The Screengrab : tom wolfe

Phil Spector Convicted of the Murder of Lana Clarkson

Phil Nugent — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 14:45:00 GMT

Legendary record producer and notorious self-made freak Phil Spector was convicted yesterday of second-degree murder in the shooting death of actress Lana Clarkson in 2003. The jury had the option of convicting Spector of a lesser charge but went with the maximum option, which carries with it a mandatory life sentence. The 69-year-old Spector, whose lawyers insist they will appeal the verdict, will remain free on $1 million bail until he is due to be sentenced on May 29. As Los Angeles Times reporter Harriet Ryan noted, his conviction, which "came six years and two trials after police found Lana Clarkson, a statuesque blond actress, shot to death in a chair in Spector's 30-room Alhambra mansion", makes him "the first celebrity found guilty of murder on Hollywood's home turf in at least 40 years." "Celebrity" almost seems a soft word for Spector, whose recording triumphs with his fabled "Wall of Sound" earned him a place in pop culture history that dwarfs the likes of O. J. Simpson and Robert Blake. Unlike them. however, Spector was never accused of having a lovable side. In his biography of Spector, He's a Rebel, Mark Ribowsky quoted Nedra Talley, a member of the Ronettes and a cousin of the group's focal point, Ronnie Bennett, who became Ronnie Spector when Phil married her in 1968: "[Ronnie] would say, 'Oh, I'm not really getting involved, he's just cute'--but let's be real. Phil is not cute."

In the early 1960s, Spector turned out what Ribowsky called "a lava flow of vinyl", including enduring hits by the Ronettes, the Crystals, Darlene Love, and the Righteous Brothers. (When some complained that the Brothers' "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" was, at three minutes, fifty seconds, too long for radio airplay, Spector left the song alone and simply sent it out to disc jockeys with a label that read "3:05.") He also crafted the various-artists holiday album A Christmas Gift for You, a commercial disappointment when it was dropped on the public in the wake of President Kennedy's assassination but since then regarded as a seasonal classic. Later, Spector gave Tina Turner the name-above-the-title treatment with the 1966 "River Deep--Mountain High", vacuumed up the shards of the Beatles' last sessions for release as Let It Be, and produced successful solo projects for both John Lennon (Plastic Ono Band, Imagine) and George Harrison (All Things Must Pass). He was also immortalized in print by such writers as Nik Cohn and Tom Wolfe, and was said to have served as the basis for the character of the sword-wielding hermaphrodite "Z-Man" in Russ Meyer's 1970 Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Roger Ebert, who wrote the screenplay for Beyond the Valley, once chortled in print that despite the rumors, neither he nor Russ Meyer had ever met Spector, but then Robert Graves never met Caligula, either.

Spector appeared as himself in an episode of I Dream of Jeannie in 1967. (His acting ability can be measured by the fact that, even though he was supposed to be himself, he was listed in the credits under a pseudonym.) In 1969, he appeared in the first reel of Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider in the wordless role of the connection in the white Rolls-Royce who finances the heroes' road trip by buying their cocaine. According to Danny Davis, a record promoter who had worked with Spector, "The real point" of this piece of stunt casting "was that Dennis Hopper could put Phil Spector in a movie and not let him talk. That was Dennis shutting up Phil Spector, which of course was something nobody could ever do." Spector's on-screen appearances confirmed that reclusive was a good look for him, and he began to make fewer and fewer trips outside his mansion. As his work became stiffer and he got into the habit of taking high profile jobs that were a bad fit for him--with Lennon on his later solo records, with Dion on the comeback trail, with Leonard Cohen on the 1977 Death of a Ladies' Man, and especially with the Ramones on their 1980 End of the Century--there began to be less and less call for him to leave the house.

At the same time, his legend as a scary nut job was only growing. Firearms figured in his collaboration with the Ramones, who claimed that he'd held them hostage in his posh digs, and hastened the end of his professional association with Lennon, who was taken aback when Spector tried to assert his authority at a recording session by firing a shot into the ceiling of the tight studio. "Phil," Lennon is supposed to have told Tommy Two-Gun, "if you're gonna kill me, kill me. But don't fuck with me ears." At the time, Spector's marriage to Ronnie Spector, which had degenerated into a whirlwind of head games and physical abuse, was ending, and it wound up taking Spector's professional and personal relationship with Lennon with it: during divorce proceedings, Spector persuaded Lennon to come to court with him as a character witness, only to have Lennon stagger away from him in dismay when Spector began screaming obscenities at Ronnie in front of the judge.

Spector was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989, the same year the Ribowsky book and Spector's own as-told-to memoir, Be My Baby, How I Survived Mascara, Miniskirts, and Madness ("co-written" with Vince Maldron), hit the shelves. His old hits would be repackaged for the digital age, and every so often Spector would make a half-hearted gesture in the direction of a comeback, but he definitely made his biggest headlines in twenty-five years with the death of Clarkson, the beautiful, much-liked actress who made her screen debut in 1982 as Vincent Schiavelli's wife in Fast Times at Ridgemont High and who became best known as an Amazonian B-picture heroine in such films as Deathstalker and Barbarian Queen. In 2003, she was still trying to jump-start her film career while holding down a regular job as a hostess at the House of Blues, which is where she met Spector; he persuaded her to come back with him to his house for a drink, and soon after the two of them vanished inside, Spector reappeared to inform his driver, "I think I shot somebody."

Spector's subsequent attempts to spin the case to his advantage included a 2003 Esquire interview with Scott Raab in which, in contradiction of all other available evidence, he claimed to not have been drunk on the nigh in question, insisted that Clarkson was drunk and out of control when he gallantly agreed to her request for a midnight tour of his digs, and then tried to sell the story that her death had been a "suicide"--that, as Spector put it, in what sounded like a hard-boiled rewrite of "He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)", the title of a Goffin-King song that he recorded with the Crystals in 1962, "She kissed the gun." The idea that Clarkson, who had sought treatment for depression in years past, was suddenly overcome with suicidal despair while in Spector's presence and wrestled his gun away from him so that she could ruin his clean and sober night out by killing herself in his home turned out to be a centerpiece of his legal defense; it was countered by prosecution testimony from a seemingly endless supply of women who had been invited by Spector to take a look deep inside the barrel of his peacemaker while the trigger-happy music legend was three sheets to the wind. The admissibility of that testimony will reportedly factor into the defense's plans to appeal. In the meantime, Spector's lawyers insist that he was fully expecting to be convicted this time out. "Mr. Spector is a realistic man," said his lawyer Doron Weinberg, which is the second judgement delivered yesterday and connected to this trial that few people could have seen coming

When Good Directors Go Bad: The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990, Brian De Palma)

Paul Clark — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Of all the prestige projects of the 1990 awards season, few had more potential than The Bonfire of the Vanities. To begin with, it was based on Tom Wolfe’s first fiction book, which had been widely read in serialized form in Rolling Stone before becoming a bestseller upon its publication as a novel. The director was Brian De Palma, who made his reputation with a series of kinky, Hitchcock-inspired thrillers during the seventies before branching out into more mainstream fare such as Scarface, The Untouchables and Casualties of War. With a wildly popular novel and an A-list director, Warner Bros. had visions of Oscars dancing in their heads, and they consequently filled the cast with big names, from recent Oscar nominees Tom Hanks, Melanie Griffith, and Morgan Freeman to newly anointed action superstar Bruce Willis, and backed them with plenty of first-rate character actors.

Ideally, The Bonfire of the Vanities should have been one of the biggest movie events of 1990. But then, if it had been, I would be writing about it in my Yesterday’s Hits column instead of When Good Directors Go Bad. As it stands, the big-screen adaptation remains one of the most notorious fiascos in Hollywood history, earning back a mere $15 million of its then-extravagant $50 million budget, and receiving mostly savage reviews. As a De Palma fan of long standing- I’m the guy who liked The Black Dahlia, after all- I’d like to say that the film was merely misunderstood, but even I have to admit that it’s a failure.

Part of the problem is the casting of the principal roles, from the top on down. If you were casting the role of an ambitious commodities trader and self-anointed “Master of the Universe”, whose name would come to mind? Michael Douglas? Tom Cruise, perhaps? But after Warner Bros. deemed the character too unsympathetic on the page, they decided to cast Tom Hanks in the role, which is sort of like casting Jimmy Stewart as Gordon Gekko. Also problematic was the casting of Willis. The character of journalist Peter Fallow was written as a dissolute Brit (the role was originally offered to John Cleese), but Willis ended up being cast for marquee value, and gave one of his laziest performances, smirking his way through the role and pissing off most of the people involved with the production with his ego.

Worst of all is Griffith. During the eighties, Griffith’s dumb-blonde persona proved to be surprisingly adaptable to a number of filmmakers’ visions, from the tart-with-a-heart of Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild to the streetwise porn star of De Palma’s own Body Double. However, the role of Maria Ruskin was far beyond her limited talent. On the page, Maria may be the trickiest character in the novel, a wily manipulator whose ditzy façade hides a pitch-black heart. But Griffith can only manage the ditzy part, so when the character begins to reveal her shameless nature after Sherman’s life begins to go down the tubes we never believe it. The two halves of her personality- sexy and cunning- never mesh convincingly, so rather than lacing her manipulations with an erotic charge, her dark side makes the sexy stuff creepy, which surely wasn’t what the film was aiming for.

But while the casting issues might have been out of De Palma’s hands, he’s far from blameless. Admittedly, Wolfe’s novel is something of a tough nut to crack, simultaneously a cross-section of New York City life, a morality tale, and a savage takedown of the craven greed and ambition that fueled the eighties. However, it fails on all three counts. Much of its power as a snapshot of the Big Apple’s social strata is lost because its characters are sketchy and one-dimensional, a problem that might have been partially alleviated by spot-on casting, but not entirely. Likewise, the film places its morality tale aspects on the back burner for most of its running time, only to have judge/voice of reason Morgan Freeman bust out an extended monologue about decency in the film’s final five minutes, at which point it comes off as a tacked-on moral rather than a natural outgrowth of the story.

This leaves only the exposé aspect of the story. In nearly 700 pages, Wolfe was able to lay bare the motivations of nearly all of the major players in the story, from Sherman, Maria and Peter, to the lawyers, politicians and community leaders who opportunistically seized upon his case for their own personal gain. Without the time to do this onscreen, De Palma instead focuses on the circus (political and media-driven) that ensues. But while a more assured comic filmmaker might have been able to spin even an abbreviated Bonfire into a bitter little pill (imagine what an Ace in the Hole-era Billy Wilder might have done with this material), De Palma brings almost nothing to the material aside from the liberal use of unflattering wide-angle close-ups to underline the grotesqueness of the characters. Sure, there are a handful of cool camera tricks- especially the nearly five-minute-long opening Steadican shot- but for the most part they don’t really work in the context of the story, and mostly just call attention to themselves. I hate to use a criticism that De Palma’s detractors are wont to levy at him, but in this case, they’re right.

In the end, the biggest failing of The Bonfire of the Vanities is one of tone. The scathing satire of the original novel was replaced by a more hamfisted style that was both broad and shrill. A few of the jabs hit (I love how Andre Gregory’s poet is introduced: “he’s on the shortlist for the Nobel Prize. He has AIDS.”), but most of the time they whiff. Scenes like the one where Maria’s cuckold husband (Alan King) suddenly dies in mid-conversation or the famous “crumbs” monologue by Sherman’s wife might have worked on the page, but they flounder and die onscreen, the former because it’s not inherently funny to see a minor character kick the bucket, the latter because Kim Cattrall plays the character as such a high-strung harpy that it’s hard to focus on anything she says.

Now, it’s entirely possible that Ebert was right when he wrote that The Bonfire of the Vanities might be enjoyable to those who are unfamiliar with the book. But I wouldn’t bet on it. De Palma and the studio took a powerful and lacerating story and adapted it in the most pedestrian way possible, and replaced the prickly citizens of Wolfe’s New York City with characters who are both cartoonish and, worse, uninteresting. If anything good came out of my watching Bonfire again, it’s that I’ve been inspired to re-read the book, to immerse myself in Wolfe’s language and marvel at the world he created. By now, it’s become a cliché that people are generally better off reading the book, but in this case that’s the only way to go.

The Farting Deal Report

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Now that we know America loves a talking dog, Hollywood is asking the musical question, “How about a farting dog?” Tween sensations the Jonas Brothers, apparently lacking any agents or adult career advisors of any kind, have signed on to star in Walter the Farting Dog. Peter and Bobby Farrelly may direct the story of “a fat dog with severe flatulence. The brothers play musicians whose parents are asked to care for the dog by an aunt just before she passes away…While his brothers play music, Frankie and the gaseous hound get involved in a plot that involves liberating a koi fish and thwarting jewel thieves,” Variety reports.

Milk director Gus Van Sant and writer Dustin Lance Blac will reteam for an adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. I don’t need to tell you it’s the true “account of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest author Ken Kesey and a group dubbed the Merry Pranksters as they drive across the country in a DayGlo-painted school bus dubbed Furthur, reaching personal and collective revelations through the use of LSD and other psychedelic drugs.” But I just told you anyway, courtesy of The Hollywood Reporter.

It’s going to happen, and by “it” I mean a remake of Footloose. High School Musical 3 director Kenny Ortega and star Zac Efron are attached to the project, and Variety reports “the studio is working on new songs that will complement some of the memorable original tunes.”

Related:
Recreating Gay Liberation in the Seventies for "Milk"
Trailer Review: High School Musical 3

When Good Directors Go Bad: Rising Sun (1993, Philip Kaufman)

Paul Clark — Fri, 23 May 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Normally, I try not to get hung up on whether a movie is commercial. While it’s undeniable that films that are intended for a large audience have to satisfy a different set of expectations than those that aren’t, I generally do my best to consider the movie based on how well it succeeds in doing what it sets out to do. However, it’s undeniable that some filmmakers have sensibilities that are well-suited to commercial filmmaking, and others who don’t. Some of our best filmmakers (like Martin Scorsese) are even able to move back and forth between big-budget filmmaking and more personal work. Others have a harder time with it. One director who falls into the latter category is Philip Kaufman, and nowhere is this more apparent than his 1993 film Rising Sun.

Rising Sun was based on a novel by Michael Crichton, whose work was experiencing a surge in popularity in the early nineties. Crichton’s novel combined the ever-popular murder mystery genre with the then-current topic of Japanese encroachment on the American business market. Rising Sun wasn’t one of Crichton’s best novels, but there was potential there for an interesting film, and the choice of Kaufman to direct was inspired. Kaufman had been working for almost three decades, directing eccentric twists on popular genre films like 1972’s The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid and the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But his best-known work came in the 1980s, with his rich adaptations of tricky works of literature including The Right Stuff, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Henry & June.

It’s clear from Kaufman’s pedigree that Fox was looking for a classy, A-list adaptation of Crichton’s bestseller. However, I’m not sure classy was the way to go with Rising Sun. This is a story that incorporates such elements as boardroom intrigue, high-tech surveillance, the Japanese “shadow world” of Los Angeles, and a woman who gets off on being asphyxiated. Yet Kaufman directs the film like it’s high drama. The result is lifeless and inert. And if there’s one thing you don’t want in a movie where a character eats sushi off a woman’s bare breasts (with a nipple/sake chaser), it’s inertia.

But if Rising Sun is a washout as a guilty-pleasure entertainment, it’s just as uncompelling as an exposé of Japanese culture. When it was first published, Crichton’s novel drew fire from Japanese-American groups for its portrayal of their business culture as being ruthless and conniving. But even when I saw the film back in 1993, most of the more shocking details seemed pretty quaint. Granted, some of the more supposedly anti-Asian elements were toned down for the movie, but no matter which form it took, Rising Sun had surprisingly little insight into Japanese culture that hadn’t been expressed in a more interesting way elsewhere.

Which leaves us only with the murder mystery, which offers few surprises. Early in the film, Sean Connery’s wise Capt. John Connor tells Wesley Snipes’ Lt. Web Smith, “When something seems too good to be true, then it’s not true.” Not particularly sage advice, but apparently advice that was heeded by Kaufman, Crichton, and co-screenwriter Michael Backes. Why else would they waste almost an hour setting up an obvious decoy villain? Once it becomes clear that the film is content to cycle through every twist and turn we expect from it- the fake villain, the heroes getting thrown off the case, the ugly revelations about their pasts, the emergence of the real villain, and so on- all that’s left is counting down the minutes between “surprise” revelations. And at 129 minutes, that’s a lot of counting.

Kaufman has always had a knack for casting, and in 1993, a movie top-lined by Connery and Snipes still qualified as an A-list production. For his part, Snipes is pretty solid in the film. I’ve long believed Snipes to be undervalued as an actor, due first to his career long being mired in forgettable action fare, then more recently because of his legal problems. Web Smith isn’t a great part- certainly not as flashy as his supporting role in Mo’ Better Blues- but he does all he can with a character who’s essentially playing straight man to Connery. I especially like his slow burn moments, when he tries desperately to maintain his cool in the middle of confounding and/or ridiculous circumstances. Crichton objected to Fox’s casting of Snipes in a role that was written as white man, but I think that it works here, giving the film a complicated yet sympathetic lead in a way that grounds the story.

Connery, on the other hand, is content to coast through the film, propelled largely by his own presence. Crichton famously wrote the role of John Connor especially the Scots legend, but both the character and the performance are something of a dud. Connery’s role consists primarily of being right all the time and deigning to offer advice to those less enlightened than he. Unfortunately, this arrogance extends to the performance itself, with Connery (who also executive-produced) putting forth no more effort than necessary to earn his pay.

What’s more, Kaufman and Crichton take every opportunity they can to underline exactly how wise Connor is, most notably by pitting him against vulgar anti-Japanese Lt. Graham (Harvey Keitel), who refers to the Japanese as “nips” and decries their presence in this country. Unfortunately for the film, Keitel’s live-wire performance upstages Connery’s self-important one, with Keitel getting almost all of the best lines (my favorite being his declining of an offer of sushi: “no thanks. If I get a craving for mercury, I’ll eat a thermometer”).

When I look at Kaufman’s filmography, I can’t help but marvel at some of the novels he’s adapted for the screen. After all, here’s a guy who has successfully adapted some near-unadaptable material, including books by Tom Wolfe and Milan Kundera. Who would have thought it would be Michael Crichton who would defeat him? But just because Crichton’s books seemingly adapt themselves doesn’t mean that Kaufman was the right director for the job. As a director who specialized in literate fare, scenes like the one in which Wesley Snipes is attacked in the middle of a raid by an irate nude woman just aren’t in his wheelhouse. Unfortunately, Rising Sun was the beginning of a downturn in Kaufman’s career, leading first to the respectfully yet hardly enthusiastically-received Quills seven years later, then another misguided commercial project, Twisted, in 2004. Hopefully, one of his announced upcoming projects- perhaps his proposed Nicholas Ray film Interrupted- will get him back on track.

Esquire's Dubious Achievement? The Heath Ledger "Diaries"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 16:00:00 GMT

An article by Lisa Taddeo, called "The Last Days of Heath Ledger", appears in the April issue of Esquire, which hits newsstands next week, just some seven weeks after the actor's death. According to The New York Times, the piece "finds Mr. Ledger eating Moroccan food with Jack Nicholson in London, returning to New York and partying at the downtown nightspot Beatrice Inn, eating steak and eggs at a cafe in Little Italy and wolfing down a banana-nut muffin as his last morsel of food. None of this is exactly true." The article is written in the first person, as if it were a diary of Ledger's last days. It is described as a "fictionalized" account of actual events, as well as a meditation on "the indignities of celebrity," though it's not altogether clear to what degree actual journalistic investigation played a part in its creation, or how much it was ever supposed to. The Times reports that "Ms. Taddeo, an associate editor at Golf Magazine and an aspiring fiction writer, spent four days in restaurants and cafes and parks near where Mr. Ledger died", but that when Esquire editor David Granger gave her the assignment, he "simply wanted a writer on the scene." Whether it was fiction or nonfiction or anything in between was not specified. And, apparently, he wanted it fast.

Granger, who says that he wanted a piece about Ledger because, in the wake of the star's death, “I didn’t understand what the fuss was all about,” calls the piece "an earnest effort." It's officially labeled as "fiction" in the magazine's table of contents and isn't headlined on the cover because, Granger says, "“I purposely didn’t want it to be seen as exploitative in any way." He also talks a good game about wanting to make fiction topical and "risky, though taking risks with subjects that you think inspired a baffling degree of "fuss" while being extra careful not to seem "exploitative" sounds like some kind of tightrope walk. (Granger refers to his magazine's mission "to make [fiction] as urgent as nonfiction,” which might tickle readers who remember when Esquire was a leader in the "New Journalism" movement to gain for nonfiction as the excitement and literary credentials of fiction.) He couldn't have known, back in January, that the results of his and Lisa Taddeo's efforts would be released into the teeth of one more flurry of media reports about made-up memoirs and literary hoaxes. Granger and Taddeo aren't trying to fool anybody, but they might want to give some thought about whether the magazine that published the breakthrough journalism of Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, and John Sacks is really adding luster to its reputation by venturing into the gray spaces between fiction and nonfiction to speculate that Heath Ledger may have departed this world with banana-nut muffin on his breath.