I am shocked, nay, stricken by the news of the death of Natasha Richardson. Back in the 1980s, she was, all by herself, a good enough reason for me to go see a movie. I loved her as Mary Shelley in Ken Russell's absolutely stark-raving-mad Gothic, then as Patty Hearst in Paul Schrader's movie of the same name, then in The Handmaid's Tale and again with Schrader in The Comfort of Strangers. I knew that if Natasha Richardson was in it, it was bound to be smart, daring and a little bit crazy. I regret not seeing her on stage in New York when I lived there and she doing O'Neill with Liam Neeson. I have nothing else to offer, except my deepest sympathy for her family.

I noted the other day the passing of William Zantzinger. What did William Zantzinger do, you might ask. Well, every Bob Dylan fan knows the answer to that -- "William Zantzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll, with a cane that he twirled 'round his diamond-ring finger." "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" is the high-water mark of Dylan's "protest songs" era, a compelling, crushing indictment of careless racism and social injustice (Zantzinger was sentenced to a mere six months for killing Carroll in a drunken rage).

I mention the lonesome death of Mr. Zantzinger here because, a few years back, I was listening to a version of "Hattie Carroll" from one of Dylan's many live albums, and I suddenly thought "Wait -- this is a real guy." William Zantzinger is a real guy." Dylan recorded this song practically on the day the events unfolded, but he's still singing the song in concert thirty, forty years later. In the song, Dylan paints William Zantzinger in all shades of ill repute, presents him in terms of lofty wealth and political connections, the better to contrast him to his victim, poor Hattie Carroll, who lived a simple, spare, selfless life of servitude and motherhood.

And it hit me: Jesus, what must it be like to be William Zantzinger? Just imagine, everywhere you go, you introduce yourself, and in the mind of every person of a certain age, a little song starts playing.

YOU: "Hi, I'm William Zantzinger."
GUY: (thinks, humming) "William Zantzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll..."
(GUY slowly backs away, giving you a vaguely disgusted look)

( Read more... )

I interrupt the holiday festivities to note the passing of Harold Pinter. To "serious playwrights" of my generation, Pinter was second only to Beckett in terms of being a must-read. Back when I was trying to figure out what a play is, I read all the Pinter I could get my hands on. As the years went by, I sufficiently developed my talent to the point where I finally began to understand that I didn't have the slightest idea what Pinter was doing. I understood that his absurdist dramas were primarily about mood, that they weren't meant to be taken literally, but it was a good twenty-five years before I started to get a handle on the full measure of his accomplishment. Pinter himself consistently refused to discuss his work in any but the most practical terms ("you stand there and say this and pause here and then stick the knife in, and that's really all there is to it") but a piece last year from John Lahr in the New Yorker did an excellent job of putting the whole thing into something like a proper perspective.  To paraphrase Beckett's thoughts on Joyce, most playwrights write about something, but Pinter's plays are something.  They don't find drama in social interaction, they are drama itself.  They aren't there to merely entertain you, they're there to provoke an emotional reaction.  That sounds easy, but try it some time, try to create a drama that pushes past the conventions of the form to arrive at a place where the drama is the play itself, and maybe you too can end up with a Nobel prize.

For those thinking "Who the heck is Harold Pinter?" I suggest you begin with Betrayal, a mid-period piece of his, a relatively straightforward romantic drama with a simple, ingenious twist -- it is told backwards. For my illiterate readers, there is an excellent film adaptation starring Ben Kingsley and Jeremy Irons. Another good place to start is his electrifying anti-torture one-act One for the Road.  Or, you could watch him explain himself -- in his own kind of way -- in his Nobel speech.  And here is the young Ian Holm as Lenny in a scene from The Homecoming. And here is Donald Pleasence and Alan Bates in a scene from The Caretaker.  And here is some very late Pinter, a chunk of his adaptation of Peter Shaffer's (actually Anthony Shaffer's  -- see below) Sleuth with Michael Caine and Jude Law, directed by Kenneth Branagh, which well illustrates his way with threat and the power struggles that underlie the smallest conversational tidbits.

