Poor Robert Culp, a good actor and a very well-liked fellow, suddenly died yesterday. The 79 year-old TV actor fell and hit his head near his Hollywood hills home, and that was it. He went out in this respect like Jeffrey Hunter and William Holden (although Holden’s death, caused by gashing his head on a coffee table, is thought to have been primarily caused by alcohol).
Culp was a talented guy and a highly appealing presence, but he suffered the career fate of peaking in his mid to late 30s (with I Spy and Paul Mazursky‘s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice) and then treading water for the next 40-plus years — working and living and having a healthy life, but his glory days well behind him. He kept in shape and looked good and stood up for caged elephants, but….aahh, let it go. I’m just thinking it would have been nice if Culp could have found some kind of comeback role in a TV series or indie film or whatever.
As I write this, the House of Representatives is enactingPresident Obama‘s watered-down, barely-worth-the-name health care legislation with no single-payer and no public option. It’s 11:07 pm, and the favoring vote tally just went over 216. Better than nothing and fine as far as it goes, but more than a bit of a letdown for some of us.
“This is about as interesting as it gets in politics,” MSNBC commentator Ed Schultz has just said. “The Democrats now own — lock, stock, and barrel — health care reform in America.”
“Congress gave final approval on Sunday to legislation that would provide medical coverage to tens of millions of uninsured Americans,” the N.Y. Times story says, “and remake the nation’s health care system along the lines proposed by President Obama.
“Representative Bart Stupak of Michigan said that anti-abortion Democrats were satisfied with a proposed executive order “to ensure that federal funds are not used for abortion services.”
“By a vote of 219 to 212, the House passed the bill after a day of tumultuous debate that echoed the epic struggle of the last year. The action sent the bill to President Obama, whose crusade for such legislation has been a hallmark of his presidency.
“Democrats hailed the vote as historic, comparable to the establishment of Medicare and Social Security and a long overdue step forward in social justice. ‘This is the civil rights act of the 21st century,’ said Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, the No. 3 Democrat in the House.”
Not only has NY Press critic Armond White written that “Oscar punditry has become a branch of journalism” — he has gone one better. Oscarology is “no longer on a par with criticism, but has taken the place of criticism,” he writes. The piece is called “Wake Up and Smell the Oscars — They Stink!”
The idea that a knowledgable guy like White would even jest that Tom O’Neil, Sasha Stone, Scott Feinberg, Kris Tapley, David Poland and Pete Hammond (to name a few colleagues in the Oscar go-go racket) are 21st Century manifestations of Stanley Kaufman, Andrew Sarris, Dwight McDonald, Judith Crist, Brendan Gill, Penelope Gilliatt and Pauline Kael is a holy-shit thought, and at the very least something to smirk about and reflect upon.
“Every year [Oscar] insanity turns the public into suckers,” White continues, “subject to the whims of how publicity mavens who decide which millionaire client will command popular attention. Oscared films become important for not a second longer than the exploitable moment. Movies released during award season for the awards crush don’t even have time to enter the culture, and we forsake our cultural right to claim — and acclaim — what is meaningful to us spiritually or aesthetically by following this whole rigged process.
“Think about it: Does anyone care anymore about The English Patient? Shakespeare in Love? American Beauty? Chicago? A Beautiful Mind? Million Dollar Baby? Slumdog Millionaire? None of these films are artistic landmarks.They didn’t mean much even while watching them. But the further you get away from the first impression or from the marketing, they mean nothing.They’re just…Oscar winners.”
I think about and greatly admire American Beauty because of Kevin Spacey‘s performance, Conrad Hall‘s cinematography and the film’s central idea — i.e., we’re all too caught up in the hurlyburly to stop and smell the roses, get high and watch wind-whipped plastic bags float around.
And I’ll always have a soft spot for A Beautiful Mind because of Russell Crowe‘s performance (and that hand gesture he came up that conveyed the act of a thought flying out of his head), the third-act pens scene and James Horner‘s musical score.
The title of this piece is the second-to-last line in a certain Oscar-winning film from the mid ’50s. Name it?
It’s being asked which of this year’s Best Picture nominees will be watched by film buffs 50 years hence. Just as I’ve watched (and will watch again) a 50 year-old Korean War film called Pork Chop Hill, I can’t imagine The Hurt Locker not being a fascinating timepiece for those looking to absorb what the Iraq War was for U.S. troops. And just as Ben-Hur is a necessary flick to own (especially when it finally comes out on Blu-ray) or at least see once, who can imagine Avatar not being a essential sit in 2060?
