Day: August 6, 2011

A portion of last night’s visit to North Hollywood — NoHo — involved a pleasant chat with the co-owner of Phil’s Diner. She suggested that I check out Boomermania, a musical that’s just opened at the Noho Arts Center. Unless the designers of the ads are hiding their cards, it’s clearly a nostalgia show. I half-smiled and shrugged my shoulders and told her that it’s an odd time in our country’s history for someone to put on a bouncy, good-time show that celebrates the most reviled generation in American history.

Boomers started out as ’60s rebels ands spiritual pathfinders (or the best of them did, at least) but they evolved into the most selfish and spoiled and economically destructive generation of all. We all know that America is on a downswirl, and that boomers have led the way. The economic meltdown of ’08 was mainly boomer-driven. Boomers will be the last generation to lead hugely swanky and abundantly materialistic lives in this country’s history, because from here on the levels of comfort and abundance and opportunity and assurance are on the wane, and everyone knows this. It’s a crushing realization for each and every American out there. Boomers have ruined it for GenXers and GenYers. They are absolutely the reigning Bad Guys of the 21st Century.

A lot of boomers are okay and many are good or admirable or even great in their visions, actions, creations, passions. Making an argument with too broad a brush always sounds silly. But this is real and everyone knows it. The boomer go-alongers (the ones who weren’t in the vanguard of social change as kids, and even some of those who were but got corrupted and corroded) have a reputation for selfishness and self-absorption that is gold-plated and will live in infamy. They really screwed things up for a lot of people. Any GenXer or GenYer who hates them has my sympathy.

There are several thousand things more interesting to talk about than feet, but there’s something about their appearance that triggers odd primal reactions in people, particularly (or should I say naturally?) when they belong to actors. In movies every aspect of every actor’s anatomy is theoretically fair game, although all directors and cinematographers understand that feet need to be avoided for the most part. There’s the ick factor, of course, but also the other side. Just ask LexG. Or for that matter Katharine Hepburn.

Unfortunate insert from the abominable Casino Royale (1967).

If I recall correctly one of Kate’s most heartfelt remarks about her Rooster Cogburn costar John Wayne was that his feet were much smaller than you’d figure for a big tall guy. She was delighted to discover this. I’ve also never forgotten a line by Pete Hamill in an early ’80s profile of Nastassja Kinski that she had “bad toes.” I remember reading that and going “what the hell does that mean?,” and at the same time having an inkling.

I’ve long felt that there’s something problematic if not alienating about feet that don’t “look right.” In real life or in a painting or a TV series or a film, bad feet are bad news. I don’t think there’s any question this is why directors and cinematographers rarely if ever let the camera linger on or even glance at this part of an actor’s anatomy. Not that there would or could be the slightest point in doing so. Right now I’m trying to think of something worse than a close-up ofZach Galifianakis‘s feet. Or Alec Baldwin‘s for that matter. One of the few times in my life when I didn’t flinch at a shot of bare male feet was a closeup of Jeffrey Hunter ‘s in King of Kings. This is also probably one of the few times that a mainstream movie has ever used such a shot. It’s weird, I know.

Why am I even writing about this? Because last night I was stupid enough to watch a Bluray of the old Casino Royale (1967), one of the worst pieces of glossy spy-spoof garbage ever released. William Holden, Deborah Kerr, Peter Sellers and John Huston all are dead, and it’s still embarassing to watch them slum their way through this thing. But the big stopper for me was when I caught two shots of David Niven‘s stockinged feet. I’m sorry but they seemed misshapen and oddly jammed together with long creepy toes. All my life I’ve never had the slightest thing against Niven, and now I do, oddly. I’m sorry I brought this up.

Screen capture from Nicholas Ray’s King of Kings.

Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes might actually hit $50 million by Sunday night. Nobody wants to think about The Smurfs, but Cowboys & Aliens has taken a 64% revenue nosedive compared to last weekend’s receipts. And The Change-Up is an El Floppo, probably (or at least partly) because the word is out among 20something women that it’s not for them. Any Apes reactions?

I remember watching the 434-minute Godfather Saga on NBC some 34 years ago. It played four consecutive nights, and I stopped my life to take part in it. I was like a priest doing vespers. I knew I wasn’t watching a “better” version of the first two Godfather films, and that the Saga was just longer (including 75 minutes of previously un-seen scenes) and chronological, etc. But I loved sinking into the all of it, the sprawl of it.

And it’s really not right, I feel, for Francis Coppola to stand in the way of releasing the full Godfather Saga on Bluray/DVD. All 434 minutes’ worth, I’m saying, just like before. And with no recognition or acknowledgement whatsoever of the miscarriage known as The Godfather, Part III. In the hearts and minds of serious Godfather-heads that movie never happened.

Coppola reportedly went along with assembling and airing The Godfather Saga in ’77 in order to raise money for Apocalypse Now. I’ve heard he doesn’t want The Godfather Saga out on DVD/Bluray because he wants his Godfather legacy to be defined by the theatrical versions, and because Saga doesn’t really add anything — it just expands the story and puts it in chronological order.

