How’s this for a Howard Hughes triple bill at the American Cinematheque somewhere down the road? Open with Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator, follow up with Edward Dmytryk’s The Carpetbaggers (1964), featuring the always-icy George Peppard as a cold, misogynistic movie mogul-slash-industrialist, a character based on Hughes, and conclude the evening with Jonathan Demme’s Melvin and Howard (1980), mostly about a middle-class American schlub (Paul LeMat) but featuring an inspired Jason Robards cameo perf as a rickety, weather-beaten, half-looney Hughes.

The mentality of those 77 year-olds who’ve bristled at Oscar Awards emcee Chris Rock’s comments about the show (“It’s a fashion show” that’s “mostly for gay people”) and who are muttering that he’s “not suitable for the job” (according to Hollywood Reporter columnist Martin Grove)…this harumph-y attitude is precisely why the Oscar Awards are seen as going downhill and increasingly irrelevant. Especially now that the specifics of Rock’s comments in the Entertainment Weekly interview (offered here as a link to a Movie City News transcript) make it clear that what Rock actually said (without the quotes taken out of context) are perfectly valid and have been articulated before by others, including George C. Scott 30-something years ago when he called the Oscar show “a meat parade.”

A non-scientific Newsweek/MSNBC poll has asked readers which super-expensive popcorn movie they’d most like to see in 2005, and right now (Tuesday, 2.15, 9:37 am) the most eagerly awaited (favored by 32% of voters) is George Lucas’s Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith (20th Century Fox, 5.19). Mike Newell’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (WB, 11.18) is the second most anticipated with 18%, Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (WB, 7.15) is third with 11%, and Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (Paramount, 6.29) is fourth with 10%. Peter Jackson’s King Kong (Universal, 12.14) got 4%, but it’s early yet. Adam Sandler’s The Longest Yard (Paramount, 5.27) gathered a 3% rating…hmmmm.

“When you say ‘no’ a lot as an actor, you’re going to go broke, and that’s been the hardest thing to go through in the last ten years,” Sideways costar Virginia Madsen says in a recent Guardian interview. Such confessions will not stop junket-press journos from asking actors “what artistic motives led you to play this role?” when the truthful answer, more often than not, is “I have two kids and brutal mortgage payments.” Or “I could have taken this far more interesting role in this indie film, but I’ve become lazily accustomed to my lifestyle and my kids like their I-Pods and their wardrobes, so I took the slightly dumber and shittier role in this big-budget genre film.”

So Lewis Beale and his New York Times editors plugged me, Variety‘s Pete Hammond, Gold Derby.com’s Tom O’Neill and blogger Emanuel Levy in Sunday’s (2.13) piece about Oscar prognosticators …but they cut Movie City News’ David Poland, which, by anyone’s barometer, makes it an incomplete presentation.

“There’s a difference in how I vote on my ballot and how I vote in the office pool,” an Academy voter tells Fade In writer Nelson Handel. It would be better if the Oscar awards were only voted upon by peers “but it’ll never happen,” the voter admits. “Everyone enjoys voting, and won’t be dissuaded by the fact they they’re ignorant.” The entire piece, which has been getting a fair amount of attention over the last week or so, can be found here .

Eucalyptus is the title of a Jocelyn Moorhouse-Fox Searchlight film that was recently put on hold because the script isn’t ready yet. Actually, because star and executive producer Russell Crowe had problems with it. The film, which would have costarred Nicole Kidman, is about “an Australian widower who plants hundreds of eucalyptus trees on his land,” according to a Reuters news story “He tests his daughter’s suitors by making them identify every species. One succeeds, but by then Ellen (Kidman) already has lost her heart to a handsome stranger (Crowe).” I’m sorry, but that sounds like fanciful chick-movie horeshit.

My most affecting Arthur Miller moment was seeing Death of a Salesman in ’84 on Broadway, with Dustin Hoffman as Willy Loman and a 30 year-old, totally-on-fire John Malkovich as Biff. Miller led an amazing life in an incredibly rich and turbulent time, and now, at age 89, he’s no longer among us. Nothing recedes likes success, but rest comes to us all.