A few years ago, I had a devastating moment of self-definition in a hotel bathtub in Innsbruck. I was reading a little book of essays on Pinter, published in conjunction with his 70th birthday. One of the essays described him as England's last "important" writer, that is, a writer whose work isn't merely decorative, or "entertainment," but which has worth and resonance into the "real" world, the world of politics and world affairs, and which physically alters the shape of its form -- plays would never be quite the same after Pinter, and any theatrical moment that wrings uneasy menace from a silence will be forever known as "Pinteresque." My devastating moment of self-definition came when I suddenly realized, with an electric chill, that no one is ever going to publish a little book of essays on my 70th birthday, describing me as an "important writer." It was a shaming moment, but also a freeing one, because I realized that the job of Harold Pinter was already taken, there was no point in my pursuing it. I decided then that if I ever wrote a memoir, I would call it An Unimportant Writer.

I would be remiss if I did not mention the passing of Yma Sumac and Michael Crichton.  Sumac I knew through her gonzo lounge-exotica album Voice of the Xtabay, an LP I kept in my collection for many years.  She was a true one-of-a-kind entertainer: how many other Peruvian sopranos were there who dressed like an Incan princess and sang oddball "exotica" in New York clubs in the 1950s?

Michael Crichton was, of course, a much more easily-defined talent: he wrote bestsellers.  Lots of them.  The Andromeda Strain was one of my first "grown-up movie" movie-going experiences, I was probably 10 or so when my brother took me to see it.  It scared the hell out of me, images of the town full of dead people still linger in my mind.  I remember, even then, admiring the deft twists of its plot, and the way it criticized the fallibility of science.  I rushed to see The Terminal Man in spite of the fact that it was, of all things, a George Segal vehicle -- pardon, a George Segal thriller, and Futureworld, which was a kind-of sequel to Westworld, which set the tone for a number of Chrichton plots to come: rich guy takes a cool scientific principle and tries to turn it into a theme park -- with disastrous results.  Chrichton had a hugely commercial understanding of how to make science cool to the casual entertainment consumer and was the source of many successful adaptations, as well as some interesting misfires -- The 13th Warrior springs to mind, with its end-of-Act I moment where Antonio Banderas, after being kidnapped by a cannibalistic tribe, suddenly finds that he can understand their language.  The scene is handled beautifully -- Antonio is huddled by the fire, scared to death as the barbarians talk in their strange, brutish tongue, and then suddenly an English word pops up here and there, and then suddenly they're all speaking English.  The dramatic point of the scene is that Antonio can now understand them, but the screenwriters figured out how to express that the way it would seem to the protagonist, and I've always kept that scene in the back of my mind in case I ever need to steal it for something.  (The 13th Warrior is based on Crichton's Eaters of the Dead, which, well, if you don't think Eaters of the Dead kicks The 13th Warrior's ass around the block title-wise, I just don't know what to tell you.

UPDATE: Okay, okay, I didn't describe the translation-by-immersion scene from The 13th Warrior very well.  swan_tower , as usual, puts it much better below.  And this blog entry must surely be the largest gathering of 13th Warrior fans ever assembled.

I gasped aloud this evening when I found out, several days late, that one of my favorite artists, Bruce Conner, died Monday.

I had never heard of Conner before I wandered into the Museum of Contemporary Art in LA, one day in 2000. They were having a retrospective of his work, and I thought that it might be perhaps a cute little show of an artist of marginal importance. What a shock -- the museum was jam-packed with room after room of staggering masterpieces in all manner of media -- collages, assemblages, drawings, photographs, films and other, more conceptual works, less easily categorized.  My head felt like, well, like the guy in the collage above. 

I am greatly saddened to hear of the passing of Stan Winston. I don't think it's too much to say that his creature designs changed and extended the realm of the possible in movies, and provided the hook, the fuel and the content of, literally, millions of dreams and nightmares.

I once came close to working with him on a project and his designs were, without exception, creative, inspiring, efficient and excellent. They were easily ten times more cool than the script that I had written and they made me wish I could start over again to better serve his work.

I am greatly saddened to hear of the passing of Sydney Pollack.

He had a great gift for infusing genre pieces -- suspense thrillers and romances, generally -- with sophistication, wit, humanity and spontaneity. He got great performances from some of our greatest leading men and ladies, and as an actor gave several great performances himself.

