The Screengrab : rosanna arquette

Debra Winger: Searched for and Found

Phil Nugent — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 20:45:00 GMT

Rachel Cooke managed to swing a face to face with Debra Winger for the Guardian, who in addition to her flyspeck of a role in Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married, has published a book, Undiscovered, described by Cooke as "a collection of brief essays and poems with illustrations of doors and windows by her friend, the famous tightrope walker Philippe Petit"--the Man on Wire guy. "I'm allergic to chapters," Winger told Cooke "They give me hives. I wanted doors and portals to illustrate the idea of transformations. I showed Philippe the old doors I collect - I keep them in my barn - and he took out his journal, and it was filled with drawings of doors. So that was it." The book has turned into a hit on the basis of word of mouth, a development that is very pleasing to Winger, whose issues with the bullshit connected to fame surfaced when she was encouraged to promote it. "I wanted to put it out under a pseudonym, but they said: are you fucking nuts? I tried going on The View, and the last time I experienced anything like that was when I was a child, and I got caught in a rip tide, and the lifeguard was yelling 'just relax!' Everyone's talking on top of each other, and it's humiliating, and I have to suffer the whole 'where have you been?' thing - as if the person asking me has been at the center of the universe all this time, and I just haven't checked in."

Of course, a lot of people wonder where Winger--who has spent a lot of the time in recent years tending to her farm in upstate New York with her husband, the actor Arliss Howard (who directed her in the 2002 movie Big Bad Love)--has been because they miss watching her in movies. It's gratifying to hear that Winger would have no objections to doing more work in movies if she could be spared the bullshit, and bewildering to hear that her appearance in Rachel Getting Married hasn't led to a spate of offers. (Though it could be that most directors assume that anyone who gets her to work for him must know the secret handshake that it takes to get her to say yes. Demme was one of those who only managed to summon up the courage to approach her after having come to terms with his assumption that she'd say no.) But Winger's name has also taken on this second life as a catch phrase for the hard time that even greatly gifted actresses have getting treated with respect, let alone offered the roles they deserve. It's fascinating to hear that she is, to put it gently, as ambivalent about this as she is about anything else. The sense that Winger might be a symbol of something gelled after Rosanna Arquette's 2001 documentary Searching for Debra Winger. "I was interviewed for it when it was called something else," she recalls, "and I said to Rosanna at the time, this is your question. I had no idea what she planned on calling the film, and she made me the poster child for something I was not talking about. I didn't give a shit [about what Hollywood was going to do to me]. I was just tired of it." With regard to the scarcity of good roles for actresses, Winger herself would rather address practical issues, such as her observation that "women don't write enough. Because who do they expect to write these roles? Men?"

One thing that Winger has going for her is that, at 53, she still has an expressive kisser, in contrast to, as she delicately puts it, "those boiled faces!" On the other hand, "I have a movie out now and I can't bear to watch it. I see myself up there, and it's not normal to scrutinise your own face on a screen this big; it's like opening a vein. So I do have some compassion for Nicole Kidman, or whoever, who has obviously looked at her face and sort of dissected it, like it's a thing." It's okay, honey, you don't have to add "or whoever" after you say "Nicole Kidman." At film festivals, "the celebrities are dragging their movies in, going 'look at this!' instead of the movie being the thing, and they're just there to support it. It's a case of: 'Look at my dress, at my hair, at my face and ... oh, by the way, there's a movie here, too!' I have this character in my head. She keeps appearing places: on trains, in the city, on the highway. I see her out there. She is heroic, but not like any hero we've ever seen. Society makes women of a certain age invisible. It's convenient. Remember our mothers? How inconvenient they were to us? It's like that, on a grand scale. In the early part of my life I carried the flame for fiery women: perky women who were not dumb. And now I feel like I could be the woman to play this role: the invisible woman." So you're saying that you would play it if only somebody would write it? "As you know, I've long been ambivalent about the whole movie star thing. But that doesn't mean that I wouldn't like to, uh ... work."

