Polemics on the Mountain-Top: A Brief History of Paramount's Risky Business

This entry comes following, respectively, a screening event and a definitively earth-shattering movie-news item that will rock the world of cineastes and collectors. Take a deep breath, folks, before you have a look at this IMDb news item. It accounts how Warner Home Video is seeing to it that every single title in their back catalogue will be released and available to the public on DVD. These special back catalogue titles will be issued and sold per demand with custom-made designs, made to order in their original aspect ratios at www.warnerarchive.com. Now, my fellow cinemaniacs, if that doesn't have your jaw dropping to the floor in amazement, I don't know what could shock or delight you. A Hollywood studio is releasing its entire load of titles on video! Everything! In Warner's case, that is 6,800 previously unreleased titles! I just used three exclamation points for three consecutive sentences, but to me, this is absolutely astounding in every damn way. Will other studios take it upon themselves to follow in suit? My brain's mouth is watering. What an image, that.

Secondly, the other night, I was privileged to see Jules Dassin's commercially iffy and (inevitably) controversial 1968 film Up Tight!, a "black-power remake" of John Ford's The Informer (1935), at Film Forum. Truth be told, I own a bootleg of this film, from a broadcast which edited the 104-minute film down to just below 87 minutes, deleting (among other things) a hilariously and, intentionally, over-played, overstylized and downright campy scene in a carnival hall of mirrors. Amusingly enough, any explicit reference to Roscoe Lee Browne's character being homosexual has been removed in this bootleg. So, once again on this blog, I behold the wonders of the city of New York, a place where film enthusiasts can delight in repertory theaters which screen retrospectives much more off the beat and track than anywhere else in the United States. On the occasion of this recent screening of Up Tight!, which is part of Film Forum's Tribute to Jules Dassin, critic J. Hoberman writes in The Village Voice, "A real polarizer in its day, Jules Dassin's lone post-blacklist studio movie was also Hollywood's first expression of black power. Consistent in its inconsistency, it represents Dassin at his worst (stagy, talky, unsubtle) and his best (evocative location work, well-choreographed violence and a passionate identification with the underdog)." On another note, Roger Ebert writes in his February 1968 review, "It's remarkable that a major studio (Paramount) financed and released this film." This last quote I considered when mulling over the film's indescribable aftertaste.


















I exited the theater thinking about the film and its place in the Paramount Pictures history of the day. Granted, the film often lapses into laughably preachy segments and, at certain moments, prosthelytizes and moralizes shamelessly and tiresomely (e.g. "Violence breeds violence"), but the film's voice is nonetheless crystalline. Keep in mind that this is mainstream cinema's earliest depiction of the black-power movement, so it is even more remarkable to consider that the film was directed by a white man. The film possesses a distinctly black voice, and many other reviewers of the time commented on how the film felt refreshingly "with it" without ultimately seeming like an old fuddy-dud's vision of pervasive social/racial unrest. And in this way, Up Tight! feels very sophisticated. The bold choice of the Booker T and the MG's soundtrack also gives the story an extra on-the-fringe quality. In all honesty, the film (co-penned by Dassin and actress Ruby Dee) feels incredibly subversive for a "Hollywood production," not only in its choice of subject matter (when such a topic and its topicality were unfathomably atypical and anomalous within the mainstream), but also in its unfettered disregard for conventional sequencing and narrative progression. Towards the film's third act, there is a exquisitely staged climactic confession scene that left me speechless, but the director consciously travels a different road to get to that destination.

Up Tight!, by its very nature, is a polemical film. Opening with actual documentary footage (shot especially for the film) of the funeral march of Martin Luther King, Up Tight! places itself firmly into historical context, and remarkably at that, as if this opening were an attempt to prevent the film from dating in a traditional sense. The word for it is "wise". It also lends an additional weight to the proceedings. Dassin has enough foresight to realize, when other filmmakers were in a bubble naively ignoring the relative vision of the racial upheaval and its place in late 60's popular memory, that he can make his work in Up Tight survive as social document as opposed to just simply quaint sociological motion-picture time-capsule. In the Heat of the Night (1967), for instance, is fundamentally a good film, but it ultimately fails to take into account the times in which it was created. Up Tight! is also perhaps one of the first mentions of Welfare benefits in a major Hollywood motion picture. That's pretty substantial...and gutsy. The very release of the film inherently had political ramifications. As an afterthought, I also want to give a nod to Boris Kaufman's deliciously low-lit cinematography -- and at one point, his camera eye-poppingly defies gravity itself during a death scene.

So what's the point of all this analysis? Okay, here it is. Ebert, to reiterate, posed the question, "How was it that a major studio got behind a risky project like Up Tight!?" Now is my opportunity to pay tribute to Paramount as a studio that took risks more than most other studios in its day, i.e. the Gulf+Western acquisition of Paramount in 1967 and after. When a friend of mine fantasized about other studios following Warner Home Video's lead of releasing its entire back catalogue of titles, he brought up Fox. I immediately responded, "No, Fox was the most capitol-driven studio in Hollywood in every single era. Paramount is where it's at." Paramount established lasting relationships with directors and filmmakers (Roman Polanski and Otto Preminger were both under contract to Paramount as directors), whereas studios like Fox and MGM were intent on establishing lasting relationships simply with celebrity.













Here is another example of Paramount taking on risky material around the same time. Two years following Up Tight!, Paramount financed a film called WUSA (1970), starring Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward and Anthony Perkins. This is another film that is not available on home video, and I own a bootleg of this film as well. The film tells the story of drifter Paul Newman taking a job as a disk-jockey at ultra right-wing radio station WUSA. Anthony Perkins plays a Welfare social worker who gradually realizes WUSA's sinister intentions...to prevent recipients from receiving Welfare benefits. Hmm, sounds like a blockbuster, doesn't it, guys? This was a film made just on the cusp of Robert Evans' takeover of Paramount, but no doubt the viability of the project came directly from the star-power of Newman and Woodward and not the material itself. The movie tanked at the box-office, of course, but the project was nonetheless always a risky business. The first thing we see in both Up Tight! and WUSA is that mountain with the stars around it. This is not even to mention a Paramount film as politically inflamatory as Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool (1969). Even ostensibly more "commercial" films from Paramount in the late 60's had more of an overriding feeling of social critique and examined, in many ways, the socioeconomic divides that segmented the United States. Look at Goodbye, Columbus (1969), and watch how Richard Benjamin's "lower-class Jew" character navigates his way through a noveau riche Jewish family and their world of uber-suburban privilege, class indulgence and materialism, and eventually being somewhat seduced by it, only to "fall from grace" when the nouveau riche patriarch accidentally finds something he shouldn't have found. That film likewise examines something pervasive in the American tableau of the late 60's, albeit in a very delicate and discreet way.

In recent times, Paramount had the best arthouse subsidiary of the majors, Paramount Vantage, until it went belly-up amidst the economic crisis. Compare Paramount Vantage stock to Warner Independent or Focus stock. Since when are films like There Will Be Blood, Margot at the Wedding and Into the Wild bankable in eyes of Hollywood? Particularly in the case of Into the Wild and There Will Be Blood, these are films that could not have been made on-the-cheap, but carried the prestige of good directors working with fine casts. And what kind of studio finances and releases a film like Warren Beatty's Reds (1981), which is of course a Paramount picture? Of course, it being subsidized hinged upon superstar Warren Beatty's involvement, but nonetheless, a film about American socialists still must have been a risky venture.


















My mind boggles at the prospect of Paramount following in Warner's footsteps. There are so many titles in the Paramount vaults that have never been released on home video -- titles that are as equally risk-taking as Up Tight! and WUSA which are awaiting rediscovery. In the case of those two films, these are two pieces of historical document, with narratives appropriately "formatted" for such a function. There are many more such titles, believe it or not, that fester in Paramount's vaults. Legend Films, a DVD company which has been releasing some of Paramount's back catalogue titles, has been working its way around to some of its more obscure titles, so we will see what happens. In my opinion, United Artists during the "Arthur Krimm period" (Krimm was head of UA throughout most of the 70's) was also on par with Paramount's love of risk-taking.









Looking back at it, Paramount was the standard for studios in the 70's. It brought in the most capitol, thanks in part to Robert Evans' and Barry Diller's leadership, and still managed to release films that could have very well been poisonous for recouping their investments. So, in the wake of the news about Warner Home Video and the Film Forum screening of Up Tight!, I thought I'd write about it. My mind boggles thinking if any other studio would follow Warner's lead, let alone Paramount. But Paramount's back catalogue is the one I am most enthusiastic about.

Land of the Seeds: Manhattan Before It Became Disneyland

(The Other 42nd Street)

This will be an epic post because the personal ideologies that led to it have been a long time coming in terms of the actual formal expression of them. This is a passionate, deeply considered topic for me.