Well, I have news for Coppola. He doesn’t own the Godfather films or the religion (as opposed to a cult) that has grown and thrived in their honor over the last 40 years. All he did was direct them. Those efforts occupied him in 1971 and early ’72, and again in ’73 and ’74. What happened after was between the films and the public. He sired them, but they went on to make millions of connections with millions of people — a process that Coppola could only observe from the sidelines. In a sense he hasn’t really been part of it. He’s just the father.

The Godfather films belong to America, to film culture, to you and me. And whether Coppola likes it or not. that includes The Godfather Saga. He put it out there, guys like me really got into it, and he owes it to Godfather fandom to supply that version.

Not because he’s proud of this assemblage or is perhaps moderately ashamed of it, or because the Saga is any kind of richer, grander, more satisfactory telling of the 1902-1959 story — it’s not. But because we want it out there as a viewing option the way we sometimes like to pig out on pizza or ice cream, and because Coppola hasn’t the right to deny us this. He can’t make or re-make something of public importance and then put it into a cardboard box and store it in the attic and forget about it.

I’m not talking about a Bluray/DVD of The Godfather 1902-1959: The Complete Epic, the 386-minute version of The Godfather Saga that was released on VHS in 1981. And I’m definitely not talking about a Bluray of The Godfather Trilogy: 1901 – 1980, a chronological edit composed of all three Godfather movies. (I don’t want to know about The Godfather, Part III, and I mean it. There are only two Godfather movies, and it’s time to re-release the most needlessly extended, wind-baggiest, absolute longest and ass-draggiest version of those classics in all their meticulous and drawn-out splendor.

A month ago I wrote that if Richard Nixon returned to earth “with the same mind and spirit and perspective that he had before he died in the ’90s but in the body of a go-getter Congressman from Southern California, he’d probably have a tough time getting re-elected because he’d be considered too moderate, too thoughtful, too practical…a guy who doesn’t get the ideological fever of the Tea Party or the debt-ceiling shutdown or any of the things that Eric Cantor or Michelle Bachmann believe in. He could almost be a centrist Democrat by today’s standards.”

Now comes a Kurt Andersen guest column in the 8.6 N.Y. Times that continues the Nixon Love. It’s called “The Madman Theory,” which is misleading as it suggests an Armageddon scenario caused by a hair-trigger fanatic. But it’s mainly an achievement check-list of a U.S. president who’s undergoing a major reputation upgrade — long regarded by boomers as one of the worst all-time ogres, but now seen as our last decisively liberal chief executive. (Bill Clinton was basically Dwight D. Eisenhower.) Nixon was more than a little pathetic in a psychological-obsessive sense, agreed, but otherwise…

“A lot of us swooned over Obama partly because he seemed so prudent, straightforward and even-keeled. But now, with Republicans spectacularly applying the Madman Theory for the first time in domestic politics, Obama’s nonconfrontational reasonableness isn’t looking like such a virtue.

“It’s frustrating. We’ve had presidents who were intelligent and progressive but also cynical and ruthless when necessary. Effective, tough-minded, visionary liberals such as F.D.R., Clinton…and Nixon.

“In popular imagination, Nixon remains nothing but a great goblin — scowling bomber of Southeast Asia, panderer to fear and racism, paranoid anti-Semite, dispatcher of burglars — but the truth is, he governed further to the left than any president who followed him. The overreaching Euro-socialist nanny state that today’s Republicans despise? That blossomed in the Nixon administration.

“Spending on social services doubled, and military budgets actually decreased. He oversaw the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission. His administration was the first to encourage and enable American Indian tribal autonomy. He quadrupled the staff of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, almost tripled federal outlays for civil rights and began affirmative action in federal hiring. He supported the Equal Rights Amendment and signed Title IX, the law granting equality to female student athletes. One of his Supreme Court appointees wrote the Roe v. Wade decision.

“Nixon made Social Security cost-of-living increases automatic, expanded food stamps and started Supplemental Security Income for the disabled and elderly poor. It helped, of course, that Democrats controlled the House and Senate. But it was the president, not Congress, who proposed a universal health insurance plan and a transformation of welfare that would have set a guaranteed minimum income and allowed men to remain with their welfare-recipient families.

“It was Nixon who radically intervened in the free market by imposing wage and price controls, launched detente with the Soviets, normalized relations with Mao’s China and let the Communists win in Vietnam.

“And, for good measure, the budget for the National Endowment for the Arts grew sixfold, by far the biggest increase by any president.

“The idea of Nixon — Nixon? — as a de facto liberal provokes cognitive dissonance, especially among people over 50. Facts notwithstanding, they refuse to buy it, as if they’ve been fooled by a parlor trick. But the only trick involved is judging Nixon circa 1970 by the ideological standards of 2011.

“My late mother, who voted for every Republican presidential candidate from Wendell Willkie through George H.W. Bush, became a Democrat in her 70s. “These black hats,” she said of the G.O.P. right, “have gotten as nutty as fruitcakes. Nothing they say shocks me anymore.” She voted five times for Nixon, whose Madman Theory was a tactical posturing to make the Communists think he was an unhinged, reckless fanatic itching to wreak havoc. But a national Republican Party dominated by actually unhinged, reckless fanatics itching to wreak havoc in America? I think that would’ve shocked her. I think it probably would’ve even shocked Nixon.”