Sidney J. Furie is Alive and Well and Living in Pictures: An Appreciation of an Unjustly Maligned and Marginalized Director

Around the age of eleven, I caught an afternoon showing of The Ipcress File (1965) on Bravo. Yes, I am speaking of Bravo as it was back in the day, when I could catch obscure gems like Albert Finney's Charlie Bubbles (1968) or Irvin Kershner's The Luck of Ginger Coffey (1964) after a sixth-grade school-day. In my mind, I romanticize those after-school sessions in front of the television watching largely forgotten works on Bravo as my first real film school — and this was, I might add, in an age before Turner Classic Movies came to be known for what it was to gloriously become. Around the same time, I had my first introduction to Antonioni's Blow-Up on the same channel, as well as Truffaut's The 400 Blows. It was a rather fortuitous education. All of the films I had seen on Bravo around that time helped to define and open the door to a brand of cinematic language to which I had not been accustomed prior.

I was struck at that age by a familiar name in the opening credits of The Ipcress File. "Directed by Sidney J. Furie." Even as a little kid, I always noticed the names of directors, even before I knew the first thing about what a director did.  Perhaps it was because their names were always ended the title sequences that belated the start of the movies. My only other reference for Furie when I laid eyes on The Ipcress File was Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987), which I had played to death essentially since infancy -- and The Ipcress File was leaps, bounds and eons from the likes of the grade-Z reputation that smeared the Canon Films production of Superman IV.  Unless you are a child genius, isn't it likely that, as kids, we would all feel that a movie like Superman IV: The Quest for Peace is the cat's meow? It takes age, which subdues easy wonderment, and a weather-beaten eye that has grown keen with film-watching cynicism, to quickly realize how poorly made and overwhelmingly ludicrous the last official sequel in the Christopher Reeve franchise appears.  My brothers used to torture me using Superman movie mythology (my next eldest brother was always General Zod) and I was one such kid who was reared on the original Superman films.  The original Superman The Movie is the first film I have any memory of seeing.  So, my very first introduction to director Sidney J. Furie was very early on, with perhaps one of his very worst films, and no doubt one of his his all-time career lows.  But every time of the many times I went to watch Superman IV as a tyke, there it was...that name which obviously meant nothing to me then, but would mean a great deal to me later.  I did not know until later that his name also meant something to the likes of Scorsese, Tarantino and Kubrick, who respectively have admired The Entity (1982), Hit! (1973) and The Boys in Company C (1977).  Yet, he has heretofore remained unwritten about, and as forgotten as many of the Obscuritan opuses I uncovered on Bravo when I was eleven.

I do not mean to play the apologist for the errors and absurdities of Superman IV, but I learned only later that last-minute mandatory script changes had compromised Christopher Reeve's original vision for the film as the "socially conscious installment" in the franchise, and that whoppingly drastic budget-cuts (from $36 million to $17 million) made the unfortunate Furie powerless to the will of the infamous Canon Films impresarios, Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus.  My second encounter with Sidney J. Furie following Superman IV was with the Rodney Dangerfield family vehicle Ladybugs (1992). I decline comment here because I have not seen the film since its release (and truth be told, I'd rather not).  But when I completed my initial viewing of The Ipcress File, Furie was no longer just the poor "journeyman" schlub-for-hire who got suckered into directing the shoddiest entry in the my favorite childhood movie series. He was a director with a voice -- yes, perhaps an artist who (like many, sadly) found himself marginalized in the 1980's, when a mainstream film's commercial prowess reached the apex of importance over its artistic merit.  After all, working directors had to eat too, of course. Most of all, though, Furie is a man whose films are anomalies among their own kind and minorities within their own subcategories -- the audacious exceptions and never the rule.  The Ipcress File and The Naked Runner are the odd films out among espionage thrillers, Hit! is most definitely an anomaly among action thrillers and blaxploitation films, Sheila Levine is Dead and Living in New York is a consummately strange exception among romantic comedies and The Entity surely isn't your ordinary horror film.  I could go on.  The Boys in Company C is an incongruously dual-structured and matter-of-fact Vietnam War picture (of which Full Metal Jacket is essentially a remake, R. Lee Ermey and all), and both Lady Sings the Blues and Gable and Lombard capitalize on the 1970's trend of Hollywoodizing and pulpifying biography, and thus both films wind up as a commentary on this trend in biopics of the era.  As you can probably tell, Furie as a director has worked in most all forms and genres.  It is my intention in writing this to showcase a filmmaker who has been unjustly sidelined as a secondary talent...and thus forgotten, and rarely remembered. He is a filmmaker with viable trademarks who makes directors films, and I intend to explore that. And no, Sidney Furie is not Sid Vicious' slightly more tempered cousin, in case that crossed your mind.

My original exposure to The Ipcress File was in a version that had been pan-and-scanned from a Techniscope screen-size of 2.35:1 to the 1.33:1 television screen-size, but the atmosphere of the film alone, with the aged and degraded print quality, its gloomy color palette, and its creepily forlorn tonal quality, left me very much affected at that age. The whole film is shot on broodingly overcast days. Even the unsettling look of the approaching headlights of a truck driving right up to the lens in a dark, deserted parking garage gives one definite pause to consider its visual ominousness. It is a film that made me realize how integral every element is in the filmmaking art, and how a director can use and manipulate those elements to heighten it to a full-blown experience. I was finally able to see The Ipcress File in its original aspect ratio when I was in my early twenties. To that point, I was completely unaware it was a widescreen picture. Seeing it in this form was a revelation.  I finally was able to experience cinematographer Otto Heller's painstakingly scrupulous widescreen compositions and his alluring, painterly noir-like mood lighting, as well of the scope of Furie's vision as a distinctly visual director.  I remember that, in one of my first amateur film projects made when I was a teenager, I mimicked a shot from The Ipcress File.  It was undoubtedly the first shot from any other film to which I ever paid homage in my own work; it was the "eyeglass p.o.v." from the parking garage trade-off sequence.

Furie's main visual motif was certainly one of the most startling aspects of seeing Ipcress uncropped. In this uncompromised version, we realize that Furie chooses to shoot through objects, and attempts to fragment the wide frame in various patterns, outright penetrating the things native to the shooting environment with his lens. A notable scene involving a physical altercation outside of a science library in London's South Kensington chooses to shoot through the glass and dulled red steel beams of a London phone booth. He also begins a half-realized romantic conversation in a government office by shooting through the thin metal dials of a desktop paper-bin. A character in the backseat of a car is framed through the hood-ornament of the car.  An approaching figure is framed through the glass of a just-expired parking meter.  The revelation of a key plot-point is framed through the errant eyeglasses of a dead man (i.e. the shot that marked my first homage in my own filmmaking). As two odious characters approach Michael Caine and Nigel Green to make a clandestine deal at a concert of military music in a public park, Furie composes these miscreants through a drumset's cymbal crashing, in beat to the march that the band is playing. These are just a few notable examples, selected from many others, of Furie using his lens to penetrate local objects, in an effort to actively unnerve the audience.  The amazing thing is that this potentially tiresome device never comes off as irritating or overstated.  He often goes out of his way to establish this visual trope as a motif, to give the film a stylistic vitality and a sense of the ethereal that it would have absolutely lacked in the hands of a Bond director like Terence Young or Guy Hamilton.  The Ipcress File is an anomaly within the world of the espionage thriller. It is no small wonder that producer Harry Saltzman, producer of The Ipcress File and the early James Bond films, strongly disliked Furie's experimental shooting and directing style.

As the story goes, when Furie was shooting the above-mentioned key fight scene in The Ipcress File through the beams of the red phone booth, Saltzman screamed at Furie, "That's now how you shoot a fight scene. The camera should be over there right next to them!" The tempered and soft-spoken Furie, who was at war with Saltzman throughout the production, simply responded, "That's how you shoot a Bond fight sequence." Music composer John Barry commented that the basis of his unusual cymbalom score for the film was Furie's framing of shots and his otherworldly staging of scenes. The film went on to win the Best Picture at the British Academy Awards that year. The word on the street is that Saltzman claimed Furie's directing award, and never handed it off to him.  In any case, Furie had arrived, and was quickly handed The Appaloosa (1966), a Universal Western with Marlon Brando, as his follow-up.  Like The Ipcress File, it is a film that takes great risks with camera placement and once again exploits the immeasurable opportunity inherent in the wide frame; however, many critics dismissed that film as ostentatious in comparison to its brilliant predecessor.  It is still grossly unlike any studio Western of the 1960's, even Brando's own One-Eyed Jacks (1961), of which The Appaloosa is arguably a dramatic extension.  One critic took note of "Furie's mania for weirdly mannered camera angles," adding parenthetically, "you spend half the time peering round, over or under obstacles behind which the action is strategically placed."

