William Horberg

The Third Act

F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous quote "there are no second acts in American lives" hardly seems true today. The country is so lousy with comebacks that it has become more than cliche.

But for those of you struggling with the weightier problem of 3rd acts, here is a handy chart to plot your narrative journey, courtesy of my friend writer Sollace Mitchell who sent it to me.

Take out your sextants to navigate these twists!

The horror film I am working on now - "don't Be Afraid of the Dark" for Miramax - definitely has a taste of the "indian legend ignored" trope in play. Australian actor Jack Thompson plays the local handyman Harris, who has the pleasure of warning our heroes about the murky history of the Victorian mansion they inhabit, unfortunately built in a place of sinkholes and ancient New England burial grounds.

But thankfully we don't dally with the "it was a dream. it wasn't a dream" twist, also common in horror films. It's a hard one to pull off these days post-Sixth Sense!

Enjoy the chart!

william

Rebooting

The term rebooting has crept in to the jargon of the Hollywood corporate filmmaking machine as a way to put a linguistic patina or gloss of modern excitement on the age-old gambit of remaking a story done once before, for the tastes and sensibilities of the contemporary audience.

It's not a novel idea, and one of my favorite instances of it was done with a large dose of chutzpah: author Matt Bradley's mid-'60's rebooting of Honore de Balzac's 19th century Droll Tales as a sex trade paperback from Jade Books sold as "Balzac '64".

As the hyperbolic copy line screams: "The wildest bedroom farces of all times, are now set in our times."

The books came in a boxed set, a fairly uncommon and upscale packaging concept for what was essentially the soft core paperback book trade. I wonder how many of the readers had ever even heard of Balzac?

The back cover features this neat logo: half harlequin, and half a kind of Hugh Hefner sixties modern man silhouette standing next to a film camera.

Wild!

Speaking of DROLL humor, I found this quote about the books on an internet site devoted to trash fiction:

Mr Bradley is also the author of some other works that lead one to suspect he wouldn't have been Balzac's preferred choice of interpreter: Faggots to Burn, Homo Hill, Lesbian Lane and Hot Curves. The cover was designed by Buck Holloway and the illustrations are by Robert Caples.

"Preferred choice of interpreter". Haha.

I recently read somewhere about a Jane Austen vampire mash-up, and I thought "the spirit of Matt Bradley" or better yet "the chutzpah of Matt Bradley" lives on in these rebooting times!

william

Trouble

Of the many thrilling moments at the Academy's tribute to filmmaker Hal Ashby that kicked off last week with a screening of his classic black comedy "Harold and Maude" it was the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens taking the stage with his acoustic guitar and strumming out "Trouble", a tune from the soundtrack of the movie he said "I haven't played in over thirty years", that brought the audience to its feet. 

It was a moment and lyrics that seemed to sum up Ashby's rebel stance as the poster child of that generation of maverick directors. And it aptly demonstrated the love clearly engendered by the man and his work, a love that brought Yusuf, as he is now known, all the way in from London to sing a set of four songs that he originally composed for the movie.

Yusuf also participated in the panel discussion of Ashby by those who knew him, like moderator Peter Bart, who was the Paramount studio executive on Harold and Maude, or Jon Voight who starred in "Coming Home" and the later "Lookin' to Get Out", or Haskell Wexler, who shot several other of his films, and those of a newer generation who didn't know him personally but admired his work and took inspiration from him, like Judd Apatow, Seth Rogen, Diablo Cody and moderator and tribute organizer Cameron Crowe.

Harold and Maude is one of the more familiar Ashby films and it holds up well on the strength of the amazing performances of Ruth Gordon and Bud Cort, who made a surprise appearance after the movie and reminisced about how he got the role and what it was like working on the movie.

But the revelation of the series for me was "The Landlord", Ashby's first film from 1969 starring Beau Bridges, Pearl Bailey, Robert Klein, and the beautiful Diana Sands and Marki Bey as the black women that white landlord Bridges gets entangled with to comedic and tragic result. But the real surprise and delight was Lee Grant as the Mother. Her drunken scene over a lunch of ham hocks with tenant Pearl Bailey was a classic. 

The film is weird and wild, a product of its time for sure, but frank in issues of race as few movies today would dare to be. It was fascinating to see this film and Harold and Maude in the reverse order in which they were made, as you could feel Ashby working out his voice and style in The Landlord in a way that would be perfected in Maude and the amazing hot streak that followed including The Last Detail, Shampoo, Bound For Glory, Coming Home and Being There.

Trouble 

Oh trouble set me free 

I have seen your face 

And it's too much too much for me 

Trouble 

Oh trouble can't you see 

You're eating my heart away 

And there's nothing much left of me 

I've drunk your wine 

You have made your world mine 

So won't you be fair 

So won't you be fair 

I don't want no more of you 

So won't you be kind to me 

Just let me go where 

I'll have to go there 

After a long downward career spiral in his final decade fueled by substance abuse and other "trouble" that ate his heart away, Ashby died of cancer at home in Malibu in December 1988.

But his best work is as timely and timeless as any great art, and thanks to Crowe and the Academy for giving him his due, however long overdue.

william

The Friends of George V. Higgins

When people say that they love '70's movies, one of the movies they love must surely be Peter Yates' ultimate '70's crime story "The Friends of Eddie Coyle", a story of Boston bank robbers, gun dealers, Federal agents and low level mobsters and the poor schmuck caught in between them all, just out in a loving new Criterion Collection dvd edition. 

Featuring a performance by Robert Mitchum that feels like the boiled down essence of his life-long pursuit of heavy-lidded, cool-handed tough guys, and an impeccable supporting cast with ace character guys like Peter Boyle and Alex Rocco and Richard Jordan in virtually every part, along with a funky score by Dave Grusin that plays like the white man's Superfly, it is a movie to make you fall in love with movies all over again.

At the time it came out, I was actually more familiar with the book it was based on and the author who wrote it than Yates or anyone else involved with the film. George V. Higgins was the real deal, an assistant United States attorney who worked on organized crime cases, and turned his experience and talent and ear for great dialogue into a career as a crime novelist.

Eddie Coyle was his first and most famous book, but I also remember Digger's Game and Cogan's Trade and The Judgment of Deke Hunter as effective stories that felt bracingly authentic. His world was Boston and its suburbs and his characters were part of the crime scene there that bubbled along as a fact of every day life which I remember being vaguely conscious of when I lived there in the mid to late '70's myself.

Higgin's died suddenly of a heart attack before he got to turn 60, but he wrote a book about writing later in life. 

Here's a memorable quote from it that rings as true as Eddie Coyle's busted up fingers:

"The secret remains that there is no secret. The way to determine whether you have talent is to rummage through your files and see if you have written anything; if you have, and quite a lot, then the chances are you have the talent to write more. If you haven't written anything, you do not have the talent because you don't want to write. Those who do can't help themselves. We do it for the hell of it, and those who raise a lot of hell, and then get very lucky, well, we make a living, too. There are worse ways to travel through this vale of tears than by doing the things you love, and making a living at it."

That last sentence feels harder to do today than ever, but what is the point otherwise?

william

There Is Always Somebody More Hard Core Than You Are

One great thing about the internet is how communities are formed around almost ANY special area of interest or information or passion or knowledge. 

Whether it is the Art of Papercutting, which my wife Elsa has turned into a movement over at her blog The Heart of Papercuts, or Vinyl Record Albums with Cartoon Drawings On The Cover, which my friend Peter Hannan turned me on to, it is amazing how deep and specialized the collection of human creative effort is on the 'net.

Like I thought I was pretty down with the Film Noir genre until I came across the folks at Noir City Sentinel. Check out some of the articles in their first annual issue:

Great illustration!

And I was just coming to grips with the Femme Fatale: Jane Greer in "Out of the Past"; Peggy Cummings in "Gun Crazy". 

But now I've got to go Beyond!

Some controversial choices here by Mr. Beetner. 

"Detour" overrated??? "The People Against O'Hara" comes out on top of "The Naked City"? 

Hmmm. 

But good for him for shouting out some titles that I definitely need to catch up on, like "The Breaking Point" (1950) with John Garfield, or "Too Late for Tears" with the sulty Lizbeth Scott (whatever DID happen to that "E"?)!

They even had an article on the noir comic books of EC genius Johnny Craig!!

No matter what vineyard you toil in, in your public life or your private dreams, there is always someone more hard core than you are, and the editors, writers and subscribers to Noir City Sentinel are certainly the inner circle of Film Noir cognoscenti!

william

Chicago Noir

The advertisement in the LA Weekly was just too appealing. I clipped it out and kept it in my wallet all week. And Sunday night, when the kids were tucked in bed and the dishes were cleaned and put away, and I'd closed the cover on the last screenplay of my weekend read, I kissed Elsa, threw on a light jacket, and cruised over to the American Cinematheque at the classic Egyptian Theatre on Hollywood Blvd. just in time to catch the second half of the double bill in their Film Noir Series.

The attraction: a rare 35mm screening of the never-on-dvd Fred Sears feature "Chicago Syndicate"!

Filmed on location in Chicago in the mid-fifties, and starring Dennis O'Keefe (so memorable in Anthony Mann's T-Men and Raw Deal) and Abbe Lane (a nightclub singer who was married to Xavier Cugat) and Alison Owen (Nancy Archer in The Attack of the 50 Foot Woman), the film is primarily fascinating today as a document of the city as it was back then, from Michigan Avenue and Lake Shore Drive to the elevated and the underground, from the Field Museum to the ending, a shootout on Maxwell Street, it was really a gas to see Chicago get the noir treatment in gritty black and white.

Xavier Cugat himself even gets into the act playing Cuban bandleader Benny Chico, and the great character actor Paul Stewart runs the Chicago syndicate, having grown up on Maxwell Street and learned at the feet of Al Capone and Big Jim Colosimo, as his character says at one point in the story.

I'd love to have a copy of this. It would be fun to go frame by frame and identify all of the various buildings and streets of the City of Big Shoulders. Thanks to the American Cinematheque and their great Noir series for pulling it out of the mothballs for one evening.

william

"Thank God, I'm still an Atheist."

This quote, attributed to the Spanish director Luis Bunuel, and the cool irony of the paradox it represents, is the essence of one of his short masterpieces, the 45 minute black and white "Simon of the Desert", recently released on dvd by The Criterion Collection.

The film is loosely based on the story of Saint Simeon Stylites, an ascetic who spent his life standing on top of a pillar in the middle of the desert in penance to his God.

The actor who plays Simon, Claudio Brook, was the same one who so memorably played the imposing butler character in Bunuel's other great film of the period, The Exterminating Angel, about a group of guests at a dinner party who find themselves inexplicably unable to leave, as if beset by a spontaneous and contagious lack of will. 

(For you younger fans, Brook even made an appearance late in his career in Guillermo del Toro's early horror classic "Cronos", I'm sure as an homage to del Toro's great predecessor in Mexican cinema.)

Silvia Pinal, who played the title character in Bunuel's 1961 film "Viridiana" which won the Palme D'or at the Cannes Film Festival, plays the devil who comes in various guises to tempt Simon from his pillar and his state of grace.

Here she teases him with her long tongue. Is it real?

The film is gorgeous and was the last collaboration between Bunuel and the great cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa (there is a beautiful site dedicated to his life and work here). And it was the final film that Bunuel made in Mexico before he returned to Europe and the international productions like "Belle du Jour" and "That Obscure Object of Desire" that were the last works of his amazing career.

It's weird to see a 45 minute movie, but I read that the producer ran out of money and they were only able to complete part of Bunuel's intended vision of the story.

But the movie does not feel incomplete, and even the bizarre ending where the characters are suddenly transported to a 60's New York rock and roll nightclub where an indifferent Simon sits in a black polo-neck sweater surrounding by shimmying dancers feels like a poetically just and satisfying conclusion.

Enjoy!   

william

3-D

3-D is all the rage in Hollywood these days.

In the Cinema of Spectacle that is our mainstream entertainment, this old technology from the 1950's has been dusted off and turbocharged with modern digital techniques, to once again try to "put asses in seats" by giving the audience an experience they cannot get at home or on their iPhone or Tivo.

In our house, as part of our ongoing effort to engage the kids in activities that are no-batteries-required, we have discovered the magic of another kind of 3-D gadget - the old Sawyer Viewmaster, which allows you to view hand-loaded stereo slides in a rotating manual shutter device.

It is amazing how the simple magic of this handheld slide viewer captivates the imagination of Diego and Natalie. I wish I could reproduce the imagery here in the 3-D illusion created by the stereoscopic camera.

We have a number of old Disney movies on disk, as well as fairy tales, urban cityscapes, and natural wonders from all over the planet.

According to the catalog, there were 3-D projectors and screens and even a do-it-yourself kit for making your own 3-D slides produced by Sawyer. I hope to get one and explore the world of 3-D with our family.

I can see an Elsa Mora spectacular-in-the-making if she turns this old technology to use in her new artwork creations!!

william

Sundance Memories

I can't remember the first time I came to the Sundance Film Festival, but I've had some memorable moments here over the years.

One film I produced at Mirage, "Sliding Doors" was the opening night film, screening to a huge gala audience in Salt Lake City one year.

Another year, Jez Butterworth's "Birthday Girl" starring Ben Chaplin and Nicole Kidman, also played here.

Once, I was up here with my whole family, and we ended up having a front row seat at one of the more infamous events to take place here over the years. 

I had attended the first screening of an unheralded Australian film directed by a relative newcomer named Scott Hicks called "Shine". The film, featuring a knockout performance by Geoffrey Rush, was a sensation, one of the most powerful reactions I have ever seen in a cinema when it ended. There was a five or ten minute standing ovation, and a crush of agents swarming over the talent in the theatre and spilling out on to the street outside afterwards.

But Rush's work wasn't the only "knockout" of the evening. A heated bidding war broke out for the distribution rights to the film, back in those heady days when the specialty business was in a less fragile state. Led by Harvey Weinstien's Miramax and his crack team of acquisition executives, the marketplace was much more heated and intense, and a film like "Shine" which screamed its Oscar potential and crowd-pleasing playability for the smart adult boomer audience who at that time were more frequent moviegoers, set off a frenzy among various competing buyers.

Unaware of any of this, I took my Father and his girlfriend and the rest of my family to dinner at a restaurant, Mercato Mediterraneo down at the end of Main Street, the next night. But as drinks were served and we ordered our food, we started to become aware of a commotion that was taking place at a table nearby. 

As we were to later learn, after an all-night negotiating session, two companies thought they had sewn up the rights to the movie, Fine Line Features, then the arthouse division of New Line Cinema, run by my friend Ruth Vitale, and of course Harvey. When Harvey got wind that the film might have gone to someone else, he tracked down one of the producers, Jonathon Taplin, who happened to be having dinner at the table in front of us in the restaurant. In what was either a brilliant or horrific physical maneuver, depending on whether you were the giver or recipient, Harvey had pulled up a chair behind Taplin, thereby pinning him right in to the spot his was sitting at the table. What started as a very intense private conversation soon escalated into a brouhaha that the whole restaurant bore witness to. Finally, the maitre d' had to intervene and escort Harvey out of the restaurant as things looked like they might get really physical.

It was a wonderful way to introduce my Dad to exactly what it was I was doing in Hollywood, and the friendly, relaxed nature of my chosen career path. "This is the business you've chosen" he asked incredulously, inadvertently echoing the famous line from "The Godfather".

But my happiest Sundance memory is certainly coming up here for the first time with my soon-to-be-wife Elsa Mora. Elsa had traveled out of Cuba a few times before I met her in Havana in December of 2000, but she had never been anywhere with cold weather, and she had never ever in her life seen real snow before.

Here is a picture of Elsa experiencing the snow for the first time. No surprise for someone from Cuba, she hates the cold, and even though she is bundled up like the Pillsbury Dough Boy in this shot, she was complaining about how freezing she was most of the time she spent in Park City.

Is that a Mona Lisa smile or a white-tooth grimace? You decide.

william

Eight Million Stories

Elsa and I caught up on the usual rush of last minute Academy screeners over the holidays, trying to be complete before casting my vote for the Oscars.

But we also tried to slip in a few of the oldies but goodies, and fill in some blanks in my cinematic education.

The Peter Sellars film collection from MGM didn't hold up as well as we wished. Even though it was fun to watch Blake Edward's original Pink Panther film with our daughter; Casino Royale, and What's Up, Pussycat were fun in parts but terribly slow and dated to watch today.

I have long been a fan of Jules Dassin's "Rififi", one of the classic heist movies ever made, but I had somehow managed never to see his earlier, famous "The Naked City", one of the first features shot entirely on location in New York City and a hallmark of American noir and neo-realism.

It was really fun to see. The melodramatic plot of the implacable older detective (Barry Fitzgerald) pursuing a whodunit murder mystery (the murder of a young model) to its grim conclusion wasn't as clever as a lot of my favorite noir films, but the documentary style, the gritty black and white cinematography which seemed to be inspired by the crime scene photographs of Weegee, and the unusual voice-over narration by the producer of the picture, all made it a worthy addition to my film education.

The fact that the producer/narrator was none other than Mark Hellinger also made the film more interesting to me. Years ago I had read a biography of Hellinger by author Jim Bishop and had, for a period of time, taken to emulating his sartorial code of black suit, black shirt and white tie, adding to my overall anachronistic connection to our modern times.

Hellinger had produced one of the noir movies that I DO place in my canon: Ernest Hemingway's "The Killers" starring Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner and directed by Robert Siodmak.

One sad but interesting note is that "The Naked City" was Hellinger's last film. He died soon after seeing the first cut of the movie, and prior to its release and success. He was young, 44 at the time of his death in 1947.

Not a lot of people remember him today, but as a fellow producer, I have a lot of admiration for him, and would give my eye tooth to have made a movie as great and enduring as "The Killers" or "The Naked City".

Check them out.

william