of audiences to let go and have fun, so ably captured in all four of these video works, Kaufman gave us entertainment-starved saps a glimpse of what we’re so often after in our media consumables: a ticket back to childhood, guilt-free and joyous, if we want it.

Film #11: Ed Wood

Lessee now...bio-pics about filmmakers. I dunno what took moviemakers so long to get around to attacking this subject---doesn't make sense, given how they make their lettuce. But as far as I can tell, Clint Eastwood's 1990 film White Hunter, Black Heart seems to have come first, surprisingly enough. It may have cloaked its main character with the name "John Wilson," but it obviously and effectively tells the brutal story of John Huston and his exploits while making The African Queen. Then we have Richard Attenborough's stuffy 1992 recounting of the life of Chaplin, with its only memorable element being Robert Downey Jr.'s dead-on performance as the film pioneer. But the best of the bunch, before or since, is Tim Burton's comically inventive version of the life of the greatest Z-list moviemaker of all time. What would've Ed Wood himself thought about Ed Wood? He would've eaten it up like a thick steak and downed it all with a fifth of scotch.

I'll never forget seeing Ed Wood for the first time, at 10:30 on a Sunday night in Atlanta, at Phipps Plaza. Not many people in the audience--the film was a bigger hit on video/DVD than at the theaters. That was okay by me--that meant less people talking in the theater. But from their rapt attention, I knew this crowd knew and appreciated Ed Wood the man. And from that first shot pulling into a rain-battered house that hides a coffin containing Criswell (Jeffrey Jones), who rises and proceeds to introduce this film in the same manner that the real Criswell introduced Plan 9 From Outer Space--this thunderstruck concept had its hooks in me, and I had no worries. I knew we were all in for a good time. Further, when Howard Shore's masterful, bongo-and-theremin-driven score blares forth, and the inventively orchestrated credits sequence carries us through an Woodian cemetery, a fight with a giant octopus, and a trip into outer space--I REALLY knew I was in for transcendence. And the show had barely started.

Face it: Edward D. Wood Jr. made movies the way he wanted to make them. He had twisted visions and technique, and not a dime, and it didn't matter, 'cuz people are still watching Plan 9 From Outer Space, Bride of the Monster, Glen or Glenda, and Jailbait. Ed Wood is easily Tim Burton's greatest movie, and one of the greatest movies about the movies, because it knows this. It realizes the singularity of his efforts and boldly makes a direct correlation between Wood, who made the "worst" movies of all time and Orson Welles, who made the "best." On top of that, the film's special luminescence comes from the clever irony seeing Burton's opulent, expensive black-and-white work, gorgeously produced and paced, about a guy who made perfectly ugly black-and-white el cheapos that still, because of their naive, even sloppy uniqueness, hold us in their thrall.

In what is still also their best work, pop culture chroniclers/ screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karazewski (Man on the Moon--about Andy Kaufman--and Auto Focus--about Bob Crane) found a sapphire of inspiration in their exploration of the creative urge and the joy in following a dream, however whacked-out it may be. Ed Wood exudes a romance for filmmaking, maybe for the first time in cinema history; it loves the process. Rich in character--and in characters (Jones' Criswell, George "The Animal" Steele's Tor Johnson, Lisa Marie's Vampira, Bill Murray's Bunny Breckinridge, and the incomparable Martin Landau, unrecognizable in Rick Baker and Ve Neill's deft makeup, as Bela Lugosi), Ed Wood's life now seems made for cinematic retelling (the film is based on Rudolph Gray's verbal history book, Nightmare of Ecstasy). Even if Wood's (and Lugosi's) time on earth weren't as peachy as it appears here, it's okay--for me, that's part of the movie's cosmic joke: it's a $25 million Hollywood movie about an off-Hollywood director who was probably lucky to make 25 million cents in his lifetime.