In the intervening years following my initial viewing of The Ipcress File, I had come to see a great deal of Furie's other films, including The Leather Boys (1964), The Appaloosa (1966), The Naked Runner (1967), Little Fauss and Big Halsy (1970), Lady Sings the Blues (1972), Hit! (1973), Sheila Levine is Dead and Living in New York (1975), Gable and Lombard (1976), The Boys in Company C (1977), The Entity (1982) and Purple Hearts (1984). All of these films left residues, including (and maybe even especially) two of his perceived "bombs," Hit! and Sheila Levine..., which both tanked upon initial release. The former is perhaps the only epic blaxploitation picture, following a "close-knit family"-like unit of American enforcers, ranging from Billy Dee Williams and Richard Pryor (truly excellent in one of his rare dramatic roles, a la Paul Schrader's Blue Collar) to the Robert Altman 70's stock company member Gwen Welles.  The cast also features Furie acting staples Sid Melton and Janet Brandt as the "classically Jewish" parents of an overdose victim, who have some unexpected "executive" experience.  Getting back to Pryor for a moment, Furie is really the only director saw Pryor's potential as a dramatic actor, and this is something that Paul Schrader would also realize and use to great effect years later in his own Blue Collar (1978). His use of him in Lady Sings the Blues (in which Pryor emerges as one of the driving force of the film, as Piano-Man) and in Hit! showcases his multifarious acting talents, demonstrating that his talent was always beyond that of just a stand-up comic who crossed over into movies.  There are moments of jazz in Pryor's performance.  As an actor, he is like a jazz musician who can spark such brilliant invention on a moment's notice, and Furie is like the bandleader who lets his wildly spontaneous jazz riffs breathe.  There is a moment of improvisation between Pryor and Gwen Welles before Williams catches a ferry to meet Melton and Brandt for the first time -- a moment that any other director would have certainly cut or advised Pryor against.  Furie not only retains it, but definitively lets it dictate a sustained tonality.  It is a blithely idiosyncratic film in this way.  A moment that was no doubt written in the script as "Nick exits the car" is hence pushed well beyond the ordinary and perfunctory.

The movie's "motley crew" band is out for revenge against the Marseilles drug smugglers who have indirectly killed substance-abusing members of their respective families. Throughout this hunt, these people become a family themselves. At 134 minutes, spanning continents and a large number of locations, Hit! is unlike any other action genre piece of its time...and perhaps any other time. Those seemingly few who have seen it (including critic and historian Robin Wood) argue that it might be Furie's masterpiece. Part of what makes the film extraordinary is that Furie uses a model of Samuel Arkoff and Roger Corman low-budget black action films, subverts it and totally turns it on its ear by adding peripheral characters and expanding it to a more epic length, and then appropriating the journey film paradigm to reflect on what the films that were the sources of inspiration were really saying about the culture and social construct they were set within. It is an extraordinary piece of work, complete with sometimes deliberately clumsy camerawork to always point back to its low-budget filmic godfathers. It begins as one kind of film, sets up an expectation, and ends as another kind of film. At two and a quarter hours, Hit! has a beautiful economy that is something to truly behold.  When the film is digressive, Furie makes his deep affection for the characters always known and perceptible, and that is enough to not just to carry the detours, but allow those detours to render the film thankfully idiosyncratic in only the best of ways.  It makes sense that Tarantino saw Hit! as an inspiration for Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction as a certain talkiness is force-fed into the action genre. The baby was fed spinach only to discover that it went down perfectly easily.

Upon its 2012 DVD release, Combustible Celluloid wrote, "Hit! is a slow, weird movie, but it tries so many things we're not used to seeing, as well as relying on some old comfortable staples, and it mixes this cocktail in such a cool way.  Richard Pryor is especially good, and is called upon to improvise some humor from time to time. Again, this is the kind of stuff that any director today would have cut in order to move the plot forward.  In Hit!, it provides the film with its true personality. It also has a welcome, grainy texture, which indicates how the film must have looked when it was projected way back when."

One can especially get a sense of a filmmaker's personal stamp at hand during Furie's tenure with Paramount Pictures, even though, on the surface, given a cursory look at the work, one could conjecture that these projects could very well have been helmed by most any studio-contracted journeyman (mostly because of Furie's eclectic choice of material and genre). However, a real case in point is the pulp-biopic Lady Sings the Blues, in which Diana Ross stars as Billie Holiday, in an epic biopic of the sultry-voiced jazz diva's stormy life and career. There are really three films in Lady Sings the Blues.  On the most basic level, there is the musical, the biography and the classic Hollywood melodrama.  But on a much deeper level, there is the film about the life of Billie Holiday, the film about the development of Holiday’s art, and the film that Furie is ultimately making.  The directorial strategy involves something like wrapping the film’s subject in its obvious biopic cocoon, then watching it act outside the confines of that cocoon. It's a music-biopic actively written in jazz itself, often rendered in a style that is simultaneously jazzy and wholesale-formalist.  A solid example of this point is the so-called "who's knocking at the door" scene late in the film, in which Diana Ross and Richard Pryor improvise an entire lengthy dialogue as the harbingers of the more formally written scene knock impatiently at the door ready to play a scene inclined more faithfully towards the dictates of the page.  You have this sense of Jazz in no hurry to answer the door to the Formalism...but eventually it does, and the scene plays on with both in harmony.  Furie discusses this scene explicitly on the DVD of the film.

It is Furie's sensitive treatment of his camera placement choices that most often sets him apart from other directors working over the same material. The stylistic choices made for Hollywood biopics usually proved deadeningly objective in terms of staging and camera placement, in American films through to the 70's and 80's. Two of the most notable early examples of subverting this model were Karel Reisz's Isadora (1968) and Furie's Lady Sings the Blues. The biopic would hit its stride and reach its pinnacle with Scorsese's Raging Bull nearly a decade later, and many would begin to rethink the potential of the biopic. One extraordinary scene in Lady Sings the Blues observes Billie Holiday in confinement during a period of painful drug detox, as her lover and her doctor tend to her shaking and trembling body in a padded cell. Furie does indeed choose to play this scene out in a master, which he holds for three whole minutes. But what would normally be an objective fourth wall view of the scene's events becomes a much more proactive view. The perspective becomes subjective with the simple use of a lurchingly slow dolly-in, gradually approaching the actors at this highly fraught emotional moment, becoming a proactive observer and taking the same concern in Billie as the two man standing over her do. With this long take, Furie allows space and respect to the performers, as well as the appropriate amount of time for the ambitions of his shot, which only augments the actors' contributions.

What is also worthy of note in Lady Sings the Blues is that Furie relegates traditional cinematic notions of race and color to the proverbial backseat.  It may sound a hackneyed cliché, but Furie later admitted while being interviewed about the film, "I wanted the audience to see Billy Dee Williams as a Clark Gable, rather than a black Clark Gable."  Yes, it all sounds nifty, but are these more than just ingratiating words?  Most certainly they are.  The question of race is certainly present but simultaneously ignored with good taste, good conscience, good judgment and artistry.  What would have been, at least partly, a heavy-handed tract on race in the hands of another director (most especially a white director in the 1970's) is, in the hands of Furie, taken for what it is: a drama that unfolds featuring actors and characters of darker pigmentation.  Even the "Strange Fruit" sequence, which exposes the so-called "strange fruit" of Billie Holiday's legendary social problem torch-song as a lynched black man hanging from a Georgia tree-branch, is thankfully matter-of-fact and not a point of heavy meditation that sinks any section of the picture in tired and mediocre philosophizing or hammy meditation.  It is what it is.  It passes as to open the film beyond an obvious element that most Hollywood filmmakers would exploit to be polemical and/or Stanley Kramer-esque.  It ends with no overwrought allegory or message-making.  Nothing in Lady Sings the Blues is mired in oppressive symbolism or shallow, capricious myth-manufacturing.  Its only sin, perhaps, is in its conception of the male lead as chivalrous, impenetrable quasi-matinee idol, however clear Furie's ambition with this was.  This sin fails to weight it down as the film exists as a deliberate "pulpification" of a true-life story.

One cannot really say the same for Gable and Lombard (1976), a film that so unabashedly plays with myth-making that it almost becomes a parody of itself.  In many ways, Gable and Lombard is Furie's least accomplished film of its time, ending the three-film cycle of having worked with producer Harry Korshak.  But the film does function in the way that Boom! (1967) and/or Secret Ceremony (1968) functions for Joseph Losey -- as camp whose awareness of itself as camp enriches it as a text that meditates on the very nature of camp and kitsch.  Shot in 1.85:1, Gable and Lombard is also curiously perhaps Furie's least dynamic in terms of visual style and camera placement, and not simply because of the scaling down of the width.  It makes an appropriate double screening with Arthur Hiller's similarly dry, campy and myth-manufacturing W.C. Fields and Me (1976).

