June 29, 2010

In case you haven’t pulled yourself away from ye olde Xbox long enough to notice, I feel compelled to inform you that the American economy is in the proverbial shitter.

Recent numbers show that the recovery is still just crawling along instead of getting up and running, and the crawling has continued way past the recession’s infancy. There was a little bit of hope a couple weeks ago, when the Obama administration released figures showing a slight uptick in hiring. What they forgot to mention, though - it just sort of slipped everyone’s mind - is that a great deal of that increase could be attributed to the government hiring people to conduct the census.

At this point, I wouldn’t blame a liberal think tank for coming up with more things for us to count, just so we can keep moving in the right direction. We won’t be able to count the unemployed, however, because somebody’s already done that— at the moment, 15,000,000 Americans are officially out of work. But the real number is considerably higher than that, since the stats don’t include people who have finally used up all their unemployment benefits.

I don’t really blame Obama for this particular car wreck, for what should be obvious reasons, but I’m not beyond blaming him for too often promising the world to desperate people and spinning copious amounts of smooth-guy bullshit to cover his ineffectiveness...and I never thought he was the Second Coming straight out of Chicago, so I’m not holding him to a higher standard than I would a "regular" politician.

Don’t even get me started on the administration’s alarmingly Bushian attitude toward our now-systemic human rights violations, many of which have been aimed at people who have been proven innocent but are still jailed indefinitely by the U.S. government, beyond the reach of their families, with no charges filed and no hope of release. In that area, Obama has just about used up the good will I felt toward him when he was first elected, and it’ll likely be enough to keep me from voting for him again.

I’m not the least bit happy about that. In fact, it breaks my heart. But I won’t abide by sheer brutality toward other people, regardless of the charisma of the guy who signed off on it. Check your history books and you’ll note that surreptitiously brutal charismatic leaders tend to generate problems rather than solving them. If God really has been on our side in this apparently infinite war we’re fighting, He may well have opted not to root for anybody by now, and I’m inclined to follow His lead.

In Obama’s defense, though, this president is the Crown Prince of being handed a sack full of shit that he’s expected to somehow transform into a rose, and as quickly as possible. The two wars and the bank-fucked economy are his most obvious inheritances from the genuinely malevolent Bush-Cheney regime. But now Obama gets to take a smack-down because he happened to be in the Oval Office when that oil rig blew up in the Gulf, as if he was supposed to have somehow stopped it from happening.

Although his finger-up-his-ass response to the situation is unnerving and often enough to make you scream, Obama is just the next in a long line of chief executives, both liberal and conservative, who have let big business have its way with our planet for the past 50 or so years. He's participated, to be sure, but he was literally in a crib when this foolishness started to take root in our government’s now wholly corrupted soil.

                                                ***

Anyway, it’s Obama’s economy now, and it’s exceptionally ugly. If you live in a money-centric metropolis like New York, it’s fast becoming obvious that even a lot of white collar workers, who surely must have had some money saved up, are now in dire straits. And I don’t mean they play drums behind Mark Knopfler.

A few weeks ago, I was in line at a midtown McDonald’s when I noticed a guy working behind the counter who obviously hadn’t seen the employee-side of a cash register in quite some time. It wasn’t entertaining, either. Here was a grown man, roughly 55 years-old, running around with a silly hat on his head at a fast food joint, trying to keep up with a bunch of co-workers who were probably 35 years his junior. From the strained look on his face, I could see he was trapped in a personal “Twilight Zone” episode, one that could conceivably never end.

I don’t know who he was, of course. Maybe he was part of the Wall Street shell game that caused the economy to fail in the first place, in which case he was receiving his comeuppance. Or maybe he was an honest person who was getting nailed by factors beyond his control, at an age when you can’t just start all over again and build a better life. Now was supposed to be the time when he eased into that better life, but it disappeared in a puff of smoke and cost-cutting paperwork.

                                                ***

So, in an attempt to draw some rueful levity out of a dark situation - if it weren’t for rueful levity, I’d have no levity at all - I’m offering this clip from the brilliant 1985 Albert Brooks comedy, “Lost in America.”

In the movie, a successful Manhattan couple named David and Linda Howard (Brooks and Julie Hagerty, who you know as the flakey flight attendant in “Airplane!”) decide to sell their property, cash in their stocks, and spend the rest of their lives cruising the country - David is inexplicably inspired by Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper in “Easy Rider” - searching for America. But things don’t go as planned.

During a quick stopover in Las Vegas, where they want to have one last taste of luxury before embarking on their journey, Linda sneaks down to the casino in the middle of the night and promptly gambles away their money. All of it, including, as David calls it, “the core of the nest egg.” That leaves them stuck in the middle of nowhere with nothing but a giant motor home and a thousand bucks to their name. Panic, as you can imagine, quickly sets in.

In the clip, they’ve finally run out of fuel for the Winnebago, and are trying to secure jobs in the sleepy Arizona town where they’ve parked. David visits an employment office where he learns a hard lesson in the new economy that other Americans wouldn’t be learning en masse until the past couple of years— namely, that you can’t go home again simply because you used to be a big shot.

I don’t think this is just Brooks’ best movie, by the way. I think it’s one of the sharpest comedies of the 1980s, and you should check it out as soon as you can if you’ve never seen it. The deadpan dialogue is a scream.

Remember when you could laugh for reasons other than staving off despair?

Paul Tatara

June 24, 2010

Someone recently landed a bargain on eBay, and their plunder wasn’t an immaculate set of early-70s Rock-em-Sock-em Robots or a stolen Chanel handbag. It was a genuine piece of cinema history.

Morace Park, a British eBay surfer, paid a grand total of $5.68 (when converted into wheezing American dollars) for an old film canister that was described by its seller as containing, rather non-informatively, “an old film.” It’s not clear why Park would lay good money down on something so apparently mundane, but he was in for a surprise when he received the canister in the mail and opened it up— inside was a 7-minute short made by and starring none other than Sir Charles Chaplin!

“Zepped,” a World War I propaganda film shot in 1916, was designed to keep Brits from fearing German zeppelin bombing runs. Park says it opens with shots of Chaplin as the Little Tramp, then switches to dreamlike images of a zeppelin attack, then back to Chaplin again, who makes light of such theoretical attacks. Film historians have long thought that “Zepped” was lost for good, so this is a significant addition to our knowledge of Charlie Chaplin during a period when he was fast becoming the most famous and beloved person on planet earth.

But this isn’t even close to the most momentous Chaplin-related film discovery. That one happened almost 40 years ago, and consisted of literally hours of footage that had never been seen by anyone outside of Chaplin and a handful of his collaborators.

                                                ***

In the early ‘70s, British Filmmakers Kevin Brownlow and David Gill badly needed some Chaplin footage for a TV documentary they were making called “Hollywood,” but the person who then owned the rights to Chaplin’s work was not about to cooperate with them. Chaplin biographer David Thomson (his book is pretty great) then suggested that Brownlow and Gill attempt to contact Rachel Ford, who was Chaplin’s longtime business manager, to see if she had anything they could use.

Ford was willing to give Brownlow and Gill “a snippet” of footage, and that was all. But, while digging through a vault piled high with silver canisters, the astonished directors realized that Ford was sitting on 30-40 cans of never-before-seen Charlie Chaplin outtakes! And she still refused to give them anything more than a brief strip of it!

In due course, Brownlow and Gill revealed their cinephilic dismay to a secretive British film collector who, it turned out, actually possessed the negatives to the mysterious footage, and more! I know I’ve used exclamation points at the ends of three consecutive sentences, but think about this. These guys were getting their hands on hours of footage containing one of the true artistic geniuses of the 20th century. Imagine someone finding a giant stash of previously unseen paintings that Picasso had discarded while working toward his masterpieces, and you’ll get the general idea. This was the mother lode.

                                                ***

Brownlow and Gill finally had their footage, but they still faced the seemingly insurmountable task of trying to figure out what they were looking at while watching hours and hours of negative images. They couldn’t possibly afford to print everything they had, so, in a desperate attempt to make some sense out of the rushes, Gill sat down with an editor to cut the shots together in the order in which they were filmed, an act that led to yet another astonishing discovery— when he was making a picture, Chaplin basically “sketched” his ideas on celluloid without bothering to write a real script!

This explained how Chaplin could have shot as much footage for one of his Mutual Films productions, which ran two reels and 25 minutes, as D.W. Griffith shot for his three-hour epic, “Intolerance!” Chaplin just kept the camera rolling while he improvised character moments and comic set pieces, fine tuning them for days on end before, quite often, discarding them completely and trying something new.

On several occasions, Chaplin even built fresh, more comically fertile sets and headed back to square-one, “making it up” as he went along, much as a writer does, but at a much higher physical and monetary cost. But if that’s what it took, that’s what it took. It’s not like he was making “Rush Hour 3.”

The cans of improvised footage were then tucked away where no one else could view them, at least until Brownlow and Gill made their fascinating, incredibly entertaining documentary, “Unknown Chaplin,” which was broadcast on the BBC in 1983. Narrated by James Mason, “Unknown Chaplin” is a must-see for hardcore Chaplin fans as well as anyone who’s simply interested in the working methods of a great artist.

In this clip, Chaplin is devising the central piece of action for a 1916 Mutual short entitled “The Floor Walker.”

“Unknown Chaplin” also reveals that the timing required to pull off such set pieces was often a struggle to maintain, which isn’t surprising, given their almost ballet-like precision. There are countless shots of Chaplin and his co-stars literally falling on their faces while trying to perfect a bit of business, only to have Chaplin abandon the joke when he felt it wasn’t working.

Here’s my favorite clip. In this sequence, the Little Tramp is wandering through a number of different sets inside a busy movie studio, thus generating more comic possibilities for actor-director Chaplin to explore.

Get in touch with me if you’ve ever thought of anything even remotely that brilliant, then threw it away in search of something better.

                                                ***

You might imagine that once Chaplin started shooting feature-length films he’d be forced to scale back on his before-the-camera improvising as a matter of course. But you’d be wrong. In fact, as his pictures grew more ambitious in scope, Chaplin seemed to become even more meticulous about what did and didn’t want in a scene. Compromise never entered into it.

There was a truly obsessive quality about Chaplin, an unrelenting need to make films that, as closely as they could, reflected his personal world view; this was one of the reasons he formed United Artists with Griffith, Mary Pickford, and his dear friend, Douglas Fairbanks. He didn’t care what it cost. He didn’t care how long it took. He just wanted it right, and, as an iconic figure on movie screens around the globe, he had the power to do what he wanted to do, with no imposition whatsoever from an antsy producer or studio executive.

From his classic 1921 film, “The Kid,” onward, Chaplin seldom settled for streams of slapstick topped off by a bit of melancholy. The sentiment in his best pictures is meticulously interwoven with the humor, with the elements of a sequence often swelling in ascending movements to a heart-rending crescendo.

Perhaps the most fascinating images Brownlow and Gill located concern the shooting of what many consider to be Chaplin’s greatest film— 1931’s “City Lights.” Here, in the rarest of all the “Unknown Chaplin” footage, we see Charlie painstakingly acting out the gestures he wants from his un-trained leading lady, a self-possessed young woman named Virginia Cherrill.

                                                ***

I wrote earlier that Chaplin was a genius, and I meant it. He wasn’t just a “comedian." With the passage of time, silent film has become emotionally antiquated— many people assume it’s impossible to connect with an art form that hasn’t been a part of the cultural landscape for over 90 years. But please do yourself a favor and approach Chaplin’s films with an open heart and mind; his immense sensitivity to the human condition, and his ability to convey it through the subtlest of movements, remains as universal now as it was when he was helping invent the filmic language.

I suggest starting with one of a series of dvd’s entitled “The Chaplin Mutuals,” which contain a sequence of short films that are as exquisitely realized as anything in the Chaplin canon. Then, you can pick and choose from the classic features, but my favorites are “The Kid,” "The Circus," “City Lights,” and “Modern Times.” However, if you still don’t believe Chaplin has anything to offer an iPod-wearing new millennium entity like yourself, I’m closing with the final sequence from “City Lights.”

In the film, the Little Tramp has fallen for a blind flower girl who mistakenly thinks he’s a wealthy benefactor. Not wanting her to recoil when she discovers he’s really just a filthy vagabond, the Tramp breaks his back to earn enough money for the girl to get the surgery that will restore her eyesight. After securing the money through a series of comic mishaps, then presenting it to the unattainable girl he now loves, the Tramp is thrown into jail.

Upon his release, he wanders the streets, not realizing that the girl has, in fact, had her sight restored and is running a flower shop while awaiting the return of her rich and handsome knight in shining armor.

I know it takes a minute to watch this, but please give it the attention it deserves— it’s one of the more tender, stirring sequences in all of cinema, and makes you realize just how much is missing from modern-day filmmaking. (Chaplin, by the way, also composed the "City Lights" score. This guy simply never let up.)

Go get some Kleenex.

Paul Tatara

June 19, 2010

I was watching a terrific documentary about the making of Steven Spielberg’s "Jaws" on the Bio channel the other night; it’s well worth a viewing if you’re a fan of that famously crisis-plagued production. Anyway, when it was time to discuss the horrifying “USS Indianapolis” speech that crazy ol’ Quint delivers to his shuddering shipmates moments before the shark starts gettin’ all territorial on their asses, the documentary cut to a close-up of writer John Milius grinning like a possum, just as I expected.

Milius wrote the better part of that legendary monologue about the shark-infested hell the men of the Indianapolis experienced when their ship was sunk by an enemy sub near the end of World War II. It’s probably the single best thing in a movie that’s wall to wall with beautifully crafted scenes and revealing character moments, and he deserves all the credit he gets for it. It’s classic stuff.

But, great speech or not, the chief reason for that cut to Milius is that every documentary ever made concerning a movie Milius participated in features him delivering amusing little anecdotes about the folly of pretending you know what you’re doing when you direct a major motion picture. Then he chuckles at some deeply absurd aspect of the commercial filmmaking process, which is usually illuminated through a story that involves people like Spielberg, Francis Coppola, Martin Scorsese, or Brian DePalma, who are Milius’ personal buddies. Then he puffs on his cigar, and chuckles again.

He may not be as widely celebrated as they are, but you just know Milius doesn’t take any crap from his more conventionally successful friends. He knows they’re just as screwed as everybody else is by their love of celluloid, even if their mansions are piled high with money and awards.

                                                ***

Milius has helmed several partially good movies himself, and a few obviously lousy ones, with his biggest hit being, God help us, “Conan the Barbarian.” He’s far more renowned for his (often un-credited) script work, due mainly to an innate ability to spin nutty, violence-related lines of dialogue that quickly, or sometimes eventually, become catch phrases.

Milius, for instance, wrote “Charlie don’t surf!” and “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” for “Apocalypse Now,” and “Do you feel lucky?” and “Go ahead, punk, make my day” for Clint Eastwood. That gun-waving alpha male stuff is just what he does. If you have to have a money-making métier in Hollywood, I suppose it could be much worse.

The thing about Milius, though, is he’s really smart and more than a little bit shit-crazy, sort of a genial blow-hard, but with an occasional salient point. Regardless of his hippie decade credentials, he’s a gun and war nut (and a member of the board of directors for the NRA) who undoubtedly wants to see some Ernest Hemingway staring back at him when he looks in the mirror. So he plays up his droll blood-and-guts side for his and everyone else’s amusement.

Milius wrote the original “Apocalypse Now” screenplay for Coppola’s American Zoetrope film collective in the late ‘60s, although his version of the script (I’ve read it) is heavily populated with insane comic book characters like Robert Duvall’s Col. Kilgore; it actually makes the acid armaments Coppola ended up with seem subdued, if you can imagine that. Plus, and I think this is pretty brilliant, Milius wanted the picture to be filmed documentary style, right there in Vietnam during the Tet Offensive!

But his collaborators - including the shy, asthmatic director who was supposed to film the script, George Lucas - backed out because they didn’t want to, you know, die while making a movie. Milius, it’s important to note, didn’t attempt to film the picture on his own after everybody bailed. But he sure likes to talk about what he might have done, which is part of his charm.

                                                ***

I actually started thinking about Milius several days before he popped up in that “Jaws" documentary because I had tried unsuccessfully to watch the whole of Michael Mann’s recent John Dillinger picture, “Public Enemy,” which, like so many of Mann’s movies, is gorgeously photographed and presented in the groundbreaking Snooze-a-Rama process.

The utter lifelessness of Mann’s movie reminded me that Milius once made a better Dillinger picture with about one one-hundredth of Mann’s budget, and only one or two decent actors. In fact, if there’s a Milius-directed movie I would suggest you watch, it has to be 1973’s “Dillinger,” starring the late, great, and vastly underrated Warren Oates.

Look a that poster! A more glowing description of Dillinger’s exploits would be hard to find— even if this is meant to be an homage to gangster pictures from the 1930s, it’s hard not to feel that Milius really is a major fan of a cold-blooded murderer. That’s a little harsh, though. It’s probably more accurate to say he’s a major fan of the idea of being a famous cold-blooded murderer. So he made a movie loaded with cold-blooded murders, several of which, I’m sorry to say, are extremely entertaining.

“Dillinger” has its problems, not the least of which being that Milius can’t seem to decide if he wants to ape James Cagney’s down-and-dirty Warner Bros. barn-burners or John Ford’s elegiac sense of Americana. But the shootouts, pardon my French, are fucking fantastic!

One bank robbery gone wrong is too full of orgiastic gunfire, spewing blood, and squealing victims to post on Wall of Paul, not because I think it’s no good - it’s amazingly well done, and contains a couple of remarkable POV shots - but because it can make you gag if you’re not prepared for it, and I try not to make my readers gag. So I’ll opt instead for a brief little clip that features one of my all-time favorite cinematic gangster killings, one that rivals anything in the much more highfalutin’ “Godfather” pictures.

Understand that Milius, who often finds himself adapting and-or filming reality-based material, has virtually no respect for reality. For instance, his Oscar-nominated 1975 feature, “The Wind and the Lion,” purports to be based on an historic event concerning Teddy Roosevelt, but is largely made up out of thin air. “The Wind and the Lion,” in other words, is a pack of lies containing Teddy Roosevelt.

So it’s not especially surprising that Milius’ take on Melvin Purvis, the FBI agent who tracked down and killed Dillinger and several other public enemies, tends to come unmoored from actual events roughly 45 seconds after “Dillinger”’s opening credits.

The bulk of “Dillinger”’s story, outside of the title-gangster's legendary robberies and jail escapes, consists of Purvis, played with rock-jawed machismo by Ford veteran Ben Johnson, resolving to blast as many guys as he can from the FBI’s most wanted list to kingdom come, then smoke a fresh cigar over each of their dead bodies. And that’s exactly what he does, one after another. And Milius films it so we can watch.

Here, then, is the most "John Milius" scene ever filmed, one that, through a mere handful of well-selected shots, reduces the entire gangster genre to a haiku.

Well, you can’t say he didn’t warn him.

Paul Tatara

June 15, 2010

When I recently read that the cult radio deejay, Dr. Demento, would no longer be broadcasting his long-running novelty-bizarro music program to America’s junior high school misfits, I reacted almost exactly the same way I did when I heard Casey Kasem announced he’d soon be quitting “American Top 20”: I thought Dr. Demento was dead, and I didn’t realize they still made radios.

But Demento (actually Barret Hansen of Minneapolis, MN, and he seems far more corny than demented) has been hard at it, playing novelty tunes, comedy pieces, lewd jingles, song parodies, and plain old sick shit backed by music, since 1974, which, to give you some idea of what we’re dealing with here, would mean that the good Doctor had to hear Barnes & Barnes’ rhythm-n-Ritalin classic, “Fish Heads,” which contains these deathless lyrics...

Fish heads, fish heads
Roly-poly fish heads
Fish heads, fish heads
Eat them up
Yum

In the morning
Laughing-happy fish heads
In the morning
Floating in the soup

…almost 1,000 times before stepping away from the mic.

I haven’t listened to Dr. Demento since around 1978, and I had had it up to my neck with “Fish Heads” when I threw in the towel back then (I’d post an mp3 of the tune for your perusal, but I’m sorry— I’m not paying a dollar for a download of fucking “Fish Heads.”)

The fact that one of “Fish Heads” vocalists was Billy Mumy, the guy who played Will Robinson on “Lost in Space” - a tidbit Demento cited often, because you try to find something different to say about “Fish Heads” every weekend - wasn’t really enough to keep me interested for years on end. Novelty songs, by definition, are novelties. After you’ve heard them two or three times, the novelty wears off. And most of them aren’t really funny to begin with.

But that was always the problem with Demento’s show. There were only so many tunes, or even recorded comic routines, that suited his committed, offbeat niche. So over and over again, I’d be forced to wade through Ray Stevens’ “Guitarzan” or Rose & the Arrangement’s “The Cockroach That Ate Cincinnati” in order to hear Stan Freberg’s brilliant 1953 “Dragnet” parody, “St. George and the Dragonet,” or maybe something more modern, like “King Tut” by Steve Martin & the Toot Uncommons, or Leonard Nimoy’s “The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins”…the latter being so unbelievably ghastly I pretty much have to post it for you.

Why Nimoy would allow himself to live after this is beyond me.

                                                ***

Actually, Demento’s scales were weighted so mightily toward same-old same-old shtick, my friends and I eventually started taping the broadcasts so we could zip right to our favorites, thus cutting our weekly Demento listening time by about an hour and 47 minutes. Still, I was introduced to some really funny stuff via the Doctor, and a lot of it remains quite amusing after all these years.

The first time I ever heard the snotty college professor-musical satirist Tom Lehrer (My favorite Lehrer quote: “The reason most folk songs are so terrible is because they were written by the people.”) was on Dr. Demento, and I’m pretty sure Bill Murray and Christopher Guest’s genius-tinged "Mr. Roberts" was spun into my subconscious by Demento, too. My very favorite Demento-related tune, however, is something he was only able to play for a few weeks before the people who recorded it were threatened with a lawsuit and had to pull it from the airwaves. Why, I ask you, is the good stuff always illegal?

Little Roger and the Goosebumps’ “Stairway to Gilligan’s Island” (I picked this particular shot of the castaways because Ginger is wearing a bikini) is probably best heard before I tell you anything about it. It’s pretty self-explanatory anyway.

“Stairway to Gilligan’s Island”

I love the falsetto when the ship starts getting tossed around in the storm.

Led Zeppelin somehow got wind of “Stairway to Gilligan’s Island” - I’ll eat shit if they were listening to Dr. Demento on their Lear jet - and offered to sue the beejeebies out of Little Roger & the Goosebumps, who weren’t quite as lawyered-up as Jimmy Page, a mere five weeks after the song was recorded in a small San Francisco studio!

Zeppelin, it’s no big secret by now, was a band full of dicks managed by a bunch of thugs, and it seemed likely they would have carried through on their threat. So Little Roger and the boys retreated, and had “all” copies of their masterpiece destroyed.

Then God created the Internet to fuck with Led Zeppelin. Like all other music, you can now practically get your hands on “Stairway to Gilligan’s Island” in convenient hat and capsule forms, if you’re willing to dig through Google for about three minutes.

It seems to me that Zeppelin could have had more of a sense of humor about it anyway. Any band full of grown men that can write and record rock songs based on the Hobbit is just begging to get kicked down a notch, and should learn to live with it. Just ask Leonard Nimoy.

Paul Tatara