Damn Numbers

It was being predicted a couple of weeks ago that the February 27th Oscar telecast will be among the lowest-rated in history, if not the lowest rated. Are we supposed to be concerned? All right, let’s say we are.
In the early to mid 1930s, back when Irving Thalberg had something to say about the way this town was being run, the Oscars were intended as a classy promotion for the studio’s higher-quality films.

The industry was saying to the public, “Enjoy your westerns and your Wallace Beery movies, but keep in mind that every so often the movie industry tries to make films of lasting value, and we’d appreciate your support in these efforts.”
That concept went into the toilet a long time ago, largely due to the interlocking rules of TV ratings and advertising revenues.
People are said to be scared because the Golden Globes awards telecast in mid-January attracted only 16.8 million viewers — 37% less than it enjoyed last year. But this is because it played opposite ABC’s Desperate Housewives, or so goes the rationale.
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If the Oscar ratings go south, it’ll have nothing to do with Chris Rock being the new host (although I’m sure some industry journos will take a stab at this if the ratings debacle happens). Most of the blame will rest on the shoulders of three Best Picture nominees — Million Dollar Baby , Finding Neverland and Sideways — for not having sold enough tickets, and therefore weakening rooting interest on the part of mainstream viewers.
Ray and The Aviator are the Best Picture nominees that have made reasonably decent coin so far — $74 million and $77 million, respectively. Decent but not humungous.
Actually, Sideways is doing fairly okay for a small film — $15 million earned since the Oscar nominations were announced on 1.25 for a total of close to $48 million. Million Dollar Baby has taken in a post-Oscar-nom $28 million for a $36 million tally. Finding Neverland has received the smallest post-nomination benefit, bringing in almost $7 million for a $36 million gross.
What the doomsayers mean, I suppose, is that none of these films have brought in over $100 million, which implies they aren’t doing as well as they should in the hinterlands. (Most of the money, I’m assuming, has come from blue-state cities, largely because the weakest three haven’t played Bubbaland theatres until fairly recently.)

And so this means…what? That Academy members need to forget about nominating movies and filmmakers that fit their “best” criteria? (Not that they do this with any focus or sincerity now, but that’s another story.) And from here on they need to concentrate on nominating only the movies (and the people who’ve made them) that have sold the most tickets?
This, of course, would be tantamount to turning the Oscars into the People’s Choice Awards, but everything’s swirling in a downward direction anyway so why not?
“The Aviator might have a chance at breaking $100 million because of all of its nominations,” Box Office Mojo’s Brandon Gray told USA Today‘s Scott Bowles in a recent piece. “But that’s a long shot. The other movies are middling performers that people don’t care about.”
People don’t care about seeing Million Dollar Baby or Sideways? What kind of dead-to-the-world, potato-chip-munching attitude is that?
On the other hand, I half sympathize with people saying “naahh, later” to Finding Neverland. It’s a decent heartfelt little film, but Kate Winslet and her coughing…oy. And it’s hard to suppress the urge to strangle Johnny Depp and be rid of his burry Scottish accent for good.
I don’t know why I’ve even getting into this. It’s appalling that people are saying that the Oscar show, or the concept of the Oscars, needs to adapt to the aesthetic vistas of a nation of rurals who wear flip-flops and don’t read Anthony Lane (much less anything hardbound) and spend too much time on the couch.
Isn’t the Oscar-choosing process polluted enough? I guess not.

My son Jett, 16, doesn’t respect the Oscars, and is saying he doesn’t care that much about watching the show this year. A lot of people have written in and said the same thing. This probably means that the show needs to change, get loose, get a new spikey haircut…but in what fashion or direction?
Or is it the movies themselves that aren’t working, or are missing, to an increasing degree, something fundamental?
A friend explains the basic problem as follows: The studios and the “dependents” aren’t making movies for the Big Middle anymore, and the backwash of this policy has been affecting interest in the Oscar awards. And it’s only going to get worse.
The studios are primarily in the super-budgeted, theme-park, Brad Pitt, make-sure-it-plays-in-Germany-and-Croatia business. Some good big-studio pics are getting made here and there, but mostly we’re getting C-level projects at A-level budgets.
(There are only two possible big-studio Oscar contenders opening between late April and Labor Day: Ron Howard’s Cinderella Man and Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown.)
And the smaller outfits, my friend said, are mostly about making or acquiring films aimed at better educated blue-state audiences (i.e., Sideways).
I don’t like that people have been labeling Alexander Payne’s film this way. It’s not about a couple of celestial physics instructors, but about the kind of guys everyone knows or at least rubs up against. But when you keep hearing the same things over and over, it’s hard to keep arguing.
A friend who loves Sideways took a Manhattan-raised ex-boyfriend to see it last week and he started seriously complaining about it about 45 minutes in. “I can’t take this…it’s all about drinking,” he said. He insisted on leaving. They went across the lobby and saw Hide and Seek instead.
Obviously this guy’s a lowbrow (with a past alcohol problem, I’m told, which explains his reaction) but avoidance scenarios like this have probably happened with others.