In Sheila Levine is Dead and Living in New York, there is another Furie-directed scene that is played out in one impressively mounted -- but fundamentally simple -- long take, this one an unbroken master shot that clocks in at five minutes and eleven seconds, never once devaluing or diminishing the ebb and flow of naturalism in the interplay between Roy Scheider and Jeannie Berlin even by once using other closer coverage. There is a very cogent decision made in favor of one single shot, a five-minute master, that perfectly captures the awkward comic folly of their conversation. The scene never leans too narrowly on the editor's prowess, but rather on the shot and, wholly by extension, the actors. I would place Furie in the highest echelon against any other director in film history for his deliberate and gutsy use of the 2.35:1 Scope frame. In film after film in which he shoots in Scope, he very calculatedly and meticulously strategizes his use of the wider canvas, actively reflecting on the ramifications and possibilities inherent in plotting the inner workings and the mise-en-scene of this challenging aspect ratio.

In the scene just mentioned, in an effort to distance us unwillingly from Berlin and also to magnify the initial distance between Berlin and Scheider's characters, Furie places them on totally opposite and extreme ends of the exceptionally wide frame. This is no new concept, and it is an effect that was of course lost in the 1980's network TV version of the film (which I have also seen), which turns this single shot into a series of cuts between two fragmented and cropped "quasi close-ups" of the two actors on those opposite ends. What makes this particular instance stunning is the more precise division of screen space.  Scheider is permitted to assume nearly two thirds of the frame (counting feet on a coffee table), with Berlin ensconced uneasily and uncomfortably in the last of the thirds, at a discernible distance.  This speaks volumes in that, from Scheider's point-of-view in the scene, she is a specimen to him -- yet another go at a potential conquest.  Coming early in the film, the scene's camera placement and how it is sustained heightens our consideration of Berlin's vulnerability as a new arrival to New York City.  Her visual presence in the scene feels relatively microscopic compared to Scheider's. It is brilliant psychology in framing, and even more so that Furie remains on this same shot for a full 5:11.

There is yet another trademark performance long-take in the earlier Little Fauss and Big Halsy (1970), a film that both Furie and star Robert Redford later wrote off as a failure and an embarrassment.  The long-take in that one lasts nearly four minutes, and features Redford and co-star Michael J. Pollard very naturalistically shooting the breeze sitting on the rear of a stalled pick-up truck, seemingly without feeling solely obliged strictly to advance the plot.  Some rumors make the claim that screenwriter Charles Eastman directed most of the final film, but the presence of this sequence certainly informs us that Furie did inject some of his own filmmaking DNA into what he deemed, in the final analysis, a failed film.  Personally, it is hard for me to totally dismiss the film out of hand.  There are some very effective things in it, including the adroit use of a Johnny Cash song score that puts John Frankenheimer's use of a Cash song score in I Walk the Line (1970, the same year) to shame.  There are also two excellent performances by extraordinary character actress Lucille Benson and 30's actor Wallace Beery's nephew Noah Beery, playing an eccentric parental tag-team to Michael J. Pollard.  The depiction of the fraught, contentious relationship between the two male leads is also particularly potent, and this relationship is central to the film's drama.  It is noteworthy to mention that, in 1970, Vincent Canby became one of the first critics to cite a thread and an auteurist sense of thematics in Furie's work, and he cited it in response to, of all films, Little Fauss and Big Halsy: "It is not so much a bike movie, or a movie about contemporary life styles, as you might believe from the ads; rather, it is another in a continuing series of betrayed male relationships that seems central to the screen career ("The Leather Boys," "The Ipcress File," "The Lawyer," etc.) of Sidney J. Furie."  This theme would reach its pinnacle in Hit! only three years later, but drop off the map in Furie's canon with the likes of Lady Sings the Blues, Sheila Levine is Dead and Living in New York and The Entity.

"The truth is that, whether your film is about a great mythological character or it's a little movie that nobody will probably ever hear of, you have to do right.  You have to approach it like it's the most important thing in the world.  But filmmakers are like gunslingers, and you don't win every duel."
    -Sidney J. Furie

Sheila Levine... was massacred almost unanimously by critics, and I have never quite understood why, as Furie handles the material, adapted from a bestselling Gail Parent novel, with a deft comic sensitivity that is rare in mainstream Hollywood literary adaptation of the 70's. Quite honestly, this film was Furie's critical Waterloo in its time. The humor, experienced nearly forty years later, is sensitive, broad at the right times, well-timed and seasoned with a welcome affection Furie possesses for nearly every one of his characters. I would venture to say that it is one of the most unfairly treated films of its time. Canby, who earlier made the first observation of thematic correlation between Furie's films, wrote in the New York Times, "Something disastrous happened to the heroine of Gail Parent's funny novel on her way to the silver screen.  Sheila, the Jewish girl from Harrisburg, the college graduate with a degree in epic survival, has lost her wit, her self-perceptions, her lucky way of failing at suicide or, rather, of having a pushy mother who knows just when to call the cops."  Pauline Kael, everyone's favorite imperious, petulant and impetuous New Yorker critic, a woman never known to mince words, was (needless to say) no kinder to the film: "Not only is this picture full of scenes that were clichés the first time they done, but Sidney Furie brings worse than nothing to them. Sheila is allowed to show vivacity only when she's clumsy or flustered or behaving idiotically; the more mature she becomes, the more slowed-down she is.  What's disturbing about the movie is that it exploits the self-hatred of so many women in the audience, who identify with Sheila because they feel that they too are not top-quality love objects.  I think they may also transfer their self-hatred towards an actress who plays this sort of role."  As of 2012, like both Little Fauss and Big Halsy and The Lawyer, Sheila Levine is Dead and Living in New York have never been released on any home video format.  Only the latter has been intermittently available for download.

Jeannie Berlin's broad comical portrayal of the quintessential homely bride was nominated at the 1972 Academy Awards for Supporting Actress, losing to Eileen Heckart in Butterflies Are Free.  The Heartbreak Kid was directed by Berlin's mother Elaine May. What Furie does is pluck that characterization from The Heartbreak Kid, stripping away the inherently victimized nature of the character in the previous film, hence making a romantic heroine of the classical type of "nice Jewish girl" that every good Jewish mother compels their son to marry.  The script was written by the original novel's author Gail Parent and her partner Kenny Solms, both of whom were prominent TV writers for "The Carol Burnett Show" and "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," and as a result, the film in stretches feels like we have crossed over into skitty Mary Tyler Moore/Rhoda country.  That is part of its admittedly dated charm, however, and, as intimated above, this film represents perhaps what is the ultimate example during this period of Furie's filmmaking of Furie as a director holding such a deep affection for his characters to the extent where binaries are neatly broken down to open up the films beyond a general sense of traditional conflict. The characters' rivalry feels civil, almost quiet and never stated so explicitly in direct drama as to disturb a kind of equilibrium.  This runs parallel to the comedic elements, which can be very boldly stated.  But the civil, quiet implicitness of the drama is never stale, dormant or unconflicted.  This trend in Furie's work really began full-blast with Hit!, which is the only action film I can recall where nearly everyone Furie puts any effort into depicting fully is an affectionately realized concoction, right down to Zooey Hall and Todd Martin's bumbling Feds who operate against the curiously heroic team Billy Dee Williams assembles.  Furie does not aspire towards a Blake Edwards-like depiction of Hall and Martin as a pair of FBI Inspector Clouseaus, nor does he ever fixate on such an approach in developing the amusing hotdog-obsessed demolition man played by Paul Hampton.  Rather, these characters are depicted to accentuate a witty sense of idiosyncrasy that never tests the limits of believability nor does it dispel the effects of the build-up to its final action set-pieces.

Through Furie's shot choices, he is able to amplify and direct the audience's empathy towards Jeanne Berlin's Sheila Levine, even when the camera distances itself from her spatially. We often lose Sheila in vast urban spaces, behind a mountainous pile of items on a cluttered office desk, burrowed far away in a tight kitchen corner, pocketed in a bedroom doorway in a far corner of the frame. Psychologically, Furie attempts to establish this spatial distance from her in an effort to have us aspire towards more of a proximity with her, and also to meditate on what it is that the city itself is doing to our Harrisburg heroine -- i.e. making her more of an entity who is relative to her new environment as well as relative within her new environment.  For instance, the first long-take encounter with Scheider (in which she is placed far screen-right significantly away from the lens, versus Scheider's dominant screen-left) is followed immediately by three-minute long-take where Sheila is once again prominent in the frame.  He is also able to amplify the implications of the film's principal threesome by a consistent use of the misleadingly balanced "three-shot," often between Berlin, Scheider and Rebecca Dianna Smith.

