Author Archives: cinepam

Can I get a witness? Merry Clayton & company testify about 20 FEET FROM STARDOM

02 Tuesday Jul 2013

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To sit in a room with 20 Feet from Stardom director Morgan Neville and two of the stars of his irresistible documentary about backup singers, Merry Clayton and Tata Vega, is to feel like a member of the audience in a tent revival show. This is not an interview. This is testifying, which makes sense when one considers that among the things that Clayton, Vega, Darlene Love, Claudia Lennear, Lisa Fischer, Judith Hill and the rest of the 20 Feet from Stardom cast has in common is church.

“I feel the more overriding through line between these singers is the church and that for all of them singing is a calling,” says Neville during a visit to the Bay Area where he screened the documentary at the San Francisco International Film Festival. “It’s something that they would do whether or not they were singing in church for no money or on a stage for 20,000 people and that their careers have been spirituals journeys as much as they are careers.

“That’s the thing I’ve gotten back over and over again from these ladies. A lot of prayers going on during this movie. And there’s something about the church mentality, too, of the humility of serving something greater than yourself, especially in the choir, that is much part of being a backup singer as the talent is. It’s being able to be comfortable in that role where you’re subjugating your ego or losing yourself in a blend, losing your individual identity in a greater singular thing. That’s something that the church prepared all these women for.”

The daughter of a minister, the vivacious Clayton agrees that she found her voice through her faith. As a youth, she would spend four or five day every week in church. Attending services was only a small part of that, as the little girl who would grow up to duet with Mick Jagger on The Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” and who would originate the role of the Acid Queen on the London stage in The Who’s rock opera Tommy would also go to Sunday school, attend choir practice and take part in other church activities.

“You had a calling on your life through the church,” says Clayton. “There’s a certain vibe that you have, because you know what you know. Everything that I got spiritually, mentally and physically, I got through the grace of God. I knew it was through His grace and His mercy that I’m still here to talk about it. I’m not ashamed to say, ‘Hey, I know what I know and I know what I am and I know whose I am.’ It has been the grace of God that has brought us this far. Had it not been for Him on my side, I don’t know where I would be.

“When you have a craft like Tata and I have and Darlene and Lisa and all the girls have, all of us were immersed, were just plucked right from the church, so our values are different from other female singers,” she adds. “They’re just different. You believe what you believe and you know what you know and you know when your behind gets in trouble, you know who you’re going to bow your knees to pray to. And you know He’s going to hear you. Because why? You were told He’s going to hear you and He’s going to show you exactly what you need to do.”

Neville says 20 Feet from Stardom is “the most prayed over documentary in history.” He isn’t joking. That, too, according to Clayton is part of the backup singer’s creed.

“Being prayed up,” she calls it. “When Tata is in Vegas with Elton John, it’s my job as her sister, in this sisterhood, to say, ‘God, bless Tata. Bless Rose. Bless the girls. Bless Elton. Let them be a blessing to people.’ This is what we do for each other forever. Because why? Because that’s what I know and that’s what I know that works for me and that’s why I’m still here to talk about it. He said, “Amen! Can I get a witness? Hallelujah!’”

Of course, there are different kinds of faith than just the religious and Vega believes that 20 Feet from Stardom offers a wider message and not just to fans of the artists profiled or wannabe singers.

“It’s a movie about everybody, really,” she says. “It just articulates and it just so happens to be about singers. All of us have dreams. Maybe somebody said something negative to us and it shut us down or maybe we just don’t think we can do it or maybe somebody actually told us, ‘You don’t have what it takes.’ So you decide to do something else, but really deep down inside, you really want to do this other thing. It’s saying, ‘You know what, you can do it and miracles do happen. There is time. It’s not too late.’ This offers hope.” – Pam Grady

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Marriage and Mystery: Joel Edgerton and Felicity Price WISH YOU WERE HERE

07 Friday Jun 2013

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wish you were hereOutside the window, white flakes keep falling, a snow day at the Sundance Film Festival, but inside this bar on Main Street, actor Joel Edgerton and screenwriter/actress Felicity Price’s thoughts are on Cambodia and their home base Australia, the locations of Wish You Were Here. Directed by Kieran Darcy-Smith, Edgerton’s friend and partner in the Blue-Tongue Films collective and Price’s husband and co-writer, the film is a hybrid of mystery and melodrama kicked into gear when long-married couple Dave (Edgerton) and Alice’s (Price) Southeast Asian holiday takes an ominous turn.

