William Horberg

Monsters versus Myself

This weekend, along with millions of other Earthlings, I took my daughter Natalie to see the newest 3-D animated movie "Monsters Vs. Aliens" (she was inspired to draw her own poster art, above!).

She loved Ginormica and the other monsters, and most of all B.O.B. the brainless blob that is an homage to the real Blob and hilariously voiced by comic Seth Rogen. BOB's flirtation with a platter of lime green jello mold, and his flaunting of his new love to the hapless, narcissistic tv weatherman Derek Dietl (as voiced by Paul Rudd), who has just become Ginormica's EX-fiance with a flick of her mighty wrist, tickled our funny bone.

But watching the movie, I couldn't help but be reminded of another Monster movie, a long ago project that was one of the first things I ever "pitched" in Hollywood when I first started coming out here from Chicago in the early '80's.

Here is a copy of the original poster art for that never-made project, as drawn by my old friend Alex Wald.

The "high-concept" of Monsters Never Die was conceived by Mitch Sisskind and Steve Schwartz, and was different in significant respects from the new Dreamworks animated movie. 

In our film, the premise was that the movie monsters of the 1950's were real and lived in our real world, but time had passed them by, and now decades on from their heydey, forgotten by Hollywood, the aging monsters lived as an ignored and discriminated-against minority amongst us. Of course, they are also called to action one more time, to save the world, and to change the opinion of the humans they save.

But what was eerily similar was that our four main characters were The Blob, the Amazing 50 Foot Woman (in our story she was getting over her break-up from the Amazing Colossal Man), the Creature From The Black Lagoon, and The Fly. It was really a deja vu experience to see B.O.B., Ginormica, The Missing Link and Dr. Cockroach, Phd. run through some of the same jokes and physical gags we had imagined all those years ago for our crew.

At the time, I think we were inspired by Martin Brest's classic 1979 comedy "Going In Style" with Art Carney and Lee Strasberg as old-timers out for one last adventure, and the tone of our story was definitely more bittersweet and less commercial than Dreamwork's massively POP product. The Fly was working as a janitor in the local high-school, The Creature had a pool-cleaning service and problems with his son; the jokes were all about anthropomorphizing these "monsters' and giving them inner lives and emotional arcs like real people.

As someone once said (I'm paraphrasing as I can't find the exact quote), the best monster movies, by showing us what makes us inhuman, show us what makes us human.

I can't say Monsters Versus Aliens rises to that level, but it was entertaining enough, and it GOT MADE and will MAKE A FORTUNE while "Monsters Never Die" remains in that virtual cinema in my mind of films I've labored on but never cracked the code to get them made, in the face of the overwhelming and mostly insurmountable obstacles that any original idea faces in the commercial marketplace.

william

The Bare Feet Shoe Store

It has been fun blogging about my adventures in Iran as part of the Academy's international Outreach Committee, and I am sure I will have occasion to write more about the trip in the future. We are looking forward to the follow up, as one of the measures of the success of our mission is how we can extend the dialogue and relationship engendered by this cultural exchange.

Your comments have been great, as always, and it has also been gratifying to get emails from Iranians in and out of the country, who have enjoyed my stories and recognized themselves or some reflection of their country here.

A few parting words on the subject:

Driving down the madhouse streets of Tehran one day we passed a sign for an establishment called The Bare Feet Shoe Store. Hilarious. I wish I had had time to stop and take a picture of it as something about the oxymoronic title of the shop seemed to evoke for me all of the contradictions and paradoxes of contemporary Iran.

If ever there was a place in which Winston Churchill's famous line about Russia in 1939  - "It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma" - would apply today, it is surely this very sophisticated, culturally rich, modern yet theocratic state.

Although we had been led to expect a hospitable reception, it was impossible to imagine the pro-American feelings so openly expressed by almost every person on the street. And yet we were roundly criticized and publicly attacked in the media for our presence there in a manner that was so aggressive it bordered on caricature at times.

