A DVD of Henry Hathaway‘s Woman Obsessed (’59) arrived yesterday. I watched about half of it last night. (It’s slow and draggy.) There’s a scene with Susan Hayward, Stephen Boyd and Hayward’s kid visiting a circus and taking a look at “the fat lady” — a side-show attraction. 50 years ago women this size were considered freaks; today they’re considered Middle-American housewives.
In the ’70s I flew across the country (Van Nuys to LaGuardia) in a four-seat Beechcraft Bonanza. The pilot was a Russian pediatrician named Vladimir. He’d agreed to take me and a guy named Gary in exchange for gas money. We left in the early morning, stopped for gas and lunch in Tucumcari, New Mexico, bunked in a St. Louis airport motel that night, flew out the next morning and arrived at LGA by the early afternoon. Anyway…
The fog was so thick when we were coming into St. Louis the air-traffic-controller guy had to talk us down. I was sitting shotgun and the air was pure soup, and I quickly fell in love with that soothing, Southern-accented voice, telling us exactly what to do, staying with us the whole way…”level off, down 500, bank right,” etc. When we finally got close to the landing strip and the fog began to dissipate, the landing lights looked like they do in this scene from The High and the Mighty. This glowing beacon of Christianity welcoming you, telling you everything’s gonna be okay, etc.
It was almost enough, during that moment and later that night as I thought about it, to make me think about not being a Bhagavad Gita mystic any more and coming back to the Episcopalian Church.
Last night’s passage of New York State’s gay-marriage law was cause for celebration among decent people everywhere. I wish I could have taken part in the Manhattan celebrations outside the Stonewall near Sheridan Square, or on the 8th Avenue strip from 14th Street to 23rd Street. I wasn’t in Berlin either when the wall came down.
Senator Mark J. Grisanti, a Republican from Buffalo, was the 33rd vote for the bill. “I apologize for those who feel offended,” he said. “I cannot deny a person, a human being, a taxpayer, a worker, the people of my district and across this state, the State of New York, and those people who make this the great state that it is the same rights that I have with my wife.”
It goes without saying that President Obama is too scared of hee-haw swing voters to have supported it, but hats off to Governor Andrew Cuomo.
“Ever since I had a memory about what my mother taught me, and my grandparents taught me, I believed that discriminating against people was wrong,” Obama said in New York two nights ago. “And I believed that discrimination because of somebody’s sexual orientation or gender identity ran counter to who we are as a people. It’s a violation of the basic tenets on which this nation was founded. I believe that gay couples deserve the same human rights as every other couple in this country.”
Most of the morning has been spent working hard on things that aren’t yet column stories or items or reports. It’ll all have to keep until I get around to it later this afternoon. It’s very easy to fall behind in this daily-column racket. Al you have to do is wake up a little bit late, and then take your time getting into things…and before you know it the time is 12:59 pm.
Weinstein Co. is announcing that some kind of official HD trailer for Apollo 18 has debuted on Yahoo…whatever. Speculative NASA fantasy pic (with simulated “actual’ footage) opens wide on 9.2.11. “While NASA denies its authenticity, others say it’s the real reason we’ve never gone back to the moon,” etc.
On June 10th L.A. Times/”24 Frames” guy Steven Zeitchik wrote about the coming of Nick Broomfield‘s anti-Sarah Palin doc, which I put a top-spin on the following morning. And today, 13 or 14 days later, Mike Fleming is reporting that “Deadline has learned there’s another Palin doc in the works [from] Broomfield” that’s “not going to be quite as favorable toward the former vice presidential candidate as The Undefeated.”
Nope, no mistake — Fleming is talking about same Broomfield documentary.
The exclusive part of Fleming’s story is a clip from the Broomfield doc in which two former associates (John Bitney, Palin’s former legislative director, and former Alaska Senate President Lyda Green, a Republican) recall how Palin was always texting during meetings and barely paying attention to “the business in the building….unengaged, cursory…lack of interest, wasn’t listening,” etc.
“Let’s create a luxury tax for Hollywood,” Marshall Fine has suggested, “comparable to the one Major League Baseball invokes whenever a team tries to buy itself a pennant by stocking up on expensive star players.
“Except, in the case of Hollywood, this would be a tax that Hollywood would charge itself every time it makes a movie that costs $100 million or more. There would be a tax of X amount of dollars — let’s say 10 percent — for every $10 million over the $99-million mark a movie’s budget goes (and I’m including the cost of advertising and marketing, which can double a movie’s price-tag). And we’d round up, from $101 million.
“That money, in turn, would go to a not-for-profit fund to help underwrite less affluent artists. It could be used for grants for low-budget independent films. Or perhaps — given Hollywood’s reputation as a hive of liberalism — it could be earmarked for the National Endowment for the Arts, which always has a bulls-eye painted on it by conservatives, targeting it for elimination.”
There’s no question about one thing: 93% of the time a smaller budget always results in greater creativity. Yes, 7% of the time an expensive movie will seem to be worth the cost with most of the the dough having been spent wisely and excitingly. Okay, make it 10% or 12% of the time. But the rest of the time big-budgets just smother the spirit.