My favorites of his directorial works are Jeremiah Johnson, Tootsie and Three Days of the Condor -- you couldn't find three more different scripts, and yet they all vibrate with intelligence, warmth and a sense of detailed, lived-in reality. Johnson and Condor also offer us two of Robert Redford's greatest performances. urbaniak  and I were, just last night, watching Spielberg's Munich, and I was reminded right off the bat how accurately it recreates the early-70s, gritty-realism vibe of Pollack's best work.

My favorite of his performances as an actor include Tootsie, Husbands and Wives, Eyes Wide Shut and, quite recently, Michael Clayton. He was a very rare kind of actor, an intelligent man who was both easily likable and physically threatening. I can't think of a false moment in any of his performances -- whenever he came on screen you knew the scene was in good hands.

I came to Jules Dassin's work relatively recently, when I was researching heist movies and rented a dub-of-a-dub videotape of his French gangster classic Rififi. I knew nothing about the movie before watching it, only that it was supposed to be a classic and have a good heist in it. The tape I was watching was such a bad dub of such a bad print that the movie looked like it took place in the middle of the night in a Paris submerged under 50 feet of water. In those circumstances, the 25-minute silent heist sequence that forms the centerpiece of the movie took on an air of deep mystery and a kind of solemn strangeness. It felt weird and transgressive and dangerous, like I was watching a snuff movie or something.

Many years later I saw Rififi courtesy of one of Criterion's typically pristine transfers and saw that there is nothing particularly weird or mysterious about the movie, except that it's always weird and mysterious when a good movie gets made. The lighting in Rififi is crisp and lush, even occasionally pedestrian. The difference with the new transfer was that I could see the faces of the people in the narrative and witness the director's skill with actors. With a name like Jules Dassin, I assumed that the director was an off-brand French gangster-movie director, the guy French producers went to when they couldn't get Jean-Pierre Melville. I was wrong -- Dassin was an American, working in France when the McCarthyites chased him out. Rififi remains a classic, and I have also hugely enjoyed Brute Force and Naked City. Topkapi is a movie whose charms elude me, but I look forward to watching Night and the City, starring the just-now-deceased Richard Widmark. I don't necessarily believe in an afterlife, but it comforts me to think of Heaven like a kind of Valhalla, where whatever you were good at on Earth you get to do forever in the next world. In this case, I assume that Widmark, having signed on to star in some afterworld production, requested his favorite director or threatened to cross the street to make the movie with the competing studio.

Robert Fagles was not a movie star, director, producer or screenwriter. He was merely a translator, but if it wasn't for his lucid, readable adaptations of The Iliad and The Odyssey my understanding of classic literature would be much poorer. Why not read one today?

I can't say that the death of Richard Widmark, at 93, is much of a surprise at this point, but I must say I'm disappointed his death was not caused by being pushed down a flight of stairs by a giggling psychopath. And I say that with the deepest respect.

Rest in peace, big guy.

It is not the function of this journal to become an Endless Parade of Death, but here we are again.

Paul Scofield didn't make that many movies, and when he did make a movie he generally played classical roles, guys in doublets and funny hats. He's best known for his performance as Sir Thomas More in A Man For All Seasons (opposite Robert Shaw as Henry VIII, who we were just discussing the other day). But I will always remember him as The Dad in Quiz Show, a film about which urbaniak  once said: "You could bounce a quarter off that movie."

One of the things that movies do, for good and for ill, is teach us how to behave.  You like to think that, if you were a secret agent charged with saving the world, you could witness the grisly death of a mortal enemy and a witty quip would simply come to you, you wouldn't need to practice it beforehand or have a running list in your head.  You like to think that, if you were a nightclub owner in wartime Africa, you'd have the moral rectitude to force your old girlfriend to go off with her husband for the good of the world, even though every fiber of your being longs to have her with you always.  On some level, dramatic structures exist to do just this: to present moral and behavioral circumstances and instruct us on what is the best way to behave under those circumstances.  If your father is shot down in the street, you rush to his side and protect him, even if he's a Mafia don and you can't stand that part of him -- that's just what one does.