On the one hand, filmmakers in Iran face hurdles of lack of funding and resources (the average mid-level budget film is made for @ $500,000 there I was told) as well as quixotic government censorship (films can be approved by the ministry at the script stage there and yet the finished version might be banned from local release) that we would find insurmountable or intolerable here. And yet these very pressures and lack of freedom might be said in some way to have fostered the subtlety and artistry of their internationally recognized and award-winning cinema, as the creativity born of great constraints has shaped their response to the world around them.

The stern face of the revolution as embodied by the glaring visage of Ayatollah Khomeini that stares down from ten story tall murals all around the city would seem to reinforce our Western view of Iran as a humor-less culture of intolerance, and yet one of the dvd's we were given to watch was a recent Iranian film called "The Lizard", about as high-concept a comedy as you would find being pitched in "The Player", about a young guy who dresses up and pretends to be an Iman in order to pick up chicks.

Before we left for the trip we were briefed by a gentleman here in Los Angeles who was an American political scientist who happened to live in Tehran during the revolution and has spent almost 30 years of his life studying Iran. He was witty and informative and helpful in giving us a better understanding of the place, and of the history and issues and attitudes that have bedeviled the relationship between our countries. (As one board member of the House of Cinema joked sardonically in our first meeting with them "One thing we can certainly agree that we have in common is that we both think that we are the greatest nation on Earth").

At the end of his lecture he grew a bit wistful as he told us that for all of his life's effort to study and understand Iran, in 30 years he felt he had barely scratched the surface. So you can imagine our own humble place after only 10 days there.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around the simple notion of "the bare feet shoe store"!!

:)

william

Persian Bloggers

I think I can safely say that I speak for all of us on the delegation of filmmakers sent to Iran for a cultural exchange by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences if I say that one of the chief pleasures we had on our ten day lollapalooza tour of contemporary cinema and culture, was the chance to get to know two members of the younger generation there, our guides and translators provided by the House of Cinema, Hamidreza and Parastoo.

With the unflagging energy and enthusiasm of youth, they put up with our group of occasionally grumpy and dislocated travelers, and they gave us insight and understanding as they guided us through this very foreign land. And they did it all with a sense of humor and grace.

Parastoo discovered that I was a blogger fairly late in the trip, and shared with me that she was one of the first women bloggers in Iran. She speaks very good English and was educated in London. She's concerned with women's issues and I hope she'll come and be a guest blogger here sometime, and share with all of you more about herself and her generational perspective as a young woman growing up inside Iran.

Hamidreza would be everyone's dream intern or assistant if he lived here in Hollywood but he wouldn't last long in that position as he would be quickly snatched up and promoted, given his smarts, his extensive knowledge of film, and his mad computer skills.

On top of all that, he is a cartoonist, and was really excited when I told him about my own passion for cartoon illustration, comic books, and graphic novels. As a parting gift, I asked him if he would draw a cartoon for me, and he came back with this caricature:

Thanks, Hamidreza. 

And thanks to Parastoo, too (I always wanted to write that sentence!!).

william

Mega Malls

On my next to last day in Tehran, Behrooz took me to see a massive development underway in the north part of the city. A Malaysian/Iranian joint venture was developing the mother of all malls, with a huge cinema center and shopping mall with food court, a separate cultural center, small theme park and mosque all on one mile long site. "Parking for 2,800 cars" he boasted.

This is a scale model of just one small part of it. 

I know it will sound somehow condescending to say I was really surprised to see this kind of large scale economic development in the leisure sector taking place in Tehran, and that is not my intent, but it certainly defied my stereotypical, outsiders view to think of The Grove on Steroids being built in contemporary Iran.

With a huge youth population, it seems the government there recognizes the need to develop facilities for this next generation, and the need for outside capital and cooperation to boost their economy. As someone put it to me: "With no bars, no alcohol served publicly, no public dancing or concerts, and very few options for young men and women to meet socially or be together in public, the cinema is one of the few outlets for the basic human need to congregate socially outside of the family."

The project manager was a friend of Behrooz's and with typical Iranian hospitality, as soon as I arrived they made tea for me, and offered me a delicate fluff pastry sprinkled with powdered sugar that was an Iranian version of a churro. As we sat in the office of the main boss, he asked me about my travels around Iran and I told him of our visit to the beautiful city of Isfahan.