For some reason, and despite being called the Best Picture of the Year by almost every critic in the country, Sideways is doing only pretty well. It hasn’t really caught on, and I keep sensing that people are smelling something they don’t like about it. This sounds cruel, but they seem to have some kind of problem with movies starring (or are largely about or cuddle up to) balding, bearded, whiny-voiced pudgeballs.
I just can’t accept that would-be moviegoers are asking each other what they want to see on a Friday night, with one saying “what about Million Dollar Baby?” and the other saying “naaah.” I refuse to live in a world that shuttered.
And yet I think people should at least go to The Aviator, despite the several irritations. (DiCaprio is brilliant, despite his not being quite the right guy to play Howard Hughes, and it is, you know, a Scorsese film.)
It’s ironic, of course, that the one Best Picture nominee that people haven’t had to talk themselves (or their dates) into seeing, is arguably the weakest candidate. And I loved watching it last fall, and I’ll watch it again this week on DVD. What’d I say?

Smart Bomb

My natural tendency is to side with a critic or journalist when there’s some kind of scuffle, but I thought the writing that went into Owen Wilson’s hammering of New Yorker critic David Denby for his slice-and-dice of Wilson’s longtime homie and costar Ben Stiller was pretty tasty.
I know, I know…I should have run with this last Monday or Tuesday.

At the very least, Wilson’s witty tirade makes for a more elevated contretemps than the one that went down between actor Rob Schneider and L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein, which was largely about Schneider’s attempt to trash Goldstein’s rep by pointing out he’s never won any journalism awards, whatever that infers.
Here’s Wilson’s thing:
“I read David Denby’s piece on Ben Stiller with great interest (“The Current Cinema,” January 24th & 31st). Not because it was good or fair toward my friend but exactly because it wasn’t,” he began.
“I’ve acted in two hundred and thirty-seven buddy movies and, with that experience, I’ve developed an almost preternatural feel for the beats that any good buddy movie must have. And maybe the most crucial audience-rewarding beat is where one buddy comes to the aid of the other guy to help defeat a villain.

“Or bully. Or jerk. Someone the audience can really root against. And in Denby I realized excitedly that I had hit the trifecta. How could an audience not be dying for a real `Billy Jack’ moment of reckoning for Denby after her dismisses or diminishes or just plain insults practically everything Stiller had ever worked on?
“And not letting it rest there, in true bully fashion Denby moves on to take some shots at the way Ben looks and even his Jewishness, describing him as the `latest, and crudest, version of the urban Jewish male on the make.’ The audience is practically howling for blood! I really wish I could deliver for them–but that’s Jackie Chan’s role.”
Here’s the link to Denby’s Stiller piece.

Downfall

There’s a nicely written, highly persuasive piece by Louis Menand in this week’s New Yorker called “Gross Points.”
Here’s Menand’s entire piece and here are some excerpts:
“The people who make the popcorn basically know what they’re doing. The people who make the movies basically don’t, at least not until the product is out there, and then it’s too late.
“The history of Hollywood is a comic routine of bad guesses, unintended outcomes, and pure luck. Half of the failures were well-intentioned, and half of the successes were, by ordinary standards of fairness and decency, undeserved. People do get rich making movies; more often than not, they’re the wrong people. That’s why moviemaking is so much fun to read about. Unless, of course, it’s your money.
“The cinema, like the novel, is always dying. The movies were killed by sequels; they were killed by conglomerates; they were killed by special effects. Heaven’s Gate was the end; Star Wars was the end; Jaws did it. It was the ratings system, profit participation, television, the blacklist, the collapse of the studio system, the Production Code. The movies should never have gone to color; they should never have gone to sound. The movies have been declared dead so many times that it is almost surprising that they were born…”

Of course, ‘death,’ in this context, does not mean ‘extinction.’ What it means depends on the speaker.
“David Thomson’s The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood (Knopf; $27.95) is a coroner’s report. The title is misleading. The book gives roughly two hundred and ninety pages to the first fifty years of Hollywood and about eighty pages to the last fifty, and the true scope of its interest is even narrower.
“Thomson thinks that Hollywood had only two phases of first-class product: from 1927 to 1948, The Jazz Singer to the Paramount decision (the Supreme Court case that broke the studio system by forcing the studios to divest themselves of the theatre chains they owned); and from 1967 to 1975, Bonnie and Clyde to Jaws.
“If you think that our interest in movies has everything to do with our feelings about them, and if you have a tolerance for repetition, digression, first-person indulgence, and general narrative shagginess, then you are not likely to find a more affecting and intellectually absorbing book on film as a popular art. Thomson’s subject is not, strictly speaking, the history of the movies; its subject is the history of caring about the movies. That calls for something more than just the facts.
“Giants like [Independence Day, Godzilla, Pearl Harbor and the two Matrix sequels] continue to stalk through the multiplexes, shaking gold from the heavens with their thunderous, THX Certified footsteps; but inside their high-definition, digitized craniums their tiny brains are dead.
“[This] wouldn’t matter so much now if the industry didn’t care. But the industry does care. The people who make movies need to be able to take themselves more seriously than the people who make popcorn do. The situation would be simpler if everyone was certain that the movies making money today have no more creative integrity or cultural significance than a beer commercial. But no one is certain. People fear that they’ve lost the key to the distinction.

“Most autopsies of the cinema tend to be `it all started to go wrong when…’ narratives. They’re appealing in the same way those `wise old person who knows the secret’ stories that turn up in so many fantasy-adventure movies today are appealing, and they have the same shortcoming, which is that in life there never is just one secret, and there never is just one cause.
“In the case of a collaborative, semi-regulated, high-cap, worldwide, mass-market entertainment like a Hollywood movie, identifying causes is like predicting next year’s weather. A butterfly flutters its wings in Culver City, and a decade later you get The Terminator.
“One of the merits of The Whole Equation is that it avoids isolating a cause of death. It maintains a kind of analytic deep focus; it tries to take in everything. Thomson thinks that some of the explanation for what happened to the movies has to do with the movies and the people who make them, but some of it has to do with the audience. `It’s not so much that movies are dead,’ he suggests at one point, `as that history has already passed them by.’
“Today, there are thirty-six thousand screens in the United States and two hundred and ninety-five million people, and weekly attendance is twenty-five million.
“And what is the main cinematic experience? The tickets, including the surcharge for ordering online, cost about the same as the monthly cable bill. A medium popcorn is five dollars; the smallest bottled water is three. The show begins with twenty minutes of commercials, spots promoting the theatre chain, and previews for movies coming out next Memorial Day, sometimes a year from next Memorial Day.
“The feature includes any combination of the following: wizards; slinky women of few words; men of few words who can expertly drive anything, spectacularly wreck anything, and leap safely from the top of anything; characters from comic books, sixth-grade world-history textbooks, or ‘Bulfinch’s Mythology’; explosions; phenomena unknown to science; a computer whiz with attitude; a brand-name soft drink, running shoe, or candy bar; an incarnation of pure evil; more explosions; and the voice of Robin Williams.

“The movie feels about twenty minutes too long; the reviews are mixed; nobody really loves it; and it grosses several hundred million dollars.
“The blockbuster is a Hollywood tradition, but blockbuster dependence is a disease. It sucks the talent and the resources out of every other part of the industry. A contemporary blockbuster could almost be defined as a movie in which production value is in inverse proportion to content.
“Troy is a comic strip, but what a lavish, loving, costly comic strip it is. The talent, knowledge, and ingenuity required to make just one of the battle scenes in that film, or one mindless James Bond chase sequence, interchangeable in memory with almost any other Bond chase sequence, would drain the resources of many universities.
“But why doesn’t anyone put more than two seconds’ thought into the story? The attention to detail in movies today is fantastic. There is nothing cheap or tacky about Hollywood’s product, but there is something empty. Or maybe the emptiness is in us.”

Forecast

David Poland ran a list this morning of some ’05 films he thinks will be Oscar nominated as of 1.25.06. I agree with all of them except two.
Forget about Columbia’s Memoirs of a Geisha. I realize how lowbrow this sounds, but any movie title with the word “geisha” is out, as it obviously portends something excessively delicate and (let’s be honest) probably dreary.
And forget Universal’s King Kong — double-triple-quadruple forget it. A remake of a classic ape movie with Andy Serkis as the ape can’t be Oscar material, and no rational person out there expects it to be…especially under the hand of Peter Jackson.

Tribute

David Poland has written about Martin Scorsese’s tribute to the spirit that propelled Howard Hughes: “Better than any of the other movies nominated, The Aviator offers a look at us…at the power of outrageous daring…not just of one man, but of a culture that shouts our aspirations across the globe.” To which I must reply, “Better than any of the other movies nominated, The Aviator offers a look at our willingness to swallow rankly phony CG images that violate any sense of organic, first-hand reality…that promote the negligible effect of CG sequences that blatantly announcing themselves as such…all to celebrate not just a single willful man, but a culture that shouts our aspirations across the globe.”

The obiter dicta (i.e., words in passing) in Brian Lowry’s recently posted Variety review of Constantine (Warner Bros., 2.18) sounds somewhat predictable: “Pic does win a few points for style if not substance.” The opening graph, though, has a strong alliterative punch: “Keanu Reeves’ latest man-in-black fantasy is slightly better than The Matrix sequels, which is tantamount to damnation with faint praise. Casting its star as a chain-smoking exorcist — someone who’s literally been to hell and back — this adaptation of the graphic novel “Hellblazer” blazes few new trails and bogs down in a confusing narrative muddle. Atmospheric and noirish in the manner of a poor man’s Blade Runner, pic possesses powerful imagery but lacks feature-length substance and will need a bountiful harvest of opening-weekend souls before a stench resembling brimstone dowses its box office flame.”

Thing Ding

When a movie is working with an audience, you can feel it.
I’m not talking about an opinion. You’re there and people are beaming and laughing and giving standing ovations when it’s over, and you can sense it coming out of every pore in the room. Guys like Variety‘s Robert Koehler can pooh-pooh all they want and it doesn’t matter — a hit is a hit is a hit.
This is the bottom-line deal with Paul Reiser’s The Thing About My Folks, an above-average, surprisingly effective father-son relationship film that I saw last Friday night at the Santa Barbara Film Festival.

Paul Reiser and Peter Falk in The Thing About My Folks.

I don’t like films that try to jerk you around and make you feel primary emotions, or ones that play the “square card” too heavily, like My Big Fat Greek Wedding did.
I understood what people saw in that film (as awful as it was) and why it comforted or charmed older audiences. Reiser’s film is plowing the same turf, but it does a better job of it.
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I didn’t even want to go at first because I’d heard it was not for me, and that it was aimed at the crowd who liked Greek Wedding and so on. My plan was to maybe watch the first 45 minutes or so and then make a call. I was also feeling a bit drowsy and wasn’t in the mood for a difficult sit.
But then the story and the acting and the writing kicked in, and I flushed all the negativity out of my system and just sat up and went with it. And then the lights came up and Reiser did a q & a with the audience, and he had them eating out of his hand.
It was announced last Sunday night that The Thing About My Folks had won the Santa Barbara Film Festival’s Audience Award.
This is a kindly, amiable, recognizably human story about a middle-aged married guy (Reiser) getting to know his 75 year-old Dad (Peter Falk) over the course of a brief trip to rural New York.
The story kicks off with Sam (Falk) telling Ben (Reiser) and his wife Rachel (Elizabeth Perkins) that his wife Muriel (Olympia Dukakis), neglected for several decades due to Sam’s focusing on his business and being a bit of an emotional miser, has left him and gone off somewhere.

Attempts to find Muriel by Ben’s sisters are initiated while Ben tries to chill Sam out with an invitation to drive an hour or two north of Manhattan and look at a farm he’s thinking of buying.
What happens isn’t on the level of Eugene O’Neill, but it’s honest and sharp and, for me, sweetly satisfying. Falk kills (it’s his best role in a long, long time), Reiser is believably befuddled and sympathetic, and Dukakis comes in for a third-act score at the very end.
It’s a well written thing — tonally TV-ish, okay, but the snappy energy never flags, and there’s always an emotional point being constructed or reflected upon. And it’s nicely cut and smoothly paced. The same unpretentious homey quality that DeFelitta brought to Two Family House has been adhered to and enlarged upon.
This is not a Luchino Visconti or a Stephen Frears film, and it’s not for critics like Koehler or B. Ruby Rich, but on its own terms it works.
Here’s the weird part: audiences have been lapping it up at the Palm Springs Film Festival and the Sarasota Film Festival, and at some kind of test screening in Pasadena and another at Hollywood’s Arclight, and yet distributors have been reluctant to grab it.
Why? It’s not a kid’s film — it’s pretty much aimed at people in their 30s, 40s and beyond — and distribs aren’t sure they can sell it or “open” it.
I understand what they’re saying, but on another level this view feels bizarre. Sappy as this may sound, The Thing About My Folks really gets and expresses family values. Not the George Bush kind (culturally regressive, turning-back-the-clock) but the universal kind that most of us have dealt with in our own lives. Connecting with your elders, caring for them, understanding what they’re about.
I know what this sounds like, but Thing is better than that.

I’ve heard that one potential distributor is a tiny bit concerned about the movie’s ethnicity, that it’s a little “too Jewish.” Right…just like My Big Fat Greek Wedding was too Greek, which is why no one except Greek immigrants went to see it.
The main characters in The Thing About My Folks are New York Jews, but that’s the window dressing. It’s what inside a movie — i.e., the values it expresses — that counts.
One of the two producer’s reps for The Thing About My Folks is Jeff Dowd (a.k.a., “the Dude”), and he expressed a thought yesterday about why this film has been connecting that makes sense.
“With movies that are quality-level and playing well, there’s two kinds of buzz — good word-of-mouth and what we call compelling word-of-mouth,” Dowd said. “This movie has compelling word-of-mouth.
“You have compelling word-of-mouth when it’s value-based….like Passion of the Christ. That was a movie that culturally embraced the values of a certain audience. Fahrenheit 9/11 had a value-based appeal, and so did Greek Wedding .
“This has a value base. People want to see adult films that are positive and empowering and also entertaining, and this is a real family values film. It’s what people really go through in holding families together…without being ideological or getting into any kind of red-state thing. It’s playing just as strongly in blue states. Throw a dart at a map of the country and it’ll play there.”
Dowd’s partner repping Thing About My Folks is David Garber, who worked in the same capacity for Monster and My Big Fat Greek Wedding.
Some of the major buyers haven’t seen it yet, but some who’ve seen it have said, “I laughed, I cried, and I’m not sure I can sell it.”
I’m going to show The Thing About My Folks on Monday, February 21st, at the UCLA Sneak Preview class I’m hosting during the winter-spring season. The series is happening at the Wadsworth theatre on the Veteran’s Administration grounds, adjacent to the UCLA campus.
The 2.21 screening will kick off at 7 pm. Industry fence-straddlers are urged to get in touch with Jeff Dowd and get their own reading. Anyone else who wants to attend can enroll in the class through UCLA Extension (310.825.9971, reg. # Q9853).
Dowd is confident the film will be sold sooner or later. He understands what buyers are up against. “Right now they’re very, very busy…they’re swamped,” he says, “and there are all kinds of ways to feel uncertain about anything, but I used to be an exhibitor, and I get my information from audiences.”

Jeff “the Dude” Dowd, the real-life model of Jeff Bridges’ character in The Big Lebowski, going for a strike.

What Dowd is trying to do now is to ease buyer concerns about how the film can be sold, and on this point his pitch is simple: Paul Reiser and Peter Falk are ready to go on Oprah and other TV and radio talk shows as a team and sell the hell out of it.
“These guys are great together, and they can get on television,” says Dowd. “The producers of these shows know who they are, they know Reiser is funny and they’ll put them right on.
“This is a relationship movie, and it’s hitting the responsive chord that we all yearn for, but more than that, it’s not only saying that women like vulnerable men, but it’s about two men learning to be more romantic with women.
“We’re real enthusiastic at this point,” says Dowd. “With sports or movies, sometimes you have to climb the mountain. Hilary Swank has had to climb it. So have Jamie Foxx and Taylor Hackford. More often than not, climbing the mountain is what this business is all about.”

Dean’s Ghost

James Dean will have been dead a full fifty years as of 9.30.05 — over seven months from now. But Warner Home Video, owner of the rights to Dean’s three feature films, doesn’t want to wait that long to exploit this anniversary.
Anyone who was young in the ’50s or ’60s has a special thing for this quietly intense young actor who was the first to make something iconic and riveting out of teen angst in mainstream films, and in a way that still touches and penetrates.
Twice I’ve visited the Dean death site, which is located near the small town of Cholame off Route 46. I’ve stood next to the spot where Dean’s spirit left his body. I’ve taken it all in and felt vague stirrings of what I’ve told myself is probably some kind of historical after-vibe, and I’ll bet there isn’t a single Warner Home Video exec who’s done this or felt this, so don’t tell me.

James Dean action figure, marketed in Japan and I don’t know where else.

Every time I re-watch a Dean flick I’m still heavily impressed by those amazingly delicate chops of his, and how he managed to deliver that aching vulnerable thing with just the right amount of finesse.
But does Dean mean all that much to GenXers and GenYers? How many under-35s have seen and really enjoyed East of Eden or Rebel Without a Cause? These are great films (nobody cares much about Giant… it’s a dull film), but does the Dean legend/mystique pack that much of a punch these days?
I’ve asked my son, Jett, to riff on this in his next Sixteen column.
In any event, Warner Home Video will release a brand-new Dean DVD package on May 31 — remastered, double-disc, extra-heavy presentations of East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause and Giant, plus a new documentary, James Dean: Forever Young, with previously unseen footage of Dean’s TV work.
And they’ll be debuting the Forever Young doc at the ’05 Cannes Film Festival, along with screenings of the three features, which have all been digitally restored.
(I wanted to ask someone at the press thing if their original negatives have been genuinely — i.e., photochemically — restored in the organic, old-fashioned way, but questions weren’t allowed.)

Aftermath of Dean car crash tragedy on 9.30.55. I’m not certain if the guy on the ground is Dean or the guy (Rolf Wuetherich) who rode with him that day…or if the photo has been faked.

Plus they’re organizing “Dean Fest,” a big three-day media festival happening in Dean’s home towns of Fairmont and Marion, Indiana (he was born in Marion, raised during his teen years in Fairmont by his aunt and uncle) from June 3rd to 5th.
I don’t know how worshipping at the altar of Dean’s memory is supposed to amount to three meaningful days for anyone of any age, but I guess the Warner folks will try and make that dog hunt.
I know — why don’t they imitate what David Cronenberg did in Crash and hire guys to drive imitations of Dean’s Posche Spyder (i.e., “Little Bastard”) and Donald Turnupseed’s black-and-white 1950 Ford Tudor, and have them smash into each other? Too perverse?
A bunch of other opportunists will be getting in on the hustle — merchandisers, piggy-backers, sweet-talkers. Peddlers of T-shirts, coffee mugs, red Rebel jackets, Dean dolls, etc.
Why am I writing about this now? Because Warner Home Video threw a press event yesterday morning at the Grove to announce the Dean bandwagon, and I had nothing else to do. All right, I was vaguely interested.

