Bennett Miller‘s Foxcatcher is about how a strange, obsessive, ostensibly Olympics-driven relationship between Pennsylvania millionaire John Dupont (Steve Carell) and former Olympic wrestling champ Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum) led to Dupont shooting Mark’s older brother Dave (Mark Ruffalo). The real-life Schultz has been highly complementary of the film and Miller over the last several months, but he’s suddenly changed his tune and thrown both under the bus, apparently over concerns that the film points to a homoerotic undercurrent between Carell/duPont and Tatum/Schultz.
Schultz has totally ripped into Miller on Twitter, calling him “scum” and declaring that “we’re done” and that he’s going to take Miller down, etc. He’s obviously quite upset but why the sudden turnabout? The film opened nearly six weeks ago, but Schultz seems to have suddenly decided that homoerotic interpretations by reviewers are hurting his reputation. It’s possible, I suppose, that Schultz’s Twitter account has been hacked (?). I’ve asked Miller and a Foxcatcher publicist what they know or suspect about this, but you know how people get when something like this blows up — they hunker down and dive into the bunker.
If Schultz has literally tweeted all this stuff it sounds to me like a delayed case of homosexual panic — not literally about gayness but media perceptions of his having had some kind of suppressed gay dynamic with duPont, which Schultz believes is harming his rep. Although he’s written that the gay element in Foxcatcher “wasn’t explicit [and] so I didn’t have a problem with it,” he’s now blaming Miller and the film for slipping this perception into the conversation.
I’m presuming Schultz might also be pissed that Channing portrays him as scowling, emotionally constipated and seriously inarticulate, which usually indicates some degree of emotional repression…but again, why six weeks after the film opened?
If Foxcatcher reps don’t get in front of Schultz’s charges and try to frame them in a fair and proper context, this will probably harm Foxcatcher as far as Academy nominations are concerned, particularly Carell’s possible Best Actor nomination. It gives people a reason to step back and say “hmmm, maybe not…maybe vote for someone or something else.”
Robert Welkos’ story about Broadcast Film Critics Association co-founder Joey Berlin being handsomely paid is a day old and I’m still not getting the hoo-hah. I run a small business that survives on advertising from distributors during Hollywood’s annual award season, and the income allows me to live a cautiously cool life with annual travel to Cannes and Berlin and Toronto and elsewhere…a pretty good gig. Berlin and his BFCA cronies run a much larger business (i.e., the annual Critics Choice Awards) that brings in a lot more dough than any columnist on my level. A lot more. Welkos reports that Berlin’s company, Berlin Entertainment, Inc., earned $859 grand in 2012 and a total of $1,851,347 between ’09 and ’12. Okay…what? The last time I looked everyone was trying to skin the award-season cat. Some with more honor than others. Sasha Stone and I do it one way (passionate advocacy), Berlin does it another, Kris Tapley has his own methodology, Scott Feinberg has a slightly different approach, Pete Hammond has his particular game and so on. David Poland didn’t really get into the Welkos story yesterday but he implied that the Berlin disclosures warrant further attention. I don’t see what the big deal is.
I’ve been on the receiving end of (a) tingly, fluttery intrigue bordering on animal lust vs. (b) wifey looks that convey pleasant but perfunctory interest mixed with vague boredom, and let me tell you that (a) is what you’ll be smiling about when you’re on your death bed at age 87. I don’t intend this to sound the way it’s inevitably going to sound, but Showtime’s The Affair seems to be up to something atypical because Ruth Wilson, the 32 year-old British stage actress and Lone Ranger costar, is clearly one of those women whose “raging rivers of passion” are somewhat modified by the fact that she’s not (here come the slings and arrows) conventionally Maxim. She’s attractively “real world”, yes, but one presumes that a married guy with kids wouldn’t risk shattering the foundation of his life without volcanic temptation.