With admirable passion, he told me that he saw this 21st century development as the continuation of a long and proud Iranian tradition. 

"After all, what was the great square and grand bazaar of central Isfahan but the mega mall of the 15th century."

Now who could argue with that! :)

william

Art Versus Commerce

For many years, Hollywood has been defined by the tension between Art and Commerce. Some might argue today that that tension is over and commercial considerations have won out completely. But the businessmen have never been able to entirely make a business out of show business, and what we are left with is the contradiction of risk adverse corporations engaged in a casino-like enterprise that leaves most mere mortals caught in this conundrum screaming for their psychiatrist.

Tom Pollock and I have had fun embracing these stereotypes and developing our "Frick and Frack" act (I'm "Art", he's "Commerce", as if you had any doubt!) as we have traveled to the communist country of Vietnam and the Islamic Republic of Iran as Producers to preach the gospel and sing the blues of making films for audiences.

Tom is the gleeful capitalist in our little morality play. 

Which is not to say this brilliant mind who has been a top lawyer, studio chief, and successful commercial producer is not an artist in his own right. It's just that his canvas is the free marketplace, and his passion is in making movies that millions of people all around the world will go to see.

I play the role of the brooding craftsman fretting over the quality and content and consequence of what I choose to try to help put out into the world. (And no jokes about how I'm from central casting!)

Which is not to say that I don't have massive respect for the power of populist entertainment, and ambition to make "Ants In Your Pants of 1939" even as I am perceived as the driving force behind a series of "O Brother Where Art Thou's".

With Tom as elder statesmen, and what contributions I can make from my own experience, we give out as much information as we can about what a producer does, how and why films happen over here, how they get financed, made, marketed and distributed, and, mostly importantly, what happens between the lines, as the devil is always in the details.

While we debate for the entertainment of our audiences, we mostly agree that no one knows anything and that it is harder than ever to get a good movie made and seen today. Tom has a skill that I never acquired in that he can make movies aimed at an audience of which he is not necessarily a prime member, a skill required to program the diverse slate of entertainment that any studio must put out to fill its distribution pipeline. 

For better or worse, although I like good movies in almost every genre, I always feel that I am an impostor if I try to make a movie that I am not passionate about and that I wouldn't go see myself. I have no compass to guide the ship and can't really tell the writer or director if they are off course unless I can see clearly the distant shore myself. 

One thing we emphasize everywhere we go is how the key to making movies that can play around the world is to make movies that can play to the audience in your own back yard first (more difficult in Iran where government censors determine what can be shown in the country). And that no film industry can survive let alone prosper where piracy is rampant and copyright is not protected, problems that are certainly not unique to Vietnam or Iran, but plague filmmakers and film financiers everywhere.

I've learned a lot listening to Tom at the various seminars we've held together. I'm not ready to switch roles in our little play yet, but maybe I can be an understudy someday! :)

william

"Filmfarsi"

While we think today of Iranian cinema in terms of the brilliant poetic quality of international arthouse auteurs like Kiarostami and Panahi and others, clearly, as evidenced by these posters I found in the basement of the Museum of Cinema in Tehran, they once had a thriving genre cinema that would've made Quentin Tarantino happy.

I love these vintage posters. 

Sorry about the quality of the pictures, they were hastily taken on the tour and I couldn't eliminate the glare from the frames.

I saw that the company PARSFILM had a credit on many of these productions which apparently dated from the 1950's and wanting to learn more about it, I came across an article by Massoud Mehrabi about the history of Iranian cinema which filled in some of the backstory, albeit from the perspective of a writer who clearly doesn't share Tarantino's taste for low-brow or "disreputable" commercial cinema:

A highly influential figure in Iranian cinema, during a long life Esmail Kushan was the photographer, director or producer of tens of films, and when old age confined him to the overall management of his studio, his sons faithfully followed in their father's footsteps. In fact Kushan's brand of filmmaking was more or less accurately adopted by all commercial producers. His film empire in Parsfilm, near Tehran, was pulled down a few years ago, but his spirit continues to dominate Iranian cinema.