There is a scene somewhere in Act III of Quiz Show where The Son goes back home to ask The Dad for advice in his plight, and it's the middle of the night, and The Dad is in his bathrobe, and the two men sit at the kitchen table and have some chocolate cake. And Ralph Fiennes and Scofield are wonderful in the scene, and director Robert Redford knows the lives of privileged WASPs like nobody's business, and it's a perfectly realized scene of WASPy father-son relations. And it all revolves around this chocolate cake, which symbolizes all the comforts and rights The Son has lost in straying from the True Path, and that cake in that scene is photographed so well, so dark and so light, so moist and so solid, so well photographed that it made me intensely nostalgic for some ideal lost piece of chocolate cake in my own wayward WASP life, and of course for the absence of a kind, wise, brilliant WASP father. Scofield in that scene became a kind of framework I could hang my notions of WASP fatherhood on, and someday, when my own full-grown son comes to my house in the middle of the night with a humiliating tale of dishonoring the family name by cheating on a quiz show, I hope to God I will have the foresight to have a perfectly-realized chocolate cake in sitting around nearby for comfort. And of course the wisdom Scofield so effortlessly conveyed.

Oh my God, I completely missed the news that Anthony Minghella died. The Talented Mr. Ripley is one of my favorite movies of all time and now I'm sad I never got to tell him so. He also directed a stunning adaptation of Samuel Beckett's Play that was a highlight of the Beckett on Film project, and is well worth seeking out.

At least I don't have to worry about him being bored or uncomfortable during his long elevator ride to Heaven, he's got Arthur C. Clarke to talk to. Unless, of course, Clarke went straight to being reborn as a giant foetus orbiting Jupiter.

Arthur C. Clarke will, presumably, be re-born as a giant foetus orbiting Jupiter.

_________

For loyal readers of this journal, bear with me. I am on a deadline for another project, this one that Hollywood staple, the comedy of divine retribution.

I am greatly saddened by the news of the passing of Roy Scheider.

I was about to say that the first time I saw Mr. Scheider was in the police thriller The Seven-Ups, but that's not quite true. I first saw Roy Scheider in the Mad magazine parody of The French Connection, which was entitled What's The Connection?

In any case, by the time Jaws came out in 1975 I was looking forward to it almost as much as a Roy Scheider vehicle as a Steven Spielberg movie. I enjoyed his work in Marathon Man, Sorcerer, Still of the Night, Blue Thunder, Naked Lunch, The Punisher and especially, of course, All That Jazz.

Few people probably know about his work as the voice of Japanese author Yukio Mishima in Paul Schrader's Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters. That movie blew me away -- I was working at a theater it was playing at when it was released and would watch it several times a day for weeks. When the DVD was released, I was shocked and dismayed to find that Scheider's precise, measured readings of Mishima's texts were gone, replaced with voiceovers by Paul Schrader. They're not the same, and to me the movie is greatly diminished because of the change. I've never figured out why that change was made (I have read somewhere that there was a rights issue with the translations used), but it is definitely a loss.

INT. ELEVATOR -- NIGHT

Ingmar Bergman and Michaelangelo Antonioni ride in (what else) silence.

It would be impossible for me to underestimate the impact Kurt Vonnegut's writing has had on my work and life.  I don't think there is a day that passes when I don't think about his voice, his attitude, his method for structuring sentences, his directness.  Everything from Slaughterhouse-Five to an ad for a paper company he wrote in the early 80s has had a profound influence on me.

( hi ho )

I'm conflicted by the death of Johnny Hart. When I was a kid, B.C. was my favorite strip in the world for a long, long time. I collected the books, read them over and over, compared one to another, mentally charted the development of ideas and themes, thought about how the characters differed and how they acted toward one another, learned to draw all of them. It was a big part of my life for what seems like years.

I had not read the strip in decades when I learned that he had decided to go out of his way to inject his strict fundamentalist Christian views into his work. Strips like this, this, this and this seem unasked for at best and hateful at worst. To start with only the most obvious, how do you explain a bunch of cavemen discussing evolution? Or Jesus? In a strip titled, ahem, B.C.? It's one thing to write according to your beliefs, but why use an art form (on the funnies page, no less) as a tool to bludgeon Jews, Muslims and, essentially, anyone who isn't also a fundamentalist Christian? Charles Schulz was a devout Christian and wrote of his beliefs with elegance, charm and great warmth. Not every cartoonist can be a Schulz, and my early life was greatly enriched by Hart's work, but he ended his career on a decidedly sour note of intolerance.