Wilson and Dominic West, both in complicated marriages, are the infidels in this pic about a summer affair in Montauk gone horribly wrong (i.e., clips of a detective asking about motive). Maura Tierney and Joshua Jackson (whom I wouldn’t even have coffee with if I was a lady) play their perplexed mates. The Affair, a Rashomon-like longform of some kind, debuts on 10.19,
As crude and simplistic as this seems at first (dreadful title design, cheap-ass music), I honestly felt more engaged by this short than by Jonathan Glazer‘s Under The Skin, which comes from a somewhat similar place (i.e., an alien life form dabbling in human sexuality). It works because of two elements. One, the sharp knocking on the door with no one found in the hallway. And two, the lights flashing off and on about halfway through. Even the shit-level FX at the end isn’t that much of a hindrance.
In my previous post about the death of Stanley Kauffmann I wrote that movies are still humming and crackling for the most part, but “you could certainly argue that the arrival of the post-cinematic, sub-literate, sensation-and-explosion-seeking, digitally-attuned generation of jizz-whizz moviegoers (by far the least educated and most reality-averse in Hollywood history) and the filmmakers in their midst has brought things to an all-time low.” And I’m wondering if we can put a list together of under-40 filmmakers who are not in this bag?
I don’t think I’m being too dismissive or pessimistic to say that generally speaking the under-40 generation of filmmakers (mostly born between the mid ’70s and mid ’80s although there are some arrested-development types between 40 and 50) are inclined tward cinematic imaginings that have clearly been more influenced by their online and gaming experiences as teens and 20somethings than by real-life experiences, and who are more or less committed to composing and presenting stories, activities and images that reflect digital as opposed to organic realms. Filmmakers, in short, who are more or less opposed to the idea of making films about the actual world. When I say this I mean scripts that are (I know it’s a pain but bear with me) based on actual, first-hand-observations of human behavior and the real-world physical laws that govern things like running, falling, fist fights and the like. In both the dramatic and comedic realms, I mean.
Wells to Paramount Home Video: 14 months ago (i.e., January 11th, 2012) a highly knowledgable source told me off-the-record that George StevensShane (’53) had undergone a high-def restoration and will probably be released sometime this year to meet this classic film’s 60th anniversary. The source was very specific and told me exactly what needed to be done, and said the work would almost certainly be completed by the end of 2012 or at the very latest early 2013 in order to make the anniversary.
Since then I haven’t heard a peep out of Paramount Home Video about this. Not a word, not a hiccup. Nothing.
The 60th anniversary of Shane‘s New York theatrical opening will happen on April 13th. Obviously that’s going to come and go without notice but will a Shane Bluray come out anytime in 2013? Why do all the three-strip restoration and the high-def tweaking and then just let it sit there, right?
I hope Paramount isn’t going to follow the path of Sony Home Video’s experience with From Here to Eternity, which opened four months after Shane. Sony’s Grover Crisp restored it beautifully and made it look better than ever before (I just saw it on high-def on TCM a few weeks ago), and yet FHTE never came out on Bluray and isn’t to my knowledge even available as a high-def download via Netflix or Amazon.
I wrote George Stevens, Jr. and asked what he knows, but he’ll probably blow me off. The levels of secrecy and deathray vibes and bureaucratic chess-playing in the home video realm are not to be believed. You have to go back to the Leonid Brezhnev era in Soviet Russia to find a similar mindset.
Update: It was announced on 2.13 by Turner Classic Movies’ Heather Sauter that Shane will play at the 2013 TCM Classic Film Festival in Hollywood (4.25 through 4.28). Films that are shown at that festival are almost exclusively ones that have been digitally remastered and upgraded for Bluray release.
Last week I wrote that the opening credits of Oz The Great and Powerful, presented in black-and-white 3D within a 1.33 aspect ratio, are inventive and beautiful and altogether quite masterful. I also noted that the subsequent 15 minutes, also in the same format, are quite good also and in fact deliver more allure than the rest of Sam Raimi‘s film, which is in widescreen color and loaded down with more emphatic, eye-soaking CG than Raimi or the audience know what to do with.
