Herewith is a spirited chat I had with the cooking-with-gas, bell-bottom-wearing, hippie-haired John Carpenter in either late 1979 or very early ‘80 to promote The Fog (Avco Embassy), which opened on 2.1.80.
It should be noted for posterity’s sake that when I recorded this interview at the Sherry Netherland (I’m fairly certain it wasn’t the Carlyle or Waldorf Astoria) that IndieWire’s Anne Thompson, then a PMK publicist, monitored the conversation.
Inspired by my “Oh, My Beloved” riff about Donald Trump summoning the spirit of Laurence Olivier’s “Mahdi”, I watched the generally tolerable, flirting-with-mediocre, Ultra Panavision 70 Khartoum last night.
Basil Dearden’s 1966 film ends with Olivier reacting with anguished disapproval when his triumphant followers, exuberant after the fall of Khartoum and the death of Charlton Heston’s General George “Chinese” Gordon, arrive at his tent with Gordon’s head on a tall pole.
Brief footage of Heston’s head was reportedly shot and included in the film, but an extremely negative audience response reportedly led Khartoum producers to axe the footage in favor of a quick fade-to-black.
It struck me this morning that the head-on-a-spike fate of Thomas More’s (i.e., Paul Scofield’s) severed eyes, ears, mouth, nose and throat in A Man For All Seasons was also a thing that year.
At no other time and in no other films was the fate of a lead character’s head a topic of interest, but it happened twice in ‘66.
Fred Zinnemann’s film ends with narration that says More’s head sat atop a spike on London bridge before his daughter retrieved and buried it. It would have been vulgar for Zinnemann to show a replica of Scofield’s head in any context, of course, but…well, nuff said.
Khartoum premiered on 6.6.66; AMFAS opened on 12.12.66.
Average Joes and Janes hate you for ushering in an age of progressive ideology in movies (now rapidly drawing to a close, thank God)…a social-cultural spasm that destroyed the mystique of transportational cinema, which had sporadically been in relatively good health until ‘17 or thereabouts.
So given this lingering loathing and a belief that H’wood is a crawling hive of woke wackazoids, do you really want to re-enforce that notion by giving the Best Picture Oscar to a mostly mediocre trans musical in order to send a “blow it out your ass” message to Donald Trump? Do you really want to dig into that hole all the deeper?
Remember when ideology wasn’t the Academy’s ne plus ultra…remember when certain movies and performances delivered profoundly or at least assuredly on their own terms (i.e., Gene Hackman’s bravura inhabiting of a racist New York detective in The French Connection, a performance that would be shouted down today by the wokeys)…do you want to continue living in that woke ditch or do you want to move on?
I’m bringing this up because yesterday the HE community didn’t say jack squat about the final paragraph in “Oh, My Beloved,” my response to Donald Trump’s holy-roller inaugural address.
The snowflakes are so tiny they’re barely visible, but there are trillions upon trillions of them. Six to eight inches of accumulation is far from historic, but it’s noteworthy. I love the quiet…the hush that always accompanies a decent blanketing. (Stuart Terrace, West Orange, NJ.)
THR’s Scott Feinberg knows full well that by posting the following paragraph in his latest (1.17.25) Oscar predictions piece…
…that this statement will activate a monkey-brain impulse among Academy members to show support for The Brutalist and Emilia Perez (not only right now but over the next few weeks) and thereby instill a feeling of…I don’t know, a feeling of belonging or vague job security or something.
Feinberg knows he’s aiding and abetting the Oscar fortunes of two big-swing movies that either aren’t loved (Perez ‘s RT Joe Popcorn score is 37%) or are determined to make viewers feel morose and under the weather.
Scott knows he’s contributing to an awful feeling within industry circles…a notion that the Hollywood community is contributing to its own sense of isolation from Average Joes and self-destruction by celebrating mediocre wokeism and/or pretentious show-off films that nobody really likes (except for the phonies).
Here’s how Scott rationalizes what he’s doing:
HE to Academy: Wake up, don’t do this and offer hugs to the genuinely well-liked, obviously well-crafted Conclave, Anora and A Complete Unknown.
Last night HE commenter “Nerf” wrote the following about the late, great David Lynch:
For the most part, “things just got repetitive” is a four-word description of what every auteur-level filmmaker tends to go through over the course of a decades-long career.
That is to say that he / she winds up making the same film or certainly the same KIND of thematically-driven film (i.e., drawn from the same inner soul pool or creative wellspring) over and over. They just emerge in this or that varying form, in some instances with greater degrees of refinement.
“A director only makes one film in his life, and then he breaks it into pieces and makes it again” — Jean Renoir.
Because despite whatever annoyance or discomfort this state of affairs may provoke in guys like Bob Hightower (“stop talking about peak periods!”) the artist has only a finite amount of psychic essence to draw from.
And that’s primarily why creative peak periods (the full, robust and unfettered emergence of creative servings or statements or heavy-cat formulations) tend to manifest most often when the artist has gotten the trial-and-error or youthful indulgence stuff out of the way and has begun to develop serious command over what he / she has inside, usually starting during his / her late 20s or early 30s.
And then it all starts to wind down during his / her early 60s. Or a bit sooner or later. Ask Pedro Almodovar about this. Ask Alfred Hitchcock, for whom the tank mostly ran dry after The Birds. (No, Frenzy wasn’t a creative rebirth — it was an opportunity for Hitch to get more sexually graphic while re-connecting with some of that old London energy.) Ask Oliver Stone, whose creative powers began to dissipate after Any Given Sunday (‘99).
If only this could’ve happened to poor Buster Keaton, whose creative glory period ENDED around age 34 or 35, when sound came in during the late 1920s.
Exceptions will sometimes occur, as Paul Schrader once pointed out, when a film artist experiences a growth spurt due to some kind of tragedy or trauma (i.e., George Stevens or James Stewart’s experiences in Europe during World War II). In which case the psychic essence trove is reenergized or freshly reflected upon.
Obviously (a) variations abound and (b) this formula doesn’t generally apply to big-time rock musicians like Bob Dylan or David Bowie or Paul McCartney, all of whom were cooking with gas beginning in their early 20s if not younger.
In 2014 Lynch, then in his late 60s, was asked when a new feature film might emerge, and he said something along the lines of “I’ve got shards and slivers and segments in my head, but I don’t have THE BIG IDEA…I just don’t have that yet.”’
Surely Lynch knew deep down that big ideas are generally not ripe for plucking when artists are in their late autumnal years. It just doesn’t work that way.
HE reply: Outside of the super-wealthy, the blissfully ignorant and the simply-lacking-sufficient-brain-cells crowd, life itself is a kind of misery index. If you’re living an examined one, I mean.
That old Annie Hall joke about human experience being categorized by the horrible for some (afflicted with ghastly disease, suffering in concentration camps) and the miserable for everyone else? It got a big laugh when I first saw Woody Allen’s classic film in the spring of ‘77.
Life is occasionally punctuated with deeply satisfying accomplishment breathers or mountain-peak highs or blissful peace-outs (family dinners, silent communings with nature, pet affection, great music, early-morning airport arrivals in Europe) or fizzy champagne cocktail moments (and who doesn’t love these?) but otherwise is mostly about pushing the plow through rocky soil and slogging through as best we can. I wish it were otherwise, but then again misery and anxiety and sore shoulder muscles build character.
Control: “And uhm…how do you feel about him?”
Leamas: “Feel?”
Control: “Yes.”
Leamas: “He’s a bastard.”
Control: “Quite.”
Actual strip of 70mm celluloid Lawrence, sitting atop bedroom bureau:
