Ennio Morricone was a talented, gainfully employed composer who knew from catchy hooks and whistling melodies, but to a significant degree he was a a genre guy. Because when you boil it right down his whole career rests upon his scores for Sergio Leone‘s spaghetti westerns (A Fistful of Dollars, For A Few Dollars More, Once Upon A Time in the West) and, more recently, his score for Quentin Tarantino‘s The Hateful Eight. Plus the scores for Gillo Pontecorvo‘s The Battle of Algiers, Bernardo Bertolucci‘s 1900 and Terrence Malick‘s Days of Heaven (along with Leo Kottke).
In the Italian realm Morricone’s music wasn’t as deep or ravishing as Nino Rota‘s, and he certainly wasn’t in the same league as Hollywood powerhouse composers like Bernard Herrmann, Max Steiner, Franz Waxman, Elmer Bernstein, John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, James Horner, David Raksin, Dimitri Tiomkin, Miklos Rozsa, Maurice Jarre, Alex North and Hugo Freidhofer. Not in my book, he wasn’t.
Seven years ago Bruce Dern shared an interesting observation about the difference between his generation of actors (i.e., Clint Eastwood, Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Harrison Ford, Lee Marvin, Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro) and the classic big-studio stars of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s (Clark Gable, James Stewart, Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, Spencer Tracy, Humphrey Bogart, John Wayne, James Cagney, Frank Sinatra, Burt Lancaster, Alan Ladd, Errol Flynn, Kirk Douglas).
“The difference between my generation of actors and their generation is that they were bigger than life,” Dern said. “My generation got a chance to work with the legends, but we are not bigger than life. Not today. Too many people want to know what you do after work. You can’t be a mystery anymore.”
I came upon this photo early this morning. I’m guessing it was taken sometime in the mid ’70s (maybe ’77 or ’78, judging by Beatty’s elephant collar). My first thought was that in their day, these guys were just as “bigger than life” as the big-studio guys. They certainly seem to have a certain something or other, an extra-dimensional glow or current that out-pulsates Timothee Chalamet, Ansel Elgort, LaKeith Stanfield, Liam Hemsworth, Nicholas Hoult, John David Washington, RBatz, John Boyega, et. al. No?
This morning Variety‘s Marc Malkinreminded the industry that “recorded stage productions are not eligible for consideration.” That’s straight out of the AMPAS rulebook, and so you can forget Hamilton as a Best Picture contender.
The fact that the Disney Plus filmed version was watched by nearly everyone over the Independence Day holiday weekend will have to do. That and the fact that it’s won 11 Tonys, a Pulitzer and a Grammy.
Hollywood Elsewhere watched the Disney Plus Hamilton a couple of nights ago, and my basic reaction was to agree that 18th Century hip-hop is indeed a thing to submit to, revel in and cheer as far as it goes.
Hamilton is five years old now, but it was the first high-impact show to afford POCs strength and dominance in a reimagined historical narrative. Many films, plays and streamers followed in its conceptual wake. A brilliant gimmick slash concept, and certainly vigorously staged, inventive, dynamically conceived, excitingly choreographed. So yes, it’s quite the capturing of the late Obama zeitgeist.
But thank God for the subtitle option. I caught a phrase here and there, but I’m glad I saw it with subtitles because at least I understood every line and phrase. If I’d paid $400 or $500 to see it on stage at Manhattan’s Richard Rodgers theatre, I would have followed the general drift but missed 60% or 70% of the particulars.
“Quibi, which rhymes with Libby, is short for ‘quick bites.'” Wait…all this time I’ve been mispronouncing? I thought it was Kwee-bee.
“People have wondered why Quibi honcho Jeff Katzenberg and CEO Meg Whitman, in their late and early 60s, respectively, and not very active on social media, would believe they have uniquely penetrating insight into the unacknowledged desires of young people.
“When I ask Whitman what TV shows she watches, she responds, ‘I’m not sure I’d classify myself as an entertainment enthusiast.’ But any particular shows she likes? “Grant,” she offered. “On the History Channel. It’s about President Grant.”