After a twelve-year hibernation the Iranian cinema rose to a fresh start with redoubled energy as if trying to make up for the lost years. Although only four films were released by Parsfilm from 1948 to 1950, annual production soared to seven films in 1951, of which five were first productions of five newly founded studios, and to eleven in the following year. The box office success of Iranian films attracted more people to the industry and more studios sprang up. The new bloom in the industry brought forth nineteen films from ten studios in 1953.
Most of the cinematic output of that year were produced after the August 19, 1953 CIA-engineered coup d'etat which led to the suppression of the Shah's opponents. The coup provided the producers with the political stability they needed. The type of themes treated in films changed and the domination of Iranian cinema by popular dance and music began. The general cultural policies adopted by the Shah's regime from 1953 onward encouraged the brand of filmmaking that was allowed to be entertaining without stimulating serious thinking. It was a commercial run-of-the-mill industry referred to by the critics as "Filmfarsi", a derogatory term coined by the veteran film critic and historian, Dr. H.Kavoosi, designating inane commercial filmmaking as distinct from serious Iranian cinema.

During the decade (1953-63) the history of Iranian cinema presents no event of major significance. Public screens catered to the tastes of the mass audience with mass productions of utter worthlessness, and no sign of any rejuvenation or emergence of new talents brightened the prospects. Under the circumstances any hope for the birth of an avant-garde cinema for an intellectual elite would have been highly unrealistic. The rigorous censorship imposed after the 1953 coup d'etat made it impossible for the intelligentsia to dictate its elitist modes of thinking to people through a mass medium such as cinema.

Funny to see the art versus commerce argument play out in the history of Iranian cinema as it has in ours, albeit with different variations and complicating factors.

"Filmfarsi" might be the perfect derogatory term for the "mass productions of utter worthlessness" that are our daily bread here today; or perhaps we should say "film-farce-y" in English?

william

Noir In Iran

I guess it was only fitting that my trip to Iran became an opportunity for me to catch up on some classic film noir on dvd. There are parts of Tehran that would make a great location setting for a black and white, down and dirty noir melodrama, if only Orson Welles were still around to film it.

The severe jet lag due to the travel time and the almost 12 hour time difference in which day is night and night is day for our body clocks left me wide awake with my portable dvd player and a cd case full of titles I had brought along to catch up on in the pre-dawn darkness.

 

For some reason, consciously or unconsciously, the movies that I carried included some film noir titles like the Mark Hellinger production of "Brute Force" directed by Jules Dassin and starring Burt Lancaster, which I know I had seen on television in my youth as many moments were familiar to me, but I had not really watched this almost archetypal prison film in three or four decades. 

I want to say that it was my own slight case of paranoia traveling to a country we've heard characterized for years in our mainstream media as part of the Axis of Evil, but for whatever reason this tough noir with its economy of storytelling and imagery (the opening dutch angle shot of the prison walls in a biblical size downpour is a classic) and an unforgettable turn by Hume Cronyn as the sadistic Captain Munsey really resonated with me.

"Why don't they learn: there is no escape. No one ever escapes."

Another movie I had heard much about but never seen was a lighter shade of noir, the breezy Elliot Kastner production of "Harper", based on the novel "The Moving Target" by Ross McDonald, and directed by the unknown, to me, Jack Smight. Thanks to Tom Pollack for educating me to Smight's resume as a top tv director in his day, picked by Kastner to handle the chores on this star vehicle. 

It has its charms, especially in guessing at the various L.A. locations they used back in the mid-sixties, and in nutty Strother Martin's turn as a cult leader/illegal immigrant smuggler on some Malibu or Mulholland Drive mountaintop temple, but in the end it is a minor guilty pleasure, not a classic.

One curiosity is why the title character's name was changed from McDonald's famous private detective Lew Archer, to the Lew Harper which is stenciled on the door of Paul Newman's office. I thought it might be a rights problem, but I read that it was Newman's own whim, apparently based on his superstition that he had had some measure of success in "Hud" and "Hombre" and wanted the title of his next film to also start with an "H".