Another element of note in Sheila Levine is Dead and Living in New York is then-newcomer cinematographer Donald M. Morgan's lighting and color palette. The film's texture is earthy, and the picture across the board is starkly lit and "Gordon Willis-esque" in the extreme. Characters often fall off completely into shadow and emerge from dark corners into the strategically placed eye-lights and kickers that marked Willis' most meticulous work. Faces emerge amidst murky New York urban spaces. It feels almost noir-ish on occasion, which I cannot help but think was a pertinent stylistic choice made consciously by Furie, Morgan and gaffer Larry Boelens.  Donald Morgan recounts a story of Sheila Levine...'s memorably tenebrous and shadow-strewn visual atmosphere: "Sheila Levine is Dead and Living in New York was probably the most exciting picture I’ve ever been on in my life, because Gordon Willis was shooting Godfather II on the stage next door; the pilot for 'Happy Days' was shooting on another stage, and Conrad Hall was shooting The Day of the Locust.  Sheila Levine barely cost a million dollars, but I remember that it was really exciting. I was working on a Hollywood film with Sid Furie.  When we first started shooting, all the suits came down from their offices and asked Furie, ‘Does this guy know that he’s shooting a comedy? Its too dark’ Sid went nuts. He said, ‘Have you guys ever laughed at radio? You don’t see anybody’s eyes on radio!’ The next day, I kind of brightened things up a bit. We went to dailies and Sid started yelling, ‘They’ve ruined you! They’ve ruined you! Go back to the way you were working before. Don’t let those guys talk you into lighting brighter.'"

With Sheila Levine is Dead and Living in New York, Furie clearly wishes to experiment with exploring the elasticity of the romantic comedy by lighting for almost noirish moods and fall-off.  One can never really buy the film as a traditional work of its genre, because Furie sees a larger picture in this story.  In the way that Willis' camera in Klute (1971) surrounds Jane Fonda's Bree Daniels with the ominous foreboding in that film's urban shadows, Morgan's camera in the Furie film has us losing Berlin's Sheila Levine with spatial distance and low-light as the character becomes more urbanized and accustomed to her new environment.  What Pauline Kael noticed about Berlin's performance vis a vis "the more mature she becomes, the more slowed-down she is" is certainly true, in that the direction and performance works in total conjunction with, and as part and parcel to, the camera-voice.  They reciprocate each other.  The performance validates camera and lighting, and vice-versa, in a direct complement.

Arguably Furie's most dynamically formalist post-70's film is the allegedly fact-based 1982 horror film The Entity, starring Barbara Hershey as a woman who finds herself repeatedly raped, assaulted, abused and otherwise violated by a raging poltergeist.  The film's basis in being supposedly "based on a true story" lies in the fact that the account of the real-life paranormal disturbances of "Carla Moran"/Doris Bither remains, even today, the most famous case study in parapsychology.  Getting down to brass tacks concerning the film itself, however, The Entity is often much admired among those who have seen it, although it is rarely discussed as a director's film.  Martin Scorsese, for example, named it as number 4 on his "11 Scariest Horror Films of All Time" list.

It goes without saying that The Entity embodies some incredibly touchy material.  Rape, abuse and molestation for the purposes of entertainment, fact-based or not, especially in genre entertainment, is not just a tough sell, but also conceivably fatal in its potential for bad taste.  Indeed the film did find itself picketed by woman's groups upon its initial theatrical release.  However, the film's central figure, played by Barbara Hershey, is certainly one of the strongest and most independent female characters of 1980's mainstream American cinema, a true anomaly in a popcorn-littered era in which helpless and one-dimensionally imbecilic damsels in distress were fashionable in Hollywood; this character actually holds her own once she finds herself surrounded and waylaid by a virtual gaggle of oppressive and near-sighted male characters (including Ron Silver's irascibly condescending psychiatrist and, perhaps, the "entity" itself) who seek little else but to question her sanity and belittle her ability to take control of her unfortunate circumstances.  On this note, The Entity represents the first Furie film perhaps since 1970's The Lawyer to capitalize on the existence of victims and binaries in the narrative, after almost a decade in which Furie had put aside associations between good and evil.  Hershey is eventually cornered into becoming little more than a lab rat in a scientists' recreation of her own home.  One cannot help but think this was a blueprint for Todd Haynes' Safe (1995) over ten years later.  Yet, we the audience are with Hershey...and her alone.  That's what makes this film a departure from the previous decade of Furie's output.

Hershey's performance is so incredibly strong and Furie lends her presence extra fire from his trademark camera placement, which goes leaps and bounds to unnerve the viewer, almost to the point that, by the film's climactic confrontation with the entity, you might find yourself trembling. The film is of course shot once again in 2.35:1 almost entirely in Dutch angles, accented by all the Furie-ous visual stamps like the use of the cockeyed "unstable two-shot" and the misleading balance of a three-shot during key dramatic beats.  Scenes featuring Ron Silver's cruelly patronizing, quasi-concerned psychiatrist feature severe close-ups, as when Silver's Dr. Sneiderman confronts Hershey's Carla about allowing the parapsychologists into her home or when he urges her to forsake her scientifically manipulated lab-rat environment for some time in the nut-house.  Bedroom scenes featuring Hershey with a boyfriend played by Alex Rocco feature a camera teetering tremulously on its axis, which is particularly enervating during what is supposed to be a moment of intimacy.  Furie also provides the eeriest of aural cues that make us come to dread the entity's attacks.

Time Out critic Tom Milne writes, "The film's men are so uniformly creepy, and its heroine so strong and sympathetic, that apart from a couple of unpleasant moments the story often seems less like horror than feminist parable, especially when Hershey (giving a fine performance) is reduced to a laboratory object with her home recreated in the psychology department. It goes to show that commercial movies sometimes hit spots that more intentionally didactic efforts can't reach."  Furie himself says of The Entity, "I don't actually consider The Entity to be a horror film.  Horror is a convenient word that is often applied but I don't think horror is a genre at all. It's more of a term."

Sidney J. Furie is a Canadian by birth, born in 1933 in Toronto. He started out working for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and was promoted to the coveted role of producer by age 25, helping to create the then-popular Canadian series "Hudson's Bay" in 1959.  He later graduated to low-budget independent feature films, launching his career with the 1957 low-budget independent feature A Dangerous Age (a picture seemingly on the M.I.A. list). His second feature, A Cool Sound from Hell (also inexplicably M.I.A.), also lensed in Canada, was screened as a double feature next to Karel Reisz's British box-office sensation Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960).  Sidenote: Does anyone remember seeing either A Dangerous Age or A Cool Sound from Hell, and do they still even exist? It might very well be the fact that Furie started off in the "wilderness" of early Canadian independent cinema that immediately puts him in my good graces. Like fellow Toronto-native director Ted Kotcheff, Furie emigrated to England in the early 60's from Canada, then emigrated from England to the U.S. soon after. Kotcheff originally found work in British television, then made a successful transition to feature-film directing, while Furie got his British launch with schlock horror and exploitation fare like Doctor Blood's Coffin and The Snake Woman.  Arguably, Furie's first break-out film was the bubble-gum Cliff Richard musical Wonderful to Be Young! (a.k.a. The Young Ones, released in 1961 with the two horror films). Even in his earliest films, Furie was working with the Scope frame.  Kotcheff worked with the BBC, only making his feature debut later with Life at the Top (1965) while Furie had just made a big splash with The Leather Boys (1964), for which he became a cinematic enfant terrible of the British cinema. Like Basil Dearden's Victim (1961), The Leather Boys dealt very directly with homosexuality in a startlingly straightforward way, and it was one of the first times this theme emerged with such frankness. Its treatment of this theme is decidedly more oblique when viewing the film in today's light, but its shock value was considerable in 1964.

Even with The Leather Boys, ostensibly a more "edgy" and independent venture than his later efforts, he chooses to shoot in 2.35:1. To me, each Sid Furie film is a lesson to me as a filmmaker as to how one should utilize this aspect ratio. A key early scene, shot at the Ace Café 's exterior, has Furie uses yet another one of his trademark master shot long-takes. In 1967, he directed the underrated Frank Sinatra espionage thriller The Naked Runner in which he, again, experiments in the framing of shots under the guidance of cinematographer Otto Heller. Sinatra hired Furie on the strength of his work in The Ipcress File. Incidentally, it was the first Sinatra film to enter into profit after a string of Sinatra flops, even though it crashed and burned in the eyes of the critics of the time. The opening scene of this film, featuring a phonograph playing, as a totally dark and obscured figure with an eye-light sits and contemplatively listens. I cannot help but think that this type of imagery informed the likes of Sin City decades later. Whereas a filmmaker like Tony Richardson would employ a manner of camera acrobatics in the same era (with films like Mademoiselle and The Sailor from Gibraltar), Furie's experiments were more restrained and arguably more successful in that they are more timeless. This is not to say that I dislike or disapprove of Richardson's more pronounced experimentation, but it is fair to assume that Furie did not have the freedom and prestige that Richardson had, so as to work beyond established models. Furie worked more in the genre picture than a Richard Lester or Tony Richardson did, therefore his experimentation had to appear more measured, disciplined and controlled. Perhaps, for that reason, they are more powerful and resonant in some way. Compare Furie's devices to someone like Lelouch's devices. Lelouch, a veritable cause celebre, was operating in France with the use of heavy camera acrobatics -- or, as one critic aptly called it, "shooting in long-hand." It is Furie's measured experimentation with the elements that seems to work more towards a timelessness.