Even with its love-lettering to movies, the decision to center the work on the father-son relationship between the optimistic Wood and the morphine-addicted Lugosi is a masterstroke, particularly coming from Burton. He had a similar relationship with his own boyhood idol, Vincent Price, who was not only the subject and narrator of Burton's first animated success, the likely autobiographical Vincent, but also, in his final screen role, played a key part in Burton's Edward Scissorhands. It stands, then, that this odd, touching on-screen fellowship between Johnny Depp's always-firey Wood and Landau's alternately sluggish and sharp Lugosi resonates throughout the film, even after Lugosi has disappeared from the scene. Both performances ended up being the single best special effect of 1994, a spinning wheel of desperate ego and deflated despair, all spiced up with Landau's grouchiness and Depp's emboldened zeal. Depp's showing here, after his uniformly touching displays of talent in Edward Scissorhands, What's Eating Gilbert Grape and Benny and Joon, convinced me that he was the finest male performer of his era.

As for the supporting cast, Murray scores points for delivering some of the movie's funniest moments, including its best throwaway gag--he dips a sneakered toe into a baptismal pool to "check" its temperature. Sarah Jessica Parker is an appropriately shrill presence as Ed Wood's first girlfriend and ill-fated leading lady (who went on to bigger things as the writer of a few Elvis Presley songs), while Patricia Arquette effuses wonderful sweetness as Wood's understanding true love (she barely reacts to Wood's nervous confession of compulsive tranvesticism). And Vincent D'Onofrio cameos brilliantly with his exacting imitation of Orson Welles (which is strangely looped in its sound--an element I like to view as a tribute to Welles' largely sound looped work in Touch of Evil). I also like Rance Howard (Ron Howard's dad) as the demanding producer of Bride of the Monster, with his emphatic desire that the film end with a "biiiiiiiig explo-sion!" Mike Starr's confused, streetwise backer of Glen or Glenda? is also a blustery notation.

However, Martin Landau is the miracle worker among them all. I still remember being introduced to him with Space:1999, the often maligned but strangely, quietly entertaining 1970s science fiction show from Britain's Thunderbirds producers Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. If you would've told me when I was 13 that he'd take home an Oscar in twenty years for playing Lugosi, I woulda laughed in your face, even while knowing of his contributions to such films as North By Northwest and Cleopatra. But, starting with Coppola's Tucker: The Man and His Dream and on into Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors, Landau was obviously on to a superior second wind. I mean, is there anything funnier than the scene where Lugosi is charged with stepping into a night-shrouded pond ("Damn, it's cold! Throw me the viskey!!") in order to fake a life-or-death struggle with a giant, dead-tentacled fake octopus? His screams as he writhes with this thing are the stuff of myth, and the camera crew doesn't even have sound! By scene's end, the shot of an awed Ed Wood saying "That was perfect!" is completely called-for. And, in another key sequence, the way Landau's drugged-up Lugosi begs to end his life--with Wood in tow for the ride--and then grabs ahold of himself, eyes aglow, and breaks down in Eddie's arms, apologizing for even considering the notion. Wow. I didn't expect to cry in this movie. But I did.

Finally, as if all this weren't enough to convince one of Ed Wood's merits (and some people might still need convincing, since the film's cult status was confirmed by its sadly low $6 million box office take), the movie boasted of some indespensible technical contributions: Shore's moving and detailed  score, Stefan Czapky's award-winning, contrasty black-and-white photography, Tom Duffield's appropriately seedy art direction, and Colleen Atwood's imaginative costume design. With the exception of his gloriously silly Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, and Edward Scissorhands (each of which were nearly equal in quality to Ed Wood), I had always thought that Tim Burton had a genius for creating deeply-flawed but quite watchable films (his subsequent output, with the exception of the charming Big Fish and ambitious Sweeney Todd, has been much less impressive, with the outrageously puzzling and derivative Planet of the Apes, Sleepy Hollow, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and on and on, with the diminishing returns of Alice in Wonderland and Dark Shadows). But he vindicated himself, forever and entirely, with this heartfelt comedic masterpiece Ed Wood.  I like to think that Burton is constantly striving to make this kind of movie once again.