Hmmm. "Hold Mountain", anyone?

william

A Life In Fragments

What is "Hollywood"? An actual place? Or a long ago real estate developer's marketing scheme? Like the notion of Los Angeles as a land of indigenous palm trees, or like the movie business itself, the very idea of "Hollywood" is an illusion of smoke and mirrors, that some very powerful marketing corporations have been selling effectively to the rest of the world for almost a century.

 Certainly our delegation to Iran was seen to be representing "Hollywood", whatever that means, and we spent some considerable time trying to deconstruct that narrative with our host at the House of Cinema, and to see our diverse group of filmmakers as individuals, with different life stories, different dreams, different aspirations and different notions of our relationship to the industry of making movies in America.

It is certainly hard to imagine anyone whose life I would describe as less "Hollywood" than documentary filmmaker James Longley, who is filming his current project in a small city in northern Iran and who joined up with us upon our arrival in Tehran to be The Ninth Man on our International Outreach delegation.

James Longley at the Museum of Cinema in Tehran

James is a nomad with a camera who lives a fairly monastic existence as he travels to remote and often troubled corners of the globe to reside among communities of strangers and gradually discover a narrative from the truth of their daily lives. 

His feature-length doc "Iraq in Fragments" was nominated for an Academy Award, as was his Iraqi-set short film "Sari's Mother", but he has also made documentaries in the Gaza Strip and even Siberia.

James grew up in the Pacific Northwest and, unbeknownst to me, was a fellow alumni of Wesleyan University (okay, I admit, I dropped out as a sophomore, but I still consider it my alma mater). James studied Russian, and eventually went to Russia to live in the '90's, where he studied film, worked as a journalist, and lived in a mining camp in Siberia where he started making his first full-length documentaries. 

He went to Israel in 2001 and filmed during the second Palestinian intifada, before turning his camera on Iraq just as Bush was declaring "Mission:Accomplished" and the insurgency was starting. At this point in his life he has spent almost as much time outside of the U.S. as in it, and his definition of home is a more loose and shifting concept than for most of us.

I have not yet had the pleasure of seeing James' other work, but I attended his screening of "Iraq in Fragments" at the Khaneh Cinema in Tehran and the q+a session afterwards, and I was deeply affected by this movie. At some point in the middle of the film I leaned across to Tom Pollock seated next to me and whispered "this guy has balls of steel", which is a rather coarse expression but the only one that seemed possibly appropriate to what we were witnessing James record with his camera. 

The film is divided in 3 parts, with the first showing a devastating portrait of a young Sunni boy working for an abusive boss in an automobile garage in Baghdad, and the last being a portrait of everyday Kurdish farmers living in harsh but somehow beautiful conditions in Northern Iraq.

But the middle section demonstrated the long held truth about cinema that "timing is everything" as James described in his post-screening interview how he happened to knock on a door one day looking for someone to talk to in Najaf and stumbled into the office of the then relatively unknown Moqtada al-Sadr. Amazingly he pursues this nascent movement with his camera and is an uncomfortably front row witness to the birth of a violent insurgency. At times the camera (and implicitly James behind the lens) is in such a "how the hell did you get there" point of view that you want to scream out "run" to the screen. 

But more than the courage that it took to film, the fact that the film gives voice, often uncomfortably, to voices and ideas and opinions that are rarely or never heard here in the West, is what made it so memorable to me. 

Ironically, it was that same quality that probably made it a quite different viewing experience for the invited audience of Iranian filmmakers, who were surprisingly harsh in their own assessment of this Oscar-nominated film. Their familiarity with both the imagery and the arguments in the film, and perhaps even more, their own first hand recent experience of life during wartime, as well as their vastly different relationship with Iraq, seemed to dull their appreciation for James' portrait of three faces of their neighbor. I thought James handled their criticisms with equanimity, and admired again his courage in even choosing to show his movie in that context.

I can't wait to see what comes next as James continues his edgy cinematic odyssey with the film he is currently shooting at a middle school in rural Iran. He showed me some of the dailies at dinner one night on his iPhone (ha!), and even in that small format and without translation, they looked curious and beautiful and arresting and provocative, as I can now say I have come to expect from James Longley!

william

Lost in Translation

Iran is a very bilingual country, with English taught in most schools and road signs and other information we saw throughout our travels being presented in Farsi and English (other than the graffiti, of course).