“I tell you what is weird: playing the husband of one of your best friends’ real-life wife in a movie. That was weird,” says Edgerton. “He was just watching us on the monitor. We didn’t have to do any serious hanky panky, but there was one day when we had a bed scene. It was more about the conversation, but then it was getting kind of a little bit romantic and Kieran just didn’t yell ‘Cut!’ for the longest time.”

“He likes to keep rolling and see what might happen,” laughs Price. “Kieran was just watching as a director. He couldn’t care less how far it went. ‘I’ve got to get this take. Is the lighting right?’”

Life is no picnic for Dave and Alice, but from the outside at least, their marriage looks strong. They are the parents of two with another on the way. The vacation they share with Alice’s sister Steph (Teresa Palmer) and Steph’s boyfriend Jeremy (Antony Starr) is a happy foreign adventure that ends in disaster and sends a jolt through the couple’s relationship.

“I was thinking about writing a film kind of about growing up and having small children and having to take on the responsibility of small children and being torn,” Price says. “Finding yourself loving your family and your children, and your relationship becoming a little more long term, but yearning for a bit of freedom, a bit of partying, a bit of change. I was interested in that kind of discordance. I wanted to explore that in a relationship and how hard you have to fight for a relationship. But then I guess I wasn’t interested in just writing a relationship drama. I wanted to write a mystery thriller. So the second part of it, I mashed together a story that’s kind of based on a true story that I heard about two couples traveling to Southeast Asia.”

“It’s no idyllic Hollywood relationship,” adds Edgerton. “They’re a couple who have two kids and probably spend very little time putting care and energy into each other and more into just the day-to-day pragmatism of looking after the kids. But the relationship is solid; we wanted it to feel like they’re there to stay. Then this situation erupts and upsets their equilibrium.”

Edgerton most recently played Tom Buchanan in fellow Australian Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby. He has also found success in far from home, appearing in – among other films – Star Wars: Episodes II and III, Kinky Boots, Smokin’ Aces, Warrior, The Thing and Zero Dark Thirty. But he was happy to return to the small-budget world of Blue-Tongue Films, where the partners include, in addition to Edgerton and Darcy-Smith, Luke Doolan (the Oscar-nominated short Miracle Fish), David Michôd (Animal Kingdom), Spencer Susser (Hesher), Mirrah Foulkes (the short Dumpty Goes to the Big Smoke) and Edgerton’s older brother Nash (The Square).

“I love being home,” he says. “I love the movies we’ve been making. I just love working on good things. There was almost a scenario where I wasn’t going to be doing this film, for various reasons. I would be genuinely disappointed if I was seeing the movie at Sundance and I wasn’t in it, particularly with another actor playing my part.

“I love what we’re doing at Blue-Tongue,” he avers. “We’re very proud of that work. It’s interesting. A couple of years ago when I did Animal Kingdom, there was always that thing of, ‘Look, you can work in North America, why not keep doing that? Why go home and make smaller movies?’ But after all my years of working in L.A., Animal Kingdom, that little movie that I made back home, kind of makes the most waves out of any other thing that I’ve worked on. It set a really good precedent. I would never dream of not going home to work, particularly on anything that’s Blue-Tongue-related. When it’s good writing, you just do it.” –Pam Grady

Anarchist superheroes: Zal Batmanglij talks THE EAST

06 Thursday Jun 2013

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the eastFilmmaker Zal Batmanglij loves superheroes. He grew up a big fan of comic books and characters like Batman, Superman and the X-Men. He loves superhero movies, singling out both Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan’s takes on Batman as among his favorites. But when it came to making his new film, the political thriller The East, co-written with star Brit Marling, Batmanglij had a different kind of superhero in mind.