Furie is interviewed in the five-part 1993 documentary Hollywood U.K. about his stint as a film director in England in the 1960's.  He is mentioned (by emcee Richard Lester) in this excellent and impressively comprehensive documentary as being among the ranks of Joseph Losey, Tony Richardson, Bryan Forbes and Lester himself as a key director in the development of the British New Wave.  The Ipcress File was credited as his key film and his crowning achievement during this creatively fertile period.

I recently told a friend that, if I were a film curator, I would program a retrospective of Sidney J. Furie's work, because I have grave doubts that anyone has seriously considered his artistic, directorial stamp until this article. If they have, no definitive materials exist. It is not hard to be an admirer of this sidelined auteur once seeing the fuller body of his work. Following his direction of the box-office success Iron Eagle (1984), he found himself streamlined into directing works that were not worthy of his talent, including many Dolph Lundgren actioneers and Rodney Dangerfield direct-to-video comedies. There was the occasional film, like 2002's Rock My World (a.k.a. Global Heresy, starring Peter O'Toole and Joan Plowright) that granted evidence of an earlier directorial voice at work again.  Nonetheless, I am hard-pressed to think of a more deserving director who has been as maligned and marginalized as he is. There are still many films of his that I have yet to see, including the major Paramount Era film The Lawyer (1970, which launched the TV series "Petrocelli"), but I do hope my writings here ignite your interest in examining these films specifically as director's pieces.

Tickled and Shocked: The New York Mayoral Eras on Film

Every single New Yorker meets a celebrity every single day – whether they know it or not. When I first laid eyes on New York, as a movie-obsessed 16-year-old Pittsburgh boy, visiting friends who lived in Manhattan, I was literally starstruck every time I turned a corner, and my hosts eventually became hyper-aware of this. I would ramble about how a particular scene from an obscure film was shot around where we were standing and how, in some other film, so-and-so had walked exactly where we were walking. I remember commenting at one point how we were walking the same street Robert Mitchum and Shirley MacLaine walk on their way to a dental appointment in 1962’s Two for the Seesaw. I also remember being on a subway platform with my friend Jeff, telling him that I was convinced that were standing on the same subway platform where Charles Bronson gunned down two ill-fated muggers in the original 1974 Death Wish. I am going to reiterate a term I used earlier to redefine and emphasize my condition: starstruck. There is just no other word to describe my state of mind on this first visit to New York. So, the celebrity that New Yorkers meet every day is the city itself – and specifically, sections and remnants of the whole. For the millions of films that have been made in New York, basically every square mile of it has been used for a filming location.

It was not too long after my first blockbuster visit to the city that 9/11 brought an end to an era, needless to say not just for New York. Shortly after that event, when I was able to re-nestle into my cinemania, after being at least somewhat able to crawl out of the epidemic of post-traumatic stress, I couldn’t help but think of the 70’s films that featured the Twin Towers as they were being built, or literally just months after they had been fully erected. The specific films on my mind then included Irvin Kershner’s Loving (1970), in which the construction of the Towers serve as the backdrop for a scene between George Segal and Sterling Hayden – and also of the film adaptation of Godspell (1973), which featured a musical number performed at the very top of one of the Towers (in what, to me, qualifies as the eeriest World Trade Center film appearance). Another winner of the Eerie-Use-of-the-Twin Towers Prize goes to Richard Brooks' Wrong is Right (1982). In this film, terrorists actually plant at a bomb at the top of the towers!  Double double ditto for Lizzie Borden's Born Into Flames (1983).

Around this time, I began categorizing New York cinema by mayoral term, calling given films Lindsay Pictures, Dinkins Pictures, Koch Pictures, Giuliani Pictures, etc. By that point, my fascination, great love and even obsession for New York-set films was at fever pitch. If I were debating between watching two films, the one filmed in New York would win out. I became determined to hunt down the most obscure thrillers, the most unusual romantic dramas, the most offbeat comedies and the most obstinate and ethereal art films if I knew they were set in my favorite town. I would see an Ed Koch-era film and think of this gregarious ex-mayor famously asking his constituents, "How'm I doin'?" I'll look at a film like You've Got Mail and see Giuliani's hand virtually everywhere, from Verdi Square (nee Needle Park) to the Amsterdam Avenue storefronts freshly stripped down for the bourgeoisie and trust-fund kids. Travis Bickle's rain came. In large part, the "real rain" did come to wash the scum of the streets.

And what have we missed after the clouds of that real rain passed? When I finally moved to New York after college, I wrote an article about the history of New York City on film. It was probably the most read and “commercially” successful article I ever wrote for this blog, before or since. But I was struck by something upon moving here. Even though I had many allies in New York City, I had never felt lonelier, and slumped into a depression. I eventually rose out of it and now have been living here for a few years quite happily. My recent filmmaking life, however, has been an attempt to commemorate that initial N.Y.C. funk, and to examine the elements that were complicit in this initial feeling of lostness. My latest film is entitled A Simple Game of Catch. It is about a hopelessly naïve (but naïvely hopeful) girl coming from Pittsburgh to the Big Apple, which echoes my own beginnings in Western Pennsylvania. She finds herself babysitting a parrot amidst a lonely city where she struggles to find a job and people with whom to connect beyond a momentary glance. Below the list of films I provide, you can watch a montage of New York on film clips that I compiled, featuring a reggae song appropriately titled "Happy Survival," which is going to be used for the closing credits of A Simple Game of Catch. The montage uses a wide range of obscure, not-so-obscure and classic New York locations, and the actors and characters that have frequented them.

Born To Win (1971) I have written about this film on a few occasions before. It is one of the many New York films over which I obsess – and I obsess often for the most unusual reasons. I have some admittedly strange propensity for romanticizing the Times Square and 42nd Street of decades ago. In many ways, this is Mayor John V. Lindsay's masterpiece. Never before and never since has New York looked so gritty, and grimy, and unforgiving, and the city itself is more of a character in the film than the actors at certain times. The film stock on which it was shot also seems to add an ashen layer of crud, which only augments the grit and grime of everything on display -- the locations, the characters, the situations, the nooks and the cubbies occupied by addicts stringing out on their last few bucks. This is the city at its most tarnished -- a seedy world that fertilizes the efficacy of a discerning artist's eye.

The Owl and the Pussycat (1970) When I saw this film on a print at Lincoln Center this past November, Lincoln Center film curator Scott Foundas commented to the film's screenwriter Buck Henry that the film has a veritable sense of "New York menace," particularly every time it ventures outside the cramped quarters in which the characters hole themselves up. However, the color palette of menace in this film is a rather garish one. From the night rain shots that open the film, to George Segal's furied run from Doubleday Books to Riker's Deli, and finally to the last scene in Central Park. Barbra Streisand has never played street-smart like this, either. This film, ostensibly a stage-to-screen adaptation of a popular romantic comedy, depicts an underbelly of Manhattan from which most mainstream productions shied away. I can tell you right now that I can't name a single other mainstream studio release of its time to feature scenes in a porn theater filled with various slimy, unsavory types ogling an X-rated film -- a film-within-the-film we do not see but only hear, featuring Streisand voicing some rather raunchy (but undeniably funny) dialogue. And when was the last time you've seen a tough leather-jacketed Brooklyn gang patrolling Lincoln Center? This film's got it. You do the same scene today and it's science-fiction.

Greetings! / Hi Mom! (1968/1970) With a titanic sense of youthful vitality that Brian De Palma seemed to shed in later years when he gave way to pale Hitchcock imitations and cinematic overstatement, his two early features (and companion pieces) Greetings! and Hi Mom! use the playground of New York with a thankfully reckless abandon. One of my favorite scenes in any New York film can be experienced in Greetings!, when draft-dodgers Gerrit Graham, Jonathan Warden and Robert De Niro's jaunt through the Financial District, sprinting, crawling and shuffling their way through the deserted streets bordering Wall Street while simply trying to keep themselves awake. In Hi Mom!, a home-movie-camera-wielding young woman shoots an empty lot that used to exist near 14th Street, while also recording other bits of priceless New York ephemera. Pound for pound, these two spry little films, wonderful early entries in the canon of a recognized and admired American director, capture a certain brand of lost New York...West Village-style.