The film runs another 110 minutes after the black-and-white section, and at great cost. A recent N.Y. Times story reported that the total Oz tab is $325 million, including marketing. I wonder how much Raimi made?
The opener is more involving than the eye-candy stuff because it’s mainly about (a) echoing the beginning of Victor Fleming‘s 1939 The Wizard of Oz, which began in black-and-white sepia-tone, and (b) is all about character set-up. The shakedown on James Franco‘s Oscar Diggs, a low-rent magician performing in a travelling carnival in 1905, is that he’s a reckless flim-flam man who feels unfulfilled (he wants to be a Harry Houdini or Thomas Edison-level achiever) and can’t recognize or express love. So we’re presuming, naturally, knowing the original backwards and forwards, that Diggs will gradually recognize and solve these issues once he air-balloons into the fairytale land of Oz and all the “whee!” stuff with the shreaking witches and flying baboons and whatnot kick in.
A resolution happens at the finale, I suppose, but not in a way that felt particularly satisfying or whole or fused together in just the right way. Not for me, at least.
But you’re thinking early on that the newbie just might come together like the 1939 original, particularly after watching a black-and-white Franco get lifted up and whipped around by a huge, snarly, wild-ass tornado, which also propelled Judy Garland‘s Dorothy Gale into The Land Beyond Kansas. But then Franco lands in Oz and the color kicks in and before you know it a cute little CG hummingbird shows up and then some piranha-like fish with razor teeth and it’s like “oh, Jesus God…here we go with the cute family crap.”
The screenplay for the old Wizard of Oz — written by Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf with uncredited rewrites by Herman J. Mankiewicz, Arthur Freed, George Cukor, King Vidor, Richard Thorpe, Jack Mintz, Victor Fleming, John Lee Mahin, Ogden Nash, Irving Brecher, Samuel Hoffenstein, Herbert Fields, Sid Silvers, Jack Haley, Bert Lahr, E.Y. Harburg and William H. Cannon — was a personal tale about 12 year-old Dorothy’s angst and imagination. The movie is basically a dream she has after being knocked out by a flying window frame. The fanciful characters are all from Dorothy’s actual life (Margaret Hamilton‘s Wicked Witch, Frank Morgan‘s Wizard, Ray Bolger‘s Scarecrow, Bert Lahr‘s Cowardly Lion, Jack Haley‘s Tinman) and the issues are all about what Dorothy and her three comrades want in a personal vein, but which they try to solve, futilely, by asking for help from others. They had the power all along but they didn’t know it. All they needed to do was reach in instead of out.
Oz The Great and Powerful, written by Mitchell Kapner and David Lindsay-Abaire, is only occasionally or incidentally about Digg’s character issues. It’s more precisely and often oppressively about excuses to turn loose the CG crew so they can go to town with this or that mindblowing digital landscape or magical effect or eye-candy fireball or waterfall or what-have-you. It’s about the same old game, the same old “let’s try and whip the easily impressed into a CG lather!”
You could use your imagination and say it’s about commercial pressures (or some phantom or claw-footed gargoyle created by these pressures) standing behind poor Raimi and constantly nudging him in the ribs and going, “Sam…Sam! You’re a family man and you live in Brentwood and you’ve contributed to Republican politicians so you need to get paid the really big bucks, right? Which is why you’re making a relatively empty-headed CG-covered family-trade movie like this. And you know, or should know, that successful movies are not story- and character-driven any more, Sam…not really and not for years. They’re driven by wow effects, and so you really have to keep ’em dazzled, Sam…okay? Keep lathering on those FX, keep playing to the four year-olds.
“C’mon, Sam…we let you have your pain-in-the-ass black-and-white opening so do the right thing and make us the kind of soul-smothering, moron-level family flick that makes big money!”