“I think that those comic-book stories were stories for a different era,” he says during a recent trip to the Bay Area where The East screened at the San Francisco International Film Festival. “Those characters, those superheroes in costumes were for wartime America, postwar America. It’s just not relevant now. I’m interested in who are the superheroes of today? What are the stories of today? How can we make sense of the world we’re living in?”

The new heroes that Batmanglij and Marling came up with are the members of the anarchist collective that gives their film its title, The East. Led by Benji (Alexander Skarsgård), the son of one-percenters who has spit out his silver spoon, the group’s actions – or “jams,” as they call them – are a form of retribution against corporations whose actions bring harm to the world. The East is more than just a nuisance. Their eye-for-an-eye-plus-another-eye quest for revenge is harmful to the bottom line. The corporate world responds by hiring Hiller Brood, a private security firm to deal with the threat. As part of her strategy to neutralize the group, company head Sharon (Patricia Clarkson) sends her latest recruit, former FBI agent Sarah (Marling), into the field to find and infiltrate The East.

“We wanted to start a conversation,” Batmanglij says. “We didn’t have any answers. We still don’t have any answers. We had nothing to preach, so there’s no preach in this movie. We wanted to braid a thriller, the kind of thrillers we grew up loving, 1970s thrillers like The Parallax View or All the President’s Men with issues of today and raising those questions and inspiring conversations.”

Batmanglij and Marling’s previous feature, 2011’s Sound of My Voice, was sci-fi, but they wanted to ground The East in reality. Private firms like Hiller Brood do engage in the type of intelligence work that was once the purview of government agencies. Corporations do pursue the bottom line at the expense of health and safety. The pharmaceutical company that The East targets in the film is based on an actual company that put profits before patients when releasing one of its drugs.

“It’s a real drug,” Batmanglij says. “It’s the most commonly prescribed antibiotic. It causes in some people those side effects. There’s a great NewsHour piece on it. When you see a mom take a couple of pills and end up in a wheelchair – she took it for a suspected infection or something – it’s like, ‘What?’ Who’s accountable for that?

“They’re only accountable to the shareholders, to the bottom line,” he adds. “What’s strange to me about the corporate climate is that no one’s in it for the long game. The long gain is not part of the equation. It’s all about the short term. Literally, it’s the quarter, that’s what it’s about and that causes a society obsessed with fads, obsessed with youth, obsessed with the moment rather than investing in growth, investing in change, investing in transformation.”

The East’s own actions are harsh, inviting questions over whether the collective actually inhabits any kind of moral high ground over the corporate entities they have declared the enemy. Batmanglij does not believe in eye-for-an-eye justice in the real world, but he finds a certain satisfaction in playing it out on screen.

“You want to see – the fantasy, the exorcism is you want to see the people who are making the most profit from that company that is making that drug, you want to see them be held accountable,” he says. “You can’t help but feel a certain sense of satisfaction when it’s done in fiction.

“I recently watched a grandmother being evicted from her home by force after it was foreclosed and I thought to myself, ‘How are we allowing this?’ Then you can imagine The East, Batman-style, coming in and forcing a banker and his wife out of their multimillion dollar mansion by police eviction. I would like to see that. I would like to see the look on her face as she’s holding her yapping puppy as they are being forced out of their home.” – Pam Grady

An Epic Done at Epic Scale: Simon Pegg & John Cho on STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS

16 Thursday May 2013

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startrekintodarkness1In 2007’s Run, Fatboy, Run, Simon Pegg played a security guard training for a marathon, but even there he never ran the way he runs in Star Trek Into Darkness when his character, Enterprise chief engineer Scotty, sprints down a long corridor at full speed. The afternoon he shot that scene he thought he was going to be filming a lot of dialogue, but director J.J. Abrams had other ideas.