A CHANCE ENCOUNTER
I was inspired to write this entry after riding my bicycle on 91st Street, in between First and Second Avenues. While speeding down the block on my old green Schwinn, I slammed on my brakes in one sudden, jarring reflex, thankful that there were no vehicles directly behind me. Before my eyes, which were suddenly glazed in absolute awe and wonderment, I observed an original Checker taxicab, one of the old "big-boy models" with the exquisitely hulking antique body and, of course, the yellow and checker design which were featured so prominently in the Manhattan movies of the 50's, 60's and 70's. You know, the taxis like Travis Bickle drove in Taxi Driver. Immediately, I was taken back in time in my own mind to another New York or, as I consider it, Manhattan before the Times Square area morphed into an ugly techno-wonderland with a constant stream of media images in every nook and cranny...what I like to call The Other Disneyland. Oh yes, and when 42nd Street was the super seedy porno-theater retreat-street...and not the tourist attraction that it is currently.

Just the day before, I was walking with a friend on the Upper West Side. This walk ultimately became a "movie tour" of the West Side as we passed by The Dakota (the deluxe, legendary New York apartment building with the open courtyard where Rosemary's Baby was shot and where John Lennon was gunned down in 1980), the apartment building "penthouse" where Sylvia Miles lived, with poodle, when she invited Jon Voight up for the misbegotten trick in Midnight Cowboy, and what was once (but is decidedly no longer) Needle Park at West 72nd and Broadway, featured in 1971's The Panic in Needle Park as the hang-out for the heroin addict characters.


THE THEN AND THE NOW
About a year ago, my brother and I spoke on the phone. Then residing in Brooklyn, he informed me that he had recently watched Scorsese's Mean Streets, and deeply and openly lamented that the New York of now could never compare to the New York of that film.

I believe firmly that this rapid evolution in the image of Manhattan began when the original Checker Cabs were expired in 1983. Confessedly, I have the most enormous love of the New York films of the late 60's and early 70's, certainly more than any other time and place on celluloid. New York City had the grit, the edge, the often seaminess and the indescribable flavor that it sadly lacks now in the age of gentrification. This entry intends to explore the films made at the outset of the evolution (circa 1982 and 1983) and pay tribute to the films before that age that captured what is in my mind the true Manhattan.













THE PLANTED SEEDS OF THE CHANGE
To begin, I wish to name a few key films to be shot in Manhattan during the evolutionary period of 1982 and 1983: Martin Scorsese's The King of Comedy (1983), Susan Seidelman's Smithereens (1982), Bette Gordon's Variety (1983), Henry Jaglom's Can She Bake a Cherry Pie? (1983), Yvonne Rainer's The Man Who Envied Women (1985), Sidney Lumet's Prince of the City (1981) and Lizzie Borden's Born in Flames (1983). Each of these films represents the ethos of Manhattan as a movie location on a geographic basis. In The King of Comedy, there is a sequence in which Robert De Niro and Sandra Bernhard are stomping down Broadway approaching a Times Square astonishingly without MTV or CNN news-feeds and Disney Channel image-streams...and you can see the occasional Checker taxicab pass by on screen right. In Smithereens, characters frequent now-nonexistent bars and punk-band clubs in SoHo, and a SoHo itself that no longer exists in the wake of the Neo-Hipster post-X generation. Take a walk through it as it exists now, then watch Smithereens and maybe compare it to the SoHo of Andrew Bujalski's Mutual Appreciation (2005). In Variety, the lead character works in the ticket booth of a porn-theater on 42nd Street. I am not, nor have I ever been, a frequenter of these establishments, but where can you see a single theater of this kind on the 42nd Street of today? In Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?, Cafe Central on 79th Street near Columbus is featured prominently as a hang-out for the post-30s singles crowd and Checker cabs are still on the radar. In The Man Who Envied Women, shot 1982-1984, the Upper West Side and Central Park West is the specialized area and, surprise surprise, Central Park West seemed to be the area that has changed the least. Prince of the City, which features many New York locations throughout its 167 minutes, peaks into the netherworld of the Bronx ghettos and the Washington Heights of yore...and into the buildings of ill-repute before they even became known as crackhouses. In Born in Flames, released in 1983 and shot over a period of almost two years, a fictional New York underground world of a quasi-future (i.e. the future as rendered by low-budget filmmaking) makes one long for the self-proclaimed glorious past. Even the bigger budgeted Soylent Green (1973), set in the year 2022, makes one hunger for that "something lost" in nearly an identical way. In a sense, this is a deep feeling of nostalgia for something that, on the surface to most people, is the Before to a current After...like the fat-cells of a jelly-donut that regret that they will never get the opportunity to join the legions of other fat cells on an obese man religiously intent on shedding copious pounds.

In my belief, the post-O'Hara Manhattan (i.e. I am referring to writer Frank O'Hara's poetic conception of 1950's New York) as documented in cinema can be divided distinctly into eras without feeling arbitrary, because each of these eras has an undoubtedly different feel when viewing the films respective to them. First, there is the Neo-Grey-Flannel-Suit Era (signified by films like The Apartment, Two for the Seesaw, The Pawnbroker, Sunday in New York and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying), then the Warhol Era (these are not strictly Warhol films, but simply movies, either indie/underground or mainstream, made during and right after Warhol started his experiments in filmmaking in the late 60's, signified by films like Midnight Cowboy, with its "wild hippy party scene," Greetings!, Hi, Mom!, Taking Off and Coogan's Bluff), followed by the Urban-Junkie/Loner Era which conincides with the Literary Jetset Era (signified by films like Born to Win, The Panic in Needle Park, Believe in Me, Maidstone, Such Good Friends and Ice). Following these first three, there lies the Summer-of-Sam Era, a time marked by the paranoia and pressures of a struggling late 70's economy (signified by films like Saturday Night Fever, Girl Friends, Annie Hall, Nunzio and Rich Kids). Beginning in the 80's, the arrival of the No Wave Movement saw the complementary arrival of the New York punk film (examples being works by filmmakers Amos Poe, Nick Zedd, Jim Jarmusch, Vivienne Dick and James Nares). The No Wave Era also will point to films like Mr. Mike's Mondo Video, Koyaanisqatsi (strictly in its use of New York), They All Laughed, Dear Mr. Wonderful, Street Smart (featuring a depiction of the last remnants of the old Times Square) and Lightning Over Water. Other films released by the company Pacific Arts around the time were also revealing of the No Wave's influence on the New York films of the time. Following the 1983 Evolution came the arrival of the Yuppie Film. Look no further for films of this era than The Secret of My Success, Big and Baby Boom. The Manhattan Financial District underwent a Renaissance of sorts in American film as Yuppiedom prevailed in mainstream cinema, particularly New York mainstream cinema of the late 80's. The post-1992 New York films are just one mass blur as the evolution became visible to the naked eye for the first time.














A TRIBUTE
To pay tribute to the "golden-age" films, I am going to begin with an unlikely film, and one that is vital to mention. Milton Moses Ginsberg's Coming Apart (1969), starring Rip Torn, Viveca Lindfors and Sally Kirkland, is a reflexive hidden-camera metadrama shot in a single Manhattan studio apartment. The film is a mostly one-camera-angle shooting directly into a mirror reflecting a window peering high over Manhattan's West Side. We never leave this apartment throughout the length of this two-hour film. Not once! Yet, you get a feeling of a different New York, a much different New York, lying outside the doors of this single location. You feel it without seeing it. That is what my point is. It is not so much a visual thing (although the "visual thing" is the major component of the evolutionary adjustments I mention before), but a feeling of what it was and what it meant for people to live in New York before the technocracy took hold of the city's infrastructure. It lost some of its intrinsic character as time progressed. I still love living in New York. I cannot imagine living anywhere other than a city, and this is the king of cities, but I wished I lived in the New York of then as opposed to now...so I could shoot it and make movies in it.

There are other films worthy of mention. William Friedkin's The Night They Raided Minsky's, shot in early 1967 and released in late 1968, recreated the Lower East Side of 1925 without losing its place in New York filmmaking history's treatment of the late 60's. I could watch the location work in this film for days without growing bored. Claudia Weill's Girl Friends, released in 1978, was a then much-touted, acclaimed indie film that has a singular way of possessing a feeling of "lost New York" when watching it today on my old VHS. The look, feeling and ethos of the Greenwich Village in Brian De Palma's Greetings! (1968) and the Midtown in his Hi, Mom! (1971) are, once again, gone today. It goes without saying that the Manhattan in Midnight Cowboy is nowhere to be found. The picaresque locations in the opening montage of Dog Day Afternoon, the beautiful East Side "rooftop gardens" in Henry Jaglom's A Safe Place (1971), the Central Park of Bill Greaves' Symbiopsychotaxiplasm (1968), the then less-developed Chelsea area of Yvonne Rainer's Kristina Talking Pictures (1976), the Needle Park of Jerry Schatzberg's The Panic in Needle Park (Needle Park is now known, in the post-Giuliani era, as Verdi Square), the Times Square of Ivan Passer's Born To Win (1971)...all gone gone gone.