Oz The Great and Powerful doesn’t really fit together or make a lot of sense. There are two witches…okay, one witch and a sister who’s under her influence (Rachel Wiesz, Mila Kunis)…who are seen as oppressors by the citizens of Oz, whose lives, they claim, are not “free,” whatever the hell that means. Believe me, these people are as free as you and me or Sam Raimi or any Anaheim Disneyland employee. They’re well-dressed and jolly and they sings songs and blah blah. And Glynda the Good Witch (Michelle Williams) is kind of half-assed in that she doesn’t seem to have much power. And the finale doesn’t involve Franco’s finding some kind of fulfillment (although he does, sort of) as much as it involves a kind of people’s revolution…you don’t want to hear this.
I know that if you’re going to include singing in a film, as in a singing or half-singing “musical,” you have to introduce it early on, certainly before the end of Act One. You sure as hell can’t can’t wait until the end of Act Two, I can tell you that.
“There’s neither a subversive nor even a gleeful bone in this film’s body,” wroteHollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy, “which means there can be no fun in the evil or in villains being vanquished. Similarly missing is any zest to the storytelling. Quite the opposite of the great earlier film, the Oz here is a dull place to be. Given the choice, you might even consider going back to Kansas.”
It’s strange that Oz The Great and Powerful has a 63% Rotten Tomatoes rating among the general population. This obviously indicates trouble, but a film as bad and unfulfilling as this one deserves a negative rating in the 30s or 20s even. I don’t get why so many people who should know better have given it a pass. The top critic rating is 29%.
Repeating from last week: “Handsome naturalistic black-and-white 3D hasn’t been seen since…what?…The Creature From The Black Lagoon? (Tim Burton‘s Frankenweenie was animated.) “This is amazing…delightful,” I was saying to myself. “I haven’t watched anything like this ever on a big screen…the first time in my life!”
Watching The Cabin in the Woods made me feel like I did in eighth-grade biology class when I did an autopsy on a frog. It felt novel and different and coldly fascinating — I’d never cut into the chest and stomach cavity of an animal before — but it was basically a clinical exercise that I knew I wouldn’t repeat. I wonder if the frog felt any pain? Too bad if he did. He’s only a little dead frog and I’m big and alive, and biology class will be over in 20 minutes so who cares?
I know for an absolute fact that I’ll never watch The Cabin the Woods again…ever. Because for all the “fun” of wading into a horror flick that fiddles with old cliches and scatters the cards in a way that feels fresh and smart-assy while spilling many gallons of blood, this is one of the coldest and creepiest films of this sort that I’ve ever…uhm, endured.
Yes — director Drew Goddard and producer-cowriter Joss Whedon have taken the old Friday the 13th/Evil Dead “sexually active kids alone in a cabin getting slaughtered by a fiend” formula and tricked it up and turned it into a kind of horror-hotel concept. With — SPOILER! SPOILER! — several older, cold-hearted creeps in shirts and ties and lab coats keeping tabs on the carnage like bored, professional-class cynics watching a dull football game that they couldn’t care less about.
No horror film is about basking in the humanity of the characters and taking emotional saunas. All horror films say to the audience, “You’re fucked.” But even for a genre that has revelled in blood and torture and sadism over the last 25 or 30 years, Cabin In The Woods is a stand-out. Horror isn’t about “scary” this time — it’s about an ice-cold spectator game that will deaden your soul. Nobody cares, everybody suffers, blood everywhere, take the pain, life hates you, we hate you, God hates you, Lionsgate hates you, fuck off, we want to hear you scream for mercy. Oh, and one more thing: you’re so much more fucked that you know.
Goddard and Whedon are saying to us, “Are you enjoying the game we’re playing here? Pretty cool, huh?” Well, sort of…yeah. You’ve shaken things up, guys, and done it differently…fine. But you and your film are so detached from any shred of feeling or a facsimile of human reality (except in a few anecdotal ways) that you make me want to inject novocaine and embalming fluid into my veins. So I can feel like I’m part of the fun and the coolness. Thanks, dickheads.
