Smash Cut

You might not have ever heard of him before, but Hal Ashby was one of the great directors of 1970s Hollywood cinema, right up there, in my opinion, with Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Yates, William Friedkin, Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma.

Ashby juggled tones and genres like a maestro, and movies like his unforgettable oddball dark comedy Harold and Maude, the star-studded drama Shampoo, or the outrageously funny yet achingly sad The Last Detail seem to come from a wholly unique directorial voice.

One of Ashby’s most acclaimed works is his 1976 biopic of American folk singer Woody Guthrie. Called Bound for Glory, the film chronicled the musician’s Depression-era travels that led him to see America through the suffering yet unwavering eyes of the country’s working class, thus finding inspiration for the now-revered ballads that he would compose. The movie was praised for its evocative depiction of Great Depression-era life and a solid performance from actor David Carradine as Guthrie, and it scored Oscars for its impeccable cinematography and soundtrack.

But if you went to a recent March 18 screening of Bound for Glory that was held by the American Cinematheque in California, then you must’ve witnessed a post-screening Q&A that would’ve made all that praise seem like it was for a totally different movie. Star Carradine and director of photography Haskell Wexler pretty much went at each other during the whole thing, flinging allegations of cocaine abuse, backhanded compliments, full-on insults, questions of authorship, and maintaining a general mood of unending animosity. (Co-star Ronny Cox was on-stage too, but apparently couldn’t get many words in during the fracas.)

Some gems:

Wexler: “I went to Hal and I said ‘Hal, just take a minute and STOP SNIFFING THAT STUFF UP YOUR NOSE!’”

Carradine: “Haskell is a little down on people who snort cocaine…And yes, Hal was a great user of cocaine. It does not change the fact that he was…Quentin Tarantino doesn’t beat Hal Ashby, and he’s one of my favorite directors. Quentin is incredible. And he’s a big cocaine freak, too!”

Carradine: “We had this incredible guy… Do you remember the name of the guy that was the handheld camera guy, that used the suitcase camera?”

Wexler: “Do I remember it? How do you think it got in this film, David? Who do you think planned it? Who did the shots? Look it, David, you fuckin’…”

Carradine: “Somebody will talk to me about Haskell and I’ll say ‘Oh yeah, he’s the guy who got an Academy Award for ruining my picture.’”

For the full story — and I highly recommend you check it out, even if you don’t know the film or any of these key players — go to writer Chris Willman’s blog entry about the evening on the Huffington Post.

Back in the days when George Lucas actually made enjoyable movies, he invited director Steven Spielberg and writer Lawrence Kasdan over to have a little discussion. The focus of the meeting was to come up with a screenplay centered around an rugged archaeologist, one that would be almost like a globe-trotting samurai with a whip instead of a sword. He’d come face-to-face with Nazis and other nefarious evil-doers in a breakneck adventure to uncover a legendary holy relic that’s reputed to bring its bearers power of unfathomable proportions: the Ark of the Covenant.

We all know that this story would become the basis of 1981’s unforgettable action classic Raiders of the Lost Ark. But even before the trio even dreamed up the name of Indiana Jones or thought about having Harrison Ford fill his shoes, they had a conference so that ideas could be bandied about, plot points ironed or abandoned, and characters envisioned in a non-stop volley.

That meeting was a gathering of three creators who, at the time, were at the top of their creative game, and we’re lucky that someone actually transcribed the conference, which is now available for our edification, reading pleasure, or plain old satisfaction of curiosity. If you’d like to have a window into the event that led to an unforgettable film and a truly iconic character, go here to download the transcript. It’s about 6MB in size, in pdf format. While it lasts, folks!

Can you believe it? A posting that isn’t about Watchmen!

In fact, I’m going back a good few years, all the way to 1964 to be exact.

That’s when screen scribe Jay Presson Allen, who also wrote such greats as 1964’s twisted Marnie and the 1981 cop classic Prince of the City, turned in her second draft of Mary Rose.

Mary Rose was to be directed by none other than the Master of Suspense himself, Alfred Hitchcock, and it is, allegedly, the project that he wanted to make above any other. However, the acclaimed director’s desire was always met by studio disapproval, and the film never got greenlit.

The story was originally a play written by J. M. Barrie, the creator of Peter Pan. Hitchcock had seen it performed during his youth and never forgot about it, so when Hollywood provided him the opportunity to feed his obsessions, he commissioned Allen to write a feature film adaptation of the play.

What interesting about Mary Rose is that it would’ve been, I think, the only true-blue ghost story to Hitchcock’s name had it ever gotten off the ground. The basic gist of the plot is that the titular Mary Rose returns to the Sussex home of her childhood where she meets her own son. The thing is, Mary’s a ghost, and her son isn’t the 2-year-old that he was when she vanished. He’s now a middle-aged adult, and because he has aged and she has not, there can be no reunion for the two. Mary can only return, alone, to spectral realm from which she emerged.

You can download a pdf of Allen’s Mary Rose screenplay here, courtesy of author/Hitchcock scholar Steven DeRosa’s amazing website, Writing With Hitchcock. Be forewarned: the file is about 21MB, so if you have a slow connection it could take a while.

If you read this blog with any regularity, you probably figure that I tend to focus on films that are a bit out of the mainstream, or have a preference for psycho killers and space aliens. That’s…not exactly incorrect, but at the same time I do love the classics. And on that note, I can’t deny that Francis Ford Coppola’s rightfully revered mafia magnum opus, 1971’s The Godfather, is totally deserving of the endless attention and accolades it has received since its release, and is worthy of being such a huge cornerstone of our pop culture.

And yet it’s tough not to think that everything that could possibly be said, thought, or written about the epic drama has been done already. I certainly believed that to be the case.

But now, journalist Mark Seal over at Vanity Fair has written a boffo piece entitled “The Godfather Wars” that somehow manages to spin the mob movie’s behind-the-scenes mythos into a brand new light, and has scripted a “making of” tale that’s as criminally engrossing as the film itself.

Do yourself a favor (rather than doing it for someone who might expect a favor in return sometime in the near future) and read the article here.

In 1972, award-winning master filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni, director of the controversial 1960 arthouse sensation L’Avventura, was invited by the Chinese government to visit its motherland for eight weeks and shoot a documentary about the country. The resulting 207-minute-long magnum opus, called Chung Kuo - Cina (a.k.a. China) enraged Communist authorities, who claimed that the movie did nothing except highlight suffering and propagate “anti-Chinese” sentiment by showing showing “barren farmlands, lonely elderlies, tired animals, and broken houses.” A curious reaction, considering that the late Antonioni (he passed away in 2007) was one of the most fervently anti-capitalist filmmakers out there, not only because of his visually/spatially driven narrative techniques (the “story” or notions of “characterization” were often revealed through visual framing or landscapes rather than traditional dialogue or action), but also in terms of his work’s content (as exemplified, for example, in the explosive (literally and figuratively) ending of his 1970 freak-out Zabriskie Point).

Anyway, as a result of the political controversy, Chung Kuo - Cina was banned in China until 2004, and it didn’t enjoy much play in the West either (the doc’s three-hour-plus running time didn’t help, obviously). It basically ended up as lengthy programming on Italian television. But if you live in or near New York, on Saturday, Oct. 11, at 3:00pm (yes, one show-time only), the Asia Society will be screening (in digibeta format, with English subtitles) the film in its entirety, as part of its series entitled “Under Mao’s Red Sun: China’s Cultural Revolution on Film.” Antonioni’s an amazing visual talent, so any opportunity to see one of his movies should be taken advantage of, especially for a rarity like this documentary.

You can look over the whole “Under Mao’s Red Sun” series schedule here, buy tickets online here, or get directions to the Asia Society here.

An unsubtitled five-minute clip from Chung Kuo - Cina can be seen here.

With this year’s Democratic National Convention currently in full swing, I thought it’d be appropriate to take a look back to 40 years ago, when another convention was caught on celluloid, with stunning, sometimes harrowing, results.

The ’60s was a rich decade for American filmmaking, with the simmering counterculture finding ways to work its ideas and politics into mainstream movies. Easy Rider has probably come to embody that time frame and phase of cinema for most, but I’d argue that 1969’s Medium Cool is a much more audacious and important work.

Directed by renowned cinematographer Haskell Wexler, Medium Cool channeled documentary techniques and actor improvisations (before that stuff became trendy or overly exaggerated, a la today’s Paul Greengrass) to bring life to the basic, nominal story about a news cameraman and his budding relationship with a woman (Verna Bloom) and her young son. The woefully undervalued actor Robert Forster — whom Quentin Tarantino tried to bring back into the limelight with 1997’s Jackie Brown — plays that cameraman, John Cassellis.

What could have been a standard melodrama found a new form via Wexler’s revolutionary filmmaking. By having Forster pose as a real cameraman, and putting him in genuine “newsworthy” situations, the movie morphed from a small-scale relationship pic into an eye-opening portrait of America’s social turmoil of the period. The most explosive culmination of that life + art mix-up is the finale of the film, in which Cassellis covers the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois. That year had already delivered some major shake-ups for this country, with the double punch of the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy still fresh in everyone’s minds. That cultural unease triggered mass protests, and while Medium Cool’s cameras were rolling at the convention, riots broke out and chaos ensued. Aside from its overall aesthetic excellence (courtesy of Wexler, who also served as the director of photography), the film’s beauty lies in its ability to directly reflect a specific national mindset of the time. Granted, I’m sure not everyone in America shared its politics, but the movie addresses issues — social, political, and media-related — with a directness that seems impossible for a Hollywood studio production. Medium Cool is a genuine cinematic treasure, and it is, unsurprisingly, rather timely and relevant to our own concerns today.

There’s a terrific, brand-new interview with star Robert Forster over here, and it’s well worth reading even if you haven’t seen the film. When you read the actor’s recollections about the shooting of the movie, or meeting Muhammad Ali during the shoot, or hearing about Robert Kennedy’s death, you’ll probably want to revisit the movie, even if it’s been a while since you’ve seen it, or try to track it down for the first time.

You can watch the original trailer for Medium Cool here.

Far be it for anyone to call it a “director’s cut,” considering the Master of Suspense isn’t around to verify it as such, but a slightly different version of Alfred Hitchcock’s groundbreaking black-and-white horror classic Psycho has recently been discovered. Where? On German television, of all places.

This site, called “Schnittberichte” (which, from what I can piece together from web definitions of its root terms, roughly translates as “Cut Report”) offers a visual comparison between certain scenes from the original 1960 version and corresponding moments in the German TV broadcast. The differences seem to be relatively lengthy; although they’re not minutes of material or additional scenes that change the movie entirely, they are, nevertheless, significant enough to add many seconds to existing sequences, like Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) examining his bloody hands, or Milton Arbogast (Martin Balsam) being killed.

People like designer Saul Bass, who created the terrific opening title sequence for Psycho, have often claimed credit for the film’s famous shower scene. I always thought that, regardless of their talent, these people were trying to crib kudos for a rightfully famous movie and work their way into cinema history books. But who knows? Perhaps these newly discovered differences suggest that other hands may have, in fact, truly been involved with Hitch’s legendary masterpiece.

Looking back at Hollywood movies from the ’70s, I’m often left wondering if half of the actors who became big names at the time — Dustin Hoffman, Meryl Streep, and Faye Dunaway, for example — would’ve ever made it had they started out in today’s market. Sure, they’re talented, but do any of today’s Megawatt Stars look like those folks? Everyone now is uniformly pretty/handsome, and very few of our contemporary top-billed performers have the unique looks or personalities of the aforementioned talents.

Another name to add to that list of truly unique actors is Elliott Gould. Robert Altman’s original war satire hit M*A*S*H made him a household name, but his nuanced, sometimes neurotic, performances in a slew of ’70s classics canonized him as a thespian who could personify and reflect the confusion and insecurities that were fueling that tumultuous decade.

The wonderful programmers at Brooklyn’s BAMcinématek repertory house/theater are currently paying tribute to the Gould’s amazing talents with a series entitled “Elliot Gould: Star for an Uptight Age”. It began on August 1, but continues through August 21. And it’s okay if you’re just hearing/reading about the series now because the only film that’s played so far is M*A*S*H, a movie that’s not hard to find or see. The rest of the list is filled with some underseen gems (like the terrific Alan Arkin-directed black comedy Little Murders, which will feature a post-screening Q&A with Mr. Gould on Friday, August 8 at 6:30pm) and a lot of treasures that aren’t readily available on DVD, such as Peter Hyams’s gritty 1974 cop flick Busting (showing on Sunday, August 10).

I wish that the intense white-knuckle thriller The Silent Partner, which was brilliantly scripted by L.A. Confidential writer-director Curtis Hanson, were part of the series. It’s one of the best heist movies I’ve ever seen, with Gould and a psychotic Christopher Plummer trying to outwit each other at every twist of the plot. You’ve seen movies with cat-and-mouse type narratives, but this one’s more like “cat and cat”; the two leads take turns pursuing and trapping each other with nail-biting results. I figure a viable print for the film just wasn’t available. Alas, alas….

Regardless of my missing fave, you should do yourself a favor and check out some of these films if you’re in the area. We’re lucky to have works like these in American cinema, and we’re equally lucky to have a true actor like Elliot Gould.

The full schedule of films is here, including details of screenings which will be followed by a Q&A with the performer. A feature article about Gould from The New York Times can be read here.