Midnight Cowboy (1969) No account of late 60's/early 70's New York on film is complete without the landmark Midnight Cowboy. This is a film that is so part of the cultural lexicon that it is quoted even by young 20somethings who have never even seen the film, and probably do not know the source of their quotation is found within. This film penetrates every gritty layer of a New York that, thanks to Rudy Giuliani, no longer exists. From the Xs on the windows of the condemned building in which live Joe Buck and Ratso Rizzo, to the seedy Times Square movie theaters Joe passes by night, this is a film that haunts someone with a penchant for obsessing about a Lindsay-era New York film. This is another one of Mayor Lindsay's seminal masterworks.

The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart (1970) We've gone gritty with addicts, losers and draft-dodgers. With this film, we go gritty with the intently aimless patrons of the 60's counterculture. The main character of this film, Stanley (played by a pre-stardom Don Johnson), wanders wanders wanders, trying to make existential sense of the aimless direction his life is taking. Stanley drops out of Columbia and resigns himself to a life of hippie-esque hedonism. One of the film's most haunting scenes is sort of an expurgated Divine Comedy, in which Stanley is taken underground, where he winds up at an all-but-buried club populated by freaky-deaky drop-outs who groove to a really "heavy" song entitled "Water," as performed by Gay Deceivers star Michael Greer. On the journey to this underground hang-out, the camera quietly takes it all in, examining the remnants of a prodigiously gritty counterculture that one was. Room after room, corridor after corridor, recess after recess, we get a compelling kinetic interior-based snapshot of the New York of 1969. This is all without mentioning a scene in which semi-famous character actor Brandon Maggart attempts to pick up Don Johnson at an all-night diner. The scene ends with Johnson running from the diner out into the unrelenting, wonderland blackness a 60's Manhattan midnight. The character in this film always re-emerges from it in some way that clues us into the beautifully dingy environment in which he is one of millions. It's not a perfect film, but a fascinating one to those who are open to a film that tosses reportable narrative incident to the wind. Andy Warhol dug it, and called it the best studio-produced film ever made about the 60's counterculture. Warning: This one ain't easy to locate.

Coming Apart (1969) Here's a real humdinger of a selection. Here is a film that never once leaves an interior set, except for one shot which peers from its window. This hidden-camera character study of an unhinged psychoanalyst, as played by Rip Torn, cooped up in a tony studio apartment would perhaps never explicitly be called a "very New York" film by anyone else except me. But it is this aforementioned window shot, which would seemingly just be put there as an early intermission from the two-hour freak show on display. This view of a vacant Manhattan lot in black-and-white, which is immediately followed by the endless parade of damaged feminine specimens that land on Torn's doorstep and unspool before our very eyes, is a stern reminder of the land we are inhabiting -- that this studio apartment is simply a microcosm for a much larger framework of urbanity. These women gain an ugly identity when they enter the set from their anonymity in the city's exteriors.

No Place to Hide (a.k.a. Rebel) (1970) This much-maligned independent film is justifiably obscure, and has been seen only by the few interested in a pre-fame Sylvester Stallone's first starring role (not counting the infamous pornographic film with which he regrettably inaugurated his career). No Place to Hide is not really a good film by any stretch of the word, but I have seen it a significant number of times because of its New York locations, from the time I was thirteen years old. Often, the film's locations are dimly lit and/or poorly composed, but they're definitely chosen quite deliberately to evoke a certain Lindsay-era ethos. An early quasi-montage featuring the band of revolutionaries arriving from different sections of New York to congregate in a dingy upstairs storage room in the West 4th Street area showcases the journey these characters take from one part of their town to the other part of their town. They might not be grateful it's "Their Town," but for better or worse, they're the figures in the landscape.

Other Notable John V. Lindsay Films:
The Night They Raided Minsky’s (1968)
Jenny (1970)
The Panic in Needle Park (1971)
Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
Klute (1971)
The French Connection (1971)
The Sidelong Glances of a Pigeon Kicker (1970)

Insert Title Here: A Movie Titling Manifesto

We have come an awfully long way from brilliantly titled films like Five Easy Pieces and Apocalypse Now to the likes of The Artist and The Help. It seems that catchy titles with layered meanings have nearly gone the way of the dodo. As for the work itself, these weak titles are just a voiceless reflection of the work they represent. As Hollywood films become more and more bombastic and puerile, and as independent cinema becomes more and more vacuous and shallow — and scared to death about probing any question that surpasses the boundaries of being ostensibly “with it” — a year’s end leaves us with not much to put in your pockets and take with you in terms of exciting new film work. And the way we’re going, we’ll be watching these lackluster excuses for good work on iPods. Like anything, there are certainly exceptions, but those often don’t stand a perfume spray’s chance in a hurricane. Largely, there’s a flagrant complacency. One of the biggest illustrations of this complacency? The lackluster titles of the films currently on the market. If originality in the work itself is paramount to its directors, writers and creators, why should the title of that work be any different? A title can completely define a film for a person who has not seen it. Yes, I am certainly someone who places a premium on the value of a powerful and impactful title, and for damn good reason. After all, a title like The 39 Steps gets one wondering what could possibly lie at the top (or bottom) of them.

So okay, if you look at the titles of the films I have personlly directed, you might think to yourself that I am exhibitionist of wanton eccentricity; well, either that or someone straining to extreme lengths to be Original. From my perspective, however, good titles are an artform unto themselves. Yes, my canon includes titles like Yarns To Be Spun on the Way to the Happy Home (oy!), The Idiotmaker’s Gravity Tour (oy!) and A Trip to Swadades (oy!). If you think those are doozies, the titles of my university short subjects were far more, shall we say, ornate. If you think I’m kidding, would you be interested in seeing an outlandishly meaningless, experimental little ditty I made called Cockamamie Daguerreotypes? Yeah, I wouldn’t be interested either, if I were you. But admit it…that title has box office smash written all over it (sarcasm). The scary part is that the previous example is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of my old film-school titles. Nonetheless, I have always tortured myself over effectively naming my work, and never have ceased deliberating long and hard about it with each and every project. The Idiotmaker’s Gravity Tour might be a crazy title and one that is easy to lampoon for its outlandishness, but at least it’s interesting and doesn’t march to the beat of any other drummer but its own — and your ears are pricked to discover its meaning(s), even when it’s not so obvious or readily apparent in the work.

As a film viewer, you take away from the title of a movie more than anyone cares to recognize. A title has the power to make or break the possibility of seeing a given film, whether one admits to it or not. As a filmmaker and as a film lover, I find myself constantly disgusted and appalled at an apathy that filmmakers often have towards titling their work effectively. Originality, in this day and age, is often a veil for being derivative in some other covert way. As a result, I have always been dogged and obsessive with providing my works with original titles that could never be mimicked. I give my work titles that stand alone, apart from all other works. This has occasionally back-fired, which I will explore more later. But as I always say, if someone is disinterested in naming their work effectively, I’m disinterested in seeing it…effectively. Now, more than ever before, mediocrity in titling films seems to be the name of the game. Generic titles rule the waves and, as a result, I seem to have been shying away more and more from the newest crop of movies. For all I know, they could be seminal works of art, but the fact that their creators have so gracelessly and unimaginatively named something over which they’ve toiled for months, and often years, drives a need in me to avoid them. If they don’t care, why should I? If they worked that hard on something for that amount of time, why not go the extra mile and work just a little harder in naming their “child”. To me, disinterest in a title is often proportionate with a director’s ultimate disinterest in the work it respresents. I once had a film professor who could be a provocateur when he felt like it, who posited that movie titles should be outlawed and numbers should be used to identify films. The Idiotmaker’s Gravity Tour would thus become Kremer’s #6. Needless to say, I never heard of anything more preposterous and nonsensical, and I don’t even think it merits further comment, but that position is indicative of a much larger apathy towards effective titling. There are as many original title possibilities as there are stars in the sky. For some reason, most filmmakers could care less. They prefer soft titles that are so passive and nondescript, they disappear.With all this in mind, I’ve composed a Movie Titling Manifesto, which seeks to call to mind the cardinal sins of naming a film and a general work of art.

1. (A, The) (noun): Boring one-word titles, with or without the definite or indefinite articles, is the chief cardinal sin of today’s movie titles. Nothing marks movie-titling mediocrity more than this. Titles like this scream “Lazy!” and “Perfunctory!” No matter how apropos a one-word title is, it’s still boring boring boring. Exceptions to this rule can include instances when the single word is unusual, esoteric, archaic or created-from-scratch. Solid and worthy examples of this exception: The Wackness, The Pyx, The Go-Between, The Shining, Sunchaser, Skidoo, Smithereens, Eraserhead, Coonskin, Barfly, Hopscotch, Kamouraska, Zardoz. Interesting surnames like Silkwood and Hesher also make sufficient titles. And the relatively recent film titles guilty of this crime? Tragically, there are way, way too many to name. We could start with The Artist (I nearly didn’t see it because its title was so bland), The Hangover, The Fighter, Somewhere, The Deal, Deal (the previous two were both released in 2008), Bully, Café (which one, you ask? does it matter?), The Village, The Postman, The Happening, The Debt, The Dreamers, The Jacket (don’t want to see a movie about a jacket unless it’s a full metal one), The Experiment, The American, The Switch, The Help, An Education, The Reader, Cars, The Town, The Aviator, The Notebook, The Dilemma, yada yada yada yada. I could go on. I won’t. I need a good drink after wading through all that laziness. In summary: If a title is one word, that one word better be fucking interesting!

2. Titles re-purposed from pre-existing films: If, after a long deliberation process, I found the absolutely perfect title for a film I had just directed, and then discovered that even one other previous film used that title before, I would bite the bullet and never even dream of using it, no matter how obscure that other film was. The title would be ruined for me, and the search for a title would continue. Remakes are another pet peeve of mine, but that’s another story. I am one of those folks who resents having to specify a version when I bring up a film like Psycho. For a certain period of time, thanks to Gus Van Sant, I had to clarify that I was discussing “Hitchcock’s Psycho” when speaking in conversation. I believe that remakes should have different titles from the original they are adapting, as not to disgrace or besmirch the reputation of the original should they tank. One of my favorite 70’s thrillers, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, was one of many films that fell victim to such a “remake smear campaign”. No matter the merits of the original, it will be known more for the failings of the remake. There are defenders of films like Soderbergh’s Solaris. I’m not one of them, even though I have a clear, unfettered view of his intentions with the remake. I do, however, greatly admire Tarkovsky’s Solaris as an immortal landmark masterpiece. I now have to clarify that I am referring to “the Tarkovsky version” when I discuss the film with people. Thanks a lot, Mr. Soderbergh. I really resent that. There are examples that I champion, like The Truth About Charlie, the Jonathan Demme remake of Charade. I can’t say I’m a fan of the remake, but I am grateful that the filmmakers were sensible enough to respect the original enough to want to avoid confusion between the two, thanks to an effective retitling. Likewise is the case with one of my favorite guilty pleasures, Meet Joe Black, which was a remake of Death Takes a Holiday. Aside from remakes, there are titles that people reuse over and over again repeatedly and ad nauseam for projects, even though the like-titled films bear no relation to each other. If you look up Lost and Found on IMDb, it will return 69 hits. Who knows what the return will be in the coming weeks! Trapped returns 61 hits. Even if those titles didn’t return all those hits, who’d want to use them? I’m sorry, there’s just no excuse naming a film with a title that’s been reused umpteen times, in my eyes. Even Scorsese’s The Aviator is guilty of reusing the title of a lackluster 1985 Christopher Reeve vehicle. The former is certainly a good film and the better film of the two, but why reuse a title? I mean, there’s a galaxy of title choices and options for a Howard Hughes biopic. Unfortunately, one cannot copyright a title, except for trademarks. This should change as soon as possible. A title is just as much intellectual property as anything else in the actual film. This goes for books and albums too.

3. Two-Word Titles That Begin With the Word “American”: Anthem, Beauty, Buffalo, Carol, Dream, Flyers, Gangster, Gigolo, Gothic, Graffiti, Movie, Ninja, Pie, Pimp, President, Psycho, Splendor, etc. etc. etc. This is such a tired formula to me. Do people like it because “American” would seem to mellifluously roll off the tongue, almost as if it were under the guidance of a metronome? Perhaps this is the case, but it’s still one of the most eye-rolling conceits in film titling. Exceptions to this rule: The American Friend (because of its ironical sound, considering Wim Wenders uses this collection of words for the sake of irony), American Mongrel (the title of my good friend Deniz Demirer’s upcoming feature works because of how the two words ideologically complement each other -- and Mongrel is a word that I have personally never heard before in a book or film title) and American Graffiti (because the word ‘Graffiti’ is just a good-looking word that is pleasing to the ear, no matter what you pair with it).

4. Excessively lengthy titles: I have been guilty of this sin many times in the past. I used to have a proclivity for the baroque in titles. Thankfully I lost it because now I find it incredibly tiresome. I don’t even believe that titles should be full sentences, no matter how short. There are still certain lengthy titles that I still quite like. Among them: Quackser Fortune Has a Cousin in the Bronx (1970), The Sidelong Glances of a Pigeon Kicker (1970), The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1972), Who is Harry Kellerman and Why is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me? (1971), Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson (1976), Those Daring Young Men in Their Jaunty Jalopies (1969), The Fearless Vampire Killers, or Pardon Me But Your Teeth Are in My Neck (1967) and, of course, the incomparable Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). That said, I now regret that I named a film Yarns To Be Spun on the Way to the Happy Home and I’m glad that I was able to see my way around to changing the title of my first film Crumbs from a Hard-Boiled Egg to the much more suitable and attractive Charles at the Threshold. My advice: If you don’t absolutely have to do it, don’t. No one except you thinks it’s cute. I learned the hard way. People didn’t remember those early films I made as much as their crazy titles. And the films I want(ed) people to forget are remembered because of their wild names. Ugh. Come to think of it, there's a 1966 comedy film called Don't Worry, We'll Think of a Title.

5. First Names: I can take the first name and last name together if it sounds interesting, but naming a film for the first name of a character is a big no-no, and they’re a dime a dozen. Rudy, Michael, Daniel, Jack, Marnie, Eva, Hugo, Joe, David, Dave, Adam, Anna, Elizabeth, Emily, Tim, Margaret, etc. All have a movie named for them. It’s like Holly Golightly naming her cat “Cat” in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

6. Question Titles: Okay, with the question formula, you occasionally get great titles like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and What’s New, Pussycat?, but by and large, it’s a hazard that makes for a bad title, and invites critics to take wise-acre stabs at the work. What’s the Worst That Could Happen? Um, seeing this movie. How Do You Know? I just know it’s bad. Isn’t it obvious? Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? Well, I don’t know about Rock Hunter, but it has spoiled Hollywood into thinking that any title will do, as long as they slap a couple celebrities’ names above it.

7. Once Upon a Time in Wherever: Absolutely no one has the right, in my eyes, to name a film Once Upon a Time in “Wherever”, except Mr. Sergio Leone. And he’s passed on. I’ve seen Mexico, Anatolia, China and Midlands permutations of the formula that belongs solely to a departed Italian master. Please, filmmakers, financiers, marketing people: By all means, knock it off…now…this instant! It really ticks me and others off…and it doesn’t get me into the theater thinking it’s another Leone film or any nod to spaghetti westerns. I walk by the theater holding my tongue from cursing whomever named it that. It’s just dancing on Leone’s grave. Some may think it’s an homage. It’s not. It’s theft. Think of something original and try again.

8. Two Names Separated by “And”: We’ve seen Mikey and Nicky, Minnie and Moskowitz, Nicholas and Alexandra, Melvin and Howard, Thelma and Louise, O.C. and Stiggs, and an endless barrage of other onscreen teams. The previous ones I can accept, but come on, the best ones have been done by now. Again, perfunctory.

9. Generally Generic Titles: Can you imagine a more boring name for an autobiography than My Life or This is My Life? Wake me when it’s over. Unfortunately, there are films that use these titles as well. When a title is so perfunctory and so stale, it’s an immediate turn-off, and tells me something about its creator’s imagination, or lack thereof. Other recent domestic titles that offend this admittedly ambiguous guideline? How about James L. Brooks’ How Do You Know, Remember Me, Life As We Know It (and just about any title with the word Life in it, for that matter), Something’s Gotta Give, It’s Complicated, Just Go With It, He’s Just Not That Into You, She’s the One, She’s So Lovely.

10. Parodies/Send-Ups/Homages to Other Titles: These titles usually remind us of the better movie that their title echoes. To harp on another title and, by extension, another film illustrates to me a lack of imagination and a lack of faith in the product – that it must drudge up the name of a successful film to be successful itself. Examples: Shaun of the Dead, the upcoming Woody Allen film To Rome With Love (which was renamed twice from the more effective The Bop Decameron and Nero Fiddled), From Paris With Love , The Chinese Connection, Silence of the Hams…I’m sure there are others of these that aren’t immediately leaping to mind. I’ve probably blocked them out.