The Cabin In The Woods reminded me of an eternal truism — never, ever trust excited geek buzz coming out of South by Southwest. The people who go there are invested in SXSW geekdom and celebrating their own aroma and determined to whip themselves into a lather about any film that half does the trick.
I wouldn’t have mentioned this but Village Voice critic Mark Olsenwrites that “at the end of The Cabin in the Woods, the world is destroyed by an apocalyptic hand of fate — an actual hand, mind you — yet that is not a spoiler, not really.” Compared to this the “guys in shirts and ties and lab coats” thing is mouse shit.
I got into a spirited discussion with Scott Feinberg during last night’s after-party for Sony Classics’ Made in Dangenham, a tidy but stirring rabble-rouser about an equal-pay-for-women strike at a London-area Ford plant in the late ’60s. The subject was The Kids Are All Right and what Focus may be planning to re-energize things for the film and for Annette Bening‘s Best Actress shot in particular.
Bening is facing tough competition from Black Swan‘s Natalie Portman, Another Year‘s Leslie Manville and Winter’s BoneJennifer Lawrence, to name but three. But in a sense Feinberg is lobbying for an even tougher scenario with yet another competitor, Bening’s costar Julianne Moore, being nominated as well. Feinberg was basically asking why and how Moore has been “thrown under the bus” despite her having the larger and more assertive role in The Kids Are All Right, and having been overlooked or dissed in more award races than Annette.
I for one don’t believe that Bening and Moore have a prayer of being nominated together, and that it would certainly kill the chances of either one winning due to a vote split. Does Moore deserve to be the nominee more than Bening? Perhaps, but whaddaya gonna do? I sound like a go-alonger, right? Feinberg sure doesn’t.
Here’s what he wrote on 7.25 and 8.7, and here’s his latest rant on the subject, posted earlier today.
“Some people are adamant that Annette Bening and Julianne Moore, the co-leads of The Kids Are All Right, cannot both be nominated for the best actress Oscar this year,” Feinberg writes. “That’s a bunch of malarkey. Not only can they, and not only should they, but — if Focus genuinely fights the good fight for both of them, as studio insiders emphatically insist to me that they will — they will be.
“Those who say that it cannot happen point to the large number of quality contenders in the category this year and insist that there isn’t room for two people from the same film. I disagree. Bening and Moore are together in virtually every scene of the film (Moore actually has a few more scenes, alongside Mark Ruffalo). Both actresses have some terrific moments in the film (Bening’s return to the dinner table after discovering Moore was having an affair and Moore’s subsequent soliloquy on the challenges of marriage are both showstoppers). And both are highly-respected by their peers, who have never been shy about nominating them before (the Academy has recognized Bening with three nods and Moore with four, and neither has won yet).
“Some people are pushing the line that Bening has a leg up on Moore because she’s ‘Hollywood royalty‘ (as if people are going to vote for her because she married Warren Beatty) and because she’s made the right friends (she’s a longtime member of the Academy’s Board of Governors), but for all of the aforementioned reasons I simply cannot see a voter sitting down and voting to nominate one but not the other.
“As I first wrote back on July 25, the Academy has nominated two best actress nominees from the same film in five of the 82 years (6% of the time) in which the category has existed: (a) Anne Baxter and Bette Davis for All About Eve (1950); (b) Katharine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor for Suddenly, Last Summer (1959); (c) Anne Bancroft and Shirley MacLaine for The Turning Point (1977); Shirley MacLaine and Debra Winger for Terms of Endearment (1983); and Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon for Thelma and Louise (1991).”
I just wrote L.A. Weekly critic Scott Foundas about an interesting terminology matter that’s cropped up over the past week or so. It’s basically about the 21st Century definition of porn, or rather the expanded cultural “street” definition that doesn’t apply to sex. I love chasing new terms and understandings, but I’m not quite 100% on all the wrinkles here so I’m asking for counsel.
