William Horberg

Let Her Ride

The great Dede Allen passed away last weekend.

 

One of the most innovative, accomplished and celebrated film editors ever to work in Hollywood, she was Oscar-nominated multiple times for work such as "Bonnie and Clyde" and "Dog Day Afternoon" among other masterpieces.

My one chance to work with Dede was on a film that was definitely NOT in the pantheon of her career, and wasn't even mentioned in many of the obituaries I read about her passing, but that has a soft spot in my heart nonetheless - the critical and box office dud "Let It Ride", which was commercial giant Joe Pytka's directorial debut starring Richard Dreyfuss and David Johansen, and was edited with saving grace by Ms. Allen.

 

With a screenplay by Oscar-winner Nancy Dowd adapting a book by Jay Cronley, and produced by another screenwriter and long-time Walter Hill collaborator David Giler, the film was shot during the writer's strike of 1988 at the Hialeah race track in Florida, and without speaking out of school, it was a veritable cornucopia of creative differences between writer and producer and actor and director and studio. 

As it is said, success has a thousand fathers while failure is an orphan, and by the time this dark comedy about an inveterate gambler's one blessed day at the track had been shot and edited and tested and recut and reshot and tested again and rejected by the audience, there were a lot of tears and celluloid on the floor.

But through it all, Dede Allen stood by the film and stood by the filmmakers, and was a lesson to me as a young studio executive with her creative and moral authority. She seems like one of those people who touched countless lives and left behind so much great work, and so many lessons to learn from along the way.

While she will rightly be remembered and lionized for the classic films and performances she helped to shape, I guess I will always remember her most for a film that didn't entirely work as anyone involved had hoped; but sometimes those are the ones you oddly feel most connected to. 

Everyone can be graceful in success, but keeping your head straight and your vision clear when the chorus of powerful voices around any struggling production raises to a clamor is a real gift that only few have.

Thanks, Dede. I feel lucky to have known you.

william

Theme and Style

Hallucinatory. Brutal. Avant Garde. Beautiful. Hypnotic. Lyrical. Primitive. Poetic. Timeless. Modern. Visionary. Blinding.

These are just a few of the adjectives that spring to mind when trying to describe Russian filmmaker Sergei Paradjanov's 1964 film "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors".

A portrait of both the harsh realities and ecstatic, magical sensibilities of 19th century life among the tribal people who live in the Carpathian mountains of his native Georgia, the movie was a shocking sensation when it came out, and eventually put this unique director in dutch with the Russian authorities of the old Soviet Union for what they considered a negative portrayal of their country and a filmmaking style that could be considered the antithesis of social realism

Harassed for the rest of his career and finally thrown into a work prison in the gulag, it is hard not to read Paradjanov's own life as mirroring the cruel, unvarnished, capricious experiences of his characters in "Forgotten Ancestors".

But it is also hard for me to think of a movie in which the harmony between the theme - which one might call the lack of any distinction between the beautiful and the brutal in nature - and the style in which that theme is expressed is more complete. 

The camera and the cameraman seem to often be untethered from any earthly constraints of gravity and vestibular motion, and the saturated colors, radical in-camera effects, and mainly the almost continual, haunting musical score of native songs and performed melodies are as overwhelming as the events in the life of the tribesman Ivan that being chronicled by the screaming red chapter headings in bold hand-drawn Cyrillic type.

Sometimes you see a film and imagine how other filmmakers may have treated the same subject or story, but sometimes you see something so unique and definitive that you can't imagine any other version being possible. Paradjanov's masterpiece is one of those movies.

Enjoy!

william

The Early Film Movement

Watching this wonderful documentary from 1993 recently about the art of cinematography and its finest practitioners suddenly and eerily reminded me of the Early Music Movement. 

Since we are rapidly reaching a point where commercial movies are going to be shot predominantly on stages with digital cameras and green screens and motion capture technology to create our fantastic cinema of spectacle and invented worlds and 3 dimensionality that has come to define mainstream moviegoing, the 20th century art of capturing light through a lens also has become a more and more manipulated event. In today's post-production world the digital intermediate, or D.I., is the place where decisions about color and hue and radiance and density and gradation occur or can be hugely modified. 

The Early Music movement was marked by a desire of performers to return to the purity of not only the composer's intentions, but to only play music on the original instruments, in as close an approximation to the original acoustical setting as possible. It represented a search for "authenticity".

It seems hard to contemplate in an era when a wholly synthetic construct like "Avatar" is the most popular movie of all-time, and audiences stimulated by 3-D and visual special effects have relegated most of their consumption of human scale drama to television, but can we imagine some future Early Film Movement cropping up, dusting off the old canisters of 35mm film or painstakingly recreating the cameras and lens and light stands and scrims to recapture the lost art of film lighting?

If the movement ever does arise, this film might be one of their most sacred texts. Watching now, it is impossible not to feel the world it describes rapidly disappearing in the rear view mirror.

william

Exiles on Main Street

Kent Mackenzie's The Exiles is one of the most compelling films I have seen in quite some time. 

The black and white photography of downtown Los Angeles in the early 1960's evokes a kinship to Orson Welles' famous treatment of the Venice Beach area in "Touch of Evil" made just a few years earlier. 

But Welles' fluid crane shots and stylized approach to his noir story give way here to a more documentary vernacular and quotidian narrative; the group of unforgettable characters that comprise this subculture of displaced American Indians living as a minority underclass in the shadow of Angel's Flight and old Bunker Hill are treated to an intimate, relaxed, slacker portrait that might have influenced Jim Jarmusch.

 

The film has a beautifully simple story line, following a small group of men and women over one single night of drinking and partying, with some of the characters winding up at a drunken, ritualistic gathering of cars and booze and girls and drums and tribal chants on what they refer to as "Hill X", overlooking the old downtown skyline dominated by the outline of City Hall made famous in Jack Webb's "Dragnet".

 

The final image of the male revelers and their pick-up dates at dawn walking noisily down the alley between decrepit buildings in this soon-to-be-extinct neighborhood, while left-behind Mary bears witness as she waits alone in her small bedroom is heartbreaking, as are many other moments in this authentic film crafted over several years and based on extensive interviews with the real people playing themselves on screen.

The independent film never got a theatrical release despite critical praise and festival attention back in 1961 (boy, does that sound very familiar these days), but you can see it now on DVD.

Once you do, you will never forget it.

william

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