Remember the old days when DVDs would deliver boxy, full-frame versions of films shot at standard Academy ratio of 1.37 to 1 (but which are routinely masked off at 1.85 to 1 when they’re shown in theatres)? Those are pretty much gone, and I kinda miss ’em. I like height (i.e., lots of headroom) and I love boxiness. But the 16 x 9 fascists have pretty much killed that aesthetic. Old studio-era films (mid-1950s and older) are still mastered at 1.37, of course, but that’s the extent of it.
Some day boxy frames will be regarded with the same damp-eyed nostalgia that old-time record collectors feel for 45 and 78 rpms.
Three months ago author-critic Richard Schickel told L.A. Weekly interviewer Richard Wasson that Martin Scorsese, the subject of a then-new book, “has an utter inability to say anything bad about any movie. I’d say, ‘You know, this is a turkey, Marty,’ and he’d say, ‘Yeah, yeah, I know. But there’s this shot in the third scene…’ It’s almost comical. I think that’s the little kid in awe of the image on the screen, buttressed by the fact of how he knows how difficult it is to make a good movie.”
Which reminds me: whatever happened to Fake Schickel? The guy stopped posting a month ago.
I don’t like tweets in which journalists talk about being at a press junket without saying for what movie or especially what city or country. Travel always generates a slight quickening of the pulse, and I don’t see why a traveller wouldn’t want to share the particulars. It’s not like they’re working for the CIA. I’m guessing this is related to the Moscow junket for Transformers 3. Others are just saying, “Moscow…yeah!”
“At least Bad Teacher offers opportunities to ponder an evergreen pop-culture conundrum: At what point do professional performers with evident talent and a proven ability to make smart choices realize they’re trapped in a film that — due to lazy writing, style-free direction and visual design, and a general refusal to aim above the lowest common denominator — simply can’t be good?
“What compels someone like Justin Timberlake — so charismatically contemptible in The Social Network, so often a saving grace on SNL — to take a role centered on a cringe-worthy set-piece involving him dry-humping his real-life ex-girlfriend? Are actresses like Cameron Diaz and Lucy Punch really cool with punishing material based on the worst male-invented stereotypes of the way women deceptively control men and compete with one another? If they’re at all conscious of what they’ve gotten into, did they try to make it better, or did they submit to mediocrity because, you know, fuck it — the check cleared?
“Are they so far inside that they can’t possibly gauge what the fix they’re in might look like from the outside?” — from Karina Longworth‘s L.A. Weekly review.
Answer: The cast of Bad Teacher submitted to mediocrity because, you know, fuck it….the check cleared.
I was milling around a Hollywood hardware store sometime in the early ’80s, looking for a screwdriver or something, when I heard raised voices. Two or three Joe Sixpack-type meatheads were having fun at the expense of Peter Falk, who was poking around like me, just wandering down the aisles. “Aaaaay…Detective Columbo!,” one of them was saying with the rest joining in. They just had to treat Falk like some kind of visiting celebrity alien. They couldn’t be decent about it. They had to be assholes.
And I remember how the perturbed Falk walked right by me as these jerks were taunting him and making their little lame-ass cracks, and how he was trying to ignore them but at the same time was fiercely cussing and not all that quietly, going “Jeezus!….Jeezus!” I remember thinking to myself and trying to telepathically say to Falk, “Yes, yes…keep going! Turn around and let’ em have it! You can do it, Peter!”
Did Falk ever have a movie role in which he hit it out of the park? Did he ever even hit a long triple? Yes — in Raymond De Felitta and Paul Reiser‘s The Thing About My Folks (’05). Which nobody saw, of course. He was also memorable in a relaxed and settled and kindly way in Wim Wenders‘ Wings of Desire (but less so in Far Away, So Close). And he was especially fine (and perhaps delivering his career best) in John Cassevettes‘ Husbands and A Woman Under The Influence.
Falk’s peak run was from ’69 to ’74, when he was 42 to 47 years old. He began the streak in ’69 when he costarred as Sgt. Ross in Sydney Pollack‘s Castle Keep, and then played Archie Black in Husbands (’70) and did A Woman Under The Influence (’74) , and all of this while starring as Lt. Columbo from ’68 to ’03.
Oh, yes…The In-Laws (1979)! Of course! Make that a ten-year streak.
I saw him play the desperate Shelley Levene in an early ’80s Hollywood stage production of David Mamet‘s Glengarry Glen Ross. It wasn’t entirely successful as Falk didn’t seem to understand or accept that you can’t play around with Mamet’s dialogue — you have to say it exactly as written.
The poor guy began to succumb to the vicious destroyer known as Al Z. Heimer a few years ago. Not an easy way to wind things down. Getting old isn’t for sissies. Falk was a very fine artist in his time and place, which, as it turned out, was pretty much his whole life.
To this day I can’t remember which eye was the glass fake and which was real.