“I was amused by and posted a comment from a reader who said that Revolutionary Road “looks to be the Citizen Kane of Gen X marital-strife porn.” It may be that a certain party on the DreamWorks marketing team has taken this as a slam against the Sam Mendes film, which it isn’t. What ‘porn’ means in this context is (and tell me if I’m wrong) an obsessive waist-deep immersion in any intense or demanding or melodramatic activity, be it war or Wall Street or baseball or politics or anything.
“In your L.A. Weekly review of Body of Lies,” I continued, “you used the term ‘terror porn,’ which came from a colleague who had amusingly used this term to describe the entire wave of recent Middle East Hollywood espionage movies — Syriana, The Kingdom, Rendition, Body of Lies. Does this mean your friend regards these films as somehow lewd or marked by questionable taste? Not unless you’re Ed McMahon. He’s saying they’re extremely immersive, whole-hog experiences. I mean…right?
“Does ‘porn’ in this context allude to something obsessive or repetitive? I’m not sure if it does. What do you think? I’ve only been using this term recently. I do know that the older crowd flinches when they hear it, presuming that it means something icky or distasteful. A journalist friend has this same reaction yesterday, but he’s now coming to terms with the new definition. Foundas replies: “Basically, I think ‘porn’ when it is used in the context of ‘terror porn’ (per the colleague I cited in my Body of Lies review) or “disability porn” (as I referred to Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) or even ‘torture porn’ (which is probably where all these other ‘porn’ derivations started) has less to do with obsession and repetition than with a certain superficiality or tastelessness — in other words, the idea that the thing being classified as ‘porn’ is somehow being used shamelessly to manipulate or titillate the audience, without any serious comment being made on the subject at hand.
“So the person who says that Revolutionary Road looks like ‘the Citizen Kane of Gen X marital-strife porn’ probably means to imply that somehow the iconography of middle-class domestic unrest is being used for its iconographic value and little deeper meaning. Of course, it’s partly an inane comment, in that Revolutionary Road takes place in the 1950s, so it has nothing whatsoever to do with Gen X, but I digress.”
[Wells comment: I took the GenX thing to mean an allusion to Kate and Leo’s own generational alignment, although the reader may have cooked it up in ignorance of the ’50s backdrop in Revolutionary Road.]
“To offer another example, I myself tried to address some of what you seem to be getting at here in my LA Weekly review of Grace is Gone last December, where I wrote:
“[Strouse has] devised Grace Is Gone to work on our sentiments the way a porn movie works on our libidos — only Strouse postpones the money shot with 80-odd minutes of emotional foreplay en route to the inevitable, orgiastic climax where Stanley finally spills the beans and the girls spill forth the entire contents of their tear ducts. It’s a horribly contrived bit of catharsis, and, as if to underline the crassness of his instincts, Strouse drowns out the dialogue of that crucial scene with music — a reminder that, in all pornography, talk is expendable.” Wells response: If Foundas’ definition of porn (“shameless manipulation or titillatation of the audience, without any serious comment being made on the subject at hand”) is more commonly understood than my own (“an obsessive waist-deep immersion in any intense or demanding or melodramatic activity”) then it was wrong — incorrect — to run that “Citizen Kane of GenX marital-strife porn” line because no one’s seen Mendes’ film and has any clue if it’s shamelessly manipulative or not. I rather doubt that it is, knowing Mendes’work as I do. So it’s probably best to drop it and put the whole porn issue to bed.
Tom Wolfe‘s “The Pirate Pose,” a Conde Nast Portfolio piece about the coarse (and in some cases appalling) social profiles of hedge-fund multi-millionaires, the 21st Century masters of the universe, is an amusing, well-composed read. It was clear two years ago that the hedge-funders were the eager-beavers one needed to talk to about independent movie financing, website-purchasing and any other mode of financial entertainment-industry investment, but I wonder what the very latest tea-leaf reading may be in this realm.
“The collision of new money and old money or, to be more accurate in our American context, slightly older money, has been a recurring drama,” Wolfe notes early on. “At the turn of the 20th century, Edith Wharton established herself as perhaps America’s greatest female novelist by focusing on precisely that. But the current new breed stands apart from all the rest for two reasons.