Mike Hodges Remembers: The "Get Carter" Director Writes About Making the Movies That Nobody Sees

Phil Nugent — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 18:00:00 GMT

The British writer-director Mike Holdges scored a big hit right out of the box with his first film, Get Carter (1971), which starred Michael Caine as a vengeful hit man and which just about single-handedly created a new kind of gritty British gangster movie. A couple of decades later, he helped make Clive Owen a movie star with another neo-noir, Croupier, a small film that narrowly escaped going to straight to video but managed to become a genuine sleeper. In between, he worked on probably his biggest-budgeted movie, the 1980 Dino De Laurentiis production Flash Gordon, a somewhat underrated entertainment that is one of the few comics-based movies to achieve true camp--the real, gilded thing itself, mind you, not that sniggery TV-Batman stuff. Aside from these high points, Modges has enjoyed the kind of career you might expect from a smart, talented guy who basically works within the industry but whose instincts aren't strictly, safely commercial: he's made some films, such as the 1987 A Prayer for the Dying, that were reportedly mangled by the distributors, and some, such as the 1985 Morons from Outer Space, where it's tempting to think that some mangling could have only helped. He's also made some movies that, as he writes in an article in The Guardian, never had much of a chance to find an audience. Such as his first film after Get Carter, the tantalizingly bizarre comedy Pulp, which also starred Michael Caine. He played a sleazy writer hired to ghost write the memoirs of a movie star (Mickey Rooney) with actual gangland connections.

Hodges writes that the movie bewildered studio executives and so was banished to the vaults, where it "languished for a year or more. Then one day, a technician appeared, brushed the accumulated dust from its label to make sure he had the right unknown, unloved film, and loaded it on to a truck. It was on its way to New York." Pulp had been selected as the first film shown at a boutique theater in Manhattan that was designed to specialize in noteworthy films that the big chains had no interest in showing at all; in order to emphasize the collectors-item nature of the enterprise, the films were booked for one-week runs only. "Now, at last, the critics would get to see it. Much to the distributor's surprise, it received rave reviews. Time magazine got a little overheated and even mentioned the word 'masterpiece'. While I'm of the opinion that film critics spend too much time in the dark, I'm always grateful when, in the case of my own work, they come to the right conclusions." The only downside was that this was in the pre-Internet days when people had to actually wait a few days for such precious information to get out. By the time those rave reviews in the print magazines had hit the newsstands, the one-week run had ended and Pulp was back in the vault.

Hodges followed that one up with the sci-fi slasher movie The Terminal Man, based on a Michael Crichton novel. In this case, the results are harder to defend, but it does sound as if Hodges put a lot of thought into the choices that make the movie so cold and repellent. (It stars George Segal as a brain-damaged fellow who has part of his brain hooked to a computer to help him get over his bad habit of stabbing people. Guess what happens.) Clearly he responded on a surprisingly personal level to its "message" about the "obvious insanity at the very heart of what drives us," which "also drove me to make the film." For the score, Hodges went austere, using only Glenn Gould's recordings of The Goldberg Variations. The pianist was famously reclusive and paranoid, and the movie had to be sent to Toronto to be screened for him to get his approval for the use of the music. "His own solitary existence and extreme hypochondria," Hodges noted dryly, "must have made for a weird screening."

A "director's cut" of The Terminal Man is showing in London in December. On November 30, there will be a screening of what may be Hodges's most obscure obscurity, the fascinatingly moody thriller Black Rainbow (1989), starring Rosanna Arquette and Jason Robards. The movie was kicked under the sofa by distributors, and Hodges writes that "From then on I consoled myself by calling my work "films in bottles". They would wash up somewhere, some time, and maybe surprise somebody watching some remote cable channel in the early hours. This theory was proven correct one morning when I was working with composer Simon Fisher Turner on the music for Croupier... The doorbell rang. It was a Japanese musician friend of Simon's, who was built like a sumo wrestler. They did their business, and he was on his way out. He suddenly turned back and approached me. My name had rung a bell. 'You make Black Rainbow?' 'I did.' 'I see six times.' I was so astonished I assumed he'd seen it on video. 'No. In cinema. Black Rainbow very big in Japan.'"

Taverns On The Screen: The Top Ten Barroom Scenes of Cinema (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 20:00:00 GMT

So, last week (as those of you who didn't black out may recall) we here at The Screengrab took you on a very special Pub Crawl through some of the most distinctive gin joints of celluoid.

This week, it’s hair of the dog time as we return to the world of booze (although we can stop anytime we feel like it...really!) for a survey of movies where the dives themselves may be forgettable, but not so the people (and, occasionally, vampires) who inhabit them.

So belly up to the bars and join us for another round of the finest alcoholic action, drunken destruction, boozy balladeering and sudsy seduction in cinema!

LOST IN TRANSLATION (2003)

Sofia Coppola’s fantasia about a depressed movie star and a directionless young woman stranded in a Tokyo luxury hotel is short on plot but long on atmosphere and the pleasures of indolence...and it’s hard to think of two better people to kill time with than Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson (in what, hopefully, won’t turn out to be her career zenith). The fizzy high point of Lost In Translation takes place during a haphazard bar hop (involving strange Japanese...spud guns? Anyone?) that ends (as all the finest bar hops do) in a private Plexiglas karaoke pod high above the city, where Murray’s Bob Harris surprises Johansson’s Charlotte (and, possibly, himself) with the naked romantic yearning in his rendition of Roxy Music’s “More Than This,” leading to lots of platonic foreplay and climaxing in one of the greatest smooches in all of celluloid. (And if you think your warm, fuzzy memories of the movie would be ruined forever if you ever discovered just what, exactly, Bill Murray whispered into ScarJo's ear following that famous kiss, then for God’s sake, don’t CLICK HERE!)

AFTER HOURS (1985)

Our own Phil Nugent recently covered the convoluted history of Martin Scorsese’s After Hours and the question of its true authorship. Whoever really wrote it and whoever deserves credit for it, though, it’s a deftly made and smartly directed little comedy, and plays up Scorsese’s rarely credited ability to handle comedy. Despite taking place in the wards and dungeons of Manhattan, After Hours focuses on only a few locations; but the one it gets the most use out of is the punk club Berlin, where the tortured soul Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne), already punished beyond reason for the high crime of trying to get into Rosanna Arquette’s pants, must visit in an attempt to do the only thing in the world he wants to do: go home. Just getting in to Berlin is hard enough: he must confront a side-of-beef bouncer (Clarence Felder) who quotes Kafka at him. When he finally gets in the door, he finds that the price of entry is being forcibly corralled by the staff and given a Mohawk as a filmmaker (a cameo by Scorsese himself) shines a spotlight in his face and Bad Brains’ “Pay to Cum” blares on the the P.A. system. And even that isn’t the end: when, later in the wee hours, Paul is forced to return to Berlin to avoid the fury of a mob who think he’s a housebreaker, he finds it nearly deserted save for an avant-garde artist (Verna Bloom) who ‘saves’ him by encasing him bodily in a shell of shellac and old newspapers. For this he paid a five-dollar cover charge?

THE HUDSUCKER PROXY (1994)

Look, we’ve all found ourselves in the same situation as Tim Robbins’ Norville Barnes once in a while. Broke, hopeless, down on your luck; everyone thinks you’re crazy, your best girl thinks you’re a heel, and your former elevator operator is stealing your ideas. (Well, okay, maybe not that last one.) And, to make things worse, it’s New Year’s Eve, and you don’t even have a date. So the least you can do is to stumble into the nearest bar and kill the pain with a slow, steady supply of martinis. But when Norville hits Ann’s 440 – the beatnik bar favored by his gal Friday, the fast-talking Amy Archer (Jennifer Jason Leigh) – even that doesn’t help: Ann’s, as the exasperated bartender played by Steve Buscemi in the Coen Brothers’ screwball homage The Hudsucker Proxy explains time and time again, doesn’t serve “al-key-hool”. It’s a juice bar, with coffee drinks for the extra-adventurous, and no matter how many times Norville asks for a martini (and he asks a lot), he can’t get one, and is forced to live on the ten or twelve he’s already got percolating in his bloodstream. Finally, Amy arrives and tries to talk him down to earth – even favoring him with a rendition of the Muncie High fight song – but it’s no good; Norville flees the bar and before the night is up, he’ll end up on a ledge. Frankly, we can’t blame him; Ann’s 440 looks cool enough, but as Norville drunkenly asks, what kind of bar is it if you can’t get a martini?

FAT CITY (1972)

John Huston's comeback film is set in Stockton, California and stars Stacy Keach as Tully, an alcoholic boxer who's managed to become a has-been without ever having been much of anything in the first place, and Jeff Bridges as Ernie, a younger man who Tully takes a shine to. Tully encourages the kid to take up boxing, as if encouraging anyone to follow in his own career path counted as a favor. The movie has its fair share of scenes in rowdy, darkly lit bars full of people with nowhere else to go in the middle of the day, but its most haunting moment comes at the end, in an unnaturally bright-looking cafe bar that seems to be a hangout for dry drunks. Tully has pulled Ernie there after the kid, spurning his offer that they go out together for a drink, has agreed to grab a cup of coffee. After an exchange of ideas on the subject of the ancient looking bar man ("How you like to be him?" "Maybe he's happy." "Maybe we're all happy."), Tully looks around the place, and Huston freezes the frames to pinpoint the moment of horrified sobriety. Ernie starts to leave, only to agree to Tully's desperate plea that he stick around and "talk some," but the two men have nothing to say to each other, and the credits roll over the image of them sitting together not talking. The actors move just enough to remind you that this time the frame isn't frozen. Maybe they're happy.

PENNIES FROM HEAVEN (1981)

Christopher Walken earned his hoofer's stripes in this phantasmagorical Depression musical, in which he appears as Tom, a politely soulless pimp who meets his latest employee, Bernadette Peters, when she's sitting in a bar trying to recover from being fired from her job as a schoolteacher for being pregnant by a married man who she hasn't heard from lately. In the movie, the characters use music-inspired fantasies to help them get through what their lives have turned into; here, Peters, who can't think of any way to support herself besides turning tricks, is doing her limited best to deal with the awful fact that she's actually met someone who can teach her how, and Walken, who can dance like a son of a bitch, has no problem making you believe that you're seeing something that a person could only pull off in a daydream. After the number is over, Tom rudely snaps her back to reality by warning her that if he discovers she's a tease who's wasting his time, "I'll cut your face." Walken doesn't have any problem with that part, either.

NEAR DARK (1987)

"Just how old are you, Jesse?" someone asks Lance Henriksen, and Henriksen, smiling like a redneck crocodile, replies, "Let me put it this way, son: I fought for the South." Henriksen's Jesse is the father figure in a brood of vampires who look like a white trash family and travel around in a van with the windows blacked out. In the movie's money scene, they wander into a roadside bar that Bill Paxton -- the "big brother" -- declares to be "Shitkicker Heaven" and proceed to use it as their own personal buffet table. A young Adrian Pasdar plays the hero, an innocent young dude who's been inducted into the family by the bite of a winsome, lonely blonde bloodsucker (Jenny Wright) and is still learning the ropes. Once the bodies start dropping, the bartender pulls out a shotgun and blasts Pasdar in the torso. Reflexively, Pasdar reacts as if he were dying and then stops and stands there with a hole in his chest, registering his surprise that he isn't. "It's a trip, ain't it?" says Paxton. There have been a shitload of reworkings of the vampire genre in the last twenty or so years, but in few of them does the blood flow so red and thickly potent as in this scene.

Related Stories:

Taverns On The Screen - The Top Ten Barroom Scenes of Cinema (Part Two)

Sweet Nothings: The Lost Words of Lost In Translation, Translated

Separated at Birth: "After Hours" and Joe Frank's "Lies"

Screengrab Pub Crawl - The Top 15 Bars of Cinema (Part One)

Screengrab Pub Crawl - The Top 15 Bars of Cinema (Part Two)

Screengrab Pub Crawl - The Top 15 Bars of Cinema (Part Three)

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

Separated at Birth: "After Hours" and Joe Frank's "Lies"

Phil Nugent — Thu, 29 May 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Andrew Hearst at the invaluable Panopticist recalls one of the lesser-known Hollywood scandals of the 1980s, the aspiring screenwriter Joseph Minion mining Joe Frank's radio monologue Lies for a script that would become the 1985 Martin Scorsese movie After Hours. Frank, a God in the highly specialized field of contemporary radio drama and performance art, wrote Lies back in 1982, one of eighteen original works he created for NPR Playhouse in the early 1990s. In the opening section of the monologue, which you can listen to at Hearst's site, the hero describes visiting a diner and meeting a woman who seems to flirt with him and mentions that her roommate is a sculptor who's looking to sell some of her work as paperweights. The hero goes home, starts thinking about the woman, calls her and receives an invitation to come over, and takes a cab to her building. In the course of the cab ride, he loses the only money he has on him when the bill goes flying out the window. When he finally arrives, he discovers that the woman's roommate is a sultry type who "sleeps around" and that the two of them live in a space filled with "leaden art droppings." Alone in the bedroom, the hero observes that the woman seems unstable and possibly nuts, and that "she seemed interested and indifferent at the same time;" eventually she tells him that she's still trying to come to term with having been raped. All these details turn up transposed in the first half hour of After Hours, along with other small, strange bits that may have been indirectly influenced by Lies. (In the movie, the woman, played by Rosanna Arquette, introduces herself to the hero--Griffin Dunne--by reciting a passage from the Henry Miller paperback he's reading; in Lies, the woman tells the hero that he "sounds like someone in a paperback book.") There's also a brief appearance by Larry Block, an actor known for his association with Joe Frank, as the cab driver. This is such a weird coincidence that Andrew Hearst is moved to speculate that it might have been part of a payoff to Frank, but in his own comments on the affair, Frank says that he didn't know Block at the time and was unaware that he'd been ripped off until someone told him that he ought to see the movie. It was just one of those fluky things.

The After Hours screenplay, which also includes a scene built around dialogue lifted from Kafka's "Before the Law"--a steal obvious enough that anyone who noticed it probably assumed it was a deliberate homage--was written by Minion when he was a kid in Columbia's Graduate Film Writing Program. (He was twenty-eight when the movie got made.) Whatever he was thinking when he wrote it, he probably didn't guess that a production team that included Dunne and Amy Robinson (who played Harvey Keitel's girlfriend in Mean Streets would get the script to Scorsese, and that Scorsese would latch onto it when he was looking for a small project he could make fast and on the cheap after his plans to film The Last Temptation of Christ with Robert De Niro collapsed. In a 2000 profile in Salon, Frank declined to name the "Hollywood film" whose producers had "paid him handsomely" for the theft of his material. In discussing the matter in the relative safety of his own web site, Frank took a pretty conciliatory tone towards Minion, pointing out that he took the story in a different direction after using Frank's monologue to achieve liftoff. The film industry may be less forgiving about the whole thing; Minion hasn't been drummed out of the business, but after achieving some whiz-kid renown on the basis of After Hours, his career failed to catch fire. His best-known screenplay credit since then was for the Nicolas Cage picture Vampire's Kiss; he also wrote the Scorses-directed episode of the TV series Amazing Stories and directed a couple of pictures, Daddy's Boys and Trafficking, neither of which got a theatrical release. Maybe he should spend a few weekends taking notes while listening to Car Talk.