tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-43836666162309518882024-03-13T15:30:56.180-07:00ConFluence Film BlogDANIEL KREMERhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11702754388135237154noreply@blogger.comBlogger99125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4383666616230951888.post-56683412947425215852022-07-26T06:45:00.008-07:002023-03-24T10:38:44.614-07:00Filmmaker Daniel Kremer at Via Vision's Imprint Films<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9DkoLSBlElGFHDho6mlw7UhH-v_l7TpPdJFhunsigD6b5uUZkMB3P4Yasf2nJjg_3oCGcKEV69fPW9ClLHJFsOoedJ2TIWbMs6e4u4wY3xfbfeUATVqB168z8o7YxHX-J7h25kQZdL6ivbsDdaujQup5CLX2KnKqh2r8SB9_GuMcXx0zH1Yda3MIH/s300/imprint-films-logo.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="96" data-original-width="300" height="96" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9DkoLSBlElGFHDho6mlw7UhH-v_l7TpPdJFhunsigD6b5uUZkMB3P4Yasf2nJjg_3oCGcKEV69fPW9ClLHJFsOoedJ2TIWbMs6e4u4wY3xfbfeUATVqB168z8o7YxHX-J7h25kQZdL6ivbsDdaujQup5CLX2KnKqh2r8SB9_GuMcXx0zH1Yda3MIH/s1600/imprint-films-logo.png" width="300" /></a></p>ConFluence-Film and Public Shore Films has entered a partnership with Via Vision's Imprint Films in Australia. Filmmaker Daniel Kremer was contracted to produce a series of video essays and essay films, most notably for their releases of <i>North Dallas Forty</i> (1979), <i>Save the Tiger</i> (1973), <i>Pretty Baby</i> (1978), and <i>The Rose Tattoo</i> (1955). <br /><p></p><p>U.S. distributor Kino Lorber also contracted Kremer to produce an essay film for their upcoming release of Patricia Rozema's <i>I've Heard the Mermaids Singing</i> (1988).</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRsSTP8DqS0EaG87dEGxmlBcC4BfYs-2AeEictNYnRi7PEXXHd-khnSLLkQXEBfgoIWUCu3OG3yk-pwvz2EM68aDibcS8DEatywSecobmVQKcx3F71vX4acokFnW2MjAwJ-T_iSvK4jU_6k5mwth8-VqQBt6bhKXHp1pRApUU6vKf1DhRfuX5TDMCS/s742/294900536_10110678401070533_7532471023132058288_n.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="742" height="215" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRsSTP8DqS0EaG87dEGxmlBcC4BfYs-2AeEictNYnRi7PEXXHd-khnSLLkQXEBfgoIWUCu3OG3yk-pwvz2EM68aDibcS8DEatywSecobmVQKcx3F71vX4acokFnW2MjAwJ-T_iSvK4jU_6k5mwth8-VqQBt6bhKXHp1pRApUU6vKf1DhRfuX5TDMCS/s320/294900536_10110678401070533_7532471023132058288_n.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>For <i>North Dallas Forty</i>, Kremer wrote, produced, and directed <i>Looking to Get Out: A Comparative Analysis of the Ted Kotcheff Vision</i>, <span class="d2edcug0 hpfvmrgz qv66sw1b c1et5uql oi732d6d ik7dh3pa ht8s03o8 a8c37x1j fe6kdd0r mau55g9w c8b282yb keod5gw0 nxhoafnm aigsh9s9 d3f4x2em iv3no6db jq4qci2q a3bd9o3v b1v8xokw oo9gr5id hzawbc8m" dir="auto">examining the director's unifying
style, thematic concern, and his clear, coherent vision of contemporary life. He also interviewed Kotcheff himself, and recorded a special video introduction to the film. Kremer also recorded a commentary track with screenwriter Daniel Waters (<i>Heathers</i>).</span><p></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigOgfc5N8N122gi11ANHhm5IdZ_1tSiGxFz-Wl3NFDQS6PfY_7NvEiTrUfYBIkzoFMNirTyGBck8R8ZEyNEGACXSW02Efjz7oSupDgksyG6Aq1ouTbPFwMGKaYtf-qJ2iDfZWdjWK7GFZzj4RIBFi1vsgp0ZEJb6q6Aeq1cs1gSMTZkPzoggqN_8a0/s759/294478841_10110678401170333_3173041897978474704_n.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="496" data-original-width="759" height="209" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigOgfc5N8N122gi11ANHhm5IdZ_1tSiGxFz-Wl3NFDQS6PfY_7NvEiTrUfYBIkzoFMNirTyGBck8R8ZEyNEGACXSW02Efjz7oSupDgksyG6Aq1ouTbPFwMGKaYtf-qJ2iDfZWdjWK7GFZzj4RIBFi1vsgp0ZEJb6q6Aeq1cs1gSMTZkPzoggqN_8a0/s320/294478841_10110678401170333_3173041897978474704_n.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><span class="d2edcug0 hpfvmrgz qv66sw1b c1et5uql oi732d6d ik7dh3pa ht8s03o8 a8c37x1j fe6kdd0r mau55g9w c8b282yb keod5gw0 nxhoafnm aigsh9s9 d3f4x2em iv3no6db jq4qci2q a3bd9o3v b1v8xokw oo9gr5id hzawbc8m" dir="auto">For <i>Save the Tiger</i>, Kremer </span><span class="d2edcug0 hpfvmrgz qv66sw1b c1et5uql oi732d6d ik7dh3pa ht8s03o8 a8c37x1j fe6kdd0r mau55g9w c8b282yb keod5gw0 nxhoafnm aigsh9s9 d3f4x2em iv3no6db jq4qci2q a3bd9o3v b1v8xokw oo9gr5id hzawbc8m" dir="auto">recorded
a new solo commentary, produced a 25-minute essay film entitled </span><span class="d2edcug0 hpfvmrgz qv66sw1b c1et5uql oi732d6d ik7dh3pa ht8s03o8 a8c37x1j fe6kdd0r mau55g9w c8b282yb keod5gw0 nxhoafnm aigsh9s9 d3f4x2em iv3no6db jq4qci2q a3bd9o3v b1v8xokw oo9gr5id hzawbc8m" dir="auto"><span class="d2edcug0 hpfvmrgz qv66sw1b c1et5uql oi732d6d ik7dh3pa ht8s03o8 a8c37x1j fe6kdd0r mau55g9w c8b282yb keod5gw0 nxhoafnm aigsh9s9 d3f4x2em iv3no6db jq4qci2q a3bd9o3v b1v8xokw oo9gr5id hzawbc8m" dir="auto"><i>Ammo for Shooting Clouds: John G. Avildsen Before Rocky, </i></span>about John G.
Avildsen’s pre-<i>Rocky</i> pictures, including <i>Joe</i>, <i>Cry Uncle</i>, and <i>The Stoolie</i>. He also interviewed
Lloyd Kaufman, and also likely the only surviving cast member Laurie
Heineman.</span><p></p><p><span class="d2edcug0 hpfvmrgz qv66sw1b c1et5uql oi732d6d ik7dh3pa ht8s03o8 a8c37x1j fe6kdd0r mau55g9w c8b282yb keod5gw0 nxhoafnm aigsh9s9 d3f4x2em iv3no6db jq4qci2q a3bd9o3v b1v8xokw oo9gr5id hzawbc8m" dir="auto"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxlaD5CgHvCJ7BSYEiUMnQZJDFrTbDKjlFlsnoxHm0wVHqBGh4GpBEYZAqJYQ9UK0xMcwgD68rw1olJUw9bSbCqEJA2B-jvfsIeUw5fELbu4JPks1qBk-tb-v6pWkxl-RfRZqMfN4DMbPB7EQ7NvUEtl8h5Tz4QPiZV8plL1KSRLinLbN5jw-6JsP1/s753/294436385_10110678401195283_1426895815392835040_n.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="520" data-original-width="753" height="221" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxlaD5CgHvCJ7BSYEiUMnQZJDFrTbDKjlFlsnoxHm0wVHqBGh4GpBEYZAqJYQ9UK0xMcwgD68rw1olJUw9bSbCqEJA2B-jvfsIeUw5fELbu4JPks1qBk-tb-v6pWkxl-RfRZqMfN4DMbPB7EQ7NvUEtl8h5Tz4QPiZV8plL1KSRLinLbN5jw-6JsP1/s320/294436385_10110678401195283_1426895815392835040_n.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><p>For <i>Pretty Baby</i>, Kremer produced a video essay entitled <i>La Vie en Gris: The Anglophone Louis Malle in Seven Pictures</i>, examining the French director's films in the English language.</p><p>Also coming soon from Imprint: <i>Hurry Sundown</i> (1967) with a new video essay entitled <i>The Great Ecstasy of Tree-Climber Otto, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Late Preminger</i>, along with a new audio commentary track featuring some very special guests.<br /></p><p></p><p><span class="d2edcug0 hpfvmrgz qv66sw1b c1et5uql oi732d6d ik7dh3pa ht8s03o8 a8c37x1j fe6kdd0r mau55g9w c8b282yb keod5gw0 nxhoafnm aigsh9s9 d3f4x2em iv3no6db jq4qci2q a3bd9o3v b1v8xokw oo9gr5id hzawbc8m" dir="auto"> </span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSnozCw6RCGEs-46JrM6uzRWRdGQmdgwnIRmKCOa-K64XYZLIacyLAOkwGJhDj3aljBCC5ckztz7e7kV0QocgrWG2_QnyBOQI6rcP5VTTvvgtmYOu4Xzra0_YnF_a_-0VygWVoxxWQIcQRr2L75PNKj9IBfOIy4Zp7ghqEVbJ19p9sEx75gH-5ggEi/s235/ive-heard-the-mermaids-singing.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="235" data-original-width="195" height="235" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSnozCw6RCGEs-46JrM6uzRWRdGQmdgwnIRmKCOa-K64XYZLIacyLAOkwGJhDj3aljBCC5ckztz7e7kV0QocgrWG2_QnyBOQI6rcP5VTTvvgtmYOu4Xzra0_YnF_a_-0VygWVoxxWQIcQRr2L75PNKj9IBfOIy4Zp7ghqEVbJ19p9sEx75gH-5ggEi/s1600/ive-heard-the-mermaids-singing.webp" width="195" /></a></div><span class="d2edcug0 hpfvmrgz qv66sw1b c1et5uql oi732d6d ik7dh3pa ht8s03o8 a8c37x1j fe6kdd0r mau55g9w c8b282yb keod5gw0 nxhoafnm aigsh9s9 d3f4x2em iv3no6db jq4qci2q a3bd9o3v b1v8xokw oo9gr5id hzawbc8m" dir="auto"> </span><p></p><p><span class="d2edcug0 hpfvmrgz qv66sw1b c1et5uql oi732d6d ik7dh3pa ht8s03o8 a8c37x1j fe6kdd0r mau55g9w c8b282yb keod5gw0 nxhoafnm aigsh9s9 d3f4x2em iv3no6db jq4qci2q a3bd9o3v b1v8xokw oo9gr5id hzawbc8m" dir="auto">For <i>I've Heard the Mermaids Singing</i>, Kremer provided an essay film entitled <i>A Cute, Acute Awareness: Toward a Canadian Sensibility on Film</i>, on the subject of early Canadian independent filmmaking.</span></p><p><span class="d2edcug0 hpfvmrgz qv66sw1b c1et5uql oi732d6d ik7dh3pa ht8s03o8 a8c37x1j fe6kdd0r mau55g9w c8b282yb keod5gw0 nxhoafnm aigsh9s9 d3f4x2em iv3no6db jq4qci2q a3bd9o3v b1v8xokw oo9gr5id hzawbc8m" dir="auto">Kremer is also at work on an experimental feature with essay film structure entitled <i>L.A. for Pedestrians</i>. That is being produced in conjunction with <i>It's a Zabriskie, Zabriskie, Zabriskie, Zabriskie Point</i>, which is promoted and produced in partnership with Joe Dante's Trailers from Hell.</span></p><p><span class="d2edcug0 hpfvmrgz qv66sw1b c1et5uql oi732d6d ik7dh3pa ht8s03o8 a8c37x1j fe6kdd0r mau55g9w c8b282yb keod5gw0 nxhoafnm aigsh9s9 d3f4x2em iv3no6db jq4qci2q a3bd9o3v b1v8xokw oo9gr5id hzawbc8m" dir="auto">For Imprint, he is also producing a piece called <i>Clear Lines of Sight: Sidney J. Furie at Paramount</i>.<br /></span></p>DANIEL KREMERhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11702754388135237154noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4383666616230951888.post-86366553222723985702019-09-02T22:19:00.002-07:002019-09-03T20:11:55.946-07:00The Spaces Around Stories: The Films of Michael Glover Smith<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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There is a sequence at the center of Michael Glover Smith's <i>Mercury in Retrograde</i> (2017) that reminded me of something a rabbi once instructed me. I asked this rabbi to recount this pearl of Chasidic philosophy for the occasion. "We see ink on a page. The question is what makes the letters; is it the ink itself or the whiteness that surrounds the ink? Seeing only the ink is the masculine perspective: it's what first hits you, it's bold, it's pronounced, and it makes a lot of noise. In truth, however, it's the blank space around the ink that defines the words and letters. Like a sculpture, it's what you chisel away that gives it its sharp definition, otherwise it would just be a meaningless blotch of ink. It's what's not there that comprises the real story. This is the feminine perspective; it's subtle, deeper, more profound, the clearest illustration of the intangible vs. the tangible."<br />
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Granted, I tend to receive many if not most stories "yeshivically," if you will, after my stint at a rabbinical college ("you can take the boy out of yeshiva, but..."), yet this particular analogy is especially salient. In Michael Glover Smith's deft drama, three young couples repair to a house in the country for a recreational getaway weekend. One night, as the men convene for their literature club over scotch and cigars, the women venture to a bar in the nearby town to fashion their own ad hoc literary powwow. As the former group debates plot and character detail in Dashiell Hammett's <i>The Glass Key</i>, the latter group recites their favorite poems -- mostly by heart -- and plumb decidedly deeper aspects of their carefully selected subjects. The ladies' night out evolves into a therapy session for two of these finely and fully etched female characters, both of whom harbor pained secrets that consume them. Meanwhile, the men's smoky river of booze and bullshit subsumes them, rendering them almost momentarily anonymous, defined only by what seems to be, slaves to the deceptive appearance of normality and equilibrium. We learn through the women how misleading these illusions and self-delusions are.<br />
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This indicates a director concerned less with blotches of ink on the page (i.e. broad strokes of plot) than the sculpted, all-important tabula rasa that surrounds it (i.e. the emotional vicissitudes that surround his simple but effective setup). To return to the earlier established motif, it is Talmudic to invoke in text the words of great rabbis of Jewish scholarly history, and the provenance of those words cement the soundness of a given nugget of wisdom. In this case, I'll do so cinematically. In the name of the Rabbi Orson the Great, Rabbi Jaglom relates, "As for me, I act and give of myself as a man, but I register and receive with the soul of a woman. The only really good artists are feminine, you know. I can't admit even the existence of an artist whose dominant personality is masculine." (These are Orson's words as related in the book <i>My Lunches With Orson</i>.)<br />
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"In Asia," my old rabbi informs me, "there is a whole school of art based on this painting by focusing on the empty spaces rather than on the strokes themselves." Smith's most obvious and explicitly stated influence as a filmmaker is Eric Rohmer. The mark of a Rohmer acolyte is indeed present, though one is welcome to take a deeper exegetic dive that might yield less instantly logical parallels. He dedicates his <i>Cool Apocalypse</i> (2015) to Alain Resnais and Harold Ramis, a combination he agrees is curious. Smith's films are bracingly, conspicuously literate. His characters are predominately intellectual, which for me suggests Louis Malle and Jean Eustache, with maybe a chaser of Whit Stillman. Stylistically, his use of color and anamorphic widescreen in <i>Mercury in Retrograde</i> suggests the Vincente Minnelli of the fifties and sixties, especially the use of radical primaries in <i>Some Came Running</i> (1958) and <i>The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse</i> (1962).<br />
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I was also reminded of a scene in Arthur Hiller's <i>Married to It</i> (1993), a
more commercially pitched movie that fared poorly with critics, in
which three diverse couples in differing stages of their respective
marriages become friends. While the men (Beau Bridges, Ron Silver,
Robert Sean Leonard) go off bar-hopping at a dive and ogle the female
specimens in the vicinity, the women (Stockard Channing, Cybill
Shepherd, Mary Stuart Masterson) convene at Petrossian for champagne,
memory-swapping, and comparing notes vis-a-vis la boudoir. It's a simple, familiar enough concept for a
sequence in a film about couple mechanics, but Glover Smith expectedly
probes its possibilities and implications in a far deeper way. Alan Alda's <i>The Four Seasons</i> (1981) covers similar thematic and narrative ground.
(Incidentally, I'm of the mind that Hiller's picture was unfairly
treated, and it remains a familiar rainy day favorite, or guilty
pleasure if you will.) <br />
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As in Truffaut, these characters either recur or exist in the same universe. In <i>Mercury in Retrograde</i>, the character Richard (Kevin Wehby) explains that conspiracy theories are comforting "because they make it seem as if everything is connected." Within the so-called "MGS Universe," this is multifarious. On one level, the filmmaker is indeed covertly (and sometimes not so covertly) connecting his filmic worlds in a very literal sense. He also establishes human interrelationships that are burdened and sometimes even oppressed by what is left unsaid, and therein lies the next "comforting conspiracy," especially so because Glover Smith is hospitable to the audience in allowing access to the internecine clashes of heart and mind that addle and stymie his characters. We know them, and we come to know the individual nature of the weight they carry. All this, again, occupies the spaces "around the letters" -- and around the story as we know it. To watch them ping-pong off each other is quite the study.<br />
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The final vignette in his most recent <i>Rendezvous in Chicago</i> finds Julie (Nina Ganet) seducing us, the audience, and our proxy, the camera, after catching boyfriend Wyatt (Shane Simmons) en flagrante delicto with another woman. The character Julie first emerges years earlier in <i>Cool Apocalypse</i>, while Wyatt emerges in <i>Mercury in Retrograde</i>. Their re-emergence here is a fitting apotheosis. At the end of an unofficial ad hoc "trilogy" involving an implicit network of satellite characters circling each other in carefully choreographed pas de deuxs, what could be more perfect than seeing these mix-and-matches burn out in favor of a literal pas de deux with the camera? By rendering us the first-person object of affection, he completes the circle in a most deliciously cockeyed way.<br />
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On a personal note, in showing my own longtime cinematographer the first vignette in <i>Rendezvous in Chicago</i>, which involves a comically suspenseful game of "strip literary trivia," he observed, "It's so hard fashioning an interesting 20-minute episode almost entirely around a shot-reverse-shot dialogue between two characters, but this sings. It is quite remarkable." I knew he would appreciate it, for its erudition, its sly wit, and above all, seeing a challenge of staging addressed with a bravado all too rare in the annals of current American independent cinema. Beyond that, it's plain old fun, a veritable hoot, and it is clear that the actors and their director approach it much the same way as those unsuspecting audiences who witness the delivery. <br />
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Michael Glover Smith has an acute understanding of the rhythms and codes infused into even the most simple and innocent encounters -- that is, he compels us to consider the "ink" on his "page" and the void that surrounds his fastidiously inscribed letters. He wraps these rhythms and codes in a cocoon of potential explosiveness, and gauges them for varying degrees of detonation. All of this is achieved with a formidable degree of cinema literacy, the tenor of which is vital, embracing, perspicacious, and passionate. Best of all, in his vigor, Glover Smith calibrates all this to be contagious.<br />
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And he is in thrall to his beloved home city Chicago in a way that would make pioneering silent-era "city symphonist" filmmaker Walter Ruttmann (<i>Berlin: Symphony of a Great City</i>) dance in his grave.<br />
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DANIEL KREMERhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11702754388135237154noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4383666616230951888.post-40850849296863897642019-02-24T15:48:00.003-08:002019-02-24T15:48:53.978-08:00Overwhelm the Sky and the Upcoming "Small Gauge Trilogy"<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Daniel Kremer's epic <i>Overwhelm the Sky</i> screened at the <a href="http://www.sfindie.com/">San Francisco Independent Film Festival (SF IndieFest)</a> on February 10, 2019. The film and its director were also the subject of a recent interview in <a href="https://filmmakermagazine.com/107019-making-an-epic-roadshow-motion-picture-on-a-microbudget-daniel-kremer-on-overwhelm-the-sky/">Filmmaker Magazine</a>. It has two premiere engagements at European festivals in the spring and summer (they cannot be named specifically until the news is official). San Francisco's Roxie Theater will also host an exclusive roadshow-edition screening event, featuring souvenir printed programs, assigned seating, and an Overture/Intermission/Entr'acte format, to emulate the epic-length "event pictures" of the 1960's. The film's official trailer can be viewed <a href="https://vimeo.com/305461750">here</a>. Acclaimed filmmaker Michael Glover Smith (<i>Mercury in Metrograde</i>, <i>Cool Apocalypse</i>, <i>Rendezvous in Chicago</i>) said of Overwhelm the Sky: "A masterpiece. The filmmaking is so confident that it's astonishing. The paranoid atmosphere, the perfectly calibrated camera moves, the always surprising but ineffably right compositions, and the precision of the cutting, reminded me of Paul Thomas Anderson."<br />
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Kremer is also at work on the Small Gauge Trilogy, a trio of feature films with unique narratives focused on the robust life that exists inside and around small-gauge film formats (i.e. 8mm, super-8, 9.5mm, 16mm, 17.5mm). The trilogy currently consists of <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7650956/"><i>Even Just</i></a> (coming summer 2019) and <i>Surface Pressures</i> (coming early 2020), with the third entry in the development stages.<br />
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<i>Even Just </i>(the first in the trilogy), starring Joel Roth (star of the feature comedy/drama <i>Roxie</i>), follows a two-bit "ambulance chasing" accident lawyer's obsession with the many 8mm film elements he has collected since childhood; because he's an incurable dreamer, his obsession comes at a detriment to his livelihood. <i>Even Just</i>'s first teaser can be viewed <a href="https://vimeo.com/207349775">here</a>. <i>Surface Pressures</i> (the second in the trilogy) is a loose adaptation of an Alberto Moravia novella that incorporates 8mm and 16mm found footage, with music, narration, re-recorded dialogue, and meticulously constructed soundscapes.</div>
DANIEL KREMERhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11702754388135237154noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4383666616230951888.post-41604901804831854692017-11-23T15:14:00.000-08:002017-11-23T15:14:33.306-08:00Hester Street and the Cinema of the Pilpul<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i>The new management regime at Fandor, in their wisdom (read: stupidity), <a href="http://www.indiewire.com/2017/05/fandor-mainstream-keyframe-closed-backlash-exclusive-1201815695/">zapped their online film magazine and blog Keyframe</a>, and with that, their entire archive of articles. No record of any of the authors' work -- all gone. So I've republished here. </i><br />
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Last year, while producing and editing “kosher media” for a
video production company in Brooklyn, I became friendly with an elder Yiddish
theater actor who often worked with us on assorted commercials and music videos
— a stout, pint-sized man with a stubbly but no less angelic “Yiddishe punim”
(Jewish face) who could effortlessly affect a stereotypical
East-Side-by-way-of-Flatbush “alter kocker” patois that put anyone in the
vicinity in stitches. The right Jewish word to describe him is "heimishe"
(exceedingly friendly, unassuming, welcoming, unpretentious). One night, he
ventured into my editing room from the adjacent studio to visit me while I was
hard at work, as the crew set up for his next shot.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After he recounted starring in a Yiddish-language production
of <i>Waiting for Godot</i>, we proceeded to talk on the subject of “mama loshen”
(mother tongue), and about the specific richness of Yiddish as it related to
Hebrew.</div>
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A quick history lesson: The early Zionist movement in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth century hotly debated what the official
language would be, should the Jews eventually achieve statehood.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Religious Jews contested the Hebrew
option because of its nature and background as “loshon kodesh” (holy tongue), a
language only to be spoken in religious context rather than in everyday
speech.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, to progressive,
secular Jews, the Yiddish language, a flavorful combination of Hebrew, German,
Russian, and Slavic languages, signified the chains of a difficult past in “old
world” Jewish Europe, with its perceived antiquated values, its stifling
strictures, and its persecution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In short, to secular progressives, it reaked of what they deemed
backwards provincialism.</div>
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Ultimately, newspaper editor and lexicographer Eliezer
Ben-Yehuda revived “loshon kodesh” by becoming the author of the first “modern
Hebrew” dictionary.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Today, the
Hebrew/Yiddish schism is no longer the issue it once was; Hebrew as a
conversational language is accepted as a fact of life in Israel, even among the
observant (though Yiddish still thrives in this significant segment of the
demographic).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Although most of
today’s American Chassidim are Yiddish monoglots, the language of Yiddish is
rapidly dying off outside these Chassidic enclaves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And it continues to die every day the Jewish elderly pass
into eternity.</div>
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So, now back to the Yiddish theater actor, who then saw fit
to extol the virtues of the Yiddish language, although I think he knew he was
preaching to the choir.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My own heart
pines and prances at the utterance of Yiddish, a language to which I listen
fluently but speak haltingly (though my everyday speech is sprinkled with
Yiddish-isms, some overt and foreign, and others commonly adopted into the
English lexicon).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He then said
something that I deemed rather profound: “Yiddish is a thing of beauty because
it’s the language of the pilpul…it’s the language of compromise.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>According to him, modern Hebrew
originally bred and continues to breed a fierce brand of Jewish nationalism and
exceptionalism that worries him (I personally do not subscribe in any way to
this view, but I can, in my own way, understand his basic logic – and this
could indeed easily be the subject of another article, but I will of course
stick to the topic at hand).</div>
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Let us rewind for a moment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What is this strange word “pilpul”?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No, it’s not like kugel, and is not in
any way edible, although it does originate from the Hebrew word for
“pepper.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, it is one of
the very few Talmudic vocabulary words to have been appropriated into the
standard English dictionary, though the word still remains obscure relative to
other Jewish-rooted crossover classics like “schlep,” “schtick” and
“kvetch”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Defined by
Merrian-Webster, “pilpul” is “hairsplitting critical analysis.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You could also call it “heavy-duty
exegesis.”</div>
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As the old adage goes, “Two Jews: three opinions.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the course of rabbinic dialectic and
Jewish learning, one is to accept the inherent complexity as it exists in everything
under the sun.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And in order for
our all-too-human hearts and minds to reconcile that which seems
irreconcilable, a careful manner of compromise must be applied and weighed in
accordance with all the conceivable factors. Thus, Yiddish as a conflagration
of many languages, is a language of compromise, just as pilpul is based on
putting compromise into action in an effort to make it meaningful.</div>
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So, all this extraneous info just to introduce a film?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I know, this stuff’s getting dense, but
bear with me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I guarantee that it
all has a point, and I think a valuable one important to cinema as a whole.</div>
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Since November 2014, I’ve been working with Oxford
University Press on the first biography on director Joan Micklin Silver, known
for <i>Crossing Delancey</i> (1988), <i>Chilly Scenes of Winter</i> (1979), <i>Between the Lines</i>
(1977), and her breakthrough feature <i>Hester Street</i> (1975), starring Carol Kane
in one of the earliest independent film performances to be nominated for the
Academy Award.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Most of Silver’s
films find comic discomfort in juxtaposing the “old world” with the modern
world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Her skill as a director
lies in orchestrating pathos and often unexpected humor that occur when these
worlds collide.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That many of her
films are Jewish-themed is certainly apropos to this, her most burgeoning
theme, but even the ones that do not broker in outwardly Jewish subjects are
steeped in this narrative conflict – of characters with a death-grip on their
memories of a halcyon past, or a way of life, who find themselves at odds with
moving forward in the status quo.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Their death-grip makes them pragmatically and emotionally vulnerable.</div>
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The prospect of this particular book project excited me at
my deepest core.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As an observant
Jew myself, one who once attended a Chabad-Lubavitch yeshiva with the intention
of entering the rabbinate, I felt especially equipped and ready to tackle the
Jewish subject matter in her films in a way that no other author would or
could.</div>
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Usually, in examining films about observant Jews, I find
myself yelling at the screen as a result of a filmmaker’s outright negligence, dumbfounding
errors, and exotification.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sidney
Lumet’s <i>A Stranger Among Us</i> (1992) is a major bête noire for me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Counter to pictures like Lumet’s
disposable, embarrassing depiction of New York Jewish subculture, <i>Hester Street</i>
and <i>Crossing Delancey</i> don’t soft-peddle their Yiddishkeit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On the contrary, they get so much
right, and render the subject matter with palpable respect and great love.</div>
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Beyond my great admiration for Joan’s corpus, the book is an
opportunity for me to braid the threads of my unusual double life. And as it so
happens, my dream film project is an epic adaptation of Abraham Cahan’s novel
<i>The Rise of David Levinsky</i>, which you might say is a Jewish Horatio Alger tale,
by way of Dostoevsky.</div>
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That much of the film <i>Hester Street</i> is performed in the
Yiddish language is auspicious, but it engenders another kind of perfection,
especially when one considers what the Yiddish theater actor expressed to me,
about what the beauty of Yiddish really means to him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The film is, in many ways, about compromise amid complexity,
staged in a language with this heritage of compromise and complexity, and one
that extends beyond just cultural or religious baggage.</div>
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Now consider this: Silver made her debut feature in direct
defiance of the standard system of motion picture production -- a system that
saw her simply as a wannabe filmmaker handicapped by shear virtue of her
gender.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As I state in the opening
line of the book, “A female first-time director wanted to make a black-and-white
film about immigrant Jews coming to America in the early twentieth
century.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This single statement,
though seemingly harmless, was at that time fraught with at least five
potential hazards.” </div>
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In choosing to adapt Yiddish Daily Forward founder Abraham
Cahan’s novella <i>Yekl</i>, she automatically committed a form of commercial
suicide.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The very first Hollywood
studios, which had been famously founded and owned by Jews eager to chuck this
aspect of their identity, were rooted in a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy
regarding questions of Jewishness in their product.</div>
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These studio heads, who “went from Poland to polo in less
than one generation,” lived in a world where it paid to be covert – and where
it was kosher, for instance, to bribe the lone non-Jewish studio head, Darryl
Zanuck of Fox, to permanently shelve his drama <i>Gentleman’s Agreement</i> (1947), an
exposé of anti-Semitism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
bribing party, Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner, Carl Laemmle and Harry Cohn, set
the stage for a persisting Jewish denial in Hollywood, which in turn cultivated
the belief that outwardly Jewish content ran counter to commercialism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The studio founders’ successors
inherited this sentiment, so one can then understand how the Cahan property was
not accepted as a pedigree for success.</div>
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<i>Hester Street</i> and its source <i>Yekl</i>, both set circa 1900, tell
the story of an Americanized Jew who has “shpilkes” (anxiousness) to
assimilate. He has shed the appellation “Yankel” for the more socially
acceptable American name “Jake”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>He also manages to dress like a dandy on his meager earnings as a sewing
machine operator in the garment district.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>When he imports his wife Gitl and his five-year-old son Yossele, no
sooner are they off the boat before he goes on a campaign to Americanize them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Gitl, however, refuses to hear of it,
as she stays steadfast to the old ways.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>She keeps her sheitl (wig), sprinkles salt in her little boy’s pockets
for luck, and tries to proposition a visiting peddler about obtaining a liebe
trop’n (a love potion) so that her husband will love her anew. "I won’t
look like a goy, even for Yankel,” she exclaims to Mrs. Kavarsky, their
busy-body landlady.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All the
while, however, she slowly finds herself going sweet on Jake’s Talmud scholar
roommate Mr. Bernstein.</div>
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Near the end of <i>Hester Street</i>, Carol Kane’s Gitl has stayed
true to herself, but has learned, and quite fast, these new American ways.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The moment when she admonishes the
character of Mrs. Kavarsky for referring to her son “Yossele” rather than the
now-accepted “Joey” defines the cinema of the pilpul. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is a gentle awareness that this
moment of Americanization is something for which a delicate balance must be
struck. She must now tend to the tall order of conforming the present reality
with her earlier expectation – one now shrivelled into a simple but no less
impassioned dream – of being able to keep the identity-defining traditions of
her rooted past alive.</div>
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<i>Hester Street</i> is cinema that is both of and about compromise
– the pilpul, as it can exist on celluloid at its most lively.</div>
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When one also considers the lengths to which Silver had to
go, to finance, shoot and then distribute <i>Hester Street</i>, it only enriches the
point.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>With only $500,000 raised,
Silver had to evoke the early twentieth century on the precious, dangerously
limited funds allotted to undertake such an endeavor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When no distributor evinced an interest in picking up the
film, and in the face of the suggestion that it could “play the synagogue
circuit,” she and her husband Raphael “Ray” Silver self-distributed (with the
help and advice of John Cassavetes and Jeff Lipsky).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was a pure go-for-broke endeavor – what indendent cinema
is really about, or at least should be about.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At least it is what I, and my filmmaking friends, think it
is about.</div>
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Independent cinema of this variety is so often about finding
the art and beauty in compromise, while at the same time being
uncompromising.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is an
appropriation of the pilpul.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Am I
saying making a film is Talmudic?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Yes, in a way, I am.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As
Orson Welles once said, “The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All of this makes <i>Hester Street</i> an
absolute must-see picture in my book, for Jews, Gentiles, and especially
filmmakers (which I deem as much a religious group as any of them).</div>
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At this point in my own personal spiritual journey, I’m
comfortable with attending my local shul (synogogue) regularly here in San
Francisco’s Noe Valley, and then, as a filmmaker, attempting to make
emotionally honest pictures that wouldn’t really qualify as kosher in any
traditional sense of the term. But the act of storytelling is ingrained in
Jewish culture, and stories told leave an indelible mark that Judaism
acknowledges. I search for my own beautiful compromise.</div>
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Fandor now premieres <i>Hester Street</i>, one of my favorite
films, brought to you by the great Joan Micklin Silver, a director sorely in
need of further consideration and discussion.</div>
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DANIEL KREMERhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11702754388135237154noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4383666616230951888.post-23683903370989569212017-11-19T00:06:00.002-08:002017-11-23T13:06:00.151-08:00Next Book Project Announced: Nothing Too Personal: The Life and Films of Henry Jaglom<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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PRESS RELEASE [November 19, 2017]: While Daniel Kremer edits both his seventh feature-length film, <a href="https://vimeo.com/233085856"><i>Overwhelm the Sky</i></a> (due in summer 2018), and his second book <i>Joan Micklin Silver: From Hester Street to Hollywood</i> (due in early 2019 from Oxford University Press), he has started researching <i>Nothing Too Personal: The Life and Films of Henry Jaglom</i>, the first book on the American independent cinema icon behind such art-house hits as <i>Eating</i> (1990), <i>Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?</i> (1983), <i>Tracks</i> (1976), <i>Always But Not Forever</i> (1985), <i>Someone to Love</i> (1987), and many others. Kremer and Jaglom (pictured above) just completed their first round of taping sessions in Los Angeles, and accumulated over 20 hours of recorded material. The two have known each other close to fourteen years, and both are very excited about the project.<br />
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The book will feature never-before-reported stories involving legends like Judy Garland, Ingrid Bergman, Marilyn Monroe, Lee Strasberg, Groucho Marx, Jerry Lewis, Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly, James Mason, Abbie Hoffman, Huey Newton, and countless others.<br />
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Kremer's film <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2644140/"><i>Ezer Kenegdo</i></a> (co-directed with Deniz Demirer)
went into release earlier in November after its <a href="http://conradfestival.pl/wydarzenie/ezer-kenegdo">world premiere</a> at the prestigious Joseph Conrad Festival in Krakow, Poland. The River's Edge International Film Festival hosted its U.S. premiere. It is now touring international
film festivals.<br />
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Shooting will soon re-commence on Kremer's biographical
documentary <i>Sidney J. Furie: Fire Up the Carousel!</i> (due in 2019) after a year-long hiatus; Furie is now gearing up for the production of his next (and final) film, <i>Hannah Cohen</i>,
a Holocaust story set throughout Israel. Kremer will be there to
capture the making of Furie's swan song (perhaps the most
important film of a 60+-year career), which will hopefully enhance his in-depth cinematic portrait of one
of his favorite directors.<br />
<br />
With film
historian Howard S. Berger, Kremer recently provided a full-length
commentary track for the Kino Lorber Studio Classics DVD/Blu-Ray release
of Furie's <i>The Taking of Beverly Hills</i> (1991). More details <a href="http://www.blu-ray.com/news/?id=22448">here</a>. It is a rather curious but fun-fun-fun track that covers a misbegotten entry from Furie's later-career tenure as an action director.<br />
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Kremer will also be starting production on his eighth feature film <i>Even Just</i>
in December. The film (possibly a musical, wink
wink) will star Joseph Badra (making his film debut),
Penny Werner, and Carol Carbone. <br />
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<i>Overwhelm the Sky</i> now has a <a href="https://vimeo.com/233085856">teaser</a>. <i>Raise Your Kids on Seltzer</i> (2015), which Kremer and ConFluence-Film released in 2015, now has a <a href="https://vimeo.com/233524405">post-release trailer</a>.</div>
DANIEL KREMERhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11702754388135237154noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4383666616230951888.post-33257176801778826932017-07-23T13:34:00.000-07:002017-07-23T13:34:04.861-07:00Decorative Letterboxing, Squeezeplay, and Pan-and-Scan<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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A note on "decorative letterboxing" and early border-boxing in old
studio film transfers, from a salty, seasoned analog format hound:<br />
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There were many ways of coping with anamorphic (panoramic widescreen)
screen-size in the VHS and pre-VHS era. Paramount was quite gone of
"decorative letterboxing" (see the upper left-hand screen capture from
an old broadcast of Sid Furie's <i>Sheila Levine is Dead and Living in New
York</i>; in this example, they clearly didn't measure top and bottom frame
evenly). I have an old VHS of <i>Chinatown</i> back in Pittsburgh
that uses a similar Paramount decorative letterboxing, except green with "Oriental" design.<br />
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It was rare for a video presentation to be fully letterboxed in those
days -- Woody Allen's <i>Manhattan</i> was the first, I believe (the letterbox bars were a shade of light gray vs. the usual black). It was, however, often
only deployed during opening and closing credits sequences that used the
entire screen width.<br />
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Universal seemed to prefer colored, gently bordered letterboxing, as
seen in the upper center screen capture from Ron Winston's soapy
golf-club epic <i>Banning</i> (1967), starring Robert Wagner, Anjanette Comer,
Jill St. John, and a pre-fame Gene Hackman. Some foreign-language
titles, like Claude Fournier's <i>Deux femmes en or</i> (1970), bottom left, used something
similar.<br />
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MGM didn't much care for letterboxing then. As seen in the old transfer
of Jerry Schatzberg's <i>Sweet Revenge</i> (1976), bottom center, they seem to
have no compunction about cropping to cut off names in the credits. In
this particular bizarre example, they pan across the width of the text.
MGM's pan-and-scanning was often the weirdest; their scanning moves feel
nervous and very odd. I remember two old MGM VHS transfers of <i>Soylent
Green</i>, <i>Westworld,</i> and <i>Pat
Garrett and Billy the Kid</i> (all 1973) where this holds true.<br />
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Both Fox (then Magnetic Video, CBS/Fox, Key Video, or Playhouse) and Disney
preferred the "squeeze method," as seen in the upper right screen
capture of <i>The Swiss Family Robinson</i> (1960). My old tapes of <i>The Robe</i>
(1953) and <i>The Big Fisherman</i> (1959), both big CinemaScope Biblical
epics, feature some fantastic "squeezeplay," but <i>Swiss Family Robinson</i>
is the only one I had handy. My <i>Robe</i> is a two-tape set (for a 135-minute
picture -- anything over two hours was put on two cassettes in those
early days).<br /></div>
I remember some Columbia/Tristar transfers in
the 90's in which the scanning moves were in serious need of "Video
Dramamine"; they would blur the motion with impunity, giving the feeling
of motion sickness. <i>Ghostbusters</i> (1984) and <i>Multiplicity</i> (1996) leap to
mind in this case.<br />
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Then, there is border-boxing for non-anamorphic titles, as seen in the
screen capture from Ivan Nagy's <i>Deadly Hero</i> (1975), distributed on
Embassy Home Video. Who knows why they opted for this? Did they just
think it looked cool?</div>
DANIEL KREMERhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11702754388135237154noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4383666616230951888.post-58317096564869899502017-04-23T12:46:00.000-07:002017-04-23T12:46:06.683-07:00Charles B. Pierce: Portrait of an Arkansas Maverick<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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On April 17, Filmmaker Magazine ran my lengthy <a href="http://filmmakermagazine.com/102185-the-art-of-the-possible-charles-b-pierces-arkansas-cinema/">piece</a> on Arkansas regional filmmaker Charles B. Pierce (1938-2010), director of <i>The Legend of Boggy Creek</i> (1972), <i>Winterhawk</i> (1975), <i>The Town That Dreaded Sundown</i> (1976), <i>Grayeagle</i> (1977), and many others. Placing Pierce's films within a larger context of American regional filmmaking old and new, I consider the potential impact of such endeavors and how Pierce realized the "art of the possible" with his films.</div>
DANIEL KREMERhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11702754388135237154noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4383666616230951888.post-63047397220417817432017-03-27T11:29:00.004-07:002017-03-27T11:42:17.242-07:00Raise Your Kids on Seltzer (2015) and Sophisticated Acquintance (2007) Now Available on Fandor!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Daniel Kremer's films <a href="https://www.fandor.com/films/raise_your_kids_on_seltzer"><i>Raise Your Kids on Seltzer</i> (2015)</a> and <a href="https://www.fandor.com/films/sophisticated_acquaintance"><i>Sophisticated Acquaintance</i> (2007)</a> premiered on <a href="http://www.fandor.com/">Fandor</a> on Friday, March 24, 2017. They are now available to stream and view. The films premiered on the site the same day as Richard Linklater's <i>Slacker</i> (1991).<br />
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The films will also be available to stream on Amazon.com in one week's time. Kremer's other Fandor titles (<i>The Idiotmaker's Gravity Tour</i>, <i>A Simple Game of
Catch</i>, <i>A Trip to Swadades</i>) are currently available to view on Amazon
Streaming. <br />
<br />
Says independent cinema icon Rob Nilsson, "<i>Sophisticated Acquaintance</i> is my favorite Daniel Kremer film. Considering his young but already distinguished career, that is really saying something. It's smart, well-performed and innovative, and lets you know that, as a filmmaker, he is for real. He makes films right now and out of thin air. While others try to raise money for a film and complain, Kremer raises a few dollars, makes two films, writes a book and gives thanks. He's unstoppable...and on his way up!"<br />
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This is the first time <i>Sophisticated Acquaintance</i> (2007) has been publicly shown in its ten-year history. The lo-fi feature, shot on consumer-grade mini-DV, is a hybrid of essay-film, pseudo-documentary, avant-garde, and
melodrama, inspired by Ken Russell's early BBC biopics, as well as
Peter Watkins' masterpiece <i>Edvard Munch</i> (1973). Kremer began shooting it as his first
feature-length film in 2006. In 2007, he shelved an early cut of it, only
to finally finish it ten years later in May 2016.<br />
<br />
It is the Internet debut for <i>Raise Your Kids on Seltzer</i>. <br />
<br /></div>
DANIEL KREMERhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11702754388135237154noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4383666616230951888.post-14022181019876717452017-01-27T16:02:00.001-08:002017-05-03T19:51:04.029-07:00A Sudden Burst of Activity and Publicity<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i><b><span style="font-size: xx-small;">A still from Daniel Kremer's untitled seventh feature film, currently shooting.</span></b></i> </div>
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Daniel Kremer was recently profiled in a piece for <a href="http://cinesourcemagazine.com/index.php?/site/comments/welcome_the_struggle_daniel_kremer_interview/">CineSource Magazine</a>. He discusses his various endeavors in filmmaking and film writing. Subjects of conversation include: the approaching spring festival release of <a href="https://vimeo.com/58656176"><i>Ezer Kenegdo</i></a> (2017), the ten years it took to finally complete <a href="https://vimeo.com/25313890"><i>Sophisticated Acquaintance</i></a> (2007), and the renewed efforts to promote <a href="https://vimeo.com/121167089"><i>Raise Your Kids on Seltzer</i></a> (2015).<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.bricolagefilms.com/">Bricolage Films</a>, the seven-person San Francisco Bay Area filmmaking collective that Kremer helped spearhead, now has a <a href="http://www.bricolagefilms.com/">website</a>. Doniphan Blair is writing a piece for <a href="http://cinesourcemagazine.com/">CineSource</a> covering the group's efforts; it is to run in February. <br />
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Kremer was also interviewed about his book <i>Sidney J. Furie: Life and Films</i> for Paul Rowlands's cinema blog <i>Money Into Light</i>. Read <a href="http://www.money-into-light.com/2017/01/daniel-kremer-on-sidney-j-furie-part-1.html">part one</a> and <a href="http://www.money-into-light.com/2017/01/daniel-kremer-on-sidney-j-furie-part-2.html">part two</a>.<br />
<br />
This past month, critic/essayist
Julie Kirgo and Oscar nominated documentarian Nick Redman conscripted Kremer -- as Joan Micklin Silver's biographer -- to provide an essay for the upcoming Twilight Time Blu Ray release of <a href="http://www.twilighttimemovies.com/chilly-scenes-of-winter-blu-ray/"><i>Chilly Scenes of Winter</i></a> (1979). The piece is comprised largely
extracts from the book-in-progress <i>Joan Micklin Silver: From Hester Street to Hollywood</i>. You can read <a href="http://www.twilighttimemovies.com/news/chilly-scenes-of-winter-and-the-comedy-of-sentimental-pessimism-part-1-of-3-no-dinner-your-joke/">part one</a>, <a href="http://www.twilighttimemovies.com/news/chilly-scenes-of-winter-and-the-comedy-of-sentimental-pessimism-part-2-of-3-john-heards-heroic-nature-and-the-movies-true-identity-/">part two</a>, and <a href="http://www.twilighttimemovies.com/news/chilly-scenes-of-winter-and-the-comedy-of-sentimental-pessimism-part-3-of-3-a-certain-tone/">part three</a> online. Kremer plans to finish the first draft of his manuscript in the summer of 2017.<br />
<br />
Kremer was also interviewed on <a href="http://microbudgetfilmlab.com/">Microbudget Film Lab</a>. You can watch that video interview <a href="http://microbudgetfilmlab.com/Blog?post=video-filmmaker-interview-daniel-kremer-talks-about-how-he-s-made-six-microbudget-features">here</a>. <br />
<br />
He also continues to work on the <i>Susan Sontag on Cinema</i> collection with Tom Luddy and David Thomson.<br />
<br />
On April 17, Filmmaker Magazine ran my lengthy <a href="http://filmmakermagazine.com/102185-the-art-of-the-possible-charles-b-pierces-arkansas-cinema/">piece</a> on Arkansas regional filmmaker Charles B. Pierce (1938-2010), director of <i>The Legend of Boggy Creek</i> (1972), <i>Winterhawk</i> (1975), <i>The Town That Dreaded Sundown</i> (1976), <i>Grayeagle</i> (1977), and many others. Placing Pierce's films within a larger context of American regional filmmaking old and new, I consider the potential impact of such endeavors and how Pierce realized the "art of the possible" with his films.<br />
<span style="text-align: center;"><br /></span>
<span style="text-align: center;">On February 7, Kremer guest-hosts a </span><a href="http://projection-booth.blogspot.com/" style="text-align: left;">Projection Booth</a><span style="text-align: left;"> podcast on Jerry Schatzberg's masterpiece </span><a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/438515396357631/" style="text-align: left;"><i>Puzzle of a Downfall Child</i></a><span style="text-align: left;"> (1970). The show features new interviews with Schatzberg and the film's male lead, Barry Primus. The following week, on February 14, he guest-hosts an episode on </span><a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/1124890997603465/" style="text-align: left;"><i>Chilly Scenes of Winter</i></a><span style="text-align: left;"> (1979). Interviewees include Joan Micklin Silver, John Heard, Griffin Dunne, and producer Amy Robinson. These shows will mark Kremer's third and fourth guest appearances on the show, following episodes on Sidney J. Furie's <a href="http://projection-booth.blogspot.com/2014/02/episode-153-hit.html"><i>Hit!</i></a><span style="text-align: left;"> (1973) and <a href="http://projection-booth.blogspot.com/2015/10/episode-241-entity.html"><i>The Entity</i></a> (1982).</span></span><br />
<br />
Kremer and cinematographer Aaron Hollander are hard at work
shooting a new microbudget feature film t<span style="font-family: inherit;">hroughout San Francisco, lensed in black-and-white and based on an obscure American
novel from 1799. The film stars
Alexander Hero, Ravi Valleti, Raul Delarosa, Randall Zielinski,
Catherine Lerza, Tiziana Perinotti, Penny Werner, Lionel Desai, Lindsay
Fishkin, and Kris Calagirone. Kremer also appears in a supporting role in indie film icon Rob Nilsson's latest feature drama <i>The Fourth Movement</i>, currently shooting.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The </span><a href="http://torontofilmreview.blogspot.ca/" style="font-family: inherit;">Toronto Film Review</a><span style="font-family: inherit;"> approached Kremer to provide a </span><a href="http://torontofilmreview.blogspot.ca/2017/04/100-best-canadian-films-daniel-kremer.html" style="font-family: inherit;">list of his Top 100 Canadian Films</a>. The Toronto International Film Festival director Piers Handling, Cinematheque Quebecois director Marcel Jean, leading Canadian film scholar Yves Lever, and other key figures provided their own lists for this review.<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Kremer also published pieces in <a href="http://filmmakermagazine.com/100199-the-adventures-of-a-furie-ous-evangelist-looking-back-after-a-toronto-international-film-festival-premiere/">Filmmaker Magazine</a> an</span>d <a href="https://www.fandor.com/keyframe/canada-lost-and-found">Keyframe</a> on the Toronto International Film Festival premiere of Sidney J. Furie's <i>A Cool Sound from Hell</i> (1959) and his efforts to "evangelize" Sidney J. Furie's tragically underrated and often forgotten body of work.</div>
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<span style="text-align: left;">Kremer's </span><i style="text-align: left;">Raise Your Kids on Seltzer</i><span style="text-align: left;"> (2015) has scored excellent reviews at </span><a href="http://www.unsungfilms.com/23184/raise-your-kids-on-seltzer/" style="text-align: left;">Unsung Films</a><span style="text-align: left;">, </span><a href="http://www.indyred.com/raise-your-kids-on-seltzer-review.html" style="text-align: left;">IndyRed</a><span style="text-align: left;">, </span><a href="http://www.roguecinema.com/raise-your-kids-on-seltzer-2015-by-paul-busetti.html" style="text-align: left;">Rogue Cinema</a><span style="text-align: left;">, and other review sites. Some key excerpts:</span></div>
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<span style="text-align: left;">"From the beginning, the viewer finds
himself piecing everything together slowly but with great eagerness. The
director, Daniel Kremer,
feeds in small doses of coherence until the picture is wholly clear.
The stunning naturalness of the dialogue, the actors, the quiet
poignancy of each scene, allows us to approach the </span><span class="il" style="text-align: left;">film</span><span style="text-align: left;"> as though it
were a dense novel. What is wholly clear from the beginning, however, is
that the story unraveling is one that deals with an array of profound
issues – Daniel Kremer opens his </span><span class="il" style="text-align: left;">film</span><span style="text-align: left;"> on a Borges quote, 'To fall in
love is to start a
religion that has a fallible god' and an interview of an attorney being
questioned on the cult of his defendant. Scenes shift with perfect
fluidity. There are moments of extraordinary storytelling in this </span><span class="il" style="text-align: left;">film</span><span style="text-align: left;">,
and the talent of the actors to </span><i style="text-align: left;">make</i><span style="text-align: left;"> us believe them is abundant."</span></div>
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-Theo Alexander, <i>Unsung Films</i> <br />
<br />
"[It] gives any larger budgeted
counterparts a run for their money. Let the odd name make you stop and
look, but let the quality keep you in your seat. Technically, there
really isn't much to complain about here. <i>Raise Your Kids On Seltzer</i>
generally offers up some nice visual candy. As far as indie productions
go, I reiterate, some more budget heavy productions I've seen simply
don't stack up to what's presented here. This is all pieced together
with a very slick edit that keeps the narrative flowing nicely, while
showcasing the best aspects. What are they? For me it was a no
brainer...the cast of course! Never did I feel like I was watching a
scripted <span class="il">film</span>. Would I recommend it? Yes. I would even go as far as to say I would buy myself a DVD."<br />
<i> </i>-<i>IndyRed</i>
<br />
"The heart of the <span class="il">film</span> exists in the naturalistic dialogue and domestic details painted by Penny Werner and Jeff Kao.
They make amazing choices with their characters and the collaborative
writing process yields very specific moments. The scenes between them
crackle with authentic intimacy. They play the married couple as complex
individuals who are genuinely curious about each other and their
dreams. While <i>Raise Your Kids on Seltzer</i> is an ambitious and
sometimes unwieldy effort, it is grounded by strong editing, solid
2.35:1 cinematography, and most importantly by the profoundly moving
performances."<br />
-Paul Busetti, <i>Rogue Cinema </i><br />
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"There is self-assurance to the direction. The relationship
between Terry and Tessa is strained and feels it, sometimes almost too
well; one feels that awkward moment at a party when a couple snipe just a
little too personally at one another. While that may make the viewer
feel a little bit put off, that’s as it should be; if you’re going to
make a movie about a relationship that is strained, the viewer should
feel that strain as well.
Penny Werner is mainly at the front and center as the emotional focus of
the film. Werner is outgoing
and an open book in many ways. Her Tessa is the kind of Jewish woman
that makes the world a better place; she’s funny, pretty and pragmatic."<br />
<i> -</i>Carlos deVillalvilla, <i>Cinema365</i><br />
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<span style="text-align: left;">Daniel Kremer's films </span><a href="https://www.fandor.com/films/raise_your_kids_on_seltzer" style="text-align: left;"><i>Raise Your Kids on Seltzer</i> (2015)</a><span style="text-align: left;"> and </span><a href="https://www.fandor.com/films/sophisticated_acquaintance" style="text-align: left;"><i>Sophisticated Acquaintance</i> (2007)</a><span style="text-align: left;"> premiered on </span><a href="http://www.fandor.com/" style="text-align: left;">Fandor</a><span style="text-align: left;"> on Friday, March 24, 2017. They are now available to stream and view. The films premiered on the site the same day as Richard Linklater's </span><i style="text-align: left;">Slacker</i><span style="text-align: left;"> (1991).</span><br />
<span style="text-align: left;"><br /></span>
<span style="text-align: left;">The films will also soon be available to stream on Amazon.com. Kremer's other Fandor titles (</span><i style="text-align: left;">The Idiotmaker's Gravity Tour</i><span style="text-align: left;">, </span><i style="text-align: left;">A Simple Game of
Catch</i><span style="text-align: left;">, </span><i style="text-align: left;">A Trip to Swadades</i><span style="text-align: left;">) are currently available to view on Amazon
Streaming. </span></div>
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Says independent cinema icon Rob Nilsson, "<i>Sophisticated Acquaintance</i> is my favorite Daniel Kremer film. Considering his young but already distinguished career, that is really saying something. It's smart, well-performed and innovative, and lets you know that, as a filmmaker, he is for real. He makes films right now and out of thin air. While others try to raise money for a film and complain, Kremer raises a few dollars, makes two films, writes a book and gives thanks. He's unstoppable...and on his way up!"</div>
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This is the first time <i>Sophisticated Acquaintance</i> (2007) has been publicly shown in its ten-year history. The lo-fi feature, shot on consumer-grade mini-DV, is a hybrid of essay-film, pseudo-documentary, avant-garde, and
melodrama, inspired by Ken Russell's early BBC biopics, as well as
Peter Watkins' masterpiece <i>Edvard Munch</i> (1973). Kremer began shooting it as his first
feature-length film in 2006. In 2007, he shelved an early cut of it, only
to finally finish it ten years later in May 2016.</div>
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It is the Internet debut for <i>Raise Your Kids on Seltzer</i>. </div>
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DANIEL KREMERhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11702754388135237154noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4383666616230951888.post-82258028184617926002016-11-23T16:36:00.000-08:002017-11-29T22:39:50.290-08:00A Remembrance of Paul Sylbert (1928-2016)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i>“How do you expect to make films if you don’t really look at the world around you? That’s the core of design and art direction, folks.”</i></div>
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-Paul Sylbert, to his students</div>
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No movie brings me to tears like Vittorio De Sica’s <i>Umberto D</i>, the story of a destitute old man and his best friend, the dog he can no longer afford to keep. But perhaps the strangest movie to turn me into Niagara Falls is Francois Truffaut’s <i>Fahrenheit 451</i>. Indeed, I’ve never met another person for which this holds true. (Am I the only one who cries at the end of <i>Fahrenheit 451</i>?)<br />
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In the third act, Oskar Werner has come to live among the Book People, a group of literary flame-keepers exiled from a dystopic society where books are burned and the written word is outlawed. The duty of each of these exiles is to memorize the whole of an individual text. In the poignant final sequence, a young boy “inherits” his own book, anxiously mastering its last few verses while the elder who instructs him takes his dying breaths.<br />
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As this elder shuffles off the mortal coil, the book in question barely, but indeed triumphantly, survives for at least one more generation. Composer Bernard Herrmann's string section mourns the human loss, but instills hope that endangered flames flicker on if we care to tend them.<br />
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For me, the ending of Truffaut’s <i>Fahrenheit 451</i> bespeaks and compounds the meaning in lessons that aged mentors in the film industry have imparted to me. They survive when their wisdom and their stories are told in the days beyond their passing. Time, memory, and record are fragile, and I’ve made a point of collecting everything I can. Like any branch of history, where we come from dictates where we’re going, and this is not untrue with cinema, on or off the screen.<br />
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The man I credit as my first mentor in the film industry, Paul Sylbert, had a hell of a resumé, and an Oscar to show for it: <i>One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest</i> (1975), <i>Kramer vs. Kramer</i> (1979), <i>A Face in the Crowd</i> (1957), <i>Mikey and Nicky </i>(1976), <i>Blow Out </i>(1981), <i>The Prince of Tides</i> (1991), <i>The Pope of Greenwich Village </i>(1984), <i>The Wrong Man</i> (1956), <i>Ishtar </i>(1987), and many others.<br />
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He was also a regular on the sets of films like <i>The Graduate</i> (1967), <i>Rosemary's Baby </i>(1968), <i>Chinatown</i> (1974), and <i>Reds </i>(1981), all of which his brother Dick designed.<br />
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<i>Above: Paul Sylbert receives his Oscar for Heaven Can Wait in 1979</i> <br />
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I remember hearing, as a sophomore film student at Temple University, that an Academy Award-winning production designer had recently taken a teaching post. Word spread fast that this man had worked under both Alfred Hitchcock and Elia Kazan. Paul Sylbert quickly became a reputed "big cheese" even among the more oblivious underclassmen. I've long been an obsessive for the cinematic era in which Sylbert made his fortune, so I was excited to eventually meet and talk to him. My rare old VHS copy of <i>The Steagle</i> (1971), a film Sylbert had written and directed, was waiting for his autograph. (Yes, I'm that kind of nerd.)<br />
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On the day I met him, back in 2004, I gravitated to him somewhat automatically, purely on a hunch. Leisurely pacing around the Annenberg Hall atrium, the heart of Temple’s media-arts hub, he was a tall, slender figure with a baseball cap and the type of khaki jacket that seemed just perfect for, say, a retired film director. I know not what possessed me to approach and spark an interaction, as it’s really unlike me. I just felt confident, I guess. "Pardon me, but are you Paul Sylbert?" I asked. Jauntily turning his wiry frame to face me, he replied, "Yep, 'tis I!" I proceeded to tell him about my video copy of <i>The Steagle</i>, and how, as the chief programmer of my university film series, Film Fridays, I was requesting he present the film and answer questions about it afterwards. Clearly stupefied, he laughed and informed me that the making of <i>The Steagle</i> had been traumatic for him…so traumatic in fact that he wrote a whole book about its undoing, at the hands of studio head/impresario Joseph E. Levine. (The book is entitled <i>Final Cut: The Making and Breaking of a Film</i>.)<br />
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I recounted the many things I admired about <i>The Steagle</i>. Seemingly touched by the sincerity with which I named its merits, he told me he would consider my proposition. “I haven't seen the thing since they butchered it. It might be interesting to see it again after all these years. I've got a masochistic streak in me.” We then sat down and discussed the rest of his career, mostly as a production designer, but also as the other half of a Hollywood power-duo formed with his twin brother, Dick Sylbert. They worked together as a team early in their career. <br />
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I quickly made a habit of sneaking into Paul's classes, even though I didn't register for them. Paul would stand before a crowd of fresh-faced kids, their eyes full of hope for a future in the movie industry, and recount his own often tumultuous (sometimes even melodramatic) behind-the-scenes stories and struggles. Paul idolized Ingmar Bergman, and would often screen Vilgot Sjöman’s 1963 documentary <i>Ingmar Bergman Makes a Movie</i> for his classes, as an example of what was possible in cinema. Incidentally, his favorite Bergman film was <i>Sawdust and Tinsel</i> (1953). As if to make a juxtaposition, his syllabus would surround this 2½-hour documentary with showings of the more misbegotten films on his CV -- works spoiled by indecisive visions, egos on parade, power trips, and executive decisions reached on casting couches.<br />
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His witty classroom rejoinders to the poor directorial choices that were on display en flagrante delicto were often quite hilarious. His unvarnished candor was the source of much of his charm. One of my favorite quips involved the ostentatious opening long take in Lili Fini Zanuck’s <i>Rush</i> (1991): “Why the hell put the gun in the safe and keep the wad of cash in the desk drawer? You open the whole damn movie on such a stupid mistake?”<br />
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As for working with Barbra Streisand on <i>The Prince of Tides</i>, he had few kind words (the strain between them on set actually made headlines): “When she wasn’t nominated for Best Director, Oscar host Billy Crystal got up there and sang, ‘Seven nominations on the shelf. Did this film direct itself?’ I couldn’t resist and, loud enough for the next row to hear, I answered, ‘Yes, it did!’”<br />
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On <i>One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest</i>: “That set was bedlam! Pure bedlam! Three people were directing that movie: Milos [Forman], Haskell [Wexler], and Jack [Nicholson]…mostly Jack.”<br />
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On <i>Kramer vs. Kramer</i>: “It’s pure kitsch. The ending is bullshit. But! But! ...the movie works.” [He was armed and ready with Xeroxes of Milan Kundera's writings on the subject of kitsch when he screened this film.]<br />
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On<i> The Wrong Man</i>: “Hitch spoke to us about Italian neorealists in regard to <i>The Wrong Man</i>. He also scolded me that there’s only one way to shoot a piano: from the side.”<br />
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On<i> Rosewood</i>: “They made it into a spaghetti western!”<br />
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On <i>Mikey and Nicky</i>: “When the movie shut down in the middle of shooting, I remember walking in to a dark room at the studio and seeing John on the floor shooting up at Peter Falk. He was clearing getting odd shots to show Elaine when she came back, to possibly put in the movie. I said, ‘John, what the hell are you doing?’ He just looked up at me and said, ‘You know me, I’m crazy!’”<br />
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On the Blacklist: "People were being busted for having gone to just one Communist Party meeting. In those days, I was redder than a lobster, no joke." [He once told me the complex story of how he continued working in that era, but I forget the precise details.] <br />
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After his classes, he would lead a posse of students to the Draught Horse, a campus watering hole. He loved his young’ns, as I once quipped to a friend who remembers well those Draught Horse powwows. Sometimes, Paul and I would convene one-on-one. I would invite him into the editing room to get advice on my first feature (<i>Sophisticated Acquaintance</i>, a picture I didn’t finally finish until this past year). Never one to mince words, he would always tell me straight-out what I really needed to work on as a filmmaker. Needless to say, this was invaluable as a learning experience.<br />
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After a few months of imploring, and planning in spite of it all, Paul finally agreed to screen <i>The Steagle</i> for the film series. As we projected the film on VHS, I sat a couple rows behind him occasionally glancing to catch anything that seemed like a reaction. When the film ended, he rose and ambled to the front of the auditorium to proclaim, “It’s better than I remember it being, that’s for sure.” He proceeded to recap some of the stories accounted in his book about the production of <i>The Steagle</i>, then imparted some wisdom: “In life and in the arts, it’s so easy to get locked into your own ideas about the way things are, or the way things were. The thing is to, yes, have your own ideas, but also wait for them to be transcended.” I've lived by that as a credo, motto and mantra in my career as a filmmaker.<br />
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The friendship between Paul and myself only solidified after that night, so much so that he asked me to be his teaching assistant (a work-study position). This job basically entailed operating anything technical (mostly running the DVDs he wished to screen), circulating the occasional handout, and officiating the handing-in and handing-back of assignments. The bonus was that it allowed me more time to schmooze with Paul, before and after class. By the time I reached senior year, and my senior thesis film loomed on the horizon, I wanted to be bold and shoot a whole feature-length production on 16mm film. I figured, “This might be the last chance to shoot a whole film on real film, before the video revolution completely takes over.”<br />
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I had the gumption to ask Paul if he would design the film. He had effectively ended his lengthy movie career in 2001 with <i>To End All Wars</i>, starring Kiefer Sutherland, and felt no need to fish out his drafting kit again. At first, he demured, but then instructed me to find a student designer he would advise. While our film program was light on design students, I did find an aspiring art director who jumped at the opportunity.<br />
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Paul’s method rested in concept. For example, his contribution to Brian De Palma’s <i>Blow Out</i> was in the use of primary colors, mainly reds and blues, to suggest an election year. In <i>Rush</i>, he designed sets to emulate the swirling colors one sees in oil spetters and gas station puddles. In <i>Conspiracy Theory</i>, it was all about shadows (“Inside Mel Gibson’s lair, there couldn’t be any shadows. It had to be a paranoiac’s safe place.”) In <i>Heaven Can Wait</i>, he fought the studio over a heaven set lit completely from below (“They were thinking of the flashlight around the campfire thing. I had to actually show them that it would work by building the thing.”)<br />
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For my movie, shot in black-and-white, it was all about gray. “Use white as little as possible. All the sets should be gradations of gray and black.” When we showed him the white walls at one of the film’s key locations, an otherwise perfect set for what I wanted, he admonished, “We gotta do something about those walls. No white is allowed in this movie!” To achieve Paul's vision, coffee grounds were splattered all over the white-tiled walls.<br />
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When I told Paul that the title of the film, <i>A Trip to Swadades</i>, was based on the untranslatable Portuguese word “saudades” (the closest interpretation is “intense nostalgia or longing”), he got excited and took up full production designer duties. To my surprise, Paul was fluent in the Portuguese language (he could also speak Greek) and his favorite word in any language just happened to be "saudades." A happy coincidence, to say the least. He assumed the credit of production designer with the student credited beside him as art director. He took the job very seriously, more than anyone of his stature would have treated a student film, and he was proud of the final product. “As a final career credit for me, you done good, Dan,” he told me.<br />
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I followed up <i>A Trip to Swadades</i> with a 28-minute comedic short entitled <i>A Collection of Chemicals</i>. The night of the premiere, Paul slipped, fell, and gouged his head while entering the building. Blood was actually dripping down his face. Many, including myself, implored him to go to the hospital; one of the attendees offered to accompany him. He refused, declaring sternly, “I’m here to see a movie and I’m damn well going to see it.” The next day, after a visit to the hospital, he emailed to tell me everything problematic with the film. “After <i>A Trip to Swadades</i>, why did you decide to go silly?” He was right; <i>A Collection of Chemicals</i> is very much a “what I did on my summer vacation” short, made out of boredom and creative animus. I think I just wanted a change of pace after the relatively somber <i>Swadades</i>. But Paul was still so absolutely determined to see it the night it premiered, blood or no blood, and respected me and took me seriously enough to put it to me straight.<br />
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I continued as his teaching assistant, and made a habit of going out to dinner with him after class, with longtime friends Andrei Litvinov and Alena Kruchkova. Andrei, a cultivated foodie, always picked the best restaurants for the occasion.<br />
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My favorite Paul Sylbert story involves my addiction to ketchup. For years, Paul would watch as I drowned whatever food I ordered in ketchup, and he would invariably comment on it with a laugh. One night, Andrei took us to a Turkish restaurant, located in a dark alley off Philly's South Street. You had to knock on a nondescript door for a man wearing a turban to open up, greet you and seat you. When we entered, the place looked to us like pure old-time Ottoman Empire Istanbul, with no expense spared in decor. As we admired the ravishing decorations that gave the place its mighty dose of atmosphere, Paul turned to the man in the turban, pointed to me and exclaimed, “Get this guy some ketchup!” His longtime friend, genius comedienne Elaine May, couldn't have timed a delivery better. For the rest of the evening, he regaled us with Stories Stories Stories (yes, that's three capital S's) from his fifty-year career -- tales that made our movie-mad brains chirp with endorphins.<br />
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When I moved to New York, Paul and I stayed in touch via our regular, epic phone conversations, which ranged in subject from his Oscar votes of any given year, to politics, to classical music or opera, to old acquaintances of his I would randomly encounter (I was able to reconnect him with an old friend, producer Michael Hausman), and beyond. Every conversation began with, "<span class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" tabindex="0"><span class="hasCaption"><span class="text_exposed_show">Hey Dan! How you
doing, kid?" </span></span></span>He would still challenge me in ways that the best teachers and mentors do; <span class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" tabindex="0"><span class="hasCaption"><span class="text_exposed_show">the conversations were very heavy, intellectual, and some of the most
fascinating I've had in my lifetime</span></span></span>. He read many scripts and treatments for films I was prepping. Some got made, others didn't, but he always remembered each project and inquired as to the progress of each. When they were good, Paul cheered me. When they needed work, we would discuss in depth (and often at great length) what needed to change.<br />
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And he would often call me for a sympathetic ear. It discouraged him
when something or someone was forgotten in any instance. I remember when he lamented
that a given film scholar or instructor he met had never heard of Irving
Thalberg. "Time passes everyone by, sadly, but for someone to call
himself a film historian and to never have even heard of Thalberg, it boggles the mind." Needless to say, I've dealt with similar frustrations and he
knew I would empathize.<br />
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When I
visited Philadelphia on the odd weekend, we would get together and
schmooze over breakfast or lunch. At each juncture, I was grateful for such a friendship. My career in film is one that he got behind,
encouraged, and pushed very early on. He was the first person in the
film industry who convinced me that I could do it, that I could make a
career making films my way.<br />
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When I moved to San Francisco in March 2015, he spoke fondly of working there on Paul Schrader's <i>Hardcore</i> (1979). I sat on Hippie Hill in Golden Gate Park and listened as he recalled his adventures with Schrader and his then-apprentice (now high-powered designer) Jeannine Oppewall in the Haight Ashbury. With a whole continent now between us, it became much harder to arrange face-to-face meetings when I did manage to travel back east. This past February, when I presented him with a hardback copy of my first book, at what was our last face-to-face meeting (photo below), he acted very much like a proud father. "I always knew you'd make good, Dan," he told me. I noticed that he looked a bit more frail than I remembered, but he sure hadn't lost any of his marbles. He was, as always, sharp as a tack.<br />
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I never really got to say goodbye to Paul before he passed away at his home near Philadelphia this past weekend. Although he was 88 years old, his death nonetheless came as a great shock to me. I might very well have believed that he would live on and on, despite how I couldn't help but notice how his particularly nagging cough had gotten worse and worse over the last few months. I certainly wasn't ready to forgo this month's phone conversation, or any of the ones to follow. There was so much I wanted to discuss with him (not least of which was the recent election of Trump).<br />
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But, for this lack of a proper farewell, I am reminded that the elder at the end of Truffaut's <i>Fahrenheit 451</i> likewise never uttered the word "goodbye" to the young charge seated beside him at the moment of passing. The elder's exit goes deeper than just saying a word we expect: the elder's<span dir="ltr" id=":2mi"> goodbye was in what he bequeathed to that young charge -- the strength to carry with him the wisdom and knowledge that had been transmitted.</span><br />
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<span dir="ltr" id=":2mi">For Paul, for touching so many young lives in his years as a teacher, heaven not only <i>can</i> wait, it <i>does</i> wait. Rest in peace, my dear friend and teacher. I'll carry your flame with overwhelming pride and great warmth.</span> <br />
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DANIEL KREMERhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11702754388135237154noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4383666616230951888.post-57271771938879679672016-10-20T16:52:00.001-07:002016-10-20T16:52:28.568-07:00Found: An Old Newspaper Ad for Sidney J. Furie at Gala Films<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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DANIEL KREMERhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11702754388135237154noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4383666616230951888.post-85399495485947515372016-09-27T15:54:00.001-07:002017-07-13T17:33:37.475-07:00Going Back to Going Back: Rescuing Another Lost Sidney J. Furie Film<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Another lost-and-found discovery has graced my ongoing research into the life and work of filmmaker Sidney J. Furie. (I hope to one day publish an updated version of my book on Mr. Furie, so the digging continues.) And when I say "another" discovery, I'm also referring to my three-year effort to find and rescue Sidney's sophomore feature <i>A Cool Sound from Hell</i> (1959), which is detailed <a href="http://filmmakermagazine.com/86423-cool-sounds-from-the-vault-a-cinematic-detective-story/">here</a>.<br />
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And check out my new <a href="https://www.fandor.com/keyframe/canada-lost-and-found">Keyframe article</a> "Canada Lost and Found" which covers the Toronto Film Festival premiere of <i>A Cool Sound from Hell</i>, published September 28, 2016.<br />
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Recently, editor Saul Pincus succeeded in digging up the 149-minute director's cut of Sidney's 2001 Canadian feature <i>Going Back</i>, a film about a traumatized group of Vietnam veterans who return to Saigon in the nineties with a television documentary crew. Sidney and his writer Greg Mellott based <i>Going Back</i> on a "Nightline" special they had caught when broadcast around that time.<br />
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In the United States, the film emerged with forty minutes missing, under the dubiously more "commercial" direct-to-video action title <i>Under Heavy Fire</i>. To add insult to injury, the film had also been severely cropped and panned-and-scanned from 2.35:1 to 1.33:1, with chronic interlace "combing" issues prevalent throughout. And there was another ingredient in this migraine-inducing cocktail: video and audio were also a full four frames off-synch through the whole film. This was a hatchet-job, and a heartbreaking experience for its creators, who invested an inordinate amount of time and effort in this particular project. It took years to engineer a working script (nearly 400 pages), then acquire the resources to actually shoot in Vietnam (it allegedly was the first production to do so following the American intervention into Vietnam).<br />
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When the film was mutilated, everyone involved, including its cinematographer and editor, rallied unsuccessfully to rescue it from its fate. Says Saul Pincus, "I took the initiative and met with
the distributor Alliance/Atlantis and told them we wanted to do a special edition, and
release the long version in 2.35:1. I also insisted that we approve the
encode, and to that end, enlisted a house to do the work. It was gratis because
we didn’t have a budget. I collected the electronic press kit, now long lost, and did
new video interviews with Sid, [producer] Gary [Howsam], and a small number of principal
crew. In the end, the encoding house dropped out and we never did get the work completed"<br />
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A feature-length group commentary track was even privately arranged. The film, of course, never secured the better release its makers sought for it, and the commentary track festered for years on one of the editor's old RAID drives. Saul recently found that too, thankfully.<br />
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There were about nine 35mm
anamorphic Dolby Digital prints made of the long version in May 2001.
Those prints went off to the Cannes Film Festival market, among other destinations,
and were never to be seen again. After the short 112-minute version was cut, the
post supervisor elected to have the only anamorphic internegative cut
to match the short version edit. In summary, the negative for the director's cut was destroyed.<br />
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A handful of release prints were struck
from this for the Toronto International Film Festival screening in 2001, plus a brief Canadian
theatrical release in fall 2001. This is why all versions of <i>Going Back</i>/<i>Under Heavy Fire</i>
are compositionally a nightmare – the anamorphic interneg, and not the
flat, Super 35 interpositive, was the source. <br />
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As the director's biographer, and an admitted fan, I was understandably less than impressed with the film in the butchered American DVD version, finding much to call subpar, especially in terms of visual quality. The narrative also felt rushed, and occasionally too much like a sizzle reel, with the character development backgrounded in favor of stringing its action scenes together more efficiently. In everyday parlance, it was rather “meh,” but with a few moments of brilliance.<br />
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I upgraded to a now out-of-print Canadian DVD, a widescreen, de-interlaced iteration of the same shortened version. Although this greatly improved my experience of seeing the film (it is amazing what much-improved video quality can do) and I wound up rating the film higher on this second viewing, something still felt missing. I expressed this to Sidney at the time. He avoided imparting the film's sob story for fear it would become a too-familiar preachy sermon about a director cheated. (I later got that scoop out of Saul the editor.)<br />
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In the newly resurrected 149-minute version (seen only privately and not available commercially, at least yet), it has become, for me, one of Sidney's masterpieces. When I saw it and raved about it, Sidney exclaimed one day over the phone to me, "Weren't we robbed?!" I had to say yes, unequivocally. Allegedly, they had enough for a five to six hour miniseries. One day...maybe one day, people will see it the way it was intended.<br />
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Eminent film scholar Gerald Pratley noted having seen this original 149-minute cut of <i>Going Back</i>. In his book, <i>A Century of Canadian Cinema</i>, Pratley calls it “a striking, powerful and penetrating war film set in Vietnam. This must have been a very difficult film to make, but Furie pulls it off ably. It is bound to stir up controversy in its depiction of a debatable war.” He then observed that its opening during the inception of Bush Jr.'s Iraq War would stir needed discussion about a fresh brewing political crisis. In my view, <i>Going Back</i>'s rugged sensitivity in rendering a story about the plight of war veterans calls to mind one of the greatest American films to do so: William Wyler's <i>The Best Years of Our Lives</i> (1946).<br />
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Stay tuned for further developments! </div>
DANIEL KREMERhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11702754388135237154noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4383666616230951888.post-16644308135814148922016-06-19T15:02:00.005-07:002016-06-19T15:05:15.200-07:00Now In Production: I Forgive Swissvale<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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As production continues on <i>Precious Wheels Above</i>, Daniel Kremer is also in the midst of shooting and editing an essay documentary entitled <i>I Forgive Swissvale</i>. Started approximately 3-4 years ago, <i>I Forgive Swissvale</i> is a medidation on how memories of lost places, in all their fragility, harden the shell of one's identity in ways we can never escape. In a working-class Pittsburgh neighborhood called Swissvale, Kremer grew up on Woodstock Avenue, the same street where his mother's family had lived since the 1900's. The filmmaker returns from his current city San Francisco to revisit his old neighborhood, specifically the now abandoned, boarded-up house where he spent his childhood. Between unfortunately rare visits with his last remaining grandparent (now stricken with Alzheimer's), fond reminiscences of Woodstock Avenue as it once was, and a memorably hilarious dinner table debate about the sanctity of Heinz ketchup, Kremer meditates on how his childhood neighborhood crystallized his intense cinephilia and shaped his life's work. The film will also include the participation of Tony Buba, the Pittsburgh filmmaker renowned for his films about Braddock, Pennsylvania, a Pittsburgh neighborhood that borders Swissvale.</div>
DANIEL KREMERhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11702754388135237154noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4383666616230951888.post-1880201728668956782016-01-01T00:20:00.002-08:002020-10-14T21:20:47.132-07:00Voluptuous Immobility: Death and Legacy in Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard and Martin Brest’s Meet Joe Black<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i>To Martin Brest, who "left us" much too early, despite laying a very large egg. </i></div>
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<i>"All Sicilian expression, even the most violent, is really a wish for death. Our sensuality, a wish for oblivion. Our knifings and shootings, a hankering after extinction. Our laziness, our spiced and drugged sherbets, a desire for voluptuous immobility, that is…for death again.”</i><br />
-Prince Don Fabrizio Salina (Burt Lancaster) in <i>Il Gattopardo</i> (<i>The Leopard</i>) (1963)<br />
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I finally got around to a belated viewing of Martin Brest's now infamous <i>Gigli</i> (2003) a full decade after its doomed theatrical release. I approached the film with the naïve hope and an arrogant confidence that the hullabaloo of negative press and critical rancor that surrounded it amounted simply to much-ado-about-nothing. "The hoi polloi is so often wrong and their cruel dismissals so often unwarranted," I pep-talked myself. Basically, I was hoping for a <i>Heaven’s Gate</i> kind of situation. (Yes, despite its still dubious reputation, I am a staunch defender of <i>Heaven’s Gate</i>, and have cheered its recent reappraisals with a big gloating bellow of "I toldja so!") But with director Martin Brest behind the camera on <i>Gigli</i>, how bad could it be? This is what I asked myself before showtime. After all, this is the same Martin Brest who gave us the mischievous but compassionate <i>Going in Style</i> (1979), the skillfully orchestrated <i>Beverly Hills Cop</i> (1984), the uncommonly witty <i>Midnight Run</i> (1988), and the flawed but likable <i>Scent of a Woman</i> (1992). I’m not mentioning his <i>Meet Joe Black</i> (1998) now, but I’ll get to that shortly.<br />
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I watched maybe about an hour before I just couldn’t bear it anymore. It is rare for me to not finish a picture once I start it. In all candor, it stands right, left and bloody center as a towering monument to bad taste; I frankly found myself dumbstruck by its singular, near indescribable awfulness. I also felt stupid looking back at my earlier hope and confidence. So alas, it was indeed good reason that dictated critics being sent into paroxysms of rage and indignation, and their poison pens being sent blazing into the art of the insult with gleeful abandon. And their invective was nothing if not colorful. Unfortunately, it also sent Brest into "Salinger-esque" retreat and early retirement. An excellent December 2014 <a href="http://www.playboy.com/articles/what-happened-to-director-martin-brest">Playboy article</a> by Matt Patches attempts unsuccessfully (but no less intriguingly) to trace Brest after his disappearing act. The apoplectic response to his movie was perhaps too much to handle, though it was also reported that Brest had the movie taken away from him and re-edited. As much as I’d like giving him the benefit of the doubt, I find it hard to imagine that anyone or anything could improve upon the woeful material on display in the release version. (Sorry, Marty, wherever you are.)<br />
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Brest, like Michael Cimino in his day, became a poster boy for the perils of Hollywood largesse. The worst side-effect of the <i>Gigli</i> fallout, however, was that it gave newly minted Brest skeptics and detractors license to further deride his previous effort, <i>Meet Joe Black</i>, the film I would surely call his most elegant, aesthetically pleasing, and outright beautiful. It might not be fashionable to lavish it with such praise, but I'm laying my cards on the table. The ravishing <i>Meet Joe Black</i> is one of my “crusade pictures,” that is, the misunderstood or outright dismissed films that I defend to the bitter end. It is also one that I have recommended to people, especially those who know it only by reputation. Without shame, I have repeatedly proclaimed it a <i>film maudit </i>(literally "cursed film," but beyond that, one worthy of re-evaluation).<br />
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Just as much a reinterpretation and extrapolation of Luchino Visconti’s <i>The Leopard</i> (1963) as it is a remake and re-envisioning of Mitchell Leisen’s <i>Death Takes a Holiday</i> (1934), its purported source, the three-hour <i>Meet Joe Black</i> was of course accused of prolixity across the
board -- mostly because it more than doubled the length of Leisen’s
"original," adding a number of subplots, thematic threads, unexpected
narrative detours, and skillfully protracted dramatic moments and
movements.<br />
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The math works out just fine however, as <i>Meet Joe Black</i> is just one-half <i>Death Takes a Holiday</i>, no more and no less. Needless to say, romantic director Mitchell Leisen's story, a genteel high-concept farce, is much more streamlined.<br />
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With its $90 million pricetag and the expected starpower that comes with all those zeroes -- boasting Brad Pitt at his most "beefcake" in the lead role -- it has become habit and de rigueur to overlook <i>Meet Joe Black</i> as a piece of filmmaking and to simply accept it as just another Big Bad Studio Film, and a flop at that. At this juncture, it is apropos to note vis a vis that the film did go into profit, thanks to the predictably discerning European audience. Stateside, it made back about half its negative cost, whereas it made double that across the pond. To me, one of the reasons for this is clear.<br />
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The film's relative intimacy suggests a perceived imbalance in the expected reciprocity between a movie's length and its flair for spectacle. On the latter front, Brest finds spectacle in Academy Award winner Dante Ferretti's exquisite design, and the “saffron glow” of cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki's rendering of that design. The European audience has never been discomfited by epics of pure intimacy, as Americans have. On the contrary, they have lauded them. I can name many such titles whose lengths belie their intimate scale: Jean Eustache's <i>The Mother and the Whore</i> (1973), Werner Schroeter’s <i>Palermo oder Wolfsburg</i> (1980), Philippe Garrel's <i>Regular Lovers</i> (2005), Cristi Puiu’s <i>Aurora</i> (2011), most anything by Jacques Rivette. Key to understand here is that these films, along with <i>Meet Joe Black</i>, protract the drama rather than distend it. Distension implies strain, whereas protraction implies premeditation -- and in this case, careful premeditation. American studios and American audiences traditionally reject such alternative, daresay subversive, treatment of cinematic duration.<br />
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The European epic to which I most compare <i>Meet Joe Black</i> does indeed offer that traditional historical epic sweep typical of three-hour length. Luchino Visconti’s <i>Il Gattopardo</i> (<i>The Leopard</i>) is based on Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa’s posthumously published saga of Italy’s Resorgimento (literally “Resurgence”), during which Giuseppe Garibaldi and his “redshirts” battled the royalist army for the unification of a fractured Italy in 1860. The novel and the film tell the story of Sicilian aristocrat Don Fabrizio Corbera, the prince of Salina, who simultaneously resists and, in good conscience, welcomes the political groundswell that sweeps the land. He also realizes with great sadness, however, that he will have no place within the new society it births. When the prince’s firebrand nephew Tancredi, previously a redshirt, intends to marry Angelica, the daughter of a nouveau riche beneficiary of the revolution, the film culminates in a nearly hour-long dress ball sequence during which she is introduced to the local aristocracy.<br />
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The dress ball is symbolic of the end of an era, the last gasp of decadence, the viking funeral given a newly irrelevant man’s deflated dignity. The prince is a “leopard,” the member of a mournful dying breed who can neither take comfort or refuge in denial, nor bargain his way out of the new, bitter reality. This dress ball is, of course, perfectly analogous to the 45-minute birthday ball that caps off <i>Meet Joe Black</i>.<br />
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Both Visconti’s and Brest’s films are pristine portraits of opulence and privilege, and conspicuously so. Both are about the nature of legacy, and both are about fear -- specifically, fear of the calamitous loss of that legacy, opulence and privilege. Both Burt Lancaster’s Sicilian prince and Anthony Hopkins’s communications magnate William Parrish are gray ghosts, the tragically irrelevant men of their age. (Al Pacino’s character in <i>Scent of a Woman</i> is also a “gray ghost,” as are the trio in <i>Going in Style</i>, but this subject is best reserved for another essay.) While <i>The Leopard</i> climaxes in the lengthy dress ball sequence, <i>Meet Joe Black</i> culminates in the 65th birthday gala thrown in the Hopkins character’s honor. Hopkins, the recently defrocked and humiliated chairman of the board of his own communications empire, knows that his death awaits at party’s end. It has been agreed upon by both parties: himself and the handsome grim reaper who has breezed into his charmed life.<br />
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At an earlier point in the movie, Hopkins’s wordly, dyspeptic William Parrish angrily laments, “I don’t want anybody buying up my life’s work, turning it into something it wasn’t meant to be. A man wants to leave something behind, and he wants it left behind the way he made it, with a sense of honor, of dedication, of truth. Okay?” One can certainly see how <i>The Leopard</i>’s Prince of Salina could relate to Parrish’s dilemma. And beyond that, the Joe Black/Angel of Death character is the prince’s death dream (and death wish) manifest. About midway through <i>The Leopard</i>, the prince launches into a soliloquy about death: “Sleep, my dear Chevalley, eternal sleep…that is what Sicilians want. And they will always resent anyone who tries to awaken them, even to bring them the most wonderful of gifts. And, between ourselves, I doubt very strongly whether this new Kingdom has very many gifts for us in its luggage.”<br />
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The prince speaks of the desire for “voluptuous immobility,” in other words, the luxury of a dirt nap. As an aristocrat who knows only the best of everything, the Prince understands and can perceive the ultimate “luxury” left unspoken and unconsidered. “All Sicilian expression, even the most violent, is really a wish for death. Our sensuality, a wish for oblivion. Our knifings and shootings, a hankering after extinction. Our laziness, our spiced and drugged sherbets, a desire for voluptuous immobility, that is…for death again.”<br />
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Both the prince and William Parrish find their final respite in dances with respective young women: for the former, his nephew’s fiancee (Claudia Cardinale); for the latter, his youngest daughter (Claire Forlani). The women’s respective romantic partners could be argued as analogous. If William Parrish daughter Susan is smitten with Brad Pitt’s Joe Black, is the Alain Delon character in <i>The Leopard</i>, Tancredi Falconeri the Garibaldini, an angel of death in some figurative sense? Perhaps, yes. The prince’s acceptance of Garibaldi’s revolution takes on a certain whimsical dimension due to Tancredi. He covets Tancredi's youthful idealism, just as much as he is amused and dismayed by it. Tancredi’s now oft-quoted line “If things are to stay as they are, they must change” is met with a quiet, acquiescing grimace on the prince’s part; there is an inconvenient truth in his nephew’s nifty slogan. The whimsicality and callowness of the Joe Black character conforms with how the prince sees Tancredi, who is the usher of the inevitable, just as Joe Black is for Parrish.<br />
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<i>"Nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen."</i> (<i>"Now and in the hour of our death. Amen."</i>)<br />
-the opening of Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa's novel <i>The Leopard</i><br />
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<i>"Then all found peace in a heap of livid dust."</i><br />
-the closing of the novel <i>The Leopard</i><br />
<i> </i>(translation: Archibald Colquhoun)<i> </i><br />
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Many Visconti scholars have argued the emotional and psychological proximity that the filmmaker shared with his protagonist in <i>The Leopard</i>. He knew what the prince's calamitous loss meant in a very direct sense, despite his own loss being self-imposed. Born an aristocrat himself, and a descendant of Milan's ruling dynasty, Visconti renounced these roots to align himself with the Italian Communist Party. Indeed, his breakthrough film <i>La Terra Trema</i> (1948) is a neorealist documentary-drama anthem to the residents of a poor fishing village in rural Sicily. Though remained a cultivated, urbane individual, renowned and even notorious for directing lavishly designed operas (and discovering legendary opera diva Maria Callas), he remained politically committed, and this is appreciable in his films up to and including his classic <i>Rocco and His Brothers</i> (1960), likewise an epic of supreme intimacy. With <i>The Leopard</i>, he makes a leap towards the more formally epic, and all an epic entails, with visual extravagance in surplus. At the time of release and its subsequent winning of the Palme d'Or at Cannes, this leap was perceived as a curious but glorious left turn. <i>The Damned</i> (<i>Il Caduta Degli Dei</i>) (1969), the saga of a German industrial dynasty during the rise of Nazism, and <i>Ludwig</i> (1973), a biopic of Bavaria's mad king and builder of extravagant dream castles, both saw him continue down the path of directing films that indicted decadence while simultaneously putting it on unfettered display.<br />
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On a personal note, Visconti is my favorite Italian director. I count many of his films, including <i>La Terra Trema</i>, <i>Senso</i> (1954), <i>Rocco and His Brothers</i>, and <i>The Leopard</i> as favorites. I find that I connect with him most on an emotional level, as his films not only consider the aforementioned loss but transfer its associated feelings onto the viewer. There is no more powerful film, in this regard, than <i>The Leopard</i>. His ability to do so is matched and indeed augmented and poeticized by his abilities as a technician and craftsman.<br />
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Beyond <i>The Leopard</i>'s various narrative parallels to <i>Meet Joe Black</i>, there exist clear stylistic and visual ones as well. Shallow focus, diaphanous lighting, and sure, steady camera movement, all especially present in the climactic set pieces, speak to a refined sense of decoupage in both films. I would even venture to guess that Brest consciously takes cues from Visconti in his own film. Admittedly, Brest appropriates Visconti tropes for an unmistakably Hollywood-engineered and financed film produced for mass consumption, but his aesthetic approach is scrupulously tasteful in ways that few other pieces of Hollywood product are.<br />
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How many Martin Brests do we really have left in today’s mainstream Hollywood machine? Most of the auteurs working today succeed in spite of the system, but seldom within it. Within only lies the safety of anonymity. This is why I cannot countenance any digs made against <i>Meet Joe Black</i>, clearly one of the most personal and profoundly cinema-literate big budget efforts of its time or any time. I love it as much as I love the arguably more sophisticated <i>The Leopard</i>. <i>Gigli</i> or no <i>Gigli</i>, Martin Brest unabashedly gets my support, for his individuality and his precision. The problem is that when he had to go, he didn’t go in style, and as evidenced in his work, that’s not like him.<br />
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DANIEL KREMERhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11702754388135237154noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4383666616230951888.post-58228811936211635782015-12-03T11:57:00.000-08:002015-12-04T11:07:51.730-08:00Biosphere, Part II: Interviews About Writing Film Biographies, with Veteran Biographer Nat Segaloff<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">After publishing the previous discussion with biographer Justin Bozung, in Biosphere Part I, I decided to make Biosphere a ConFluence-Film Blog "mini-series" of discussions with film biographers. My guests and I will talk </span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">about what it means to delve into other peoples' lives as writers.</span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> It is
an interesting phenomenon for someone in the position of having to do
it, and there's really nothing on record about it.</span></span> If you're "biographing" for the first time,
where do you go for advice and resources? I could have used such a
series of interviews when I was getting going on my first book. Instead, I had to
track down authors and bug them for personal meetings. Now, all their trade secrets will be available on the ConFluence-Film Blog. <br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Before I signed the publishing contract with University Press of Kentucky for my book <i>Sidney J. Furie: Life and Films</i>, I scoured the other books in their Screen Classics Series. Name by name, I was honored to have Sidney deservedly included among the likes of Raoul Walsh, Victor Fleming, Hal Ashby, Preston Sturges, Josef Von Sternberg, and Arthur Penn, among a slew of others. My editor, legendary biographer Patrick McGilligan (who recently published a substantial volume entitled <i>Young Orson</i>), enthusiastically recommended that I check out the book on Penn, written by seasoned author Nat Segaloff. As Pat saw it, the circumstances under which that book was written mirrored my own situation: an author working with a still-living director on the first authorized biography of that director's life. When I received it, I became aware that the same author, Mr. Segaloff, had penned a book on William Friedkin that I'd grown fond of. (I was disappointed that Friedkin, in his own memoirs, exclud<span style="font-family: inherit;">ed</span> even a mention of the films of his that tanked, but I was pleased to discover that Segaloff covered pictures like 1983's <i>Deal of the Century</i> in detail.)</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In this chat, as a counter to Justin's discussion on the process of working on the biography of a deceased artist, Nat and I discuss working with living artists, the ramifications of that, and what all of that entails. Nat, personally, will only pursue writing biographies if he has had, or can have, one-on-one time with his subject.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">So here is the biography of the biographer: Nat Segaloff is a writer-producer-journalist. He covered the film
industry for The Boston Herald, but has also variously been a studio
publicist (Fox, UA, Columbia), college teacher (Boston University,
Boston College), and broadcaster (Group W, CBS, Storer). He is the
author of twelve books including <i>Hurricane Billy: The Stormy Life and
Films of William Friedkin</i>, <i>Arthur Penn: American Director</i>, and <i>Final
Cuts: The Last Films of 50 Great Directors</i> in addition to career
monographs on Stirling Silliphant, Walon Green, Paul Mazursky and John
Milius. His writing has appeared in such varied periodicals as Film
Comment, Written By, International Documentary, Animation Magazine, The
Christian Science Monitor, Time Out (US), MacWorld, and American Movie
Classics Magazine. He was also senior reviewer for AudiobookCafe.com and
contributing writer to Moving Pictures magazine. As a TV writer-producer, Segaloff helped perfect the format and create
episodes for A&E's flagship "Biography" series. His distinctive
productions include episodes on John Belushi, Stan Lee, Larry King,
Shari Lewis & Lamb Chop, and Darryl F. Zanuck. His The Everything
Etiquette Book and The Everything Trivia Book and The Everything Tall
Tales, Legends & Outrageous Lies Book are in multiple printings for
Adams Media Corp. His latest book is <i>Mr. Huston/Mr. North: Life, Death, and the Making of
John Huston’s Last Film</i> (from BearManor Media), and rumor has it that he
has also written his memoirs. <i>Photo by Joseph Benjamin Lahmani</i></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>ConFluence-Film: <i>Other than just having personal interest in the subjects you choose for books, what else goes into selecting a subject for you? Do other factors play into you moving forward with a given project?</i></b></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>Nat Segaloff:</b> Until now I have wanted to write about filmmakers whose work inspires me and challenges me, but there’s something else: I am fascinated by the creative process, and that’s why I choose to write about living people. This doesn’t mean that I am not judgmental; this being Hollywood, I like to get additional voices who can expand and correct, if not contradict, what my subjects remember about their lives. If I don’t have access, though, I’m not interested.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>CF: <i>Yes, access is important, though there are a number of directors I’d like to cover who are no longer with us, Tony Richardson and Franklin J. Schaffner among them. But, of course, I’d much prefer to cover the ones who are still with us and have things to say one-on-one. A funny question, granted, but how would you describe your taste in films and directors?</i></b></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>NS:</b> A film must touch me personally in some way, and I don’t care how strangely. This is because I appreciate directors who know how to use the medium to do more than tell stories. F’r’instance, I cry at the end of William Wellman’s <i>Beau Geste</i>, though Wellman would probably puke while spinning in his grave knowing that. I applaud John Milius’s <i>Big Wednesday</i>, even though I don’t surf, because it’s one of the few films that expresses my feelings about friendship and honor. I love one of Michael Powell’s and Emeric Pressburger’s least stylized films, <i>I Know Where I’m Going</i>, because it shows how love can be believably mysterious rather than just ordinarily mysterious. Go figure. And I defend to the death James Bridges’ <i>Perfect</i> because it gets under the skin of the press just as well as <i>All the President’s Men</i> while denying the viewer that sense of smugness. All of these accomplishments are highly personal, if not idiosyncratic.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>CF: <i>Interesting that you’re a defender of </i>Perfect<i>. In terms of later James Bridges, I’m loyal to his final film </i>Bright Lights, Big City<i> (1988), and have defended it on a few occasions. Maybe I need to see </i>Perfect<i> again.</i></b></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>Personally, Sidney Furie was the first director from whom I learned purely visual storytelling, at a very young, tender age. Discovering his oeuvre was revelatory for my young self, and I kept on discovering him as I aged. With Joan Micklin Silver, it is much more personal: As an Orthodox rabbinical school dropout -- we're a bit more rough around the edges than beauty school dropouts, har har -- she came the closest anyone has ever come in a recognized feature film to rendering scrupulous accuracy to Jewish tradition and belief constructs, in </i>Hester Street<i>. And beyond that, I think her </i>Chilly Scenes of Winter<i> is absolutely brilliant, as well as many other works. I'm also a hardcore auteurist, so connecting threads of a thematic, ideological or visual nature really get my wheels turning. I feel like I need to have a central idea driving my analyses of the films, because it excites me to watch the artist and his/her threads evolve over the decades.</i></b></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>Now for a potentially unpleasant question: Has anything traumatic or especially dramatic happened while researching a book or article you write? To make a long question short, any horror stories? What is the best way of dealing with such bumps in the road?</i></b></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>NS:</b> In the course of writing <i>Arthur Penn: American Director</i> – which took five years -- not because I couldn’t finish it but because we couldn’t find a publisher -- I lost no fewer than nine people I’d interviewed for it, including Dede Allen, David Brown, Hillard Elkins, Horton Foote, Larry Gelbart, William Gibson, Don Hewitt, Tad Mosel, and, before the book came out, Arthur himself. Fortunately, Arthur and I had gone over the final manuscript together and sent it to the publisher three days before he died.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">One other trauma during the Penn book was learning that another biographer, whom I won’t name, was circulating word that Arthur had authorized him to write a biography, and it took my agent and myself several months to put out that fire. This was especially disturbing because that biographer is a superb writer and it irked me to learn, firsthand, that he was a shit.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Any other horror stories I have had are likely the same as every biographer faces: people who refuse to be interviewed, people who agree to be interviewed and then never make themselves available, people who lie, rights-holders who think their materials are worth a fortune but aren’t, and the lack of historical record to confirm single-source information. I’ve never been faced with the kind of lawsuits that haunt some high-profile biographers. This is because I don’t embark on a book without the cooperation of the subject. Perhaps this allows people to question my objectivity, but with one exception I have never been asked to hide anything about someone, and that was on an A&E “Biography” I wrote and produced on Larry King. It wasn’t Larry himself who asked me to bury something, it was one of his lawyers, who happened to be a friend of mine. I’m sure Larry knew nothing about the request. In as much as the revelation would have hurt somebody else and its absence would not have harmed the biography, I used it as leverage to put juicier stuff out on the record. Interestingly, I found the information by connecting dots in the public record, so I’m surprised that nobody else has found it.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>CF: <i>Yes, my worst story is having to contend with a real nudnick who wanted quote approval on all the interview lines he gave me. This guy had a handler, a publicist, who really hounded me. He wanted absolute control on how the quotes were used. I wanted his participation, so I sent them both the portions I’d written that featured the quotes. They got back to me asking for a couple minor word changes, even though I’d quoted verbatim. I told them I revised everything to their wishes and thanked them. Once again, they asked to see the same passages with these minor changes implemented. This understandably was getting on my nerves, so I contacted the great Pat McGilligan<span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span>for advice. He told me something like, “You shouldn’t give quote approval even once, let alone multiple times, for multiple drafts.” So, I then declined their second request, which caused something of a stink. I was also worried because the guy had a background in law, and had a reputation for litigiousness. Worse than that, some of his claims flew in the face of what others had told me about the same topics, even though I would have presented him respectfully as an alternate perspective.</i></b></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>NS:</b> That sounds awful.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>CF: <i>Yeah, it was the roughest patch writing the book. Otherwise, I had a ball. The Arthur Penn book seemed like a longtime dream project for you. You once told me that we're "joined at the auteur" because you saw </i>Bonnie and Clyde<i> paired on a double bill with </i>The Naked Runner<i>. Did Penn grant you immediate access, or was there some convincing to do?</i></b></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>NS:</b> This is going to take a while to answer but I’ve never told the whole story before and your readers might find interest in how subtle these things can be.
I said that you and I are “joined at the auteur” because I caught Penn's <i>Bonnie and Clyde</i> on the bottom half of a double bill with Furie’s <i>The Naked Runner</i>. I had come to see the Furie, which is a superb film, but was totally blown away by the Penn. This was before Warren Beatty persuaded Warner Bros. to get behind it, and it took off.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The idea for the Penn book came when I was shuffling through lists of directors and realized that, aside from the monograph that Robin Wood had written in 1969, there were no full-length books on Arthur Penn. Not just no biographies, but nothing (although a compilation of interviews was in the works). This was beyond astonishing. Here was a director who had changed the face of cinema and nobody had written about him.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">What happened next is an example of what kind of man Arthur was. I had his address from an old Academy Award mailing list that I had had the foresight to copy when I worked for one of the studio publicity departments, so I sent him a letter at his New York address asking if I could write his biography. He e-mailed me back to say yes, but there was a catch. It seems that the motion picture Academy had asked if they could honor him in November of 2005 with a showing of <i>Night Moves</i>, and he was on the fence about agreeing. He would, however, tell the Academy yes if I would fly east from Los Angeles to emcee it. At this point, Arthur and I had neither met nor spoken.
I agreed, he agreed, and the Academy agreed. I prevailed on my then-current employer, Weller-Grossman Productions, to donate editing time for a tribute compilation video of Arthur’s films. This not only gave Arthur and me control over its content, it relieved the Academy of the expense of contracting for it themselves. Arthur leaned on the Academy to spring for my plane tickets and hotel, and I crossed the country not knowing why he was showing so much faith in me. On arrival, I finally met Arthur and his wife, Peggy. We talked for a few hours, did some interviews, and then parted to prepare for the screening.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The event drew a full house of east coast Academy members and a number of the Penns’ family, friends, and co-workers. In addition to our video, there were tribute videos from Melanie Griffith (<i>Night Moves</i>), who was in tears thanking Arthur for giving her a career, and Dustin Hoffman (<i>Little Big Man</i>), whom I had asked to tape a few words. As emcee, I did quick interviews with Estelle Parsons (<i>Bonnie and Clyde</i>) producer Julian Schlossberg (<i>Sly Fox</i>), Academy host Arthur Manson (whom I’d known when I worked in exhibition), and offered a critical appraisal of Penn’s work. That’s when it clicked. As I watched Arthur watching me talking about him, it struck me that this was his elaborate way of auditioning me for the role of biographer. His trust in me – we worked on nothing more than a handshake, and I had full control of all content – was what kept me focused and motivated. It still does.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>CF: <i>That was the same with me and Sidney. He told me it was up to me to write what I wanted to write, based on what he and the others interviewed told me. There was such enormous trust, basically carte blanche, which I probably didn't deserve, as it was my first book. Would I have trusted me in his position? Hard to say...but probably not. Being a fellow filmmaker was most important to him when it came to me, and that can't be underestimated. "You know exactly what directors go through when they make a movie," he told me numerous times. When it was ready, I showed Sidney the full manuscript. He actually stopped reading it after Chapter 5 and said, "It's just great, but I can't read any more about myself. When you've actually lived it, and when you're as old as I am, it's surreal seeing your life condensed into book form." And it always made him sad that many of the people in the book are no longer with us. To this day, he hasn't read the whole thing, but keeps on saying, "I hear good things about it."</i></b></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>So, what about with Friedkin?</i></b></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>NS:</b> Billy Friedkin is a force of nature, which is why I called my book about him <i>Hurricane Billy</i>. We met in the spring of 1974 when I was living in Boston and running the publicity department of the Boston theater chain that was showing <i>The Exorcist</i>, which had just opened the previous December.
We had, however, spoken once before under unusual circumstances. It was after I, along with my bosses at the theater chain, had been indicted by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for “blasphemy, obscenity, and corrupting the morals of a minor” after a local religious nut demanded that we be charged under archaic state law.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Purely out of naiveté, I phoned Friedkin’s office at Warner Bros. in Burbank and left word that I was proud to be charged for such a great film. To my astonishment – and, better, to the astonishment of my bosses at the theatre chain – a day or two later the receptionist, Jackie, announced over the public address system in our main office, “Nat, there’s call for you from William Friedkin.” I skidded down the hall to my office. Billy was friendly and resolute: “Nat, you have to fight these people wherever they turn up.” He then said that he was coming east in a few weeks on a lecture tour that had been booked before anybody knew how successful <i>The Exorcist</i> would be, and let’s get together then.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">When I proudly told this to my contacts at Warner Bros., they were horrified. They insisted I intercept Friedkin at his lecture venue and tell him not to speak about the case lest he be subpoenaed back to the Bay State to repeat his words in court. Telling Billy to do or not to do something is as useless as King Canute commanding the tide to retreat. But we did connect – at, of all places, Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts – and began a friendship that continues.
We kept in touch over the next fifteen years as I became a journalist and could always count on him to give me good quotes and share his insights. When he shot <i>The Brink’s Job</i> in Boston in the summer of 1978, my video crew was the only one he didn’t kick off the set. I was in the production offices when some local hoods held up the editors and made off with what they thought was camera negative, intending to hold it for ransom. (It was, of course, workprint, and, when they called with a ransom demand, Billy got on the phone and told them exactly what they could do with it. The FBI was not pleased and the culprits remain free to this day).</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">By 1988, I was getting bored with being a film critic and having no success selling scripts, so Gregory Mcdonald, a close friend and a successful author (<i>Fletch</i>), told me flat-out to start writing books. “They make 250 movies a year and publish 100,000 books,” he said. “Go with the odds.” It seemed natural to write a book about Billy -- keep in mind, by then I had fifteen years of archived interviews. I checked with film scholar friends and determined that there was no book on him, and called to ask if he would take a chance on a first-time author. He immediately said yes, I wrote a proposal, and, on the strength of his being the director of <i>The French Connection</i> and <i>The Exorcist</i>, I found an agent and an almost-immediate book deal, back in the day as when publishers actually paid for books. Again, we had a handshake and he gave me full control. Long story, I’m afraid, but it shows that nothing comes out of the blue.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>CF:<i> Making the approach for my first book was very willy-nilly. I had no agent at the time, though I do have one now, and the deal came it as the result of a chain of people that connected me with Pat McGilligan. I was a first-time book author, an unproven risk, approaching a highly respected and established biographer to do a book on a rather more esoteric director. Heaven knows what made him put such faith in me, but I owe a great deal to him!</i></b></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>You wrote a book about screenwriter Stirling Silliphant. Other than Dalton Trumbo's recent bio, are there many other books about screenwriters? I can't think of many. Other than the obvious differences, how does writing about a screenwriter differ from writing about a director?</i></b></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>NS:</b> There are a few bios of screenwriters such as Nunnally Johnson, Herman Mankiewicz, and Rod Serling, as well as the highly commendable Backstory series that Pat McGilligan edits -- but most of the writing about writers is autobiographical. Indeed, the Silliphant bio grew out of the monograph I wrote on him for Backstory 3, which I then expanded into a full book (<i>Stirling Silliphant: The Fingers of God</i>, 2013) with the encouragement of his widow, Tiana. Tiana said that it was Stirling’s deathbed wish that she and I write the story of their love. By the time I finally landed a deal with Bear Manor Media to publish a book, Tiana was off making a documentary and I wrote it alone. Stirling died in 1996, so it only took me seventeen years to sell it. (That’s nothing; my latest book -- on John Huston’s last movie -- took twenty-eight years. Never say die.) I had met Stirling and Tiana in 1974 when I was still a press agent working for Fox and I booked him on press tour for <i>The Towering Inferno</i>, which he had written. Once again, contacts can pay off. We stayed in touch up to his death, and I remain friends with his widow and their son.
Writing about screenwriters provides great horror stories but tough narrative. Writing is so internalized that it’s hard to describe the process. And let’s face it, the directors and actors get all the attention, even though none of them would have a job if the writer hadn’t done his job first.</span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b> </b></span></span><br />
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<b>CF: <i>When working with living subjects, is it important for you that you establish a stance on the work independent of the subject's views? Do you ever feel in any way beholden to them?</i></b><br />
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<b>NS:</b> Perhaps because I have had pre-existing relationships with the people about whom I have written major works, as opposed to knocking out a newspaper or magazine interview, there is an element of trust -- or at least familiarity -- that prevails. The people I interview have all been interviewed a zillion times and they know how the press works. As to whether I feel beholden, of course I do, but, then, they’re beholden to me too, because I am giving them a frigging book. On a more specific level, I will accept meals but not travel or expenses, and definitely no gifts, though none to date has ever been offered.<br />
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<b>CF: <i>How do you feel when handling material about a subject's life that must be handled delicately? Or are you more apt to "let it all hang out" and convince the subject that this is the best way to go?</i></b><br />
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<b>NS:</b> I hold nothing back unless, as with Larry King, it may harm a third party. I also ask the subjects if they want a transcript, and I tell them that they can make “corrections” (a purposely vague term). I do this not only as a courtesy because transcribed speech never reads as well as it sounded when it was spoken, but also because it’s hard for someone to scream that he was misquoted when he saw his words in advance. I also do my best to fact-check (dates, locations, etc.) and offer subjects the chance to correct themselves.<br />
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As far as letting everything hang out, frankly, if my subjects had more hanging out, I might have sold more books.
CF: How do one best avoid hagiography? Do you find objectivity difficult sometimes?
NS: The very act of writing a biography is, to some extent, hagiographic. I have been accused of writing “friendly” biographies and this is a fair charge, but I mitigate it with three answers. First, I wouldn’t be writing the book if I wasn’t interested in the subject. Second, my writing style is somewhat heroic, so hagiography in inherent. Second, I have been making my transcripts available to scholars in my papers at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy Foundation and at the UCLA Library Performing Arts Collections. In this way, others who have not had the advantage of sitting at Arthur Penn’s feet to ask about <i>Bonnie and Clyde</i> or hanging around with Stan Lee to ask why mothers throw away comic books can go look it up.<br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>CF:<i> When I was sprinkling the initial draft of my book proposal with unchecked, neon-lettered hyperbole, which I was convinced would make the package look irresistible or whatever, Pat McGilligan told me something very wise: "The very act of writing a book on a particular subject is making a statement." It was from there, with piece of advice, that I turned in a workable proposal. Again, don't know what made him keep the faith.</i></b></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>Any advice you can give biographers or aspiring biographers about getting your book circulated? I spoke to Justin Bozung about this in the previous installment. We're in a kind of nether realm of book publication, but there are certainly things we can do to get our work more read by a readership that would most appreciate it, right?</i> </b></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>NS:</b> Book publishing is in the same frantic state now that the record industry was in when the mp3 player was invented, that the video industry was in when streaming took over from hard copies, and that the movies have been in practically since Edison: aggressive stupidity. First they ignore trends in technology, then they try to control and/or suppress them, and finally they embrace them when it’s nearly too late. At the moment, publishers are run by the same mentality that runs movie companies, namely, “if everybody doesn’t want it, nobody can have it.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">When mega-publishers like HarperCollins, Hachette, and Bertlesmann bought up all the small publishers their idea was to reduce competition by being able to serve all markets, large, medium, and small. This was a smart business decision but a poor financial one because, as the major Hollywood studios discovered when they absorbed the specialty film companies, the small imprints survived because they knew their markets, served them, and made a livable profit. Now that every book that’s released has to contribute to the income of the massive conglomerate, the small ones have no place. Big publishers seldom can afford to introduce new authors, and small publishers can seldom get their new authors seen and heard on the mass media. The books I write will never sell more than 5,000 copies or, by wild luck, 10,000. That doesn’t even pay for the binding at a large publishing concern. I resist e-books because they’re so easy to pirate, but a sale is a sale. This is why I’m happy with Bear Manor, which is a print-on-demand publishing house that serves a niche audience of pop culture customers. They have my latest three titles. I feel that P-O-D is the way to go for niche books; there are no returns, no hold-backs, and no remainders. But the trade-off is that there is no publicity (their authors have to do it themselves) and no bookstore presence. Perhaps a curated book club is the way to go. I dunno. We’re on the threshold of market fragmentation.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>CF: <i>Any other special stories you've had on the biography-writing trail? Any special challenges you conquered?</i></b></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>NS:</b> Among the pleasures of writing biographies is being able to reconnect estranged family members in the course of tracking them down for interviews. This happened with both my Silliphant and Penn books. In researching Silliphant, I brought his son by his first marriage together with his son from his last marriage; they had simply drifted apart over the decades. With the Penns, I wrote about a woman named Nonnie who was the first wife of Arthur’s brother, Irving Penn, the brilliant photographer. Irving, who famously married his star model Lisa Fonssagrives, had apparently never discussed this first wife with anyone, but Nonnie’s daughter contacted me through my publisher and I put her in touch with Arthur’s children. If I ever get to do a revised edition of the Penn bio, I’ll add that.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>CF:<i> I didn't have the occasion to reintroduce any estranged family members, at least yet, because Sidney has none really, but I have connected him with many old, cherished collaborators, some of whom he had not heard from in nearly sixty years. For instance, the composer of his first two independent Canadian features is a jazz artist named Phil Nimmons, who is now in his nineties, still living in Toronto, and amazingly, still blowing his horn. "He's only 81? Tell Sid he's a young punk," Phil joked with me. I also relayed information back to Sidney that Nic Roeg, whom I interviewed, had married Harriet Harper, the daughter of British producer Ken Harper, who gave him one of his big breaks. Nic was camera operator on two cheap genre films he directed when first arriving in England in 1960. News of their marriage startled and especially delighted Sidney.</i></b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>More bios for you on the horizon? I know you once told me that you don't discuss such projects before they're official, but spill whatever beans you so wish...or none at all, if you so please.</i></b></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>NS:</b> I’m finishing the biography of a world-famous speculative fiction writer. This has been another hard sell because, again, writers are not seen as commercial, even though what they write often is. This author writes a lot of what has been called science fiction, and the wisdom that has been handed to me over the long journey has been that science fiction fans love to read science fiction, but they do not like to read about science fiction. We’ll see.
I am also – God help me – finishing my memoirs. I’m not famous enough for anybody to be interested in me, but, as a publicist, then an interviewer, and finally as a writer-producer, I can drop names that other people can’t even lift. It’s called Screen Saver.
If that doesn’t work, I guess I’ll have to bite the bullet and write a cat book.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;">Nat Segaloff’s latest book is <i>Mr. Huston/Mr. North: Life, Death, and Making John Huston’s Last Movie</i>. It’s available in print and e-book from Amazon.com and Bear Manor Media, and as an audiobook (read by the author) from Bear Manor Media and Blackstone Audio.
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DANIEL KREMERhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11702754388135237154noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4383666616230951888.post-36089623558086133232015-11-29T13:39:00.000-08:002015-12-02T14:08:17.763-08:00Biosphere, Part I: Interviews About Writing Film Biographies, with Author Justin Bozung on Director Frank Perry<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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I became a biographer by accident. You might say I sort of fell into it, despite having been a film writer before embarking on my book <i>Sidney J. Furie: Life and Films</i>. I spent years voraciously binging on show-business biographies, through which my “stomach” for anecdotes swelled. As I got gordo on such trivia, I eagerly regurgitated this steady diet of behind-the-scenes stories at will, for whomever seemed even marginally interested, sometimes even in the presence of perfect strangers. (I could have said that my mental “library” for stories grew so overstocked that it had to outsource, but I found the dietary metaphor funnier and more apropos.)<br />
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Galvanized by the fact that I myself would need to spring into action if I wanted a book to exist on one of my filmmaking heroes – a slightly more esoteric name than the type of directors who traditionally get such coverage – I underwent a kind of baptism by fire. The book became an addiction, a passion, a quest, a crusade. I’m deliberately using very dramatic words, but they are very real to me, as is the project very near and dear to me.<br />
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I had written many articles and casual pieces about film, but had never undertaken such an epic endeavor as writing a book about film. The icing on the “cake” was, bar none, getting to know my subject as a human being and, ultimately, as a friend. By the time I delivered my full manuscript to my publisher in the summer of 2014, a strong sense of post-partum depression swept over me. Even though at that point I had lots of rigorous editing to anticipate, I wanted to do it all over again, to start again from scratch, like a child who shouts “Again!” after whirling down a water slide. I wanted to re-experience the eureka moments of finding the research materials that magically dissolved question marks – make no mistake, for any scholar or researcher, this is a drug. I wanted to re-interview Sidney’s stars and collaborators. I wanted to take those long, recorded walks with Sidney all over again. My overall involvement with the project taught my endorphins how to dance.<br />
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Since this was wishful fantasy, I had no choice to move on. I still resolved to do it all again, this time with a new subject – and, as it turns out, a new publisher. The first subject I considered as a follow-up was Frank Perry, director of <i>David and Lisa</i> (1962), <i>The Swimmer</i> (1968), <i>Last Summer</i> (1969), <i>Diary of a Mad Housewife</i> (1970), <i>Play It As It Lays</i> (1972), <i>Rancho Deluxe</i> (1975), the now “infamous” <i>Mommie Dearest</i> (1981), and a number of notable others. I was drawn to Perry as an early independent filmmaking pioneer, as someone with a specific and refined sensibility, and as a deft director of performance who amplified his actors’ contributions with exquisite staging and camerawork. Beyond that, his films were explicitly philosophical in nature, but nevertheless still managed to emotionally involve their audiences. Thus is the particular nature of Frank Perry’s refinement: they are exercises for the heart as much as for the head.<br />
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Deciding to just dive headfirst and right into it, I contacted filmmaker friend Henry Jaglom, asking him to put me in touch with the Perry collaborators I knew that he knew. This indeed proved fortuitous, although it certainly did not seem so at first. His response: “Sorry, Dan, I know someone working on a Frank Perry book.” Considering that Perry had rather fallen into obscurity, especially in the years since his premature death to prostate cancer (Perry's 1992 documentary <i>On the Bridge</i> follows him in treatment battling the cancer), I was flabbergasted. “How could that be?” I asked myself. Maybe Henry misheard or confused Perry for someone else, I first told myself. “No,” I said, “Henry’s definitely not the type to confuse directors.” When I chanced to meet Joan Micklin Silver, a filmmaker I’ve admired since childhood (I saw her masterpiece <i>Chilly Scenes of Winter</i> at a very young age), it seemed to be in the stars. After convincing her to work with me on a book, I sped forth on that project.<br />
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It wasn’t until this past summer that I discovered the name of my fellow Perry admirer. Enter Justin Bozung, a freelance film writer, blogger, researcher and part-time archivist, who has been working on his Perry book for the last two years, while also working on a book about the films of Norman Mailer. A bittersweet sigh: “Good,” I said to myself. “While he’s covering this never-before-covered filmmaker, I can do another filmmaker of that stripe. We’re both working for a common cause: redirecting the spotlight towards lesser known directors who deserve it.” I’m always drawn to covering directors who haven’t been given proper coverage thus far, and breaking with the scholarship monopoly that benefits a certain untouchable pantheon of artists, so I'm thrilled that Justin is doing the same with Perry.<br />
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<i>Gam zu l’tovah</i>, so goes the old Jewish saying. In English, we’d know it as “everything for the best.” In Jewish culture, though, the deeper meaning is “everything for a reason.” Considering the fortuitous turn of events here, that has a wisdom. The fact that I contacted Henry first, before anyone else, and then to have Henry tell me about another author covering Perry, saved me wasted time and energy. Imagine had I worked for months only to meet Justin further down the pike! Oops. So, I thought I’d present an interview I conducted with Justin, discussing his process as a biographer, as well as challenges we as biographers face when taking on new subjects – and in our case, subjects that prove to be much harder sells than doing the 127th book on Hitchcock or Welles.<br />
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First, I offer the biographer’s biography: <a href="http://justinbozung.net/">Justin Bozung</a> is a freelance film writer, blogger, researcher and part-time archivist. He has researched and contributed to two books about Stanley Kubrick and has written for such print publications as: <i>Shock Cinema</i>, <i>Videoscope</i>, <i>Bijou</i>, <i>Whoa</i>, <i>HorrorHound</i>, <i>Fangoria</i>, and <i>Paracinema</i> magazines. He is on the board of the Norman Mailer Society, curates the Norman Mailer Podcast Project over at <a href="http://projectmailer.net/">ProjectMailer.net</a>, and works with the Norman Mailer Estate as a video/audio archivist. He is the official biographer of film-maker Frank Perry. His next book <i>Film is Like Death: The Films of Norman Mailer</i> will be published in mid-2016.<br />
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<b>ConFluence-Film: <i>So, we’re both drawn to Frank Perry’s work, but for you personally, what was it about Frank Perry that called for such a work-intensive showcase as a full book?</i></b><br />
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<b>Justin Bozung:</b> There are many reasons why I chose to start work on a biography on Frank Perry. I guess, originally, my motive was simply to just research and write a book about Frank because, as the fan of his work that I am, I was so disturbed at the lack of information out there about him and his films. There's been nothing written about Frank to date. Originally, I had envisioned this project as a dual biography, really. I wanted to write a biography about Frank, but also his first wife, Eleanor Perry. I wanted to write it as if it were a giant X, and I'd have them intersect in the middle and then continue on down their respective paths after their divorce in the film world.<br />
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<b>CF: <i>Yes, Eleanor was vital in the early part of Frank’s film career, and an interesting figure herself. In researching my Joan Micklin Silver book, Joan told me that she worked with Eleanor on a number of unproduced scripts in the late seventies, some time after she divorced Frank. Digging into Eleanor a bit, I discovered that she had done things like painting over the Cannes ad billboard for </i>Fellini’s Roma<i> because she thought the graphic was sexist and offensive.</i></b><br />
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<b>JB:</b> Neither Frank nor Eleanor would've had a career or made any movies if it had not been for the other's talents. It’s important to consider that. They really complimented each other when it came to the film business, although Eleanor, in the forties, while she was still living in Cleveland, had written a series of true crime novels with her husband, who was a prominent area lawyer. They wrote these books under the pen name, Oliver Weld Bayer. In 1945, a producer bought the rights to one of their novels, and made it into a film, <i>Dangerous Partners</i>, with Eleanor being tasked to write the screenplay. While Eleanor had this experience under her belt, by the time she had met Frank in New York in the late fifties, she had been hyper-focused on writing for the theater, which is where Frank and Eleanor met, though Frank, by that time, had no film experience.
With Frank, though, as I've researched him, and talked to some of his family and friends, I've just made many personal connections in his life with which I have identified…things that I really don't want to go into here. Frank was very passionate about working with actors; in fact, he was one of the first non-actors to be granted membership into the Actors Studio in New York to study. He was passionate about actors, and he had a knack for working with them. And he had an incredible eye for discovering talent. He discovered Cathy Burns, and he more-or-less discovered Bruce Davison. He discovered Janet Margolin to the extent that she had been known as a theater actress and not a film actress before <i>David and Lisa</i> (1962). Frank brought many actors to the front, who still credit him for giving them their first big break.<br />
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<b>CF: <i>You could count Carrie Snodgress in that lot too. She was nominated for the Best Actress Oscar for her role in </i>Diary of a Mad Housewife<i>. I guess Neil Young fans know her today as the ex Mrs. Young, but other than that, today she is a fairly obscure actress, but one who rose to momentary greatness only under Perry’s excellent direction.</i></b><br />
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<b>JB:</b> Right! Another aspect of Frank's career that drew me in was that almost all of his work was with great novelists. He also had this incredible knack for convincing writers to allow him to adapt their works. In that way, he was a hustler. What's not to admire about that? He worked with some of the greatest literary minds of the twentieth century: Joan Didion, John Cheever, Truman Capote, etc...the list goes on and on. And that doesn't include the writers he was working with on films that he couldn't get off the ground, with amazing writers like Patricia Nell Warren and Walker Percy, for example. He had a knack for a great story, and not just a great story, but one that was really ahead of its time in terms of subject matter and point-of-view. He was very literary-minded, and I really like that about his work. Also, it really bugs me how Frank isn't quite as well-known as he should be today. Things are slowly coming around, but his legacy should be farther along than it is by now, in my opinion. So I'd like to help his family achieve that too. There's this idea, as well, that Frank's films post-divorce from Eleanor aren't as "good" as those that he made with her, and I would disagree with that notion. So, my job, really, is to sort of debunk a lot of things out there concerning his life and his films. I care about his work and his legacy, that's probably because, as I've gotten deeper into researching him, I have discovered these aspects of his life that we share between us. How we were both raised, traumas, etc.<br />
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<b>CF: <i>Was it easy getting the okay from the Perry estate, and were you granted immediate access to Perry's papers and archives?</i></b><br />
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JB: It was pretty easy. The challenge, of course, came in finding out who was in charge of the Perry Estate and who controlled what aspects, and all that. Frank was married three times, so there is some red tape there concerning who owns what and who is charge of what. Frank's archive with his papers sits at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. But they are currently private holdings there; which means that not just anyone can go into them to research Frank. You have to get permission from Frank's estate directly to enter, and to date, I've been the only person allowed into Frank's papers outside of any Wesleyan students who are in the film program there. Frank's papers will likely be made open to the public, but probably not until after my book is complete.<br />
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<b>CF: <i>Establishing trust with your subject -and/or- his/her family is crucial. I've spoken with a few other biographers about this, including Foster Hirsch, in relation to his Otto Preminger book. And Nick Dawson too, with his Hal Ashby book. Sidney Furie didn't want to know hide nor hair about any book, because he distrusts journalists...and hates walking down memory lane even more. It wasn’t until he discovered I made films myself that he finally agreed, because he loves talking shop with fellow makers – and eventually, we became best buds. It’s one of the greatest gifts I’ve ever gotten. Joan Micklin Silver, ditto. How was that for you, and what tips would you personally give other authors in going about doing this?</i></b><br />
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<b>JB:</b> Well, as I mentioned, originally I wanted to do a dual biography about Frank and Eleanor Perry. That went by the wayside when I exchanged a couple emails with Eleanor's son, who today, is a pretty well-known writer. He was really cold on the idea of a book about Frank and Eleanor, in fact, he even suggested that their work wasn't even important to film history.<br />
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<b>CF: <i>That's just so absurd to me.</i></b> <br />
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<b>JB:</b> Yeah. So, with no support from Eleanor's family, that left me to focus on Frank, which is disappointing to me, as I had wanted Eleanor to have a major role in the book, now she's barely there on the page. It isn't right, because she did have a major role in those early films. I mean, she wrote them! Frank and Eleanor's divorced in 1971, even though they sort of stayed friendly, made her slightly bitter over how it all turned out.<br />
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Frank went on to make more films, and Eleanor was alienated as a female screenwriter in Hollywood. She was profilic with projects that went into purgatory or turn around in Hollywood. She wanted to direct. She was slated to direct a western: <i>The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing</i> (1973), but in the end she was screwed over on that, and the script was re-hashed by another writer after she was fired over conflicts with the producer of the film. In the end she was bitter about how Hollywood treated her, and so much so that she wrote a book about her relationship with Frank at the end of the seventies which also took big stabs at Hollywood and the treatment of the screenwriter, in particular, the female screenwriter. And the book really hurt Frank's feelings to boot! So I think her son's lack of interest in wanting a book written about his mom really has more to do with his concern about not wanting old wounds opened up.<br />
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With Frank's estate, they were sort of on the fence at first, but not because they didn't feel the same way about Frank's legacy as I did – only because they didn't know who I was, or where I came from. So it took a few phone calls and some discussions about Frank and his work with his longtime personal assistant turned producer, his ex-wife and her son – who are both executors of his estate. We talked about Frank and his films and why I felt compelled to write the book in the first place. Who would publish it? When would it be done? What would my focus be? Would I dish any dirt? They asked to see previous work that I had done too. I sent them magazine articles and interviews that I had written and done prior. I sent them a manuscript for a book about Kubrick's <i>The Shining</i> that I had just finished working on at the time. Once we had talked a few times, and they had read my previous work, they felt comfortable in giving me permission to access his papers and they decided to help on the project in any way that I asked them to.<br />
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<b>CF: <i>What are the most valuable resource you've had at your disposal so far?</i></b><br />
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<b>JB:</b> Never trust a writer who doesn't use the library.<br />
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<b>CF: <i>Absolutely! I must have spent weeks at AMPAS's Margaret Herrick Library alone, not to mention the pertinent university and institutional libraries! </i></b><br />
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<b>JB:</b> And writers shouldn't forget to access the obvious too! Look on websites like eBay for materials or on iOffer. It doesn't happen every day, but on some days, you'll be lucky and find a weird, obscure magazine that was only published for a handful of years that may feature an interview with your subject that you didn't even now about prior in your research. Cross-check bibliographies at your library, and then hunt down missing magazine articles on sites like Abebooks or Alibris. I've found actual scripts to Frank's films online for sale---scripts that aren't even available in Frank's archives at Wesleyan. When hunting for scripts use Scriptfly or Scriptcity in Los Angeles. If you find a script that you need for your project, one that will aid you in your research, you can buy it, and in 24-hours they'll email you it in PDF or they'll ship you hard copy. Use the Internet, but at the same time don't limit your research to the internet exclusively. If you do, you will fail. There is a wealth of information out there online, but it needs to be cross-checked and verified.<br />
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There are huge errors of information out there, particularly concerning Frank Perry's films. One of the biggest errors out there concerning Frank Perry is that his film <i>Last Summer</i> (1969) was released with a X-rating and then re-cut later on and re-released into theaters with an R rating. This is something that is mentioned on Wikipedia online, and in books that have mentioned the film in the past. This is simply, not true. I'd rather not say now why and how this isn't true, but it will be clarified in my book about Frank when it comes out. This is, of course, just an example. There are certainly errors in print too, but I go by the addage that if you hear something once from someone--it's just a rumor. If you hear the same thing from several people, it's most likely truth. The danger is when the rumor is printed too many times, effectively making it a truth to many. I'm trying not to let that happen per Frank Perry.<br />
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<i><b>CF: Yes, I’ve encountered a great deal of apocryphal information about Sidney and Joan in researching my own books. The most hysterical one, one that sent Sidney up in stitches, was that Charles Eastman wound up directing the rest of </b></i><b>Little Fauss and Big Halsy</b><i><b> after Sidney left the production. In the first place, Sidney never left the production, nor was the shooting ever at any point tumultuous, let alone to the extent that anyone would have walked off. In the second place, Sidney only met Eastman once, in producer Al Ruddy’s office, with two bull mastiff dogs. He was a hands-off writer and, once turning in his script, never was heard from again on that production. So, nonsense in print, for sure. Then there was one I read that Michael Caine visited the set of </b></i><b>The Appaloosa</b><i><b>, where Brando told him that Sidney couldn’t even direct traffic. From Michael Caine’s lips: “That’s a load of rubbish. I was never on that set even for a second.” But of course this gets printed in a book and it has a deleterious affect on public perception, and then make way for the nonsense stories getting reprinted. Part of our job is often to debunk myths that are comprised of sexy, "juicy" but fundamentally untrue stories.</b></i><br />
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<b>JB:</b> Yes, that happens more than people know.
Frank's archive at Wesleyan has certainly gifted me with a lot of information I need for my book on him, but there are huge gaps in his chronology as well. So, it has been very important to me to get out there and talk to as many people as I can concerning Frank and his work. I've done over 150 hours of interviews in relationship to the book project to date, and I anticipate to double that time before its all said and done. I don't think one can write a book in under three years, at least, a book that I'd ever take seriously. So the interviews are extremely important, if not, even more important than my access to Frank's archive. There is just too much to be explored, and as with everything I try to do, personally, I want my work to represent something of a definitive nature regarding the topic. I find that setting out to "leave no stone unturned" will only leave stones unturned. When I'm researching something--when I feel as if I've cracked the "case," I stop and take a break for a couple weeks. I start looking at something else, because, at a point, your mind tires and you need to re-set, it becomes difficult to see everything. It never fails me. Once you've taken the break and then return to your subject, you will always find things that you missed the first time around.<br />
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<b>CF: <i>Yes, on the Furie book, I had the privilege of jumping between writing the book and also prepping, shooting and then editing my feature film </i>Raise Your Kids on Seltzer<i>, which likewise took years to reach completion</i><i>. I've accounted to many people how that rhythm helped clear my head, on not just the one project, but both projects. It's a routine I hope to maintain: balancing the writing of a book with the making of a film.</i></b><br />
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<b>JB:</b> And, plus, it's always interesting to see how things you experience in
that break alter your perception of your subject later on as you're
following up on them in the second round of research or study.<b><i> </i></b><br />
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<b>CF: <i>Absolutely! Now, you and I both agree that Perry isn't nearly as well-known or admired as he should be by cineastes, scholars, and cinephiles. Like my own subjects Furie and Silver, Perry is either ignored or forgotten, despite his strides as a relatively powerful, prodigious independent producer-director. What specifically has challenged you in the writing and research process so far, with this in mind?</i></b><br />
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<b>JB:</b> I don't know if I've experienced any challenges regarding Frank's work. I love everything about Frank's work. There isn't a "bad" film in the lot. I've always been a firm believer in not reading or paying attention to what a critic has to say about any filmmaker or a film itself. Film as an art form is completely subjective, therefore, the notion of any criticism pertaining to any film is completely null and void of meaning or matter. I don't like thinking negatively about anything, really. I prefer to think positively and objectively in life, and that carries over, for me, into my thoughts or theories about art itself.
You know, one of my favorite film writers, or scholars – whichever you'd perfer to call him – is Rudolph Arneheim. Arneheim crafted a very potent metaphor for thought back in the 1930's while he was at Harvard about perspective pertaining to the arts. He said, and I'm totally paraphrasing here: "If you see a box on a table, if you look at that box while standing in front of it, it's just a box. But if you walk around the box, turn the box to a different angle, alter the box in some way, then the box becomes something else altogether." That's kind of how I approach film and art. I don't think it's the job of the the filmmaker to show me the greatness of their work. I think it's up to me to find that greatness in their work myself. I don't think that films were intended to be viewed only once, which is often times what critics and these mass-consumer new cinephiles do.<br />
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There are no such things as bad filmmakers or bad films. Of course, I have the same post-modernist programming that most of us have. There are times when I watch a film, and I may not always enjoy it, but it’s in those moments that I realize that it's not important what I thought about the film, its my job only to find something in the film that is great, as a film lover. In those moments, you'll always discover something of merit that will re-set your mind and allow you see things in a completely different light pertaining to that particular work of art, or in this case, the work of a filmmaker.<br />
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<b>CF: <i>I wish I could be like that, but alas, I can be fairly tempestuous when it comes to my "problem" films and filmmakers, but that's actually just the filmmaker in me coming out...always the "backseat driver" thing. It's a curse that a few of my filmmaker friends have as well.</i></b><br />
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<b>JB:</b> With Frank, I'm still working on the project. I'm only still working on the book because I took twelve months off because of a legal problem concerning my use of materials from the archive in my book. I decided that if I couldn't use anything from his archive, then I wasn't going to do the book on him in the first place. But that's been cleared up now, and it took all this time to straighten it out really. In that time away, I took an opportunity to work on another book project, a book about Norman Mailer's films that will be out next year through a major publisher. With Frank, there are, as I said, huge gaps in his story that I haven't even been able to put those together just yet.
The parts of the book that are done or about done, thus far, are sections where I've got a wealth information pertaining to certain films in his oeuvre. I mean, I've got huge gaps pertaining to <i>Ladybug, Ladybug</i> (1963) because many of the actors from the film are either dead, were one-time child actors and not current in the business, or are not interested in talking about the film because it was such a flop for United Artists and/or are writing memoirs that talk about the making of the film, like actor William Daniels. I still have lots of gaps pertaining to his teen years, his time in the military, his time at college, and a couple other films as well.<br />
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<b>CF:</b><i><b> I quite like </b></i><b>Ladybug Ladybug</b><i><b>. I saw it for the first time last year and couldn’t understand why critics shot it down. It's a lovely piece of work, beautifully made and, in my opinion, one of the best nuclear scare films of the era. What are you favorite Perry films?</b></i><br />
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<b>JB:</b> I'm partial to <i>Last Summer</i> and <i>Play It As it Lays</i> (1972).<br />
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<b>CF:</b><i><b> I’m a really big fan of </b></i><b>Play It As It Lays</b><i><b>! I always thought it would make a brilliant, ideal double feature with Jerry Schatzberg’s masterpiece </b></i><b>Puzzle of a Downfall Child</b><i><b> (1970).</b></i><br />
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<b>JB:</b> And I love <i>David and Lisa</i>. <i>David and Lisa</i> doesn't get the respect it should. It was one of the first independently-made films to be nominated for an Academy Award, and it deserves respect and awe for where it fits into the historical landscape of American independent film. I mean its right up there as far as earlier indies go with <i>Shadows</i> (1959). I love <i>Compromising Positions</i> (1985). I love all of his work though. I'm even wowed by his epic three-hour TV pilot <i>Skag</i> (1980), which starred Karl Malden and Piper Laurie.<br />
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<b>CF:</b><i><b> Yes, we discussed </b></i><b>Compromising Positions</b><i><b> one-on-one some time back. I admire that one greatly, and feel it is criminally underrated and unjustly forgotten. It's a perfect and quite apt companion to the earlier </b></i><b>Diary of a Mad Housewife</b><i><b>, complete with the odious Edward Herrmann character, the officially "out to lunch" husband. Are there any Perry films you champion that might have bombed with critics and audiences on initial release, but deserve a second look?</b></i><br />
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<b>JB:</b> Again, I like them all. I don't think there is a "bad" film in the lot. Certainly, certain Perry films have their detractors. Certainly, <i>Compromising Positions</i> is one that not a lot of people like, even though when it was released, it did well with the critics, and was used to suggest that Frank was sort of "returning to form" or back on his "game" after coming off of a couple TV movies. I think its a bit ahead of its time. It's certainly a revisionist take on the detective genre, even though it apes classic film noir visually in certain moments. Also it has a pre-<i>Desperate Housewives</i> kind of thing going on in it. It tackles the second-wave of Women's Lib that came in late seventies and early eighties. I do like <i>Hello Again</i> (1987) as well. If there is one Frank Perry film that everyone seems to think is a stinker it would be that one. I think it's really quirky and funny. At its core, it really is a <i>Bride of Frankenstein</i> meets the screwball comedy from the '30s. Can't you just image someone like Katharine Hepburn in that Shelley Long role? Or a Lucille Ball? Frank even references <i>Bride of Frankenstein</i> in the visuals of <i>Hello Again</i>. Watch for that great shot of Shelley Long after her sister "Zelda" has brought her back from the grave in the cemetery. She's dressed in that long, all-white dress and white elbow gloves. She's framed identically as to how James Whale framed Elsa Lanchester as The Bride after she's just been created and unveiled for the first time on screen. It really is a goofy screwball comedy.<br />
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It's almost something out of the Theater of the Absurd, which of course, was designed to produce comedies of manners that not just explore the human condition but the state of human relationships in contemporary sociological terms. Had <i>Hello Again</i> been released in black-and-white people would likely look upon the film differently. Again, it goes back to what Arneheim said about perspective. But there are many films like that.<br />
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<b>CF:</b><i><b> Yes, I never thought that </b></i><b>Hello Again</b><i><b> was nearly as “bad” as critics made it out to be, though it's certainly not a favorite Perry film for me. And your observation about Hepburn and Ball is really on-point. I’m a big fan of </b></i><b>Rancho Deluxe</b><i><b>. I find it one of the great unheralded films of the seventies.</b></i><br />
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<b>JB:</b> Yeah, with <i>Hello Again</i>, Disney/Touchstone really put their foot down on Frank during the shooting. It wasn't a good experience for him. Shelley certainly wasn't Frank's first choice for the film, but because she had ties at Disney, because she had made them money with <i>Outrageous Fortune </i>(1987), they insisted that Frank cast her in the lead role. In the end, Disney had too much input into the film itself, and into Susan Isaac's script, and Susan sort of gave in to their demands regarding the changes they were requesting. Susan's original script for <i>Hello Again</i> is hilarious. The film as it stands now, is also really hacked up from a editorial perspective as well. But, still, in its current state, it's a funny screwball comedy in the spirit of those classic Hollywood films of the '30s and '40s.<br />
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<b>CF:</b><i><b> </b></i><b>Mommie Dearest</b><i><b>? I would have been conflicted covering that film, if I had been the one to do the Frank Perry book. Would I or could I indulge the “so bad it’s good” crowd, who love it for its camp value, or would I forge my own path?</b></i><br />
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<b>JB:</b> <i>Mommie Dearest</i> is another of Frank's films that I feel really has been run under the bus. While, it's become this campy cult classic, I really don't see the film through that lens. I don't see Faye's performance as being over-the-top either.<br />
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<b>CF:</b><i><b> You’re not going to believe this, but I totally agree. From everything I’ve been led to understand about the real Joan Crawford, I can’t help but think that Faye Dunaway’s performance is pretty on-target, though I can still nonetheless totally understand why the camp crowd has a blast with it. But I think the acting and direction are pretty courageous and audacious in that film. I don't even call the scene with the wire hangers "the wire hanger scene." I refer to it in my own head as the Kabuki theater scene, considering Dunaway's face-cream makeup.</b></i><br />
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<b>JB:</b> Again, I think, it's a film that would've been better suited for black-and-white. There's something about color film that conflicts with American film audiences, whereas in a way, it portrays an attempt at reality, and when that reality is segmented or skewed, it really inflicts harm on how we understand that relationship to reality itself, as if a film in color is actually a version of reality. We remember films as if the stories happened to us personally in a way. And there are critics who argue that the film isn't faithful to the book by Christina Crawford as well. Truth be told, Frank Perry and Frank Yablans based their screenplay on not just the Crawford book, but on other sources as well. One book that they were big on was Conversations with Joan Crawford. That was a huge influence on their screenplay. I don't see what Faye Dunway did in that film as being anything different that what Joan Crawford was in something like <i>Strait-Jacket</i> (1964) for example. She was an actress with a Capital "A." Faye's performance is really amazing in the film. I think it's a brilliant film that has a ingenious structure from a narrative perspective, great performances, a lush, old Hollywood-sounding Henry Mancini score, and brilliant direction. Faye and Frank had a good relationship with each other too, certainly they have worked with each other before on <i>'Doc'</i> (1971), another brilliant Perry film.<br />
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<b>CF:</b><i><b> Has anything truly interesting, noteworthy or unpredictable happened amid your investigation into Perry's life?</b></i><br />
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<b>JB:</b> I mean, isn't it all interesting? Certainly it's all noteworthy, and as in all life, rarely predictable. There are aspects to Frank's story that are shocking. Certainly, he earned no points during the Frank and Eleanor Perry divorce, certainly he had a history of not looking back, leaving people important to his life and the sucess of his films in the dust after he didn't need them anymore. His story is tragic on a few levels, awe-inspiring on others, because he was a go-getter. He was self-created. He was independent in the sense that he worked out of New York and that prevented studio interference on much of his work. But make no mistake, his pictures were financed by the studios. They are studio films, and in a weird way, made independently. His childhood was painful, his final years were painful and sad too. He left us too early certainly. One can revel in his guts and audacity as a filmmaker, and also one hopefully will feel a great empathy toward him after his story is completed by me. He was a big personality. That's something that no one really knows about him. Those that knew him well always remember, all these year later, after he's been gone, now for 20 years, as a big personality.<br />
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<i><b>CF: Do you have ideas about how to promote the book considering the slightly more esoteric nature of the subject? I've had to contend a great deal myself with this.</b></i><br />
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<b>JB:</b> Not sure what to say about this. I suppose it's foolish of me to not care about this stuff. But I really don't. I know that doesn't answer your question. I guess it is a cliché for me to suggest that, but its how I feel. I don't work on my projects because I want to be famous or well-known. I don't work on my projects because I want to do anything except explore the subject as it satisfies my own desires for learning and knowledge. The book is almost secondary, really. In the end, I guess I'm really asking a question: What does it matter how you promote your book? What is the means or the goal in doing such? In this day and age, there are no publishing advances for writers. Unless you're a celebrity who is writing a tell-all, forget about it.<br />
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<i><b>CF: Yes, I wrote my book on Sidney purely out of love. When it was released, the onus of promotion was thrust upon me, and my publisher encouraged that I get my hands dirty, which I gladly obliged. I definitely want people to read it, though, and desperately want audiences, new and old, to see the films covered in the book again, so I guess it’s a necessary evil. I’m pushing pushing pushing for people to pick it up, and hoping Sidney gets some mileage out of it. I’m 101% doing it for him more than anything. Sidney himself and his films are very important to me.</b></i><br />
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<b>JB:</b> Yes, my interest is in film, so be interested in film. If your work is any good, then it will find an audience. If not, who cares? It's not like you're going to retire a successful film book writer, right? Do you think Jonathan Rosenbaum is living in a lavish pad in Chicago counting his royalties from his film books? No, but he's one of the great film minds of the twentieth century. That's what Rosenbaum will be remembered for when he's gone some day. Write the book for you. Leave the marketing up to your publisher. If you're worried about marketing yourself, then you're probably working toward the wrong thing in the first place. Rudolph Arneheim probably wasn't concerned with being famous or selling books, so I don't think anyone else should be. At least, if you're a serious film person, that is.<br />
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<b>CF: <i>Thanks for taking the time to talk with ConFluence-Film Blog, Justin! I personally look forward to your Frank Perry book with great anticipation.</i></b><br />
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<br />
<b>Justin also took time discuss the “art” of the interview:</b><br />
<br />
“I've studied, quite a bit, the work of filmmaker/journalist/photographer Lawrence Schiller, who is probably the greatest interviewer in the history of the world. If you want to learn how to interview anyone, study his interview tactics and his overall body of work. He's a genius. I'm lucky enough to know him, as he and I are both involved in the Estate of Norman Mailer, and I've had the opportunity to interview him about interviewing people. When Larry Schiller tells you you're a good interviewer, you know you're on the right track!<br />
<br />
“Interviewing someone, though – the key is to do your research. Don't wait to talk, don't be stuck in your questions. I've gone into interviews with no questions, and I've gone in with one hundred questions. The key is listening. Also, I try to establish some sort of personal connection with my interview subject prior to firing questions at them. I try to make them comfortable. I try to keep it conversational. I want it to be like two old friends talking together. Try to get a good idea of that person's mood in the first couple minutes of talking with them and adjust your approach based around that. Do the research, don't ask questions they've been asked a zillion times prior. Avoid clichéd questions. Read previous interviews with them, see where the previous interviewer faltered, and cover his tracks on your own. Also ask follow-ups to the questions that they were asked in previous interviews. I don't mind open-ended questions, but you need to be careful with them because often times you won't walk away with the answer you need or are looking for, so if you do choose to go in with open-ended questions, be prepared to ask specific follow-ups within their response. Don't be afraid to go after what you're trying to find out. Respect your subject, and don't waste your subjects time either. Keep it fun and respect their art. Know your topic too! Don't interview a first assistant director if you don't know what a first A.D. does on a film set! Respect their craft. Go after what you want, otherwise you won't get it. Don't ask questions you already know the answers too either. It's just a waste of time for all involved. Don't hog their time, be grateful that they agreed to talk with you in the first place, and never believe that you're entitled to their time either because you're sitting down with them, or have them on the phone.”
</div>
DANIEL KREMERhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11702754388135237154noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4383666616230951888.post-29984316396400904712015-11-10T15:13:00.002-08:002015-12-07T11:45:31.917-08:00SIDNEY J. FURIE: LIFE AND FILMS, by Daniel Kremer -- Now Available!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Daniel Kremer's book <i>Sidney J. Furie: Life and Films</i> hit bookstands on November 5, 2015. It is available for purchase in clothbound at <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Sidney-J-Furie-Screen-Classics/dp/0813165962/">Amazon.com</a> and directly from the <a href="http://kentuckypress.com/live/title_detail.php?titleid=3889#.VkJPbKThOt8">publisher's page</a>. The University Press of Kentucky is offering 20% off as part of their annual holiday sale (offer expires after December 2015). The book started as an <a href="http://confluencefilmblog.blogspot.com/2012/06/sidney-j-furie-is-alive-and-well-and.html">article</a> about Furie's films, published on this very blog. From that article sprang a 430-page book. The book comes with 77 photos from behind-the-scenes of Furie's films, as well as stills from the films themselves. It also features never-before-reported stories about Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, Robert Redford, Peter O'Toole, Richard Pryor, and many others. Please also recommend that your local and institutional/university libraries purchase the book.</div>
DANIEL KREMERhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11702754388135237154noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4383666616230951888.post-71395898012969320072015-07-21T13:54:00.000-07:002015-07-21T13:54:08.646-07:00The Leather Boys (1963), Hester Street (1975), and Drive Me to Vegas and Mars (2016)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Keyframe, an online independent film
magazine powered by Fandor, published four of my articles (with a fifth forthcoming and in the queue).<br />
<br />
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<br />
The publication of the first, <a href="https://www.fandor.com/keyframe/leather-boys-and-elastic-love">Elastic Love: A Valley Obscured by Clouds in Sidney J. Furie's </a><i><a href="https://www.fandor.com/keyframe/leather-boys-and-elastic-love">The Leather Boys</a></i>,<i> </i>coincides with Fandor's licensing of the film for <a href="https://www.fandor.com/films/the_leather_boys">streaming in high-definition</a>.<br />
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<br />
The second, <a href="https://www.fandor.com/keyframe/hester-street-and-the-cinema-of-the-pilpul"><i>Hester Street</i> and the Cinema of the Pilpul</a>, covers Joan Micklin Silver's independent classic as it likewise makes its premiere streaming <a href="https://www.fandor.com/films/hester_street">on Fandor in high-definition</a>.<br />
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<br />
The other two are installments in a video-enhanced production diary series from the set of Sidney J. Furie's latest (and last) film, a personal project entitled <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4818722/"><i>Drive Me to Vegas and Mars</i></a>. You can read/view the first <a href="https://www.fandor.com/keyframe/video-diary-drive-me-to-vegas-and-mars">here</a>, and the second <a href="https://www.fandor.com/keyframe/video-diary-2-sidney-j-furies-latest">here</a>. The third and final installment is coming soon! </div>
DANIEL KREMERhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11702754388135237154noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4383666616230951888.post-6115820041746107652015-06-28T09:57:00.003-07:002016-07-05T15:00:02.336-07:00Raise Your Kids on Seltzer: The Filmmaker's Statement<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<br />
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I started with the
title, then I made the film.
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To many artists,
that’s like naming a baby before conceiving the baby in question.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As my film inches
towards its world premiere (a cast, crew, friends and family only
event), I consider the process of having made the film, what it means to me now
that it is complete, and how it has evolved and morphed over the period of its
production.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Years ago, though,
I was struck by a particular combination of words when shooting another
project, a rather unfocused documentary about a close friend, a woman whose
uniqueness is unrivaled.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She then lived
in a small, windowless Upper East Side apartment with her 100-year-old mother
and nineteen cats.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I do not
exaggerate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This arrangement reminded me
at least somewhat of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Grey Gardens</i>
(and as it turns out, she happened to have once been the secretary of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Grey Gardens</i> filmmaker Al Maysles).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Speaking off the cuff about what being Jewish
meant to her growing up on an upstate chicken farm resided over by her beloved
Socialist poet stepfather (whose fifteen minutes of fame came in writing lyrics
to the Paul Robeson tune “Spring Song”), she said, “You know, you had bagels on
Sunday and you raised your kids on seltzer, and that was it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s what I thought it meant to be
Jewish.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I never finished that
particular project because it never really took me anywhere, but the words
“Raise Your Kids on Seltzer” echoed through my synapses years after she first
uttered them.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Over six years
later, her mother is gone (having passed at the age of 101) and the number of
cats has dwindled from nineteen to three.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I knew I wanted to
one day make a film entitled <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Raise Your
Kids on Seltzer</i>, but I could not imagine the subject matter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Would it be about a seltzer dynasty,
kind of like Visconti’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Damned</i>, perhaps replacing that movie family’s metallurgy industry with a soda water empire?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The truth is, I just like the way it
sounded.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was snappy, it was punchy,
it was catchy, and the word “Seltzer” looked attractive to me on paper, and not
just in the merit of the drink itself.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When I shot the
still-in-editing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ezer Kenegdo</i>
throughout 2013 with my collaborator Deniz Demirer in the San Francisco Bay
Area, I had the tremendous fortune of meeting most of the members of the
current Rob Nilsson filmmaking troupe, who are now my fulltime filmmaking
partners following my move to San Francisco in March of this year.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Never let it be said that a single fateful
meeting (in this case, my meeting Deniz and having an epic six-hour conversation
with him on an initial 2012 business trip to San Francisco) cannot dictate the
unpredictable direction your life takes.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On one of my trips
to shoot that project, I was able to catch a rough cut of Rob’s film <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Leap to Take</i>, an ensemble feature set
at a wayfaring birthday bacchanal and shot in a single night (in what was
originally planned as a single unbroken take).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Two minor characters, a sculptress and her blind husband, were played by
Penny Werner and Jeff Kao.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Quite simply,
I found them incredibly funny and charming together onscreen, and thought a
film in which they were front and center playing a married couple would be
priceless.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I even voiced my delight to
Deniz that night, with a cockeyed smile still in the midst of reacting
to them as a team: “I want to make a film with Jeff and Penny.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s my next project.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now, what’s funny
is that I had first met them individually and never saw them together before
seeing them in Rob’s movie.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And I think
Deniz first deemed my random musing a “haha, that’s funny” lark of a
comment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But I was serious.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Really serious.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They really turned my wheels that night, and they
were really only in two scenes.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So, I went about
approaching them to suggest this project.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>All I said to them was, “I want to do a movie where you guys play a
married couple, and I already have the title.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Raise Your Kids on Seltzer</i>.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They were suitably puzzled, as was I.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“I don’t know why, or what any of it has to
do with seltzer, but that’s what I want to call it,” I told them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At the foundation level, I wanted them to
play a corporate video production tagteam notorious for their unintentionally
funny affectations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They were to make
corporate media with style…bad style.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This was, of course, based on my many years working in the world of
corporate media and wanting to scream at the top of my lungs just to spite how
indescribably boring it all was.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
thought, the movie could be about how we all try to enliven the drudgery in our
lives, by injecting it with whatever dose of art and making it personally
fulfilling in spite of itself.<br />
<br />
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</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I didn’t dislike
that idea, but it just wasn’t enough.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It ran
the risk of being precious and twee.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I asked
myself, how could I make it really intriguing?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>So, I probably did what any writer would do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I gave the characters a past.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A doozy of a past.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A humdinger of a past.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As a teenager, I
was rather obsessed with cults and the charismatic individuals at their helm
who had an uncanny power to control people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Mind control as a subject was one in which I was steeped. I knew the most minute details concerning the Manson Family case and the
Jonestown massacre, and would often pour over literature written about
cults.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At many junctures, I got the
feeling that my parents were concerned about this obsession.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So, with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Raise
Your Kids on Seltzer</i>, it was about time I made a film that put my
“magnificent obsession” to use.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I considered <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Martha Marcy May Marlene</i> to be one of
the finest films of the new decade, but I started a regiment of watching and
re-watching slightly older movies about the cult phenomenon, pictures made at
the height of the boom, like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ticket to
Heaven</i> (1981), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Blinded by the Light</i>
(1980), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Split Image</i> (1982), and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Guyana Tragedy</i> (1980).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A fairly consistent but backgrounded element
in these dramas was the figure of the deprogrammer, the person called upon to
kidnap and counsel the main character out of their brainwashed state.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Normally, the deprogrammer enters the story
as the third act begins, and ultimately saves the day.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They are the deus ex machina.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What interested me in watching these films
was something the directors of them didn’t seem to care much about: What kind
of person deprograms cult members for a living?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>How does one become a deprogrammer?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>What are <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">their</i> lives
like?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Only in Ted Kotcheff’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Split Image</i> do we get a sense of the
character of the deprogrammer, played by a deliciously unhinged James
Woods.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But the problem for me was that
the character felt cartoonish and overbaked.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I contacted Jeff
and Penny and told them that they were now playing retired (and all too human) cult deprogrammers
(kind of a good cop/bad cop mom-and-pop operation, if you will) who, in the
last 5-10 years, switched professions to corporate media, and are now running
away from their past.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They ran away from
deprogramming, despite its lucrative-ness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Penny’s first reaction: “Whoa! That’s heavy!”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I expressed my passion for the idea, and with
equal doses of trepidation and excitement, they immediately got to work on
researching the roles, as did I.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As the
center of my own research was the real-life figure of Ted Patrick, the “father
of deprogramming,” and perhaps the most famous in the “business.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Patrick earned a reputation and notoriety
because of his liberal use of physical violence and indiscriminate abuse of all
varieties, in order to initialize the rousing of his subjects from their
mentally comatose state.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was often
met with lawsuits from “clients” after the fact.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All of this reading
and researching of the process fascinated me, but what really intrigued me was
the story of the marriage itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
remembered something that Alan Alda claimed that a friend told him, which
inspired his 1981 comedy <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Four Seasons</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Friendships and relationships go through
seasons: spring, summer, fall, winter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
wanted to examine the winter of a healthy marriage.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I wanted them to get downright nasty and
abusive towards each other, but know deep down that love hadn’t died.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was around then
that the McGuffin of the movie hit me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
had conspired at one point to write a short story about a “snail mail” letter
that makes a claim for a character’s complicity in a suicide.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The letter would suggest that the main
character was named as an “accessory” in the suicide note, or rather a reason
for this person’s decision to kill him/herself, either because of a previous
transgression the character had committed against the deceased, or some other
unknown reason.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The baffled, emotionally
dumbstruck accused would then go about the rest of the story questioning why,
and what he really did to inspire the suicide, questioning his own actions,
grilling and thus torturing himself with guilt.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I worked that concept into the film.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The letter would throw a monkey wrench into both their marriage, and
into their efforts to effectively put their past behind them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It would also jumpstart the rest of the
story.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The deprogrammers would now get
such a letter from one of their ex-clients.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then came the idea
of “ritual,” as it exists in the home.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The notion came to me gradually.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>To what degree are any of us “programmed”?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How much of life and love is based in the
idea of control?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How much do we stoop to
control, and how much do we allow ourselves to be controlled?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I then encountered a literary quotation from
Jorge Luis Borges: “To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible
god.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A few such rituals were deleted
from the final cut, but a vital one that remains involves the dream diary
sequences, in which the characters keep daily written accounts of the dreams
they have, then share them at the breakfast table.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I hatched a subplot idea of a reformed,
ex-cult leader in the couple’s circle, who is ironically being “controlled” and
“programmed” by his own daughter, whose job it is to handle him, especially in
his dealings with potential outside influences (like our main character, in his
efforts to write a book partly about him).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The ideas flowed like a pulsating river current, with one idea bleeding
into another, lending everything an added complexity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>An off-handed comical remark from Penny about
a “twin” single-handedly invented a rich, new aspect of the story, and before
we knew it, we had a strange creature of a movie.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A sasquatch.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I was asked by my mentor Sidney Furie, “It’s really interesting, but
what would you call it?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A comedy?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A thriller?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>A drama?” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I couldn’t answer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I don’t think he expected me to.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A few days before
departing for the west coast (I still lived in New York when the film was
shot), I met up with director Josh Safdie (<i>Daddy Longlegs</i>, the newly released and acclaimed <i>Heaven Knows What</i>)
to record ADR for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ezer Kenegdo</i>, in
which he plays a key role.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At the end, I
told him I was about to embark on shooting <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Raise
Your Kids on Seltzer</i>, and we proceeded to discuss cults, about which he
seemed to have much knowledge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We
discussed “cult leader” Mel Liman, the related appearance of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Zabriskie Point</i> stars Mark Frechette
(“The main purpose of the community is to serve Mel Liman”) and Daria Halprin
on The Dick Cavett Show, what became of Frechette, and what became of Mel
Liman’s “community.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Josh instructed me
to be careful, stating that he tried to write and direct a film about a cult at
one point, and that it just got too messy for him.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Shooting the
project over fourteen days, with nothing but a detailed outline, in late
April/early May 2014, predominantly in Lafayette in the East Bay, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Raise Your Kids on Seltzer</i> quite
organically took root by the time we turned our cameras on.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A “Siamese pickle” that I found in a jar the
night before departing to San Francisco from New York for shooting played a
major role in the first sequence we shot.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>We arrived in the daytime and staged a beautiful scene around the pickle
that night, hitting the ground running.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I started with something I thought would be fun and I knew from their
performances that we were in business.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My trusty cinematographer
Aaron Hollander was back on hand, devising some of his most painterly lighting
and shot design yet (we based much of the visual style on his namesake Adam
Holender’s gorgeous work in Jerry Schatzberg’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Puzzle of a Downfall Child</i>, with its delicate, earthy mix of
exterior and interior light, which spoke to our primary location needs as well
as our themes).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The camera style was to
be deliberate, mostly steady, locked off, with selected moments of
“embedded-war documentary photography,” domestic-style.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Though much of the
film was “stolen” guerrilla-style in terms of shooting strategy, we shot most
of the film in a house belonging to two of our friends, who were moving out of
it at the end of the month.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So, we went
into it knowing there was no possibility of reshoots (as the house would also
to be redesigned and renovated after move-out).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The house, however, was too perfect not to use and, with its wide-open
windows, suggested many high-concept motivations for its use.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Those who live in glass houses shouldn’t
throw stones,” for one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Another idea for
me was the couple being, in a way, exposed, out in the open for all to
see.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There were no secrets anymore.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Look inside and you can see them at their
most pathetic with little effort.<br />
<br />
One of the great discoveries of the film was the 17-year-old actress Nancy Kimball, who made her feature debut in <i>Raise Your Kids on Seltzer</i>, after starring in a short film called <i>Charlie</i> co-starring the great Andrea Marcovicci the previous year. It is rare that I shoot only one take on any scene or piece of coverage. Usually, I am always in favor of doing "one more for safety," but Nancy so impressed all of us, especially me, on her first major day of shooting a big emotional scene that I opted to move on without even thinking for a moment that we could get it better. She is a prodigy, a rare breed of young actor who is truly and absolutely born for it. She has a bright future ahead. Unfortunately, Nancy will not be able to make it to the premiere because she is away at an acting camp this summer.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At this point, we
still didn’t really have a handle on the title’s meaning.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I concocted that it was a mantra they used
when deprogramming: “Raise your kids on seltzer, bubble per bubble.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The best things are the most painful going
down.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The code for the deprogramming
location became “the RYKOS center,” and the film itself became commonly known
as Rykos.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Only after picture wrap on
principal photography did someone inquire, “Does the title have anything to do
with Kool-Aid?”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The problem was thus
immediately solved.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“For those who’d
rather not drink the Kool-Aid, raise your kids on seltzer!”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We went back to include it later in the
pickup shots.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The title also speaks to
the theme of complacency.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Kool-Aid is
sweet and non-abrasive.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Seltzer is
refreshing because of its roughness; the bubbles seizes the throat and, when
the carbonation is potent, provides a wake-up call to the gullet and the taste
buds.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The central marriage in the film
needs such an awakening from complacency.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Two additional
pick-up scenes included a special appearance from actor Barry Newman (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vanishing Point</i>, “Petrocelli”, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Limey</i>), who did me a favor in
playing the attorney of the film’s central Neoneida (Nee-oh-nigh-dah) cult.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The name Neoneida
is a conflation of Neo and Oneida, adopting the principles of John Humphrey
Noyes’s original Oneida colony, founded in the 1860’s, whose members practiced
free love, complex marriage (a polite word for polygamy) and believed in the
notion of Perfectionism (bringing about the Christian milennial kingdom on
Earth, freeing oneself of sin in this life, and being perfect in this world and
not just the next).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>John Humphrey Noyes
is a historical figure that has fascinated me since my high school days, mostly
because I perceived him very much as an early cult leader in America, and
because his community possessed all the qualities of a cult and what one does
to its members.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Editing proved a
formidable challenge because of the number and variety of story threads, and
how they subsisted on each other and flowed into each other.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You couldn’t excise one of the threads
without affecting or negatively impacting the others.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As I joked with Aaron and the cast, “I think
maybe we got too ambitious on this one.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Narratively, the film was a juggling act during the post-production
process.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was akin to arranging and
conducting for a mega orchestra.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I had
to establish the nine individual plot threads, fade them out for some stretches,
bring in another, fade that one out, bring in another, etc. while considering
how they would cohesively fit into the film’s larger context.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Success came only in striking the most
delicate balance.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The film took the
better part of a whole year to reach an assembly cut.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In addition to the fact that I was trying to
finish my book on Sidney J. Furie, the meticulous plot thread “orchestration” took
time and care.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And because the film was
improvised within tight parameters, every take was different.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Raise Your Kids on Seltzer</i> has screened
four times in rough cut form and, with each successive screening, I made
adjustments and organized two important reshoots.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was during this stage of the process that
I was made aware of the movie <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Faults</i>,
an independent film about a former deprogrammer employed to spring a young
woman from the cult of the title.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was
motified when I discovered it, because I was convinced that I had something
utterly original.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I saw my way to
actually scoring a copy of the film, but upon seeing it, I was relieved to
discover that not only was it a radically different film, but that I also
didn’t care for it very much.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now, it is in
picture lock mode.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The film is as good as I hoped it would be
with the material shot, and reactions have been fairly uniformly positive and,
I daresay, even enthusiastic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Like I had
hoped, people connect with the couple’s story, seeing the cult material as an
intriguing and compelling backdrop for the story of a relationship.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I look forward to unleashing it to audiences
after the premiere screening next month. It is a quantum leap forward for me in terms of my own filmmaking, and was a personal triumph for me in the creative process.<br />
<br />
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DANIEL KREMERhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11702754388135237154noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4383666616230951888.post-86065898578074931252015-05-27T10:15:00.004-07:002015-05-27T15:07:41.869-07:00Coming Soon: Daniel Kremer's Book, Sidney J. Furie: Life and Films<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="http://kentuckypress.com/live/series_detail.php?seriesID=SCCL">University Press of Kentucky Screen Classics Series</a> is releasing Daniel Kremer's first book <i>Sidney J. Furie: Life and Films</i>
on November 5, 2015. Award-winning biographer Patrick McGilligan is the
series editor at Screen Classics, and the Foreword of the book was
written by Piers Handling, head of the Toronto International Film
Festival. Learn more about the book <a href="http://kentuckypress.com/live/title_detail.php?titleid=3889#.VWXOsqbhOt8" target="_blank">here</a> and pre-order it on Amazon.com <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Sidney-J-Furie-Screen-Classics/dp/0813165962/ref=ed_oe_h" target="_blank">here</a>. The same press also published Nick
Dawson's <i>Being Hal Ashby: Life of a Hollywood Rebel</i> and Marilyn Ann Moss's <i>Raoul Walsh: The True Adventures of Hollywood's Legendary Director</i>. Their recent releases include <i>Dalton Trumbo: Blacklisted Hollywood Radical</i>, by Larry Ceplair and Christopher Trumbo, and <i>Charles Walters: The Director Who Made Hollywood Dance</i>,
by Brent Phillips. Kremer's book, written and researched with the
collaboration and cooperation of Sidney J. Furie himself, details the
life of the venerable director of <i>The Ipcress File</i> (1965), <i>The Leather Boys </i>(1964), <i>Lady Sings the Blues</i> (1972), <i>The Appaloosa </i>(1966),<i> Little Fauss and Big Halsy</i> (1970),<i> The Boys in Company C</i> (1978), <i>The Entity </i>(1982), <i>Iron Eagle </i>(1986),
and many others. The book features interviews with Michael Caine, Rita
Tushingham, R. Lee Ermey, Billy Dee Williams, and many
others. A full-length biographical documentary film, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3742954/"><i>Sidney J. Furie: Fire Up the Carousel!</i></a>,
is also in production as the veteran director steps into making one
last personal film on a shoestring budget in Las Vegas and Los Angeles. The title originates from the Frank Borzage quote, "When you make pictures for studios, you are just operating the
carousel, disengaged but vigilant. When you make personal pictures, you
fire up the carousel."
Stay tuned for further updates!<br />
<br />
<b>"How wonderful that there is finally a book about Sidney Furie, one of
the best directors in the whole of my career . . . and one of my
greatest friends. I wouldn't have had a career without him!"</b> ―Michael
Caine<br />
<br />
<b>"One hell of a book on one hell of a director, with one hell of a career! I originally wanted to make <i>The Godfather</i>
with him but wound up working with him on two other pictures―and had
about as good a time as I ever had on a movie set. Sidney J. Furie is
one of the favorite directors of my career, and now, finally, there is a
book to tell his story. He has survived fifty years as a filmmaker on
grit, determination, and genius . . . especially genius!"</b> ―Albert S.
Ruddy, producer of <i>The Godfather, The Longest Yard,</i> and <i>Million Dollar Baby</i><br />
<br />
Meanwhile, Kremer is signing with Oxford University Press, under series editor Gary Giddins (<i>Warning Shadows: Home Alone With Classic Cinema</i>, <i>Weather Bird: Jazz at the Dawn of the Second Century</i>), for his book on director Joan Micklin Silver (<i>Hester Street</i>, <i>Chilly Scenes of Winter</i>, <i>Crossing Delancey</i>)<i>.</i></div>
DANIEL KREMERhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11702754388135237154noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4383666616230951888.post-13565062946853352512015-03-23T09:27:00.002-07:002015-05-20T16:03:05.882-07:00ConFluence-Film Moves to the San Francisco Bay Area!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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I’m moving to San Francisco this week, so on the eve of this momentous relocation, I took a moment to consider my favorite San Francisco-set films and decided to write about them. I am going to bypass the usual titles included on such a list, so please do not kvetch about my neglect of <i>Vertigo</i>, <i>Bullitt</i>, <i>The Conversation</i>, <i>Dirty Harry</i>, <i>Point Blank</i>, <i>Invasion of the Body Snatchers</i> (1978), <i>Zodiac</i> or any of the other canonical San Francisco titles. Briefly, I will digress and just say, for the record, that <i>Zodiac</i> is my favorite Fincher film, and beyond that, simply sounds the least “recited” and the least overwritten of Fincher’s films. I found his most recent offering, <i>Gone Girl</i>, distasteful, far-fetched and flat-out ridiculous, and I felt overly conscious of the actors reciting "precision-timed" dialogue.<br />
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<br />
<b>1. <u><i>The Strawberry Statement</i></u> (1970, Stuart Hagmann)</b> Whenever I think San Francisco and film, I think immediately of this movie, produced by MGM during a troubled era of their history that saw studio head James Aubrey greenlighting unusual projects like this one, then taking power away from the director in final cut. Nothing much happened to this one in that department, thankfully. I saw it at the age of twelve or thirteen, and it became what San Francisco and the Bay Area means cinematically to me. Winner of the Cannes Film Festival Grand Jury Prize, it is intriguingly packed with visual gimmicks, some that are of course dated, and others that are ravishing and still original. While its source, James Kunen’s book <i>The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary</i>, covers Columbia’s student activism, the film’s subject, the Berkeley campus riots, is rife with rich Bay Area history, and its soundtrack, by Crosby Stills Nash and Young, Neil Young solo, Thunderclap Newman, Buffy Saint-Marie and others, is out of this world. I had the pleasure back in 2009 of meeting actor Bruce Davison at a DGA screening of a Henry Jaglom film, and speaking with him about making <i>The Strawberry Statement</i>. Rembering the brouhahas surrounding the shooting of the film on the Berkeley campus put a nostalgic smile on his face. Davison's comments to me about shooting echoed the opening title crawl that coyly thanked the school with a detectable degree of tongue-in-cheek irony. Critics of the time dug it, then, within just a few years, trashed it in retrospect as a faded relic. I love it and have seen it a ton of times and know many of the lines by heart. We are all conditioned by films we see at the youngest of ages, and I find that I am prone to connecting specific early viewing experiences to places, feelings, dreams I had for my own future. Of all movies, Brian De Palma’s <i>Greetings!</i> (1968) exemplified the call of New York City. <i>The Strawberry Statement</i> is my San Francisco, a San Francisco best defined in my own mind. The film is filled with a line-up of memorable sequences, including its frightening finale, a harrowing, graphically violent police raid during a student sit-in. The supporting cast is something of a who’s-who, including Bud Cort, Jeannie Berlin, Bob Balaban, James Coco, Michael Margotta, Bert Remsen (an Altman and Ashby repertory player), and the film’s screenwriter, playwright Israel Horovitz. Recently, the Warner Archive Collection of DVD's released the film on a double-disc set, one with the original theatrical cut and the other with an extended international version. Boy, do I love distributors who care about stuff like that!<br />
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<b>2. <u><i>Signal 7</i></u> (1983, Rob Nilsson)</b> One of the earliest film shot in video and then transferred to 35mm, this ensemble film about actors moonlighting as taxi drivers is inspirational to any filmmaker directing flicks on the cheap. It proves Rob's status as a pioneer and true visionary. I wrote about the film back in ’09 <a href="http://confluencefilmblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/10-great-movies-youve-likely-never-seen.html">here</a>.<br />
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<b>3. <u><i>Bushman</i></u> (1971, David Schickele)</b> I feel grateful that Rob Nilsson was kind enough to get the filmmaker's widow Gail Schickele to send me a video copy of this just a few months ago. Rob, who had been close personal friends with David Schickele (the brother of P.D.Q. Bach creator Peter Schickele), spoke to me of it many times as a masterpiece and as one of his favorite films. He also formally named it as one of the best films ever made in the Bay Area in a <a href="http://www.focusfeatures.com/article/rob_nilsson">Focus Films website showcase</a>. Rob couldn't be more on-point in this case. It's one of the most stellar examples of the fiction-documentary hybrid, much like Robert Kramer’s <i>Milestones</i> (1975), but somewhat less sprawling and more focused towards an engagement with its chief subject. Shot in gritty black and white, <i>Bushman</i> has Schickele following an African student named Gabriel who matriculates into a San Francisco college and struggles to resolve personal and racial issues that have become central to his life after having uprooted himself. It is almost as if Bay Area filmmaker Marlon Riggs’s seminal documentary <i>Black Is, Black Ain’t</i> (1994) picks up where this film leaves off, especially in a scene in which Gabriel’s girlfriend instructs him on the finer points of the black-American street dialect, only to humorously fail. The San Francisco Film Society says it best when they write, “One is immediately struck by the juxtaposition of African outlooks and California urban life, especially in the sudden flashback to Gabriel’s Nigerian village, with its simplicities contrasted to the complex life-hustle of a Fillmore existence. For the first time in American cinema, an educated African elucidates in a no-nonsense manner, the bewildering ineptness of American society to live humanistically, with every opportunity to do this either ignored or thwarted. Because one begins to see black-American life through African eyes, certain revelations occur.” <i>Bushman</i> is an astounding, tragically obscure wonder that should be seen by a much wider audience. Schickele, who saw to editing duties for John Korty’s <i>Funnyman</i> (1967), Corr and Gessner’s <i>Over-Under Sideways-Down</i> (covered below), and Rob Nilsson’s <i>Chalk</i> (also covered below), also directed other deserving but unseen films like <i>Give Me a Riddle</i> (1966) and <i>Tuscarora</i> (1992). <i>Bushman</i>, though, seems his greatest personal contribution to the art, taking home the Chicago International Film Festival's award for Best First Feature.<br />
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<b>4. <i>Over-Under Sideways-Down</i> (1977, Eugene Corr)</b> I had the great pleasure of meeting filmmaker Gene Corr through Rob, and Gene was kind enough to procure me a DVD copy of the film a couple years ago. Produced by the Socialist film collective Cine Manifest (of which Rob and Eugene were members, and which also produced the award-winning <i>Northern Lights</i>), this is one of the best depictions of the working class that has ever been committed to screen, with an excellent lead performance by Robert Viharo, a seeming staple performer in San Francisco independent cinema. In terms of American cinema, I'd put it next to Paul Schrader's <i>Blue Collar</i> (1978). I wrote about this in 2013 <a href="http://confluencefilmblog.blogspot.com/2013/01/my-movie-camp-vacation.html">here</a>.<br />
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<b>5. <u><i>Riverrun</i></u> (1970, John Korty)</b> Next to Nilsson and Schickele, Korty is certainly my favorite Bay Area filmmaker and this is my favorite of his films. I could just as easily write about and include his films <i>The Crazy-Quilt</i> (1966) and <i>Funnyman</i> (1967) on this list, and in many ways this is more a John Korty entry on the list than it is one that is solely about <i>Riverrun</i>. Shot in Mill Valley, the latter is a simple three-character drama, and exemplifies what good, down and dirty independent filmmaking spirit is all about. And the kicker: this was financed by Columbia Pictures in the immediate aftermath of the success of their own <i>Easy Rider</i> (1969). At that time, they also had a multi-picture deal with BBS Productions (which produced the latter, as well as <i>Five Easy Pieces</i>, <i>The Last Picture Show</i> and others), but gave <i>Riverrun</i> much less heft than those indie-esque enterprises, unceremoniously dumping this unapologetically arty picture. Drop-dead beautiful images play in concert with some interesting performances by three unknowns. The poster had the perspicacity to recognize how the movie considers how the characters assume archetypal roles in nature: “Air, Earth, Fire, Water. Mother, Son, Father, Daughter. All the elements are in <i>Riverrun</i>.” Korty once said in an interview that, “My first thought was, I want to make a film about salt water and grass and earth and wind and old wood, the texture of the farmhouse, and about animals and about flesh. To me, these are the building blocks.” This artistic intent is fulfilled as early as in the film’s opening, which focuses closely on these textures and surfaces, and in later sequences as in the one in which the young man and woman witness in amazement the birth of a new baby sheep. Even in the scene in which the young woman gives birth to her own child, there is a preoccupation with textures that one can feel with everything that surrounds her, because the audience has become so predisposed to noticing such things by that point in the picture. One might call such seeming digressions “still lifes,” but there is something about the way Korty frames all of this, stitches into the very fabric of the film, which makes all this about the environs somehow very much alive.<br />
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<b>6. <u><i>Good Neighbor Sam</i></u> (David Swift, 1964)</b> I’ll “go Hollywood” for this entry. The underrated and now obscure David Swift was the director of sixties screwball-ish comedies, specifically in the Hawks tradition, with more than a dash of Frank Tashlin…but all with a decidedly different set of vocal cords. How Sarris missed Swift in his otherwise comprehensive 1968 auteurist study, <i>The American Cinema</i>, is a head-scratcher. In this old-fashioned but incongruously irreverent 130-minute romp, adapted from a comic novel by the author of <i>Invasion of the Body Snatchers</i>, Swift keenly satirizes the American preoccupation with conservative “wholesome family values” based in quasi-Puritanical morality, the loathsome deception beneath, and the standards and expectations within an obstinate society that holds such rooted things as paramount. Arching over all of this is a simultaneously caustic and zany view of corporate America, and the individual conformists and yes-men within it. The film, then, remarkably, remains relevant and perceptive even today, despite the period trappings themselves having dated -- and, specifically as a self-aware snapshot of sixties suburbia, it also manages to be quite discerning about the essential American delusion. Jack Lemmon plays a San Francisco ad agency man (and Marin suburbanite) whose career takes a turn towards upward mobility when he scores a major account, that of a dairy corporation run by a wholesome, pious family man (played by none other than Edward G. Robinson) who is a notorious and almost Fascistic self-appointed spokesperson for the aforementioned wholesome family values (Anita Bryant, anyone?). When Lemmon’s wife’s old college friend (Romy Schneider) moves next door, and announces that she stands to inherit $15 million from her grandfather’s estate, things look even rosier. However, according to a clause in her grandfather’s will, she must be happily married, and living according to the expectations of conventional western womanhood, before she can even lay her hands on a dime. When Lemmon and his wife agree that he should masquerade as her husband for a percentage of the take, hijinks ensue. The film’s sprawling third act, in which Lemmon goes on a rampage of defacing his company’s billboards, stacks the set pieces, and veers further into becoming a frenetic, high-impact farce. One must, as always, consider the time in which this film was made. America in 1964 was on the very doorstep of the cultural and political breakdown, and a revolution that, for the first time, would call into question the values roasted in this film. The revolution would attempt to radically subvert these values, and this film does so satirically well before the culture took hold of itself. Apart from that, its use of San Francisco as a location is often unique and, for the time of its release, quite fresh. Corporate satires were, after all, far more prevalent in the New York milieu. And that cast! Lemmon, Robinson, Schneider, Dorothy Provine, and a host of recognizable character actors are all clearly having a good time.<br />
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<i>Endnote:</i> Someone should do a study of Swift’s career (not that it would gross any sizable audience, but he should be given a new look somewhere). He is perhaps most known for directing the Disney vehicles <i>Polyanna</i> (1960) and <i>The Parent Trap</i> (1961), but developed into more of an auteur when he broke free of the Disney machine. Other films include: <i>The Interns</i> (1962), <i>Love is a Ball</i> (1963), <i>Under the Yum-Yum Tree</i> (1963) and the big screen adaptation of <i>How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying</i> (1967).<br />
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<b>7. <u><i>Chalk</i></u> (1996, Rob Nilsson)</b> Another great Nilsson film, set in a murky world of pool hustlers and two-bit bikers and barroom denizens, and his longest at 139 minutes. It does feel ambitious and epic and it is, again, inspirational. And no film, with its candy-colored neon smoke and haze, looks like it. As per standard procedure, Nilsson also directs the action so that we buy that what we are seeing is actually happening in reality, to an extent that even the most able and nimble of directors would flagellate themselves for a lack of.<br />
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<b>8. <u><i>Watched!</i></u> (1974, John Parsons)</b> An independently produced foray into pre-Watergate paranoia cinema, set in a then-future 1980, starring Stacy Keach as an ex-District Attorney busted on a 1969 drug charge who is now holed up in a rundown loft trying to make sense of his past via old home movies, reel-to-reel audio tapes, diaries, and black-and-white police surveillance footage. Through flashbacks, we as the audience piece everything together. Once Keach’s character gussies himself up as a Mafia kingpin in an effort to exact revenge on his old nemesis, played by Harris Yulin (Keach’s personal friend and co-star in 1970’s equally surreal <i>End of the Road</i>), things get batshit-crazy. A critic at the Atlanta Film Festival called the film “a fantastic cocaine nightmare.” One wonders what Keach was doing with this, slumming it in what appears to be a weird experimental, underground movie. This one, overall, in story and content, is a head-scratcher, but as I see it, a fascinating and worthwhile head-scratcher. Dig it…and dig for it.<br />
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<b>9. <u><i>Nocturnal Jake</i></u> (2009, Deniz Demirer)</b> I wrote about this film, directed by my good friend Deniz Demirer, in the early part of 2013. You can read that review <a href="http://confluencefilmblog.blogspot.com/2013/01/my-movie-camp-vacation.html">here</a>.<br />
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<b>10. <u><i>Shoot the Moon</i></u> (1982, Alan Parker)</b> This MGM-produced chamber drama, about a messy divorce between Albert Finney and Diane Keaton, features one of the most jaw-dropping domestic scenes I can recall. In it, the eldest of Finney and Keaton’s four daughters refuses the birthday gift that Finney has brought to the house after moving out and taking up with mistress Karen Allen. When Keaton also attempts to keep him out of the house, he forces his way in, literally throws Keaton outside on her ass, then charges up the steps to his daughter’s bedroom. When his daughter likewise shuts the door on him, he breaks that one down and proceeds to give her a whipping for disrespecting him and his love. A free-for-all develops between Finney, the victimized daughter and the rest of the girls. The thing of it is, that, up until that point in the movie, Finney’s character has been depicted as a non-violent and quite loving father. This bout of domestic abuse and violence is unusual for him and shocking to us. This flawed film, scripted by Bo Goldman (<i>One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest</i>, <i>Melvin and Howard</i>), is full of moments you would never expect from such a studio endeavor. Indeed, in scenes like these, the film almost feels like Cassavetes at his most frantic. Interestingly enough, I saw this at the age of fourteen on my first visit to the Bay Area, staying with longtime friend and documentarian Peter Nicks (<i>The Waiting Room</i>). Pete, do you remember watching this one with me and being equally shocked by the scene I describe? I’ll never forget what I felt when I saw that traumatic scene at that young, tender age.<br />
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<b>Honorable Mentions:</b><br />
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<b><u><i>The Laughing Policeman</i></u> (1973, Stuart Rosenberg)</b> Many homophobic slurs are let loose in this decidedly non-progressive detective story/cop thriller, which despite its title has nothing comedic whatsoever to justify its name, even Walter Matthau in the lead role. However, there are many things about it that make it more than just palatable. The descent into the “underworld” of porn theaters, strip clubs and the like of San Francisco that Matthau and his partner Bruce Dern take, makes for memorable detective cinema, as they attempt to find the gunman of a transit-bus massacre through learning as much as they can about the dead victims of it. The final chase sequence is one I’d stack against any other from a filmic era armed to the teeth with chase sequences.<br />
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<b><u><i>A Christmas Without Snow</i></u> (1980, John Korty)</b> John Korty directed this made-for-television picture, more promising than its exhibitional fate would indicate, casting John Houseman in a classic Paper Chase-esque role, as a stern church choirmaster who attempts to whip a team of amateur vocalists in shape for a Christmas performance of Handel’s Messiah. It features a memorable monologue by Houseman, about the origin of the word “amateur”: "Mrs. Burns is right, of course; you are amateurs, unlike certain
pseudo-professionals like myself who insist on slave wages. Your
voluntary and steadfast attendance at these rehearsals fully qualifies
you for any definition of the word "amateur". What Mrs. Burns and many
others are wrong about is the meaning of the word, which has to do with
motivation, not quality. Remember "amo, amat, amas", the Latin verb "to
love". The meaning of "amateur" is "he or she who does a thing for the
love of it". There is no higher reason for singing than the love of
doing it. In that respect, you do qualify as amateurs. And I salute you
for it." <br />
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<b><u><i>Experiment in Terror</i></u> (1963, Blake Edwards)</b> Edwards took a radical turn away from <i>Breakfast at Tiffany’s</i> (1961) and <i>Days of Wine and Roses</i> (1962) with this intriguing genre “experiment,” certainly a far cry from his other work. With scenes set all over the San Francisco area, including Twin Peaks and a finale in Candlestick Park, this is a good one to catch on a lonely night. It also features one of Henry Mancini’s greatest scores.<br />
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<b>P.S.</b> I don't "get" the love letters and homilies written to Richard Lester's San Francisco-set <i>Petulia</i> (1968) and I feel very alone on this front. I’ve heard the word “masterpiece” bandied about in regard to this film. Far from it, really. Very far from it. It’s interesting in many ways, and has its moments, but is alas incredibly flawed. I respect Lester and understand his important place in the history of cinema, but I am rather personally immune to many of his charms. <i>A Hard Day's Night</i> (1964), <i>The Bed-Sitting Room</i> (1969) and <i>Juggernaut</i> (1974) are actually the only films of his I can take seriously, though I grew up with the Superman films and think there is intellectually (yes, intellectually) more to <i>Superman III</i> than meets the eye, despite a considerably larger number of flaws. If only <i>Petulia</i> had been directed by its cinematographer Nicolas Roeg, then it might have been something more. Sorry, this is just my personal opinion. It does use the city well, though. I'll say that for it. </div>
DANIEL KREMERhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11702754388135237154noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4383666616230951888.post-21459947317451322392015-01-01T07:59:00.001-08:002015-01-01T08:02:16.600-08:00New Literary Projects, In Utero<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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As my first book, a biography/monograph of film director Sidney J. Furie, awaits publication in August 2015 from University Press of Kentucky's Screen Classics Series, I have taken on two other literary projects akin to this first one. One is the first published biography on the life of film actress Karen Black. Black's widower Stephen Eckelberry, an old friend, has brought me on to pen the project. I personally knew Karen Black quite well, having lived with her and Stephen for a couple months in the summer of 2008. The other is the first biography of film director Joan Micklin Silver (<i>Hester Street</i>, <i>Chilly Scenes of Winter</i>, <i>Crossing Delancey</i>, <i>Between the Lines</i>,<i> Finnegan Begin Again</i>). I am currently taping sessions with Joan Micklin Silver in New York, after having met her at an anniversary screening of <i>Chilly Scenes of Winter</i> (1979) at the IFC Centre. In addition to all this, my upcoming feature-length drama, <i>Raise Your Kids on Seltzer</i>, has a projected completion of March 2015. That's just two months away! Stay tuned, and happy new year!<br />
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DANIEL KREMERhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11702754388135237154noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4383666616230951888.post-71344792994242530742014-12-10T14:19:00.003-08:002015-01-01T08:13:51.661-08:00On the Critic-Proofing of Artists, and the Irresistible Allure of Flaws<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
This is the first post I have made on this blog in quite some time. The manuscript of my upcoming book, <i>Sidney J. Furie: A Filmmaker Works the Angles</i>, has finally been submitted to my publisher and I am moving on to finish editing on my two features, <i>Ezer Kenegdo</i> and <i>Raise Your Kids on Seltzer</i>. More to come on the blog soon, including Aaron Hollander's long-awaited article, a survey piece on the horror genre.<br />
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I realized something about myself over the course of writing my first book -- that I, in many ways, strive to be the champion of the un-championed and under-championed when it comes to my study of film. Fair enough, you say, but why is this such an epiphany?<br />
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I feel that identifying as such gets regularly equated with being a contrarian. I actually do not see myself as a contrarian, but if you wish to label me thus, I suppose it is not so far off, in a way. In conversations with people about film over the years, though, I find myself immediately peeved over the fact that there are some directors I am not free to openly criticize, filmmakers with works to which I am supposed to feel beholden -- or, works that I am cornered into blindly admiring to suit the expectations of canonists. As someone who routinely (and religiously) consults Andrew Sarris's milestone text <i>The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968</i>, and as one without hesitation in valuing Sarris's work over Pauline Kael's in their infamous schism, I still cannot help feeling that, in many ways, Sarris pigeonholed auteurist study, and became too much of a taste-maker for his own good, inadvertently or otherwise. He deserves credit most of all for importing the auteur theory of France to America, but he also did his part in critic-proofing many directors he used to make his case.<br />
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I enjoy playing a game I invented called the Auteur Game, i.e. coming up with a pithy statement that encapsulates a given director's work when it comes to theme and approach. We often play it on my movie sets, at lunches and the occasional downtime between takes. For instance, Norman Jewison: "Easy-to-package, easy-to-digest messages, often with a salt-of-the-earth ethnic angle (Jews in <i>Fiddler on the Roof</i>, Italians in <i>Moonstruck</i>, Russians in <i>The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! </i>Bohunks and Eastern Europeans in <i>F.I.S.T.</i>)" It is also rather fun to consider what Sarris might have written about filmmakers who arrived on the scene after his book was published in 1969. A good one for Ted Kotcheff (<i>Wake in Fright</i>, <i>The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz</i>, <i>Weekend at Bernie's</i>): "Renders stories about often reckless social climbers, or less specifically, people looking to break out of some kind of trap, in whatever degree of comedy or tragedy." Who knows what Sarris would have made of Paul Thomas Anderson or Richard Linklater?<br />
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When the spirit moves me to check into a book about Hitchcock, I first turn to the chapter about <i>Topaz</i> (1969), one of his major flops. In my recent reading of Jared Brown's biography on Alan J. Pakula, the very first thing I did was open to the chapter on <i>Dream Lover</i> (1984), <i>Orphans</i> (1987) and <i>See You in the Morning </i>(1989), to see what Pakula possibly had to say about three of his biggest misfires. This to me is more of a window into the soul of an artist. It says much more than any masterpiece (and the holy-holies and hosannahs that a masterpiece incites) can ever say. When I look at any book on Joseph Losey, I first turn to the chapters on <i>Modesty Blaise</i> (1966) and/or <i>Boom!</i> (1967), two of his most embarrassing flops. I also place great value on self-critical directors, and was delighted to discover that Pakula spoke frankly about what he perceived as drawbacks, even in his hits. That's real. That's the good stuff, and I do not care that anyone else may think I'm misguided in this approach. I learn the most as a filmmaker and as a film scholar from excerpts like these. I can faintly hear a Hitch cultist protesting, "Hitchcock had no need to call out his own cinematic flaws!" What a pity -- we might have learned something more incisive about the man's art! Instead, we just have people making vacuous Hitchcock homages without understanding what they mean. A flop, a bomb, a misfire, or whatever you care to call a perceived failure, is an index, one that emboldens and guides deeper study.<br />
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I am not denying the fact that figures like Hitchcock, Hawks, Ford and others have the right to be called masters, definitive ones at that, but when I am to accept them as infallible demigods and when I am nothing but obliged to stand back in awe without being given the courtesy of looking at their respective corpus with a real critical eye, one that I feel might truly get to the heart of them and what they are about, as individuals as well as artists, I start losing interest in them. I will try to divert a conversation about Hitchcock to a conversation about something or someone else. If I cannot discuss them in this way, what worth are they to me? Kubrick has likewise positioned himself as untouchable, I believe partly because of the personal mythologies that have built up around the man as a recluse, an eccentric, an iconoclast, an obsessive, a...genius (though, I still emphasize that I love Kubrick's work, flaws and all, and revisit his pictures at least once a year). In certain cases, it would seem that this critic-proofing centers around the cult of the personality.<br />
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But, as Mozart says in Peter Shaffer's <i>Amadeus</i>, "Come on now, be honest! Which one of you wouldn't rather listen to his hairdresser than Hercules? Or Horatius, or Orpheus...people so lofty they sound as if they shit marble!" This is not to equate Hitchcock or Kubrick with Hercules or Orpheus, or to equate my contenders with hairdressers. What I look for in true artistry, however, are beautiful flaws, ones that canonists are often eager to claim do not exist in works that they deem beyond reproach, despite lame protestations on their part that this is not so. Sarris was among this breed, though his writings are deserving of praise and were rightly groundbreaking in their time. There is also Jonathan Rosenbaum's text <i>Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons</i> to perpetuate these tendencies.<br />
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[from Woody Allen's <i>Small Time Crooks</i> (1999)]<br />
<b>David (Hugh Grant):</b> What type of paintings are you interested in buying for your collection?<br />
<b>Frenchy (Tracey Ullman):</b> Uh, Rembrandt, Picasso, Michelangelo. You know, the boys.<br />
<b>David:</b> <i>[sarcastically]</i> Uh huh, yes. I'm afraid I might be out of Michelangelos at the moment.<br />
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My Sidney J. Furie literary project has been met with as much intrigue and applause as it has met with cold but courteous dismissal. It is interesting to note that the personalities in the film world that originally mattered the most to me are the ones who ultimately saw the value in it when I finally met or made contact with them. (Intuition is a funny thing.) The detractors, who shall remain nameless, are people who, in the ensuing time it took to write the book, were keen to write the umpteenth piece that worships one of "the boys" (Hitch, Hawks, Ford, et al.). I can cite at least three examples, and I would do so here if I didn't have to fear retribution, even the meager variety brandished by scholars, aesthetes and film snobs. To me, it just spells ignorance and obstinance. Thankfully, I found a leading publisher and a series editor who found the project ripe with potential. I was also consoled by this thought: Who in the U.S. took Howard Hawks seriously before Peter Bogdanovich's famous Hawks monograph?<br />
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Let us take, for example, more recognized directors whose careers often took left turns. Case study number one: Robert Altman. Whereas Altman is certainly beloved, and no one will begrudge him his successes and the advancements he made in the form, he still has not ascended the canonical heights the way that "the boys" have. For every <i>Nashville</i> (1975), there is an<i> O.C. & Stiggs </i>(1985). For every <i>McCabe and Mrs. Miller</i> (1971), there is a <i>Beyond Therapy</i> (1987). This is not to mention other written-off works in Altman's wildly scattershot, but seductively fascinating, oeuvre, like <i>Quintet</i> (1979), <i>Popeye</i> (1980), <i>HealtH</i> (1980), <i>Ready to Wear</i> (1994), <i>The Gingerbread Man</i> (1998), <i>Dr. T and the Women</i> (1999).<br />
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However, the truth in my case is that I would rather watch any of those films in lieu of seeing <i>Bringing Up Baby</i> (1938) or <i>Psycho</i> (1960) repeated times, just because of how beautifully flawed all those films are, and how ready and enthusiastic the Altman fans are to discuss these flaws. If I told Hitchcock cultists that <i>The Birds</i> (1963) is a horrendous piece of shit (as I believe it is) and Hitch's worst film by far, I would be ostracized and ridiculed, even if I were to specifically, respectfully and responsibly remunerate why I believed such a thing. Same with Hawks's <i>Gentlemen Prefer Blondes </i>(1953), another work I find wildly overpraised. Or Ford's <i>The Searchers (1956)</i>, though I know for a fact that I'm not alone in this sentiment regarding that particular film.<br />
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Altman's work has a vulnerability when put under the critical microscope. That to me is attractive, because it more fully reveals the man who is behind and beneath the work. What makes his work most worthy of note is that Altman strikes an assured balance of quality and vulnerability (in which case, it often appears that a given work teeters on the edge of falling flat on its face, yet somehow doesn't). This is part of what makes him one of my personal filmmaking masters.<br />
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Case study number two: Woody Allen. People run hot and cold on Woody, and this has been so from the very outset of his career. Like Altman, for every hit, there is a flop, and though he is a stalwart in the form and style he has established for himself, he is nonetheless still erratic and unpredictable. However, in lesser appreciated works like <i>September</i> (1987) and <i>Celebrity</i> (1998), for all their faults, I get more of a sense about the truth of him as an individual than in many of his other films, by sheer virtue of the fact that most discard them as failures. I personally don't think <i>Celebrity</i> is nearly as bad as folks make it out to be.<br />
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With Sidney J. Furie, I had to contend with folks who had only a memory of <i>Superman IV: The Quest for Peace</i> (1987), <i>Ladybugs</i> (1992) and his string of direct-to-video quickies, rather than the works as I deem as so-called "masterpieces," including <i>The Leather Boys</i>, <i>The Ipcress File</i>, <i>Lady Sings the Blues</i>, <i>The Boys in Company C</i> and <i>The Entity</i>. It was a case of selective memory, and this was enough to cast him out of the "cool kids club." That said, I dislike using the word "masterpiece" in really any case. It makes me very uncomfortable, because it tends to negate a work, to strip it of its individuality, as I discussed above.<br />
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I happen to know someone who wrote and published a book on one of "the boys," and when last year I e-mailed him to discuss George Cukor, another favorite director of mine (one who was having a retrospective in New York at the time), he responded: "Strangely, I prefer Cukor to Hitchcock and many other higher rated directors. I never say so publicly. But I much prefer his subject matter and his humanism." This comment was wholly unsolicited by my own feelings, and we had not even been discussing them when he brought it up. This, dear readers, is what I mean by the critic-proofing of artists. There is such a thing as sacrilege in film conversations, but it pays to be irreverent. Here we have a thoughtful film scholar and cineaste who is silenced into canonist submission. So, I'll just say it. Hitchcock is great, but flawed. There, I said it. Before anyone gets sore or sour, and if you haven't guessed by now, here is my point: A substantive discussion of film should not consist of a flood of adulation, an oohing and ahhing at those who rest at the top of some ad hoc food chain. Sure, a biographer or the author of any work must insure that a work will sell, and that there will be interest, and canonical directors are certainly ones readers know. Who wants to invest in a work of such scale if it will only see an audience of one? The focus, however, has skewed to the point where "the boys" have the monopoly, and the rigidity of canons becomes obstructive and, in many ways, destructive. To quote Carol Burnett in Alan Alda's marital dramedy <i>The Four Seasons</i> (1981), "When you call me perfect, I cease to exist!"</div>
DANIEL KREMERhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11702754388135237154noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4383666616230951888.post-77685017750345951192014-09-03T13:39:00.002-07:002014-09-04T09:56:42.091-07:00Teaser Trailer of Upcoming Feature Film<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Daniel Kremer's upcoming feature film <i>Raise Your Kids on Seltzer</i> is in the editing stages, with a projected mid-2015 film festivals release. The film tells the story of a pair of married retired cult-busters whose lives are thrown into turmoil when they receive a disturbing letter from the father of an ex-client of theirs. When they take a new cult-busting job after years of inactivity, all hell breaks loose. Starring much of the San Francisco Bay Area cast of <i>Ezer Kenegdo</i>, which is still in post-production, <i>Raise Your Kids on Seltzer</i> is a very unusual motion picture "for those who'd rather not drink the Kool-Aid."</div>
DANIEL KREMERhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11702754388135237154noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4383666616230951888.post-53804476978910812332014-09-03T11:25:00.001-07:002014-09-04T09:50:52.014-07:00Cool Sounds from the Vaults: A Cinematic Detective Story<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i>Previously published in <a href="http://filmmakermagazine.com/86423-cool-sounds-from-the-vault-a-cinematic-detective-story/#.VAdbPd11Nvk">Filmmaker Magazine</a> on June 23, 2014.</i></div>
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Having a “Scorsese moment” could mean many things. If you walk into a bar feeling like the flurry of activity around you is grinding into slow motion and you hear the Stones playing on the nearby stereo, that qualifies as a Scorsese moment. Check. If you’ve just taken a few moments to assert or reassert your machismo while standing wide-eyed in front of a mirror, that could also be a Scorsese moment. Check. Or, if in standing your ground during an intense argument, you say something colorful but no less inspired…and, yes, generously laced with four-letter words, ’nuff said. Check. There are other varieties of this as well, but chances are that if you’ve lived in New York long enough, you’ve had at least one such moment.</div>
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I recently had what I like to call “my Scorsese moment.” I do live in New York, but it did not involve any of the scenarios I recounted above. The iconic director is known, perhaps secondarily, for his burgeoning involvement with film preservation and restoration. In 1990, he founded The Film Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to the protection of film elements festering carelessly in vaults that are deteriorating with age. Prior to that, he oversaw many individual restorations, including one for one of my all-time favorite films, Powell and Pressburger’s <i>The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp</i> (1943). Recently, as chairman of the Cannes Classics committee, he rescued Ted Kotcheff’s excellent <i>Wake in Fright</i> (1971), while simultaneously his World Cinema Project rescued unsung international films like Ritwik Ghatak’s <i>A River Called Titas</i> (1973). He is among the elite few of those in power who have the wherewithal to recognize what should be obvious — that our cinema past is part of our broader cultural heritage and that it is in grave danger. Because of this, he has committed himself to tirelessly insuring cinema’s magical permanence. You might say he is a motion picture archaeologist.<br />
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Every filmmaker and cineaste, it seems, has a pet film and a pet filmmaker they champion and wish to see given their due. Scorsese, in some respect, is the ultimate righteous man of the cinema. He wants to see respect given to most any pieces of old celluloid that sit in vaults, whether they are widely appreciated or neglected and forgotten.<br />
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Granted, my recent Scorsese moment only involved preserving a single film, relative to the countless number of preservation projects he has undertaken (often simultaneously), but the detective work that surrounded the process, and the dogged perseverance I was forced to maintain throughout, made me respect and applaud Scorsese even more for his prodigious efforts. When I met him briefly about two years ago, the very first thing I made sure to do was express my deep gratitude for what he does on behalf of film lovers who find our cinema past vital and important.<br />
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For the last year and a half, I have been writing the first book on filmmaker Sidney J. Furie, a manuscript that is both biography and monograph. The book, detailing the life and career of the director of <i>The Ipcress File</i> (1965), <i>Lady Sings the Blues</i> (1972), <i>The Boys in Company C</i> (1978), <i>The Entity</i> (1982) and many others, is currently due for publication from University Press of Kentucky’s Screen Classics Series in the fall of 2015. This is the same press that published Nick Dawson’s wonderful book on the similarly shafted Hal Ashby, who had also been scantly covered before its 2009 publication.<br />
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It has been a labor of love and an ultimate expression of admiration to a filmmaker who has been a hero of mine from age eleven, making my first amateur Hi-8 films by mimicking shots from <i>The Ipcress File</i>, which showed one day after school on Bravo (in its early/mid-’90′s incarnation, when old movies were shown and before reality TV took them over). Over the years, it actively pained me to see Sidney forgotten, maligned and marginalized, as I came to equally appreciate his other work, especially his British New Wave classic <i>The Leather Boys</i> (1963). While writing the book, I became quite close with the 81-year-old Furie. He became a friend and mentor. I have had a number of discussions with him, both taped and untaped, about his career and his films, which I believe, when seen collectively as a body of work, are a treasure trove for those who value auteurist analysis, despite his befuddling skill as a genre chameleon who turned to helming direct-to-video action films beginning in the ’90s. As he himself told me, “Making a movie, any movie, is my golf. It’s what I do to enjoy myself.”<br />
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Throughout my coverage, there was one film that stuck out, both because of its “cool” title, its subject matter and its status as a true pioneer effort. <i>A Cool Sound from Hell</i>, shot in Toronto in 1958 and released in England in 1960 shortly after Sidney’s arrival there, is the story of a small Canadian branch of the Beat Generation, starring Anthony Ray, one of the lead actors in John Cassavetes’s <i>Shadows</i> (1959) and the son of Nicholas Ray. Having won the Canadian Director’s Guild Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010, Sidney has rightfully been recognized as one of Canada’s cinematic forefathers in that he mounted two independent feature-length film projects in a time in Canadian history when there was neither an easy way to make such projects nor a way of getting the final products seen inside their native country. Canada imported films from the U.S. and England, but neglected and outright rejected their own product, or what little there was of it.<br />
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“I remember in 1957 taking my first Canadian feature, <i>A Dangerous Age</i>, to a Canadian distributor,” Sidney recalls. “He looked at it and said, ‘Throw it in the garbage. It will never play in a Canadian theater. Just forget about it.’” A year later, the film picks up excellent reviews and good press on England’s Odeon circuit, with the Evening Standard proclaiming, “Only 24, but what a filmmaker!” This became habit with Canadian cinema. In 1965, Don Owen’s first independent feature <i>Nobody Waved Good-bye</i> had to play to good reviews in the U.S. before returning for a contained, no-frills release in its home country. Donald Shebib’s <i>Goin’ Down the Road</i> (1970), had to suffer some of the same slings and arrows before becoming Canada’s first big hit.<br />
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As Canadian film writer Martin Knelman aptly asks in his book <i>This is Where We Came In: The Career and Character of Canadian Film</i>, “How can one explain that Canadians have been content to exist for most of the twentieth century without films of their own, while living next to a country whose movies have culturally colonized the world?” Thankfully, things have gotten a bit better there since Knelman’s frustrated and frustrating question was posed. Sidney once told the British press, “I wanted to start a Canadian film industry, but nobody cared.” As the old joke goes, why did the Canadian cross the road? To get to the middle.<br />
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<b>False Leads</b><br />
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<i>A Cool Sound from Hell</i> as a missing piece of Sidney’s career and as a piece of Canadian film history fascinated me. What also fascinated me was the fact that, in 1958, Anthony Ray was shuttling between New York City and Toronto to make <i>Shadows</i> and <i>A Cool Sound from Hell</i> respectively. There seemed to be an odd kinship between these two pictures.<br />
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In doing an extensive search on Google, I was (as the Brits would say) gobsmacked when I discovered that a DVD was selling at Best Buy that claimed to be <i>A Cool Sound from Hell</i>! I ordered the disc for $20 and exclaimed, “Well, that was easy!” Three weeks later, the package arrived. Opening the padded envelope revealed a badly designed disc entitled “Cool Space Stuff,” an hour of generic NASA footage with bad Muzak playing in the background. What the hell was this?! Talk about the air going out of your tires! This defeat revved my engines even more to actually find the film…somewhere.<br />
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I ordered the same disc that claimed to be <i>A Cool Sound from Hell</i> on the Barnes & Noble website, thinking that perhaps a shipping error had been made. Again, my hopes were dashed and my resolve was heightened. More space shuttle launchings and bad Muzak. Caveat emptor! I just dismissed it as a strange computer error at the distribution company. Sidney and I have long considered it an incredibly odd red herring. Up to the time of the publication, this falsely represented DVD is still being sold on both vendor websites. The Library of Congress, while listing the film, only held a record of its previous existence and cited it in a survey of jazz in films (ironically, yours truly has the same kind of Library of Congress listing, and my first feature is cited in the same survey). The Canadian National Archives, while having restored and housed a print of Sidney’s first Canadian indie <i>A Dangerous Age</i>, had nothing whatsoever on <i>A Cool Sound from Hell</i>. “How typical of Canada,” a prominent Canadian actor friend of mine told me in a cynical tenor.<br />
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The cards were stacking more and more against me and my quest. Sidney’s friend Paul showed me a book about Canadian filmmaker Don Owen. Owen played a bit part as a poet for Furie, and in his book, <i>A Cool Sound from Hell</i> was referred to as lost. Director Ted Kotcheff, when discussing Wake in Fright‘s restoration, mentioned that an acquaintance of his from the Toronto International Film Festival, who specialized in films shot in Toronto, could not locate the film either. Other sources, including a site called Canuxploitation, likewise used the word “lost” to designate its status. It had vanished without a trace, clouded by decades of disinterest that made forgetting a foregone conclusion. I became more and more crestfallen.<br />
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Despite everything, I became determined to find <i>A Cool Sound from Hell</i>, and I was miffed because these bad discs being sold made a substantive Google search more difficult. I hit up various friends on the video grey market (i.e. bootlegs of older, unavailable titles) who had often sent me ultra-rare stuff in the past. No go.
My best friend (and cinematographer) Aaron, who has always been the best audience throughout this literary project vis a vis my Furie yammering, then mentioned that he had a friend named Frank studying documentary cinema at the British Film Institute.<br />
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Aaron and I had seen a wonderful BBC documentary called <i>Hollywood U.K.</i> (1993), a comprehensive four-part program that examined the British film industry in the 1960′s. In the third episode, titled “Strangers in the City”, series narrator Richard Lester (yes, the filmmaker) discusses Sidney Furie’s arrival in England and how <i>A Cool Sound from Hell</i> had been featured as a double-bill with Karel Reisz’s block-busting hit <i>Saturday Night and Sunday Morning</i> (1960). An old British Pathe newsreel of the theater showing both films accompanied Lester’s voice-over. Emblazoned over the theater entrance was <i>A Cool Sound from Hell</i>, in large letters. I remember wanting to jump into the newsreel, <i>Purple Rose of Cairo</i>-style, and buy a ticket.<br />
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“No,” I told Aaron, “BFI seems like a bureaucracy to me, and it’s a longshot that they have it.” For some reason, I was quite doubtful about the prospect. I think perhaps I had begun to lose hope, having passive-aggressively thrown in the towel. When he persisted, I emphasized, “Why would they have it? The original distributor, Galaworldfilm, is obscure and long defunct!” Frustrated with my strange stubbornness on the matter, he implored me to reconsider. When it took me awhile to respond, Aaron took it upon himself to contact his buddy and get a BFI contact with whom I could consult. When I got the e-mail address of a woman at the BFI National Archives named Lynn, I decided to give it a shot just for kicks and giggles, not expecting anything.
In this life, we usually always like to be right about things. But in this instance, was I ever glad to be wrong!<br />
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<b>Discovery and Excavation</b><br />
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On May 1, 2013, we received a response from Lynn: “Dear Daniel Kremer and Sidney Furie, Thank you both for your enquiry. The BFI holds a master picture and sound negative only – for the title <i>A Cool Sound from Hell</i> (1959). The cost to access the negs and to digitise to produce viewing material (DVD) will run into several hundreds of pounds. I’m attaching an application form for you to return – should you wish to continue, and I will then obtain a quote for you for the work involved.”<br />
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Despite her caveat that things would be expensive if we wanted to undertake digitizing and preserving the film (it ultimately wound up costing quite a few thousand pounds), I was thrilled that the negative still existed, in whatever shape. When Sidney told me to spark the whole thing, Lynn responded to my e-mail by reiterating the considerable cost and by mentioning that a DVD already appeared to be available for purchase in the U.S. “I would therefore assume this would be a far more preferable option for you.” She was referring to the space shuttle disc with the Muzak. I fumed for a few moments about the red herring and reasserted our need.<br />
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Once we got the ball rolling, we were asked for proof of copyright and documentation. This is something we could not provide, for obvious reasons. Sidney financed the original film under the banner Caribou Productions with the help of his father, who invested in his second film when the first paid off. He sold the film to a B picture distributor Galaworldfilms on a ten-year lease. Now, we were being asked to provide proof that the copyright rested back with Sidney, a forty-some-year-old document that would have never existed in the first place. Paper trails can be difficult to navigate, let alone one that finds you in the dark, dense forest without crumbs.<br />
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I replied in kind, “You must understand that this film is over 50 years old and Caribou Productions was established for the sole purpose of producing <i>A Dangerous Age</i> and <i>A Cool Sound from Hell</i>. It was not a formal production company, had no formal office, letterhead or paperwork. Additionally, it is also highly doubtful that Sidney or Kenneth Rive’s defunct companies possess still existing and/or readily available documentation to support such claims, nor would it probably exist under the aegis of any other outfit or company. The film has literally lain dormant for decades, with no outside interest.”
Sidney told me that he would sue if it meant getting the materials back into his possession. Around the time, I read with great interest about how William Friedkin had to sue both Universal and Paramount, not for monetary gain but just to discover who owned the rights to his film <i>Sorcerer</i> (1977). Friedkin’s film, recently crowned a rediscovered masterpiece and given a wide re-release, was caught in a legal stalemate while awaiting its own restoration…and meanwhile, the film elements weren’t getting any younger.<br />
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Sidney himself responded to this inconceivable request: “Isn’t a biographer wanting to see a lost film the very purpose for which the BFI was formed? I realize that you need to be vigilant about protecting the donations that you hold in trust, but if a filmmaker who wrote, personally financed and directed a film can’t get access to that film for a biography of that filmmaker’s life and career, than what is the purpose of even holding the materials in the first place? The last thing I want to get into is who gave you the materials to begin with. I certainly didn’t authorize it and I never gave my permission as the copyright holder for anyone else to give it to you. The UK distributor certainly had no legal right to do so. Of course, I’m glad you have it at all. I only mention that if you want to stick to legalities, it works both ways.”<br />
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Sidney is one of the most passionate personalities I’ve ever encountered, and that facet of him had come out in fine form. Yes, we were both eternally grateful that the BFI held the materials, but never bargained about having to fight to see it once it was located.
Our pleas seemed to do the trick for the BFI, and, after weeks of back-and-forth on this point, the inspection of the elements was mounted.<br />
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In the meanwhile, to get into the mood of mounting a preservation project, I started reading Ronald Haver’s book about the detective work surrounding the restoration of George Cukor’s <i>A Star is Born</i> (1954). That film had been cut down by a meddling Jack Warner from its 182-minute premiere length to a release version of 154 minutes, much to the horror of the director, who always harbored resentment and hurt about what had been done to a film to which he felt close. In 1983, Haver took it upon himself to find the missing pieces of the 182-minute version and, through a great deal of detective work, premiered a 176-minute version the day after Cukor’s death.
I was rapt by Haver’s account of the false leads, the heartaches, the leg work and the time and energy that went into the restored cut of <i>A Star is Born</i>.<br />
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In the middle of reading this, we received news of the inspection. The condition of the 35mm mute dupe negative was noted as “ok,” i.e. slightly shrunken and bearing some scratches. The pH acetic level on the film tested at P1, thankfully the lowest level.
The bad news was that the magnetic sound track and one of the 35mm reels had gone missing. A search was about to be conducted in the BFI’s vaults. Without the sound and a missing part of the story, what use would it all be?<br />
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<b>Finding Hell’s Cool Sounds</b><br />
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Months passed as the BFI folks searched for these missing elements. Sidney and I remained hopeful, but were prepared for the worst. At this point, I was prepared to shell out just to view what existed of the soundless reels. I worked away on the book, interviewing various actors and crew members with whom Sidney worked over his more than 55-year career. I watched other films that I knew had been excavated and preserved, but whereas I was grateful for the salvaging of these other films, I pined to see my own restoration project fully realized. It was part idle dreaming, part envy, part compulsion, part something else. Scorsese probably suffered worse battle scars in this endeavor than what we’ve had to withstand, I thought.<br />
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Sidney told me during this waiting period, “Don’t get your hopes up too much. It’s not really a good film, but it’s important for you to see for the book.” I hoped he was just being modest or underselling it for some other reason. In any case, good or bad, it was an important piece of film history. This was a true grass roots independent production, written, produced, financed and directed by Sidney, shot in 10 days, on little money and resources, on the streets of Toronto. It predated many of the other films labelled as independent filmmaking landmarks. Even if it didn’t win medals and statuettes for quality, that counted for something in my book. As Sidney told me in our original taping sessions, “It was just me, the cameraman, the sound man and the actors on <i>Dangerous Age</i> and <i>Cool Sound</i>. It was extremely intimate.”<br />
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We received good news in the fall of 2013. They located both the magnetic sound track (a revised mix track dated June 29, 1959) and the missing reel, both having been misfiled under the title “Beat Generation.” The magnetic track had tested with dangerously high acetic levels, but they transferred the audio to a digital WAV file with minimal damage. When a Canadian donor (who shall remain anonymous) stepped up to the plate to finance the preservation/restoration project, we were ready to go, and I was ready to inspect the elements myself: 6,267 feet of film, translating to a relatively modest 72 minutes of screen-time.<br />
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In something of a cosmic moment, Lynn sent us a list of development, post and telecine houses in London from which we had to choose to have the film’s work done. Near the top of that contact list was the name Tony Ray, who worked for a post-house in London called Dragon We, of course, knew it wasn’t the same Tony Ray as the actor in the film, but it caused Sidney to exclaim, “It’s a sign! An omen! That’s our man! Take our stuff to Tony Ray!” We had a laugh, one that made both of us feel oddly fulfilled, that perhaps the aggravation was about to pay off. The lost film of one of my favorite filmmakers was about to be restored! To me, it was a privilege akin to a Monet enthusiast discovering a painting of his no one ever knew about. We’d come a long way from making annoyed returns to the Best Buy website, and unsuccessfully confronting cheap DVD companies about false product information.<br />
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<b>Is It Any Good?</b><br />
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Just a few days ago, I finally received the spec DVD of the BFI’s work on <i>A Cool Sound from Hell</i>, after over a year of false leads, copyright entanglements with a non-existent paper trail, missing reels and mag tracks, the minutia, the waiting, when patience was in short supply and eagerness was in surplus. As Yiddish would have it, I had a case of year-long chronic schpilkes, or “pins and needles of anxiousness.”<br />
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Does the film measure up to expectations I might have had for it? As expected, it is not a perfect film. It is, in many ways, the work of a filmmaker still growing and discovering his voice. Against the likes of Kubrick’s similarly flawed <i>Fear and Desire</i> (1953) and other blood-sweat-and-tears debut features, it holds up remarkably well, however. It certainly merits being called an item of fascination, as I would actually consider a few scenes and sequences real standouts (especially the “late-night jazz-blasting motor rave” sequence) because they exude a vigor, a raw ambition, an exuberance, and a glorious youthful impetuosity often present in the best filmmakers’ less-than-perfect debut films, even though this was Furie’s second. I have provided three video samples from the film to consider vis a vis. The film also treats the city of Toronto much like a character in the film, and one could easily write a paper just about its extensive use of Toronto locations.<br />
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Upon seeing the film for the first time in over half a century, Sidney found himself flabbergasted. Shortly after viewing it with his wife Linda, he phoned to tell me how grateful he was that I helped to dig up the film, then expressed how proud he was seeing it today. “I was a crazy kid making <i>A Cool Sound from Hell</i>, and it’s written all over every frame,” he said, recounting scenes and moments where he perceived the general influence of <i>On the Waterfront</i> clearly overtaking his 25-year-old self. It was emotionally overpowering to him. The next day, he reiterated his feelings to me in an e-mail: “Indebted to you for pursuing <i>Cool Sound</i>. Seeing it really inspired me.” By inspired, he means concerning his upcoming film project, the first he has written solo since 1961′s <i>During One Night</i>, his first British independent film. He claims this will be his final film. I don’t believe him for a second, because he’s got too much spunk, even for me as a 29-year-old. He says this will be his swan song and a return to personal filmmaking on a shoestring budget, with my own usual crew of young filmmakers, including my usual cinematographer, helping him to achieve it.<br />
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The people reading this article are, no doubt, film lovers and buffs, at least to some extent. An impassioned appeal is in order. Preservation has become imperative in an age when digital processes have overtaken photochemical ones, and as elements decaying in vaults face an obliteration that is often deliberate. Yes, deliberate. Recently, on the phone, Ted Kotcheff recounted to me the story of his old editor’s visit to Pinewood when they were in search of the <i>Wake in Fright</i> negative. While leaving the archives that day disenchanted with the chief archivist’s nonchalance, another man standing next to a lined-up row of film cans asked if he recognized any of the titles on the cans. When he did not, the man informed him that these films were slated for demolition, to be burned and discarded, never to be seen again. Later, the last remaining source of <i>Wake in Fright</i> was found in a warehouse in Pittsburgh, in a bin marked “For Destruction.”<br />
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There are many grandstanding speeches in George Clooney’s <i>The Monuments Men</i> about the importance of preserving cultural heritage, and how the job of art historians and their comrades is just as important as the job of the soldiers fighting the battles. I’m not making a claim that Clooney’s sanctimonious adventure flick is making a sweepingly original statement, but I cite it perhaps because it is more fresh in the collective consciousness. Although simply a nice little yarn of a movie, it did express a startling and immediate reality, most of all, for our cinematic cultural heritage, one that Scorsese strives to make permanent. With many film prints and photochemical sources comprised of elements that disintegrate, deteriorate and/or remain on the shelf indefinitely while people stuck on the outside of the vaults yearn to see even more obscure titles in the best way they can be seen, the clock is ticking.<br />
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As a single person lacking the resources that organizations and committees have at their disposal, I will continue to seek ways, even in small strides, to insure the permanence of filmmakers’ visions. Scorsese, bless him, cannot be the only one doing it. If possible, have yourself a Scorsese moment that doesn’t involve an inspired insult or slow-motion daydreams with an oldies soundtrack. Easier said than done, but I recommend having one that might be everlasting.<br />
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<i>A very big thanks to the anonymous donor, and to the British Film Institute, and everyone there who helped us uncover this neglected film. Thanks to Aaron Hollander and Frank Verano, who suggested I contact the BFI. Thanks to Martin Scorsese for the inspiration. And Sidney, ditto.</i></div>
DANIEL KREMERhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11702754388135237154noreply@blogger.com0