“First, they have more money, infinitely more, than any of the various waves of new money that preceded them, with the possible exception of robber barons on the order of John D. Rockefeller, who, incidentally, was regarded as a rude Pocantico hillbilly Baptist by society in New York a hundred years ago. Second, hedge fund managers are possessed by a previously unheard-of status fixation.”
And I love this graph about a certain coloration of hedge-fund multi-millionaire trophy wives, whom Wolfe describes in aggregate terms as “Twinkies”:
“The twinkies who have their eggs fertilized by their husbands’ sperm in a laboratory, creating embryos for implantation in the wombs of surrogate mothers who are paid to manufacture children for delivery in nine months, since why on earth should any wife whose husband is worth a billion or even $500 million have to endure the distended belly, bilious mornings, back cramps, not to mention a cramped social life, to end up with her perfect personal-trainer-sculpted boy-with-breasts body she has spent thousands of sweaty hours attaining, ruined… tempting her husband to survey all the little man-eaters out there, including those former wives who used to meet regularly at the Boxing Cat Grill until it burned down, whereas the current wives leave their husbands catatonic before the plasma TV and meet three or four times a week at one local bar or another and drive home in their Hummers and bobtail Mercedes S.U.V.’s, bombed out of their minds, while waiting for the baby to come from the factory…”
I’m now searching around for two or three easy-reading columnists who’ve been keeping tabs on hedge-fund investment activity in the entertainment industry and reporting about it in layman’s terms, and if anyone has any tips…
I have a military underwear problem with Flags of Our Fathers (Dreamamount, 10.20). Nobody will see what I’m talking about for another ten days and it may seem like a chickenshit thing to bring up, but the final scene of Clint Eastwood‘s Iwo Jima film shows the small group of Marines who raised the U.S. flag atop Mt. Surabachi taking a swim in the Pacific Ocean, and they’re all wearing white underwear.
The problem is this: no G.I.’s wore white underwear during World War II — they were all issued olive drab briefs for camouflage purposes. I’m not trying to make a major deal out of this, but it’s definitely a significant error.
As soon as I saw the white briefs I suspected it wasn’t correct, but I wasn’t 100% sure. So I called my father, a former Marine lieutenant who fought at the battles of Iwo Jima and Guam, and he said yup, olive-drab underwear, the film has it wrong.
Then I found a military uniform and accessory site called What Price Glory that says, in discussing 1940s-era underwear, that “soldiers who fought in World War II were introduced to the concept of colored (olive drab) cotton boxer shorts with elastic waistbands.”
I then found another site about cotton apparel that says “during this era of WWII, American troops discovered that the freshly washed white underwear that they hung out to dry attracted enemy fire. A wartime ad for Jockey headlined: ‘Target: White Underwear’ and explained why the armed forces switched from white underwear to OD (Olive Drab), because the latter color blends in with its surroundings more effectively.”
The guys-swimming-in-the-ocean scene doesn’t work for two other reasons. Eastwood deciding to have them wear underwear (two guys jump into the water with their pants on) seems prudish. Was Clint looking to avoid an R rating from all the bare asses and long-shot genitalia? My dad says whenever soldiers took a swim after a battle they always skinny-dipped — nobody wore underwear. He also said that nobody went swimming off the island of Iwo Jima because the water was too cold, the location being in the northern Pacific (only about 650 miles south of Japan) and the time of year being February-March. So the whole scene doesn’t work for me.
Clint has to take the bullet on this one because he’s the boss, but other guilty party appears to be Marynn Scinto, whom the IMDB lists as the “wardrobe costumer” on Flags of Our Fathers.
It doesn’t seem fair, I realize. You work your ass off and get it historically right in dozens of different ways — uniforms, weapons, every last little thing– and then you screw up on the underwear and some guy like me comes along and gives you noise about it. But getting every last detail right is a big part of the challenge in making first-rate films.