“Katzenberg is on his phone all the time, but he is also among the moguls of his generation who have their emails printed out (and vertically folded, for some reason) by an assistant.
“In enthusing about what a show could mean for Quibi, Katzenberg would repeatedly invoke the same handful of musty touchstones — America’s Funniest Home Videos, Siskel and Ebert, and Jane Fonda’s exercise tapes. When Gal Gadot came to the offices and delivered an impassioned speech about wanting to elevate the voices of girls and women, Katzenberg wondered aloud whether she might become the new Jane Fonda and do a workout series for Quibi. (“’Apparently, her face fell,’ says a person briefed on the meeting.)
“Most subscribers have signed on with a 90-day free trial. This month, as that period expires, Quibi will learn how many of those people will stick around once they’re asked to pay. If they don’t, Quibi will be left to reckon with how it miscalculated so badly, and for Katzenberg and Whitman, it could be a deflating capstone to two storied careers.”
We all know how a “death of someone famous” story is expected to read. Family, friends and colleagues describe the deceased as God’s gift to humanity who left a glorious legacy, and was a vessel of pure love, industriousness and boundless energy. And at the moment of departure the entire family was at bedside. No family members were in the bathroom or in the downstairs cafeteria or taking a shower back at the homestead…the family is always there en masse and without exception, standing or praying in a perfect half-circle.
And we all know what we’re expected to say when we read about the death of a noteworthy person. Second verse, same as the first.
I’ve taken some heat three or four times for posting overly candid obituaries. The truth is that I posted only one that could be fairly accused of being a tad insensitive. I’m referring, of course, to the Bob Clark piece that appeared on 4.4.07. The consensus seemed to be that it wasn’t so much what I said (“Very few directors have offended me as much as he did over the years”) as not waiting a week or two before posting. Clark had only died 12 hours earlier.
This morning I came upon a highly unusual post-mortem assessment of Peter Sellers, who died of a heart attack in 1980 at age 54. The speaker was his old friend and Goon Show colleague Spike Milligan, quoted in Ed Sikov‘s “Mr. Strangelove“: “It’s hard to say this, but [Peter] died at the right time.”
That’s the kind of searing observation that only a fellow artist could share or even think. A variation of this sentiment could be that the deceased didn’t die soon enough.
Nine years ago Scott Feinberg‘s posted a 7.25.11 piece about the death of Amy Winehouse (“The Art of Dying Young“). The idea was that it’s not such a terrible thing to check out early if your legend is going downhill anyway. Biological shutdowns will always be traumatic to friends, fans and loved ones, but it may be worse, Feinberg said, to hang on past your peak point.
But how do you know when you’ve peaked? Answer: Nobody ever does. Everyone goes through life saying, “I’ll find a way to turn things around…after all, tomorrow is another day.”
“Most [performing survivors] overstay their welcome,” says Feinberg, “and simply begin to evaporate from the public’s consciousness, either because they find themselves (a) unable to maintain the performance-level that first garnered them fame, (b) are creatively limited by the public’s limited perception of them, (c) are distracted and/or deterred by fame and its trappings, (d) no longer able or willing to compete with ‘fresher’ faces.”
Joe Rogan and James Lindsay combined: “That’s one of the things going on now. People getting retroactively cancelled for things they did [in the relatively distant past]. We can talk about the psychological side of it…the moral purity thing that’s going bonkers. You’ve gotta think of woke as kinda like a church. ‘Everybody’s a racist‘ is the vibe of the new thing. So you’ve got the woke academics…the woke people who are teaching it to kids, as critical race theory. They’re making the nonsense, and you get this feeling they’re wrestling with their inner demons?
“There’s this book, Robin DiAngelo‘s ‘White Fragility‘…the one Matt Taibbi destroyed…and if you read the book there are all these weird vignettes, [and you can sense that basically the woke nutters] are wrestling with the racism within themselves. Rigid ideologies, can’t be challenged, you cannot in any way veer from the course…this is cult shit, straight-up cult indoctrination stuff.”