“I ran the length of it three times,” Pegg says on a recent visit to San Francisco. “J.J. said, ‘You have to run from there to there,’ and I did it once and I’ve run as fast as I’ve ever run since I was a kid. The quad bike that was filming couldn’t keep up. I just completely went for it. I felt so free. It was like being a child again.

“I got to the end and all the crew applauded. I felt so good about myself. Then J.J. said. ‘That was great. Can you do it again?’ ‘Yeah, no worries. Give me one minute.’ I did it after that and felt slightly funny after that, like something wasn’t right. And then J.J. said, ‘Just once more,’ and I did it, and I was convinced by the time I slowed down that something was going to happen, so I walked off set very quietly and just waved to everybody. And threw up.”

In a weird way, Pegg’s discomfort is a tribute to the sheer scale of the movie. As Capt. James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) and his crew face a mortal threat in John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch) and even greater forces, the story is epic. But so is the filmmaking behind it.

“The set we have now is biggest ever rendering of the Starship Enterprise in the history of the Star Trek story,” says Pegg. “We had a bridge that was connected to a corridor that went through to Med Bay, Engineering and the transporter room. So we could do long talking and walking scenes and have a sense of the ship’s size.”

Other sets were equally massive, including the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore Lab, the massive laser that serves Star Trek Into Darkness as Scotty’s natural habitat, the Enterprise engine room.

“NIF was just extraordinary to be part of,” Pegg says. “ Aesthetically speaking, it formed a brilliant bridge between all the clean lines and that fantastically futuristic bridge to the industrial metal of the engine room, which is what J.J. always wanted it to look like, the guts of the Titanic. But in the middle of this you have the warp core, which kind of looks like a perfect mishmash of the two. You’ve got all this steel and yet it’s all modern looking.”

Adds Pegg’s costar John Cho, Star Trek Into Darkness‘ Sulu, “J.J. Is keen on having as much stuff around you physically as much as is possible and using CG as little as possible. It makes it easier for an actor certainly to look up and see things instead of a green felt cloth.”

The physical space might make it easier for an actor to simply act, but Pegg notes, it could be physically punishing – and not just when called upon to race down a long corridor at full speed for multiple takes. He recalls one scene where Scotty and Pike are running when gravity starts to shift.

“The set was too big to put on a gimbal, which is what you’ve seen in films where – like Inception, say, where there’s a corridor that moves – because the set was too big to move, we are on a wire, running on our sides, which is very hard to do,” Pegg says. “It enabled us to have that sensation, but do it on a much bigger scale. It was hard work.” – Pam Grady

Down Those Dark Streets: I Wake Up Dreaming 2013

10 Friday May 2013

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bluesLeave it to Elliot Lavine to emphasize the 99 44/100% aspect of his latest tour down cinema’s darkest, loneliest and most dangerous streets when he opens “I Wake Up Dreaming 2013: 99 44/100% Noir” – running May 10 through May 23 at San Francisco’s Roxie Theater – with Blues in the Night, a 1941 musical.

Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer’s title tune that cautions against getting involved with a “sweet talkin’” woman pretty much sums up what happens to pianist Jigger Pine (Richard Whorf) when he meets sultry chanteuse Kay Grant (Betty Field) at a New Jersey roadhouse appropriately enough called The Jungle. Before riding the rails into Jersey, Jigger and his band – a quintet that includes the aptly named singer Character (Priscilla Lane), drummer Peppi (Billy Halop), trumpet player (and Character’s husband) Leo (Jack Carson) and clarinetist Nickie (future directing great and HUAC snitch Elia Kazan) – are footloose but poor. The Jungle signals a welcome change in fortunes, but then two things happen: Kay gets her hooks into Jigger and their boss, Del Davis (Lloyd Nolan), shows his true, ugly self.

Blues in the Night is no “Guys and Dolls.” There are some laughs and the tone at times, especially, at the start is deceptively light, but Jigger is on a treacherous path and the gambling den Del presides over is fraught with violence and danger. “Noir musical” might seem like an oxymoron, but direction by Anatole Litvak (“Sorry, