The Screengrab : david thomson

Steven Bach, 1938 - 2009

Phil Nugent — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 16:30:00 GMT

Steven Bach, a writer, film and literature professor, and studio executive, died last week of cancer, at 70. Born in Pocatello, Idaho, Bach moved to Los Angeles in 1966 and began working in public relations and as a story editor for various production companies. In the late 1970s, he produced Mr. Billion and Butch and Sundance: The Early Years, and was made vice president and head of international production at United Artists, working under UA President Andy Albeck. Albeck and Bach were in place when UA gave the go-ahead to Michael Cimino to direct his epic Western Heaven's Gate, which was in production, on location in Montana, from April 1979 until March 1980 and finally cost upwards of $40 million. (It was originally budgeted at $11 million and scheduled for a Christmas 1979 release.) The collapse of the movie at its first premiere screening in 1980 caused the implosion of UA, which was sold off by its parent company, Transamerica, to MGM, which discontinued its production arm. Five years later, Bach published Final Cut: Dreams and Disaster in the Making of "Heaven's Gate", a witty, gracefully written account of his time at the studio. Writing in The New Yorker, Pauline Kael called Bach's book "About the only good thing that has ever come from the movie"; David Thomson called it "the best book ever written about the making of a movie. It gives you an understanding of the battles, the egos, and how a film like that could come about. It’s all the more remarkable because he’s one of the stooges in the story: he let it happen, and he admits that.”

In Final Cut, Bach covered the last couple of years of UA's existence, including his role in the making of other movies, such as Raging Bull, and other crises, such as the studio's unsuccessful efforts to maintain its relationship with Woody Allen. (A bunch of UA executives had left to form their own company, Orion, and were wooing Allen, who felt ties of loyalty to them.) The debacle in Montana figures in the narrative as a persistent, pesky irritation--Cimino was always a vainglorious pain in the neck, but after his previous epic, The Deer Hunter, won the Academy Award for Best Picture, he was considered a prestigious one--that steadily inflates into a full-blown migraine. Bach describes what happened, and he also makes it easier to understand how management let it happen--why, with so much else going on, they were slow to figure out how badly things had spun out of control and why they couldn't just fire Cimino when they realized that he was running amok. The book lives as a first-rate picture of what Hollywood moviemaking turned into during the period when studios were becoming the playthings of conglomerates, and an illustration of why this was not a happy development for the history of motion pictures.

Because Bach didn't go easy on himself in the narrative--both he and Albeck come across as considerate, intelligent, and decent men who were in over their heads practically from day one--the book also serves as a demonstration of why its author wasn't cut out for success in the movie industry. After leaving the business and writing Final Cut, Bach, who as a graduate student at the University of Southern California in the 1960's wrote his dissertation on the films of Josef von Sternberg, wrote a biography of Von Sternberg's star creation, Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend (1992), which he followed up with Dazzler: The Life and Times of Moss Hart (2001) and Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl (2007). He also taught at Columbia University and Bennington College.

"Rio Bravo" Turns Fifty

Phil Nugent — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 19:30:00 GMT

"Most cult films are too hip to be popular," Allen Barra writes in The Wall Street Journal, "and most big hits are too popular to be hip. But Rio Bravo is that rarest of films -- both popular and hip." This month marks the fiftieth anniversary of the release of Howard Hawks's Western, which Barra argues "may be the most popular cult film ever made...[which] was shot in glorious Technicolor and starred perhaps the most popular star in movie history", John Wayne, and kudos to him for keeping in an eye on the calendar so as to be sure and catch this. One critic, Robin Wood, has written that "If I were asked to choose a film that would justify the existence of Hollywood, I think it would be Rio Bravo." Another, David Thomson, recently asked, "Is there a film from the fifties so free from strain, or one in which the drift of song is there all the time?" Quentin Tarantino, who once listed it as one of his three favorite movies of all time, introduced a screening of it at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival and informed the room that whenever he starts seeing a woman for the first time, he always wants to show her Rio Bravo. If the woman doesn't like it, it is not his opinion of the movie that he proceeds to re-evaluate.

Rio Bravo, Barra writes, "was designed as an Alamo story in which the besieged Texans win. In case viewers don't get the message, the hotel Wayne's sheriff lives in is called "The Alamo," and the outlaw boss hires a Mexican trumpeter to play "El Deguello," supposedly the song that Santa Anna had played for the Alamo's garrison. (Actually, the piece was written by the film's composer, Dimitri Tiomkin, and Wayne liked it so much that he used it in his 1960 film called The Alamo.)" Hawks and Wayne liked to tell interviewers that the movie was designed as a fuck-you to Fred Zinnemann's Oscar-winning High Noon, which was written by the soon-to-be-blacklisted Carl Foreman. In that movie, the townspeople are too cowardly to help sheriff Gary Cooper when word arrives that four vengeful gunman are on their way to shoot it out with him; in the end, Coop mows them all down and throws his badge away in disgust. Oddly, what seems to have rankled Hawks about this wasn't that the townspeople were gutless but that Cooper was, as the director saw it, so unmanly as to stoop to asking for anyone's help. ""I didn't think a good sheriff was going to go running around town like a chicken with his head off asking for help," he said. So Wayne, in a town that barely seems to have any townspeople except for the staff at the hotel, faces down a much larger force than Cooper had to contend with, backed up by a drunk (Dean Martin), a crippled old man (Walter Brennan), and a suburban-rockabilly show biz kid moonlighting as a cow hand (Rick Nelson). "The odds," Barra notes wryly, "are about the same for the good guys in both films."

The fact is that most people couldn't care less about whatever political message the people behind either film imagined they were peddling at the time. Tarantino summed up Bravo's enduring appeal to a great degree when he called it the greatest "hang-out movie" of all time, a term, he explained, refers to movies that hold up under repeated viewings just because the people onscreen are so damned pleasurable to spend time with. Barra refers to Rio Bravo's longish running time (two hours, twenty minutes) and measured pacing, with a time out from the plot for such digressions as a musical interlude in the jail, as evidence of Hawks's "daring", but they play to what Tarantino perceives as the film's strength; the audience, enjoying the unlikely mix of personalities onscreen (which also includes Angie Dickinson, in her breakout role as a seductive lady gambler named Feathers), cares less about suspense and action than in kicking back with them and forgetting about the clock.

This was indeed a gamble on Hawks's part, but he had the elements to make it work. This is all the more remarkable considering how he had gone about casting the picture. Most people assume that the casting of Nelson, who then had one foot in the music charts and one on the set of his parents' The Ozzie and Harriet Show, was a sop to the youth audience and TV watchers, and they are not wrong. (His role was originally written for an older man, and Hawks considered such leathery faces as Robert Mitchum and Jack Palance before deciding to look for a pretty boy. He apparently toyed with the idea of using Michael Landon, then best known as the star of I Was a Teenage Werewolf< before deciding that it would be nice for Dean Martin to have a singing partner.) Surpringly, Walter Brennan, who had worked for Hawks in five earlier movies and won an Oscar for one of them, Come and Get It, was also asked aboard in part because he was, thanks to his series The Real McCoys, now a TV star. According to Todd McCarthy's 1997 biography of Hawks, this would in fact cause the only real tension on the set, when Hawks discovered that Brennan was locked into the lovable, folksy old duffer act he'd been doing on TV and had to scream at his old reliable for a spell before Brennan became sufficiently pissed off to become the picture of a "crabby, evil, nasty old man" that the director had in mind.

Perhaps because some of the things that make the movie seem downright lovable today struck some critics as the time as something between facetiousness and blasphemous, Rio Bravo, despite being a great international success and the second-biggest box office hit of Hawks's career, it won no Oscar nominations, which seems an even more remarkable feat when you consider that Wayne's unfortunate The Alamo racked up seven of them. But we can guess at Hawks's estimation of it from the fact that, for the rest of his career, he continued to rifle it for spare parts. For some of us fans, Rio Bravo stands as the director's last hurrah. He worked for another dozen years, but the slow pace that feels so right here would come to see ever duller and more meandering, especially in the two additional Westerns he made with Wayne, El Dorado (1967) and his final film, Rio Lobo (1970). Both borrow heavily from Rio Bravo for their stories and characters, but at least El Dorado made back its costs. In 1975, when John Wayne walked out onto the stage at the Academy Awards show to present Hawks with a special lifetime achievement Oscar, the star of Red River and Hatari! told the crowd that he and Howard Hawks had made four pictures together. Everyone who knew that the real total was five knew that the one they wanted to forget was Rio Lobo.

Scientific Research Proves That Romantic Comedies Are the Work of the Devil

Phil Nugent — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 19:00:00 GMT

We all know that Kate Hudson is on a mission to find out how many multiplexes she has to stink up before studios will stop paying her to do it--perhaps in some kind of ultimate homage to her mother, the star of Protocol, Wildcats, and Overboard--but did you know that she's also destroying your chance for romantic happiness? It's true! Scottish researchers have concluded an enquiry into effect of exposure to the cliches of formula romantic comedies, and the results are not encouraging. "We have this idea," says psychologist Bjarne M. Holmes, "that out of six-and-a-half billion people, we're somehow going to meet our predestined soul mate, who happens to live in the same neighborhood or work in the same place. I love how that always happens." (If this were a romantic comedy, Dr. Holmes would be the wisecracking best friend played by Joan Cusack. Tip your hat.) The Los Angeles Times reports that "In the study, recently published in the journal Communication Quarterly, Holmes and fellow researcher Kimberly Johnson selected 40 top-grossing romantic comedies released from 1995 to 2005 -- including such titles as What Women Want and You've Got Mail -- and analyzed their content, cataloging each scene of romantic action such as gift-giving, kissing, declarations of love, weddings, involvement with exes and even acts of deception in the pursuit of love."

In the process, they seemed to find "a correlation between the preference for such entertainments and the students' curdled concepts about love." People who watch enough of the things seemed to take as gospel some of the more dubious "messages" that are repeated over and over in movie after movie: the "predestined soul mate" concept; the always helpful idea that the strongest relationships are those built on lies and deception, and even that these relationships, after a brief spell of soul-searching, will only grow back stronger after your loved one discovers that you understand him so well because you've been reading his mail and also that you're now really the long-lost Princess Anastasia; the clinically idiotic concept that your partner should be able to divine your deepest thoughts through some kind of lover's ESP, which means that your relationship would be sullied if you stooped to actual, straightfroward communication; the inexplicably popular notion that men and women are totally different species and that the secret of romantic success is to crack the gender-based code of behavior that governs each of us. (This last one has apparently gotten a big boost from He's Just Not That Into You, despite the fact that it is universal knowledge that anything that comes out of Justin Long's mouth has got to be horseshit.) Researchers also failed to find a single successful marriage that involved an incident of one partner blurting out a lengthy declaration of undying love to the other in full view of a bemused crowd while breaking up their wedding to an unamused third party or after a mad chase to the airport.

Film critic David Thomson agrees that the researchers are onto something more than a cute conceit here. "How can we not assume that the works we produce for ourselves, the stories we tell each other, are going to affect us in some way? I grew up thinking you really have to fall in love with someone and marry them and it will last forever and you'll be happy. None of these things is true. I think the comedies of the '30s and '40s, some of them stand up among our best films. But there was a kind of code of family life that has probably been very destructive because it's left a lot of people feeling, 'My family didn't work out that way.' It's a lot to live up to." The question that remains is whether people imitate these patterns because they've seen them in movies--and, says Holmes, "The average American sees more examples of relationships in popular media than in their own lives"--or if the movie cliches grew out of common preconceptions that people already had and that they wanted to hear restated again and again when they were being entertained. Whichever is the case, the movies pound these half-baked ideas that much harder into people's brains, with long-term unfortunate consquences; as Holmes sees it, "people sometimes spend ten years going through a series of relationships that, if they had put time and energy into, might have actually gone somewhere instead of having this prior idea of what they're expecting." Arguing otherwise is Laurie Puhn, author of Instant Persuasion: How to Change Your Words to Change Your Life, who argues that her clients are actually less thick than they may appear. "What I find about people who come in for family mediation is that they're not deluded; they don't think, 'He should be able to read my mind.' They just don't know how to express what they're thinking." But if they don't know how to express what they're thinking, how do you know they're not thinking that their partners should be able to read their minds? Huh!? Thanks for playing!

Cary Grant Doesn't Vent

Phil Nugent — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 19:00:00 GMT

In The Atlantic, Benjamin Schwarz uses the excuse of sort-of-almost-as-an-afterthought reviewing what sounds like a pretty lame book (Richard Torregrossa’s Cary Grant: A Celebration of Style) to compose a love poem to the star of His Girl Friday and North by Northwest. The impoverished Cockney Archie Leach took the name "Cary Grant" when he signed to a Hollywood contract in his late twenties, but it wasn't until he was past thirty, with twenty pictures under his belt, that he became Cary Grant. The by-now standard gospel tells of how Grant, working with his frequent co-star Katherine Hepburn and the director George Cukor for the first time, in Sylvia Scarlett, suddenly "he felt the ground under his feet" (in Cukor's words) and how he then put it to use in his first really sophisticated, screwball romantic comedy, The Awful Truth. Scwartz writes that "seemingly from nowhere the Cary Grant persona gloriously appeared, fully formed. All at once there was the detached, distracted wit; the knowing charm; the arch self-mockery; the bemused awareness of his audience, with whom he was sharing a joke (a quality that made him simultaneously cool and warm); the perfectly timed stylized comedic movements—the cocked head, the double takes. And, not least, the good-natured ease combined with a genius for pitiless teasing ... Moreover, he suddenly created a new hybrid, combining qualities that hadn’t before mixed in the movies. He was oddly unplaceable: C. L. R. James, the brainy Trinidadian Marxist theorist and cricket writer, noticed at the time that Grant appeared both American and quintessentially English; at once subtle and rollicking, he seemed to James to anticipate nothing less than 'a new social type.' ”

For decades, Grant, whose name always seems to come up first in conversations about people who never won an Oscar (along with that of Hitchcock, who called Grant the only actor he'd ever loved), was everybody's ideal movie star without being taken very seriously as an actor. Schwartz gives much of the credit for his finally getting his critical due in the mid-1970s to two idiosyncratic, brilliant writers on film: David Thomson, who hailed him as "the best and most important actor in the history of the cinema” in his Biographical Dictionary of Film, and Pauline Kael, who fleshed that appraisal out in a legendary New Yorker profile, "The Man from Dream City." As for the book under review: "Torregrossa stumbles when it comes to one big thing. He devotes four pages to explicating what’s wrong with ventless jackets, how Grant came to eschew them, why double vents look best (they don’t), and the ways Grant modified his vents. He then holds up that perfectly tailored slim-line suit Grant wore during his cross-country travails in North by Northwest as an example of the star’s preference for customized vents. Torregrossa is talking here about the most famous suit in pictures. Todd McEwen wrote a smart and stylish Granta essay on it (North by Northwest isn’t a film about what happens to Cary Grant, it’s about what happens to his suit”). GQ has declared it nothing less than the best suit in film history. It’s ventless." Speaking as a man who, on his best days, can just barely figure out which Nike goes on the left foot, I am appalled.