Day: April 11, 2009

My interview earlier today with Tyson director James Toback, which happened between 11:30 am and 1 pm at Manhattan’s Harvard Club, was easily the most spirited, relaxed and and enjoyable discussion I’ve had with anyone in a long while, taped or not. (Here’s more of the same.) Toback is one of the most sage observers I’ve ever known, and hands down the greatest gabber — not in a blah-blah, listen-to-me-talk sense but in the vein of a guy who just knows and doesn’t believe in trimming his sails.

Intimidation (even the intimidation that beautiful women impose on the best of us) never seems to affect him. He doesn’t seem to know from hesitancy either. Which is why his discussions with Mike Tyson went so well, which is the main reason, I feel, why Tyson connects.

I had more fun listening to this after the fact (i.e., as I edited it down at a Monticello pizza parlor) than any taped conversation I’ve ever done for Hollywood Elsewhere. Seriously. In large part because our chat was substantive. Here’s part #1 and part #2.

In discussion #2 Toback told me something I didn’t know, which was that two days ago Tyson began to be illegally downloaded. He said that Sony Classics attorneys were doing what they could to have the file taken down, and that it might already be down as we spoke. Toback isn’t horribly disturbed by this as he tends to believe that illegal downloads are seenhelpful to films that have drawn good word-of-mouth. Which would include Tyson, of course.

I’ve been feeling more and more amped about the possibility of Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock (Focus Features, 8.14.09) playing at Cannes next month, and so I decided on the spur of the moment early this afternoon to rent a car and drive up to the site of the 1969 Woodstock Music and Arts Fair. You can really feel something when you first arrive and take it all in. It’s like visiting Dealey Plaza or Ground Zero. The site is located on Hurd Road right off 17B in Bethel, New York — about a two-hour drive from Manhattan.

4.11.09, 6:35 pm, facing the area where the stage sat at the 1969 Woodstock Music and Arts Fair. A private security guy pulled up in the area behind the stage and told me I wasn’t supposed to be walking around on the field.

4.11.09, 6:55 pm.

4.11.09, 6:35 pm, facing the natural amphitheatre from the area where the stage once stood.

Marked on any Sulllivan County map.

A year ago I ran a brief plea for the DVD release of Carol Reed‘s Outcast of the Islands, which coincidentally aired a month later on Turner Classic Movies. Yesterday, still fired up by the response to Thursday’s “The Disappeared” piece, I came upon this Pauline Kael capsule review.

“A marvellous film (drawn from Joseph Conrad‘s work) that relatively few people have seen,” she began. “It’s probably the only movie that has ever attempted to deal in a complex way with the subject of the civilized man’s ambivalence about the savage. It also contains some of the most remarkable sequences ever filmed by the English director Carol Reed; it’s an uneven movie, but with splendid moments throughout.

“Trevor Howard is superb as Willems, who makes himself an outcast first through contemptible irresponsibility and through betrayal of those who trust him, and finally and hopelessly when, against his will, he is attracted to the silent, primitive girl, the terrifying Aissa (played by Kerima). Willems is wrong in almost everything he does, but he represents a gesture toward life; his enemy, Almayer (Robert Morley), is so horribly, pathetically stuffy that his family unit (with Wendy Hiller as his wife and Annabel Morley as his child) is absurdly, painfully funny.

“With Ralph Richardson, whose role is possibly ill-conceived, and George Coulouris, Wilfrid Hyde-White, and Frederick Valk. The screenplay is by William Fairchild; cinematography by John Wilcox.”

I wrote last year that Outcast of the Islands is “a forgotten film that nobody cares about at all. Except, I’m thinking, possibly those obsessives at the Criterion Collection. These fellows are just peculiar enough to put out a remastered version of this British-produced film on DVD.”