And I’m feeling kind of hurt about this. How come I haven’t been called by Harvey Weinstein? I can bang this stuff out as well as anyone else. Here, listen: “Is this an excitement tremor or what? Inglourious Basterds is a come-from-behinder, a last-minute sprinter…breathless at the Kentucky Derby! The old ’90s Harvey is back in action! And Quentin’s no spin-slouch either!”
They haven’t called me, I’m guessing, because they see me as too much of a Hurt Locker guy. Too opposed to the baseball-bat scene, etc. But I could at least write about how Harvey has hijacked the Oscar-blog conversation. Even though, as I said two days ago, it’s mainly happening out of columnist boredom.
If I wanted to be contrarian, I could openly ask how Harvey got sop many people whose job it is to be skeptical to suddenly swig the Kool-Aid.
Or I could argue that Harvey has had an Oscar “upset” once in his career — Shakespeare in Love — and it wasn’t really an upset as the film did have the most nominations that year.
Or I could get pissy and argue that Harvey’s suggestion that actors are monolithically voting en masse for Inglourious Basterds because Quentin writes such good parts is arguably deluded if not offensive to almost everyone else in the race. I mean, to suggest that Jason Reitman or any of the other Best Picture screenwriters haven’t written good parts is like…hello?
And I could argue the idea that Inglorious Basterds is a consensus choice in the year of a preferential ballot is laughable. Isn’t any “love it or hate it” movie by nature not a consensus choice?
Or I could just quote this L.A. guy I spoke to this morning — call him a dispassionate pundit — who says that…uhm, well, actually, he goes on a bit so I’m going to give him a stand-alone HE berth. It’s in the story that follows (i.e., is right behind, even though it has a more recent time-code) this one.
Roger Ebert has written a response to Chris Jones‘ touching profile of his situation and the state of his soul in the current Esquire. Roger is fairly laid back about it, although he takes exception to the line that he is “dying in increments.”
“Well, we’re all dying in increments,” he writes. “I don’t mind people knowing what I look like, but I don’t want them thinking I’m dying. To be fair, Chris Jones never said I was. If he took a certain elegiac tone, you know what? I might have, too. And if he structured his elements into a story arc, that’s just good writing.
“I knew going in that a lot of the article would be about my surgeries and their aftermath. Let’s face it. Esquire wouldn’t have assigned an article if I were still in good health. Their cover line was the hook: Roger Ebert’s Last Words. A good head. Whoever wrote that knew what they were doing. I was a little surprised at the detail the article went into about the nature and extent of my wounds and the realities of my appearance, but what the hell. It was true. I didn’t need polite fictions.
“[Jones] wasn’t precisely an eyewitness the second night after Chaz had gone off to bed and I was streaming Radio Caroline and writing late into the night. But that’s what I did. It may be, the more interviews you’ve done, the more you appreciate a good one. I knew exactly what he started with, and I could see where he ended, and he can be proud of the piece.”
“I mentioned that it was sort of a relief to have that full-page photo of my face. Yes, I winced. What I hated most was that my hair was so neatly combed. Running it that big was good journalism. It made you want to read the article.
“I studiously avoid looking at myself in a mirror. It would not be productive. If we think we have physical imperfections, obsessing about them is only destructive. Low self-esteem involves imagining the worst that other people can think about you. That means they’re living upstairs in the rent-free room.”
It’s been 33 or 34 years since I first saw John Carpenter‘s Assault on Precinct 13. It’s a well-admired…make that beloved Howard Hawks/wild-in-the-‘hood exploitation film, of course, but is especially memorable for Darwin Joston‘s tersely sardonic Napoleon Wilson — a performance that encompassed a kind of studly melancholia, ironic machismo, flitting comic asides and a riveting aura of existential cool. And delivered with a sort of movie-conscious, wink-winky tone, but no less legendary for that.
I just watched Assault on Blu-ray last night, and was reminded what a beautifully iconic hard-boiled egg Joston and Carpenter managed to create in Wilson. I would have a guy like Joston in movies today. I really miss that steely-folksy quality of his — that steady, working-class, no-bullshit and not-too-beautiful Warren Oates vibe.
A New York-trained actor who hailed from North Carolina, Joston kicked around and then got lucky with Assault but never caught on like he should have, and movies of the ’80s and ’90s were poorer for that. He was 38 or 39 when he made Assault — he was 61 when he died of lukemia in 1998.
A little less than two years ago Matthew Kiernan of Headquarters 10 wrote a great Joston tribute. Here’s a portion:
“Joston started in the late 60s with roles on numerous TV shows like Rat Patrol and bounced around the industry like a lot of other actors, sometimes popping up in small roles in low budget movies but mostly sticking to the TV scene until he retired from acting to work behind the scenes (in film transportation) until his death from leukemia in 1998. Joston probably would have gone on to be another one of many forgotten actors if fate hadn’t placed him into the starring role in Assault on Precinct 13, the first real feature from writer/director John Carpenter.
“Joston happened to have been Carpenter’s neighbor in the same apartment complex, where the two became friends, and Carpenter wrote the role of Napoleon Wilson specifically for Joston, who Carpenter claims had inspired the character. You hear a lot of times about certain roles being written for certain actors, but that doesn’t mean they’re always perfect fits; however, Napoleon Wilson turned out to be the role that Joston was born to play, and even though the film lead to big things for Carpenter, whose next film ended up being Halloween, Joston went back to being another actor waiting for his big break.
“Although Carpenter gave Joston a small role in The Fog and planned to cast him as John Rainbird in his proposed film version of Stephen King‘s Firestarter (which obviously never happened), Joston never had a role that good again. But goddamn if he didn’t make something out of it when he did.
“While the actual star of Assault on Precinct 13 is Austin Stoker (who is also very good), Joston gets the best role, a villain with a set of principals who may not be the nicest guy in the world but is certainly the person you want on your side when your police station is under siege by street gangs.
“The entire film is Carpenter’s homage to Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo, with Joston sort of in the Dean Martin role (he sure ain’t Ricky Nelson), but the whole film is also Carpenter’s tribute to the entire western genre and the Children of George and Steven should take ample note of it because this is what a fucking genre homage is supposed to be like.”
I’ll always be in awe of Harvey Weinstein‘s chutzpah, but Inglourious Basterds isn’t going to win the Best Picture Oscar. How do I know this? I don’t, not for certain. But I do know that the season has been dragging on and that entertainment journalists are getting bored and need to come up with scenarios that allow for some variation of the c.w. — i.e., the winner will be either Avatar or The Hurt Locker.
I’m also sensing that the Movie Godz, the aspirational angels of our nature, are feeling a wee bit antsy as we speak, and have taken to hovering like the monochrome Bruno Ganz and Otto Sander in Wings of Desire and intimating/whispering “don’t…don’t do this…not the baseball-bat movie…think of how you’ll feel the next morning.”
But if you want to trip out on an IG fantasy, consider Pete Hammond‘s Notes on a Seasonarticle that was posted seven days ago. Or Steve Pond‘s piece in The Wrap (which borrows most of its material from Hammond’s piece). Or Tom O’Neil‘s piece on Gold Derby/Envelope/L.A. Times. Or Jack Matthews‘ article for Moviefone. They’re all riding this bullshit horse.
“Harvey Weinstein has been pulling out all the stops,” Pond writes, “flatly proclaiming that Basterds is going to win Best Picture.” Fine — Harvey wouldn’t be Harvey if he didn’t strut around. “To that end, Quentin Tarantino has been making constant public and private appearances. Audi sponsored a packed party for film and director. Norman Lloyd and Roger Corman threw a smaller lunch at Musso and Franks.
“The latter gathering seemed to suggest that Tarantino has the approval of an odd subset of the Academy, voters like Mickey Rooney, who told the L.A. Times that he doesn’t see new movies.
“Weinstein also has suggested that the Academy’s newly installed preferential system of counting final Best Picture ballots might hurt Avatar and help propel his film to victory.
“Under that system, voters are asked to rank all 10 nominees from first to last. Unless one film gets more than 50 percent of the first-place votes – which, let’s face it, is virtually impossible in this year’s race – the film with the fewest Number One votes will be eliminated. Its ballots will then be redistributed into the pile of whatever film is ranked second on each ballot. The process continues, with the last-place film eliminated in each subsequent round, until one film winds up with a majority of the votes.
“The system means that Number One votes alone won’t be enough to propel a film to victory — it’ll also need to be ranked second or third on lots of ballots if it wants to hit that magic number.
“Avatar, it seems, should get lots of Number One votes – but it might also be ranked pretty low on the ballots of voters who don’t think it’s the best, leaving an opening for another film that’s more of a consensus favorite to ride to victory on the strength of more second- and third-place votes.”
When O’Neil predicted a Basterds win last November I wrote, “Trust me — it’ll never happen.” This morning he notes that “Mathews is saying it really might happen and I still say it will.” I’m fine with all this crap. The fever dream of a three-way race is better than an either-or. Without it things would be fairly flat, and we still have two and a half weeks to go.
Wells to Mickey Rooney: If you don’t see new movies you should resign from the Academy. No ifs, ands or buts.
I did my farewell hugs with the Santa Barbara Film Festival team last night. For the most part at a big noisy wrap party at a place called Eos. I was forced to leave when a large crowd started dancing to Kool and the Gang. Thanks to Roger Durling, Carol Marshall and the others who made my ten-day stay a pleasant one. (Excepting that goon who got in my face the other night.) Short hop to LAX, LAX to Dallas, Dallas to LaGuardia — back around 9 pm.
Roger Durling‘s on-stage interview last night with A Single Man star Colin Firth went on too long, but the conversational vibe was easy and unforced. And yet probing, amusing, revealing. I love the smile that always follows after Firth delivers one of those wry, self-deprecating comments. A very mellow fellow. The tribute reel reminded that he does anger quite well when a scene calls for it, but he has virtually none of it on his own, or so it seems.
I was convinced Firth was the leading Best Actor contender when I spoke with him in Manhattan a little more than two months ago, but now the apparent assumption is that Jeff Bridges has it in the bag for his Crazy Heart performance. Firth’s brand has nonetheless been upped. Everyone has come out ahead.
Firth’s classy gentleman aura — that sense of urbane reserve and sensitivity and aplomb– “is what everyone has been savoring since Firth broke through roughly 15 years ago,” I wrote in early December. “And now there’s widespread agreement that he delivers the finest variation of this very particular aura or attitude in Tom Ford‘s A Single Man.
“One of my questions began with a paraphrasing of John Ford’s quote about how directors make the same film over and over. Do actors do the same thing more or less? Firth didn’t disagree. His achievement in A Single Man is that he’s playing the deepest and most intriguing aspect of this patented thing. Because the role of George has found him in exactly at the right place and time, and vice versa.”
The after-party was held in an industrial park in eastern Carpinteria — a 15-minute drive. The SBIFF elite were cordoned off in two smallish, well-lit rooms that were protected by the usual goons in black suits.
One of the security guys — young and muscular with marble-black eyes — came up to me early on and asked to see my wrist band. I said I hadn’t been given one, but that SBIFF publicist Carol Marshall had walked me in. I assured him in any case that he wasn’t going to throw me out. He gave me one of those cock-eyed glares. He wanted to demonstrate his alpha-male capabilities, but Carol chilled him down. I’ve said this before but I were to run a security company I would (a) call it Cool Goons and (b) make a point of not hiring guys who stroll around parties looking for trouble.
During an interview inside Santa Barbara’s Lobero theatre yesterday afternoon, director Oliver Stone (Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps) spoke about South of the Border, his still-unreleased documentary about a political sea-change brought about by a group of nativist, left-leaning South American leaders over the last few years.
Early in the discussion Stone riffed on the U.S. government’s constant investment in creating, agitating and maintaining enemies, which is primarily fueled by perceptions that their values aren’t sufficiently supportive of U.S. financial interests. He was primarily alluding to hostile attitudes and policies directed at Chavez by the Bush administration, but more generally to the agitated, five-alarm-fire mentality — paranoid, us.-vs.-them, line in the sand — of the military-industrial complex.
“[Beginning with] the Russian revolution, and then terrorists, this and this and this, drugs — I mean, it just goes on and on and on,” Stone said. “Since 1946 we’ve obviously been under the influence of something. Perhaps our water. Do you have to lose your mind in order to be initiated into the American political system? I’m not the only one [to feel this way]. But the level of debate is just astounding. It makes me long for…it makes me long for civilization.”
Growing disappointment with President Barack Obama was an underlying current in his remarks. Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, Stone believes, were the only two 20th Century presidents who tried to seriously re-order and shake things up in this country. Roosevelt especially, he said, who went in strong with no half measures — “If you’re going to change things you have to do it all the way.”
Stone was interviewed by MCN’s David Poland, who had also arranged to speak to Stone after the show for one of his DP/30 video pieces. I was going to congratulate Poland on the recent birth of his son, Cameron, but his condescending “I see you and ‘hello Jeffrey’ but that’s as far as I’d like to take it” attitude quashed this notion in seconds.
I reviewedSouth of the Border after seeing it at a special Lincoln Center screening last September. Here’s a portion of it:
“Is Stone’s documentary a hard-hitting portrait of South American political realities and particularly the reign of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez? No, but it’s a perfectly reasonable and welcome counter- view to the U.S. mainstream-media Kool-Aid version, which has always been reactionary and rightist-supporting and hostile to nativist movements.
The doc “is a good deal more than just a friendly (i.e., non-condemning) portrait of Chavez. It’s actually a group portrait of all the left-leaning South American heads of state whose views represent a political sea change.
“All my life (or at least until recently) the leaders of South American countries have been largely run by right-leaning frontmen for the oligarchs (i.e., the upper-crust elite), which have always been in league with U.S. interests and the coldly capitalist, market-driven finaglings of the International Monetary Fund. And the lower classes have always had to eat bean dip.
“But since the turn of the century a turnabout has begun to happen with the arrival of a generation of Bolivarian (i.e., nativist, anti-outsider) leaders with skeptical or contrarian attitudes about US manipulations — Venezuela’s Chavez, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Brazil’s Lula da Silva, Argentina’s Cristina Kirchner (along with her husband and ex-President Nestor Kirchner), Paraguay’s Fernando Lug, and Ecuador’s Rafael Correa.
“So now there are six Latin American presidents of a similar mindset, and seven if you add Cuba’s Raul Castro. That’s pretty significant considering that much of South and Central America had been under the control of a series of U.S.-supporting, IMF-funded rightist governments for most of the 20th Century.”
SBIFF publicist Carol Marshall, Oliver Stone backstage at the Lobero — Saturday, 2.13, 4:25 pm.
As if by magic or cosmic intuition, yesterday’s suggestion that Santa Barbara Film Festival tribute ceremonies could use a little less discipline and perhaps unfold less smoothly and uniformly came true hours later during last night’s James Cameron tribute at the Arlington theatre. And everyone played their parts beautifully.
Except for the show starting almost 35 minutes late (i.e., around 8:35 pm), almost nothing happened as planned. Cameron began delivering his acceptance speech at the get-go as host Leonard Maltin stood on the opposite side of the stage, delivering one of the most elegant and controlled “what the fuck is going on?” emcee performances I’ve ever seen. (Somebody had mistakenly told Cameron to offer his profound thanks at the get-go.)
After four or five minutes Maltin called out to Cameron, “Sorry, but you’re stepping on my act! I’m supposed to be asking questions!” (Or words to that effect.)
The film clips (Aliens, The Terminator, T2, Titanic) were shown somewhat out of sequence, and again — it was like jazz. The feeling in the room was giddy, liberating. Half of the red punch had splashed out of the bowl and splattered on the floor, and the feet of Maltin and Cameron and some of the senior staff were damp with it. It wasn’t quite on the level of the Marx Bros. A Night at the Opera, but it was sneaking up on that. Sometimes life is not a West Point reville formation.
And then Cameron’s q & a with Maltin had to be interrupted to allow Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to present Cameron’s Modern Master award hastily, before the Santa Barbara airport closed. Silhouetted figures scampered out from backstage to confer with Maltin while the clips were playing. If I had a special mike I would have probably heard festival p.r. chief Carol Marshall say, “Pssst! Leonard! Governor Schwarzenegger has to leave now…cut short your discussion of Sigourney Weaver‘s riveting performance as Ripley or whatever…I know we didn’t plan it this way…of course!…but he has to deliver his speech now!”).
Perhaps I’m slightly exaggerating the feeling of disorder, but it was certainly noticable and amusing — a feeling of “this isn’t in the script.”
We all think we need order and prudence in our lives, but what we really need is an occasional shot of uncertainty or even chaos to clean the blood out. Nights like last night make existence on this planet seem like the ribald and foolish farce it actually is deep down. They force everyone to think quickly on their feet, and transform fleeting anxiety into humor and sparkle and goobah-goobah-goobah. Please, give us more tribute sessions like this!
I was sent to the wrong after-party (i.e., a second-tier gathering on the Santa Barbara pier) but I eventually figured things out and made my way over to the correct one. I had a great chat with Cameron (which included a somewhat clumsily-spoken woman coming up to him and blurting out a complaint about Avatar) but I can’t share until later.
I have to drive a friend down to Point Dume and then turn around and be back by 10 or 10:15 am in order to get to the Directors panel at the Lobero theatre, which starts at 11 am. It’s now 7:03 am.