UPDATE: An eloquent appraisal of Hart's talents can be found here.

It's difficult to imagine now, 25 years later, the impact the early days of the NBC Letterman show had on us young hipsters.  Cable was still  a rarity and TV comedy in the days after Monty Python was Mork and Mindy.  The 1982 Letterman show was a bizarre, cathartic psychotic freakout of TV culture, a show that took everything that had preceded it and turned it inside-out, and then devoured it, and then shat it out and devoured it again.  You could turn on Letterman in 1982 and, quite literally, have no idea what to expect.

(I remember, early on, there was a "wheel of fortune" bit they did where Letterman would spin the wheel to see what would happen next.  Selections were all mundane or ridiculous things, but then one choice was "Surprise Visit From Mick Jagger," and there was a booth onstage with the hand of "Mick Jagger" waving out the top.  In 1982, the idea of Mick Jagger showing up for Letterman was a cruel joke; now it would be commonplace.)

One of the high-water marks of the period was the character of Larry "Bud" Melman, a cranky, befuddled old man who was too real to be fake (although, of course, he was fake, an actor named Calvert DeForest).  His timing, whether produced by comic brilliance or simple ineptitude, was absolutely stunning, and he could destroy a routine in the blink of an eye, then resurrect it into another realm in the following breath.  Letterman would thrust him into situations clearly beyond his comprehension, seemingly to make fun of a sorry old man on national television, and Melman's palpable haplessness, rage and desperation could become almost unbearable.  You couldn't figure out why Letterman kept using this guy except to make fun of his ineptitude, and you couldn't figure out why Melman would keep showing up for the gig when he was only there to be laughed at.  His every appearance in the early days was a high-wire act, with the audience not knowing quite what to make of this cranky, easily distracted and opaque old man.  He couldn't tell a joke -- Christ, he could barely read his cue-cards -- but the electricity between him and Letterman was astonishing.  Routines would fall apart or turn into horrifying, cruel shouting matches and you didn't know whether you wanted to laugh or cry but you certainly weren't going to change the channel.

It turned out it was all a joke, but I never knew to what extent the joke was on Melman, DeForest, Letterman or the audience.

Nowadays, Letterman's art of spinning comedy gold from the common man (Rupert Gee, Sirajul and Mujibar, et alia) is the norm on the show and everyone is in on the joke, but in the beginning, it was untested, even dangerous ground he was treading and the volatile Larry "Bud" Melman was his advance scout.

This is going to be one awkward elevator ride.



Almost as bad as the time Richard Nixon and Kurt Cobain died within days of each other.

Well, I couldn't let the day go by without mentioning the passing of Robert Altman.

He had a gigantic filmography with all kinds of stuff in it. 87 directing credits, including anonymous TV piecework, a decade's worth of adaptations of American plays, some bizarre (and failed) experiments, some charming frippery, a few expensive studio misfires and probably twenty or so visionary masterpieces of American cinema.

If you've never see MASH, or only know the material from the insipid TV series, do yourself a favor and see the original. It will blow you away. It's profane, hilarious, bloody, shocking, electrifying and defiantly frank in its depiction of the human condition.

Altman could be distressingly erratic but his successes were so definitive and inspiring that they always made up for his failures. You could sit through a dud as hapless as Beyond Therapy knowing that, sooner or later, he would come back with a superior entertainment like The Player or the flat-out masterpiece Gosford Park.  Eclectic, prodigious and up for anything, his unpredictability made him relentlessly uncommercial but also gave him the most daringly alive career of any American director.

I am dismayed to find that I have only seen 17 of his movies: Countdown, MASH, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, California Split, Nashville, Buffalo Bill and the Indians, Popeye, Streamers, Fool for Love, Beyond Therapy, Aria, The Player, Short Cuts, The Gingerbread Man, Cookie's Fortune, Gosford Park and The Company. As I peer over this list, I find six staggering masterpieces, one expensive, fascinating failed experiment, five worthwhile but lesser works, one atrocity and two mainstream studio pictures that could have been directed by anyone (both of which were, by the way, commercial failures). That would have been an entire career for most people but for Altman it's barely a fifth of his output.

I also note that Altman's breakthrough work, MASH, was released when he was 45 years old.  45 and he was just beginning!  So there's hope for me yet.