James Dean

They got Pete Hammond to be the master of ceremonies. A parade of corporate suits took turns at the mike, blah-blahing about Dean’s rebel spirit and lasting influence. Some pals and colleagues of Dean’s from the old days shared some recollections. Martin Sheen (who played Dean in a TV movie about 25 years ago) showed up also, paying tribute to Dean’s profound effect upon actors, etc.
There was no trace of Dean’s old pal Dennis Hopper, though. There should have been.
I was told the whole presentation would last a little more than an hour. I stayed for the first 90 minutes, at which point the screen presentations had completed and Hammond had introduced and interviewed six or seven of Dean’s former friends, co-workers and/or associates. There were thirteen empty chairs to go when I left.
If Dean had lived he’d be 74 today — Clint Eastwood’s age. But I don’t think it was in the cards for Dean to reach a ripe old age. Photographer Phil Stern, easily the morning’s most caustic and honest speaker, said Dean was reckless about driving and was probably nursing some kind of urge to self-destruct.
Stern said he was driving on Sunset Blvd. (near the corner of Crescent Heights Blvd.) one day in early ’55, and he nearly killed Dean after he ran a red light.
“Dean was very prescient because he structured his career in such a way that he passed away, which I believe was inevitable, in a way that precluded the possibility of people seeing him as a pot-bellied bald man,” Stern remarked.

There was something odd about friends and contemporaries of a guy known as the most influential troubled teenager in movie history…the proverbial `50s youth with a turned-up hood…there was something disorienting about Dean’s contemporaries looking so old and crochety and bent over.
Corey Allen, 70, the actor who played Buzz in Rebel Without a Cause (i.e., the one Dean had knife fight with, and who went over the cliff in the car) was white haired and bearded and carrying a cane and apparently suffering from Parkinson’s, or something like that. He seemed okay attitude-wise.
You came out of this corporate presentation knowing one thing: time sure as shit marches on, and getting old is a sonuvabitch.
I’m a huge Dean fan, and I’m very glad that East of Eden is finally coming out on DVD. (I own the laser disc version that was issued in ’93, but I threw my laser disc player into the dumpster around ’99 or thereabouts).
And as long as I’m breathing I’ll always love Leonard Rosenman’s scores for both East of Eden (especially the overture and main title pieces) and Rebel Without a Cause .

James Dean, 24, taken sometime during or after the making of Rebel Without a Cause.

But there was something seriously odious about all these bottom-line corporate suit types paying tribute to Dean’s earning potential as a brand name, but not necessarily (or at least, not believably) paying tribute to who he actually was.
There’s a line in Woody Allen’s Hannah and her Sisters in which Max von Sydow’s artist character says that if Jesus Christ were to come back to earth and see what is going on today in his name, “he would never stop throwing up.”
I was wondering what Dean would have thought of Tuesday morning’s presentation. I like to think he would have been amused in some way, shape or form. I was also imagining his ghost sitting in the seats yesterday and throwing ectoplasmic spitballs.

Dean Again

“I’m under 35 (a good 15 years under, actually) and I’ve never seen East of Eden, mostly because a good copy is hard to find, and I’ve never gotten aorund to Giant. But I want to say that me and my friend damn near worship James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause.
“His subtle performance as a tortured youth is made only more legendary by the stories of his own tortured life and tragic death. The myth of lost promise built in the themes of Rebel Without a Cause may have been solidified by his death, but they were created by his performances.
“I’m glad that Warner Brothers has decided to give his movies the big editions they deserve, although I do agree that the hype only seems to be the shallow corporate bottom line.

“Maybe Universal will want to get with the program and release a DVD of James Bridges’ 9.30.55, a movie about Dean’s death that I’m told is pretty okay.” — Michael Avalos
“I’d cut the Warner Home Video people some slack if I were you. Okay, so the Dean event was run by a bunch of suits and htey don’t get it. I wasn’t there and couldn’t say. Everybody sells out at some point, whether it’s them or someone else doing it on their behalf (remember Disney using The Doors’ “Break on Through” to promote Monsters, Inc.?
“What I do know is that there’s no other studio today putting out better DVD releases of classic titles than WHV. Hell, they may be the only reason many under-35s like myself have even heard of certain films, whether they see them or not.
“No matter what the money men do to promote the discs, the fact that they’re putting the time and money into promoting them at all is enough for me, as it’s clear to me that this is one studio that cares about their classic titles more than most.
“In this case, the announcement of double-disc East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause set and the new doc should go far in showing who Dean was as an actor and a person rather than, as you say, his ‘earning potential as a brand name.’ His movies are getting the treatment they deserve, and that’s enough for me.” — Mark Van Hook, Boston, MA.