But some things are hard to translate, so it was a happy occasion when two young men approached Annette Bening and I in the central plaza, called the Naghsh-i Jahan Square of the ancient city of Isfahan and asked us to explain to them the meaning of some Eminem lyrics that had apparently been troubling them for quite some time.

"What does it mean 'my dogs are barking'?", one young man queried.

Annette fielded that one with a smile. "My feet are tired." The guy looked like you could blow him over with a feather, as he clearly had been trying to puzzle that out for some time.

"Thank you. And can I ask you one more question?" 

"Of course."

"Okay, to 'roll like a renegade'? What does that mean?" he earnestly implored.

Annette and I stumbled through our mental thesaurus and came up with rebel, dissident, someone contrary to authority. He liked that. We did the best we could but we kind of fumbled around trying to explain what it meant "to roll", or even where that expression came from, as our own familiarity with gangster lingo, and our ability to translate it with meaning, was sadly limited. But in the end I think he got the general idea.

It was a surreal cultural moment in a transcendentally beautiful spot, as Isfahan is home to one of the most celebrated mosques in the world.

No words were really needed to translate the deeply spiritual design of the place.

 

But it was a huge site to explore, and sure enough, by the end of the day our "dogs were barking" and our group of renegades rolled out of there for the night to retire at our local caravanserai.

william

Persepolis

"Persepolis" is the name of a wonderful pair of graphic novels by Marjane Satrapi and a subsequent animated film based on these highly entertaining and moving memoirs of life growing up in Iran under the Shah and after the revolution and the almost decade long Iran/Iraq war that followed.

It was also our first destination outside of Tehran, as we flew on a late night flight south to the city of Shiraz (planes only seem to fly there very early in the morning or very late at night - or at least the ones that we flew on) and then woke up early the next morning to drive the 70 kilometers further south to visit the ruins. 

The ancient city of Persepolis is a World Heritage Site that was built starting in around 515 BC and was the capital of ancient Persia. It was started by Cryus the Great and then really developed by Darius the Great and later Xerxes the Great (whose armies were defeated by Alexander the Great) - hey, enough with all "the Great" already!

The last Shah of Iran, the late Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, staged an elaborate coronation ceremony there in 1971 in an effort to present himself as a contemporary manifestation of the 2,500 year old tradition of "great" Persian rulers, and cloak himself in this symbol of national pride. The bleachers he built for the occasion, on which sat the kings and queens and prime ministers and presidents of many nations during that time at the height of the Cold War, are still standing on the site, but today they sit empty and unused and the pomp and circumstance of that distant ceremony are like the faded trumpets of a deposed era.

This was the most typical touristic day of our trip to Iran, but it was important for our delegation to get out of the cinemas and seminars and to allow our hosts to share with us their pride in their amazing cultural heritage. 

As I played tour guide to the group with a book I borrowed from our real tour guide, it was easy to imagine a hopeful day in the future when, in a different political reality, Americans might include a stop at Persepolis as often as they would visit The Pyramids or the Parthenon. 

Hey, maybe Yanni will even have a live concert here one day!! :)

The walls that are still standing are covered in the most amazing reliefs carved into the grey limestone. Looking at these drawings from thousands of years ago, with their rows of pictures telling stories, was like peering into an ancient nickelodeon and seeing the first movies ever made! I love these dudes holding hands in this shot! :)

A short drive from Persepolis and up on a high plateau where we were buffeted by a fierce wind and stunned by an amazing view stands the Necropolis, where the tombs of the Kings were carved from the sides of high cliffs overlooking the valley and Perespolis in the distance. Looted over the centuries, nothing remains but these monumental crosses in the stone.

At the same location was one of the coolest buildings we saw there, a tower of astrological purpose built by the ancient Zoroastrians. It looked like something that Stanley Kubrick should have used in one of his movies. 

A truly awe-inspiring day in every way.

william