HE conclusion: When the woke insanity thing finally subsides and goes away, sensible people everywhere will come for the Khmer Rouge fanatics, and it will be beautiful. Wokesters will have to hide in the shadows like Jean-Louis Trintignant did at the end of The Conformist. Today’s retroactive cancellers will themselves be retroactively cancelled, and then they’ll be forced to eat their own poison. I for one cannot wait for that to happen. Revenge is a dish best served cold.
I feel a little funny about re-posting a piece from the satirical Babylon Bee, a kind of rightwing Onion. I hate the idea of chuckling at any kind of conservative humor, but the Khmer Rouge has become so toxic, so deranged, so over-the-waterfall that, in the words of Richard Gere’s “Mayonnaise” in AnOfficerandaGentleman, “I got nowhere else to go.”
I’ve been a Los Angeleno for 37 years, and I’ve never seen or heard a July 4th spectacle like the one that happened last night. It just kept going and going.
Peter Medak‘s The Ghost of Peter Sellers (currently streaming) is a fascinating documentary about the disastrous making of his own Ghost in the Noonday Sun, a 1973 Peter Sellers pirate comedy that turned out so badly it was never released theatrically.
It was, however, issued on VHS in ’85, and on a Region 2 DVD in 2016 — $7.98 to buy, $3.99 to ship.
The 36 year-old Medak, coming off the success d’estime ofThe Ruling Class (’72), agreed to direct Noonday Sun in order to work with Sellers, regarded worldwide as a comic genius who was worth his weight in gold. If, that is, the script was first-rate and everything else was in its proper place.
Alas, the Noonday script was allegedly shoddy and shooting at sea (off the coast of Cyprus) was sure to be technically difficult. But the torpedo that destroyed the movie (and which damaged Medak’s career) was the erratic, instinctual madness of his lead actor, who could be extremely skittish and difficult to work with.
Sellers often said that he couldn’t abide mediocrity. Apparently he inhaled a good whiff of the stuff (or so he believed) almost immediately upon arriving in Cyprus. And so he tried to escape by bringing hell.
The best disaster docs of this kind are George Hickenlooper, Fax Bahr and Eleanor Coppola‘s Hearts of Darkness (’91), Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe‘s Lost in La Mancha (’02), about the calamitous undoing of Terry Gilliam’s first attempt to make The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, and Les Blank‘s Burden of Dreams (’82), about the arduous making of Werner Herzog‘s Fitzcarraldo (also ’82).
The Ghost of Peter Sellers is just as good and as necessary as these three. You really do have to watch it.
I was going to write about Medak’s film earlier this week, but I was depressed about being late to the party. I could have seen it at the 2018TellurideFilmFestival but I didn’t. I could have obtained a press screener earlier than I did. Bummed, man. Couldn’t get it up. I finally got going today.
A week-old discussion with a colleague:
HE: “Sellers was obviously the lunatic villain in this bizarre saga. Yes, they shouldn’t have made the damn film. Yes, it was a bad idea with a script that allegedly blew chunks. The only thing that was ready was the money. But Sellers was a crazy man.”
Colleague: “Sellers was crazy at times, but I honestly don’t think it was his behavior that ruined the film. And if that’s the case, why is he the villain?”
HE: “A producer says in the doc, ‘We all knew Peter was crazy, but we didn’t know how crazy.’
“Sellers was miserable during the shoot, but he was the powerhouse. He knew the difference between a good script and a bad or weak one. He wanted to have fun and do The Goon Show with Spike Milligan. But he had to know that the whole thing had a basic dubiousness and fragility.
“Yes, Medak saw that also, but he trusted in Sellers’ genius. Which was absurd, of course — if it’s not on the page it isn’t worth doing. Sellers played the innocent when he met Medak later on. ‘It was you and me vs. them,’ he recalled. Medak replied, ‘No, Peter. It was you.’
Fans aside, who would be dumb enough to vote for Kanye West for president? Conservative-minded African Americans who might otherwise vote for Trump? Not that anyone will regard his candidacy as anything more than a dopey ego-trip. He didn’t even have the resolve to announce during primary season.
