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.

Regional Filmmaking and Eagle Pennell's The Whole Shootin' Match

At one time in my life, throughout a nearly three-year time span, I governed and facilitated a university screening series called Film Fridays. Mostly rare and/or esoteric titles were shown. A film would be screened every week, most often on video formats as they were made available, and a presenter would discuss the film, why it was chosen and the meaning it had for them to screen it. At one of the weekly screenings, a friend of mine (a filmmaker himself) screened Steven Soderbergh's Bubble (2006) alongside Francis Ford Coppola's The Rain People (1969). The discussion that followed concerned the endless possibilities inherent in regional filmmaking, a topic about which the presenter, a native of Oklahoma City (who would soon after that screening move back to that part of the country), was quite passionate.

When I recently purchased by 3-disc set of independent filmmaker Eagle Pennell's recently re-released The Whole Shootin' Match (1978), I flashed back to the post-film discussion at this screening. After all, The Whole Shootin' Match was the film which allegedly inspired Robert Redford to spearhead the Sundance Institute. Shot on a shoestring budget in Austin, Texas in grainy, black-and-white, 16mm stock (and a fast film stock at that), this drama tells the simple story of two "loser" friends who are intent on finding a way to get on the dole and on their way to their big break.














While watching the film, I stopped midway to actively think about other regional filmmaking efforts I have witnessed in my film-watching heretofore, and their relationship(s) to The Whole Shootin' Match. I looked across the way to one of the many bookshelves in my apartment which house DVDs. On one particular bookshelf, I have arranged an American Independent section of the collection, featuring films like Barbara Loden's Wanda (1970), Bruce Schwartz's In MacArthur Park (1977), Joseph Strick's Road Movie (1972), Jon Jost's Last Chants for a Slow Dance (1977), Rob Nilsson's Northern Lights (1978) and others. I immediately, then, started thinking about the many efforts that have been made to not only get films made outside the Hollywood system on the independent circuit but to also get them made outside the bustling, "artistically fertile" urban environments which have, as if by default, assumed the role of an artist fusion...a mass, unofficial artists' commune. The individuality of independent cinema, particularly American independent cinema, rests in our collective interest in specialized regional filmmaking. I thought of a friend of mine, Mark Thimijan, and his recent successes in shooting independent films, a feature entitled Barstool Cowboy and a short entitled The Girl Who Could Run 600 Miles Per Hour in his native Nebraska.

I then continued watching The Whole Shootin' Match , confessedly an often technically ragged piece that uses the "charms" of a low budget to render what we are seeing a singularly and supremely emotional experience, one where investments are made and the heart and passion of the filmmaker is deeply felt. One is drawn in the strangest of ways to the wild, impulsive zooms, the rough pans, the super-directional lighting, inconsistent exposures and all the other inconsistencies in ways where we are shrugging and saying, "In any other film, I lose my patience...but with this, I am locked into it and, amazingly enough, gain a heightened appreciation from these 'distractionary elements'." Keeping in mind that this film was shot on an astounding $30,000 budget, it's all the more something to savor and a morale booster for those regional filmmakers looking towards the completion of their opus.














I was similarly delighted by Watchmaker Films' DVD release of this film. Great care has been taken in the transfer and a great deal of effort has been made in the supplements department. There are two commentary tracks for the film itself, a 46-page booklet detailing the film's creation, reception and legacy, as well as a soundtrack CD, an earlier 28-minute short film by Eagle Pennell (A Hell of a Note) and a full-length documentary about Pennell (The King of Texas).

There is a certain grainy black-and-white to be had here as well. For one who has shot a film where the "grain factor" on the black-and-white image was quite high (to the extent I had it manipulated in processing by pushing underexposed stock), the feeling of a homemade, but nonetheless presentable, feature-film was yet another irrestible element. The struggle of these two impetuous backwoods boys as they attempt one backward scheme after another (whether its polyurethane or flying squirrels) makes for a very endearing story, told the best way shoestringers know how: with a motto of "the rough-hewn is the best-hewn".

Every effort made in regional filmmaking most decidedly renders different results. For example, in Jost's Last Chants for a Slow Dance, which Time Out called "a scathing portrait of the American macho," a wildly improvisatory style that seems all too becoming of American independent cinema young and old is, here, aptly used to explore the actor's (and vicariously, the viewer's) conception of this archetype in American culture. The mystification cum demystification of the West can be grasped simply by observing how the actors on display choose to demonstrate their image of the archetype. Jost uses long (read LONG) takes to do so, and takes us on the road in a very regional-filmmaking way, in an effort to get us to witness how the actors delineation of the given archetype morphs from port to port, from encounter to encounter, in locations that feel (and are) very real to our image/conception of them as well as to the reality itself. It most importantly makes no concessions to any momentary quaintness, and uniformity not the least bit inherent in the stream of interactions.














The "word on the street" would lead you to believe that finely observed quotidian flourishes from moment to moment are always and forever the bread and butter of regional-filmmaking indie works. That would also seem to be the allure it has for cineastes. In Bruce Schwartz's little seen AFI-financed In MacArthur Park (1977), the lead character makes an unwilling exodus from the Indian reservation of his youth to the big city, resolved to support his family outside the community following a local tragedy involving the encroachment from outside of their land, including their entire food supply. Moving to L.A. for work to support his family, he mugs and accidentally murders a man in desperation in the eponymous Los Angeles park. The sometimes clunky acting, the technical inconsistencies and occasionally questionable editing cannot hold a candle to the tone Schwartz evokes with images of the reservation in its halcyon days. Schwartz described the film as "the story of a man who fell through the cracks -- a man lacking the skills one needs for survival in modern society." It also about the abyss that exists between where the man came from and where he has wound up. It is a simple film...pick up a camera and shoot it. The actors explore, in a similar way to that which we observe the actors doing in The Whole Shootin' Match. Wanda, directed by Elia Kazan's wife Barbara Loden, uses a similar construct. It relies on being wholly, totally 100% organic, without falling on the heels of contrivance or, daresay, tedium.

Rumor has it that Watchmaker Films is now restoring Pennell's second feature, Last Night at the Alamo (1983). One of the marvels of home theater...you can catch films that (inevitably) fell past the radar on the first go-round.