IN CONCLUSION
So what does it all mean now? How can we juxtapose it to what it meant then? How can we do it as filmmakers and film watchers? How can people like my brother reconcile the feelings he had for the New York of Mean Streets to the only New York we can walk through today? And, ultimately, what is the value of a place and the character of location, and what role does it play in our intake, digestion and renewing appetite for films that seek to capture time, place, atmosphere, the common feeling of its teeming people, for posterity? The pre-evolutionary, pre-gentrification places were seedy...but for filmmakers, this New York was the land of the seeds. Ideas sprouted from the harsh realities of urban life...from the personality of the city itself. Now, all we have is this little word, "retrospect".

A Walk Through the Grey Market (or, Confessions of a Bootlegger)

I have decided to open up the forum with a post concerning a topic near and dear to my heart, and to the hearts of other lovers of cinema esoterica.

I am an avid video collector, with 12,000 titles on both DVD and VHS (I added the comma to make it clear that none of those zeroes are typos...and yes, I indeed still collect VHS and they're still worth an awful lot to collectors). Many of the titles in my collection were never released in any video format throughout the 30+ years during which recordings of movies have been sold for home viewing. Recently, I became aware of a film in my collection that many people, for some reason, have been hunting in vain. Some who came my way claimed that they had been searching for the film for decades now, until they discovered I owned it and was willing to end their quest. The film is called Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing, starring Maggie Smith and Timothy Bottoms, and directed by Alan J. Pakula in 1973. Ever hear of it? Want a copy?  No?  Well, let me tell you, eventually orders for copies of the film came pouring in until, ultimately, I wound up having to service 18 customers, some saying they would have paid "anything". And they're still coming! Some of my customers even wound of telling me stories involving their memories of the first time seeing the film and the impact it left on them.

In speaking with a friend of mine who likewise is a consumer of esoteric "grey market videos" (i.e. a polite term for bootlegs of old movies the MPAA could often give a damn about), he brought up a rather interesting point. There are obviously people out there who are interested in the titles that never made it to these formats. Why don't the studios get off their asses and do something about it? Or, better yet, why don't more "boutique DVD labels" get a hold of some of these titles and do their own treatments of them if the majors are not interested? If the Love and Pain experience taught me anything, it is that my friend was right. There is a demand. It is there. People are willing to pay, they are often desperate to find certain titles.

Of course, many problems do enter into the picture. For one, things like copyright issues, music clearances, licensing and video rights (precluded from pre-1977 studio contracts) prevent many titles from reaching the shelves of video stores. Video rights is the major issue though. You see, prior to home video formats, when films were made, home video royalties were not considered because home viewing formats simply did not exist, that is outside of personal film prints, which were of course free and clear of such obligations. Video wasn't even considered an ancillary market. Now, of course, they are their own ball of wax in the world of movie marketing. Thus, many pre-1977 titles have quite frankly disappeared. When I was walking the Paramount backlot over the summer, I passed their film vaults, and all the time wondering what unreleased titles lurked in those vaults. Then came the news of the Universal studio fires, which hit their vaults and destroyed many prints. I cringed when I heard about this, and wondered how many neglected films in Universal's vaults went the way of the dodo.

Many have turned up on grey market by people having taped them off television, often on late-night broadcasts from geographically centralized stations in the 80's. I own many grey market titles that fit those conditions. Some titles are in the studios' back catalogue, where titles with seemingly little demand can fester indefinitely.

The point is this: there is a demand for many titles. I can't make a case for all of them (hey, how many people really want a copy of 1970's Microscopic Liquid Subway to Oblivion...and yes, that is a real film), but many people are willing to lay down the money for them. Like I said, often the quest to find these titles are epic...for people, it can be a journey. The "search stories" I have heard are worthy of their own films. An Army colonel in Fort Benning told me with great relish how he and a buddy went to see the film The Carey Treatment in 1974, how they had been talking about the film since then and how difficult it was finding an available copy. I furnished him with one and you cannot imagine how thankful he was. Another guy from Australia told me that he and his wife met at a screening of Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing and, when they were having marital issues, a halfway-through viewing of the film on 80's Australian TV inspired them to reconcile.

So until the studios or boutique labels start picking up the slack and getting those back catalogue titles released, I feel it my duty as a film-lover and collector to service people who just might have a late-Preminger craving, or need an early-Losey fix, or what-have-you. The "Whatever Edition" of Clueless isn't helping you get those backlog titles out there, Paramount, or for that matter the "Don't Go Into the Water Edition" of Jaws (how many frigging DVD releases have there been of Jaws for Pete's sake?). A question of priority, ladies and gents...it is time to welcome the biggies into the collector's sphere.