11. Titles Containing Words Like “Deadly,” “Dangerous,” “Fatal” and “Murder”: Titles containing these words nearly always sound like B movies to me, maybe because B movies need the extra dose of sensationalism to sell them, which is something those words provide. When I see these words, I envision the quality of the film being sub-standard. I have a friend whose film was renamed Deadly Drifter by a low-rent distribution company, who then proceeded to market this abstract art film as a big-budget action-packed firecracker. Boy, did that audience probably have a reason to be upset! And what of Dangerous Liaisons and Fatal Attraction? Fairly solid films, yes, but the titles don’t scintillate those baser natures to which they’re trying to appeal.

12. Diary of _____: Zzzzzz. I mean, it was okay when Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970) did it, but today it is a woefully overused trope.

The really scary part of all this? Many of today’s titles are guilty of multiple above "crimes" all at once.

Favorite Titles of the Last 10 Years:

Exit Through the Gift Shop – This one is a conversation-starter. That, and certain titles look great on paper. This one does.

Gabi on the Roof in July – I wouldn’t have even seen this film if its alluring title hadn’t so successfully and poetically evoked Eric Rohmer’s titles. It’s one of my favorite film titles of the last five years.

The Hurt Locker – An unlikely combination of words increases the intrigue level.

The Limits of Control – The way it looks and what it says; when both are solid, it makes a deadly titling combination, and this has both.

Mutual Appreciation – Pleasing to the ear, easy to say and fitting for the film it represents.

Slumdog Millionaire – Some titles just have a good beat.

Martha Marcy May Marlene – It sure is a mouthful, but at least it’s different…and gutsy.

Gambling, Gods and LSD – Sounds slightly more like a book title than a film title, but it’s an enticing combination of words and elements. It got me to buy the DVD from Amazon sight unseen.

L.A. Without a Map – I passionately hated the actual film, but the title was attractive enough to me to want to at least see it.

Lust, Caution – This title is poetry, and it defines the film so well.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close – In my mind, this film was the real all-stops-out worst piece of excrement of 2011. It was just a horrid, wretched, tragedy-milking excuse for a family drama. But I still like the title.

Inglourious Basterds – It may be a riff on another title, but it’s got style. How could one dislike that title?

Underused and Undervalued Titling Models (Paragons of Title Style Which Filmmakers Should Use More):

1. One or Two Characters Doing Something: Celine and Julie Go Boating, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, The Leningrad Cowboys Go America, Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench. I once entertained Reggie and Chazz Play Catch as a possible alternate for my upcoming film A Simple Game of Catch. Two characters doing something establishes a sense of mission and playfulness. Before I wound up seeing it, I sure wanted to join Celine and Julie on their boating expedition. The best part: most of the time, the expectation that the title precipitates is defied, and the title takes on a completely different meaning. That’s the good stuff, folks.

2. Titles That Use a Clock Time: Adam at 6 A.M., 3:10 to Yuma, 12:08 East of Bucharest, 10:30 P.M. Summer, Dinner at Eight, Tonight at 8:30, High Noon. I don’t know why we don’t encounter titles with times more often. After all, isn’t a lot of film watching in eager anticipation of something that is going to happen…or something that’s supposed to happen? Like I wrote above, even a title like The 39 Steps gets us wondering what lies at the top of them, like we wonder about what’s going to happen tonight at 8:30. You want an answer? In that case, Noel Coward’s got it…go see the show! See what I mean?

3. Commands: Kiss the Blood Off My Hands, Exit Through the Gift Shop, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, Tell Me Lies, Drive Me to Vegas and Mars, Raise Your Kids on Seltzer, Let Joy Reign Supreme, Go Get Some Rosemary, Gimme the Loot.  Commands are attention-grabbers and they are perhaps the best way to combat a lamentable trend toward gerundial titles (e.g. Finding Forester, Saving Silverman, Taking Woodstock). 2017 Note: I convinced Sidney Furie to change the title of his recent script from Driving to Vegas and Mars to Drive Me to Vegas and Mars. A subtle but huge difference, in my opinion. Who wants to see Bringing the Head of Alfredo Garcia?

4. Addresses: An interesting and/or cool-sounding address in a title at least could get me to give a film a chance. 84 Charing Cross Road, 10 Rillington Place, 11 Harrowhouse, 711 Ocean Drive, 99 River Street, 29 Firemans Street, 2046. The most excessive (and perfect) example of this is Chantal Akerman’s masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23 Rue du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. An offshoot of this is archaic phone prefixes: Butterfield 8, and Call Northside 777. These addresses and phone numbers hold enough water to be movie titles? You’re wondering why, right? Let’s watch the films! These places have to important somehow.

5. Acronyms, Organizations, Statutes, Rules, Stations, et al. Any title that can get you asking right away, “I wonder what that stands for?” or “I wonder what that means” is a real plus. In a different way, one of my titles seems to successfully do this. Everytime I tell someone I directed a film called A Trip to Swadades, always the first thing out of their mouths is “Where’s that?” Many believed upon first hearing the title that I went to a foreign country to shoot it (I didn’t), and asked me if that was the case. In any case, the intrigue level was definitely upped for most. Examples: M*A*S*H, Catch-22, F.I.S.T. (Federation of Inter-State Truckers), Article 99 (a legal loophole which states that unless his illness/injury is related to military service, a veteran is not eligible for VA hospital benefits), WUSA (a right-wing radio station), C.H.U.D. (Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers), CHOMPS (Canine Home Protection System), D.A.R.Y.L. (Data-Analyzing Robot Youth Lifeform), S.O.B. (Standard Operational Bullshit), even Robert Altman’s HealtH (Happiness, Energy And Longevity Through Health).

6. Town and State: An unlikely mixture of town and state will get the prospective audience asking themselves “What’s so important about that place?” Scotland, PA; Synecdoche, New York; Vernon, Florida; Paris, Texas; Eversmile, New Jersey.

7. Simple Noun/Verb Combo: The Runner Stumbles and A Man Vanishes are two perfect, simple examples. I was once so fond of The Runner Stumbles as a title that I made up a (too) similar one: The Shaman Staggered.

8. Intentional Redundancy: Story of a Love Story, Raymond Carver’s short story “Can You Please Be Quiet Please”

9. Ambiguous and/or Evocative Titles: Your prospective audience can never ask too many questions and wonder too much about “what that’s about.” I’d easily put my own film The Idiotmaker’s Gravity Tour into this category. I can’t tell you how many times this exchange has occurred:

Person: So what’s your film called?

Me: [with a weird smile] The Idiotmaker’s Gravity Tour.

Person:: [chuckling] The Idiotmaker’s Gravity Tour?! And what is that about?

Do you think they would have been even half as interested if I had named my film The Indian Journey, or something like that? I don’t think so. An interesting title goes a long, long way to build an audience’s intrigue level, take my word for it. Other examples: 37^o2 in the Morning (the temperature of the human body after a morning orgasm – in the U.S., they changed the title to the “less cerebral” Betty Blue), 36 Views from the Pic San Loup (the U.S. distributor changed this title to Around a Small Mountain), Four Flies on Grey Velvet, The Sterile Cuckoo (I've seen the film a few times and never figured out what the title really signifies), Puzzle of a Downfall Child (I personally asked the director the meaning of the title and he couldn’t give me a straight answer – bravo!), Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle, the 1971 obscurity The Christian Licorice Store, and the epic-length 1969 Japanese political screed Eros Plus Massacre.

General Rules of Thumb:

1. Titles containing the letters K, X and Z are usually attention-getters for the eye.
2. Unless making a James Bond movie, melodramatic titles containing play-on-words involving Living, Dying, Tomorrow, Yesterday, Forever and the like usually are a hazard, and should be reserved exclusively for soap operas.
3. Repetitions of words and names are corny. Why was the Seinfeld fake-movie Rochelle Rochelle as funny as it was? The only movies to ever get away with it are Kazan’s America, America and Scorsese’s New York, New York.
4. Avoid excessive foreign-language titles if the film isn’t in that language. It’s Pretentious Filmmaking 101.
5. Use the word “Heart” very carefully, lest your film sound like a Hallmark Movie of the Week production.
6. Shakespeare in a title must be done with extreme care. An example that works well: Fortune and Men's Eyes.
7. Avoid overwrought metaphors involving the word Life.
8. Avoid naming a film after a hit song. People will often remember the use of the song in the film much more than anything in the work.

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There are many titles that I love dearly, too many to name in this article. I have a 25-page index of titles I conceived from simply combining words that I found at least some way fascinating in list-form. Pairing up words for titles is my form of crossword puzzle. From that 25-page mass, there is perhaps one single solid page of good titles. One could write stories based on the content of these titles. Truth be told, a couple short films I’ve made have arisen from a this index. I just don’t understand why more people aren’t like this. Titles are arbitrarily handed out to films, and very little thought is put into anything. A note to filmmakers: the next time you’re up to bat with a film, why don’t you think about these points. “You must choose, but choose wisely.”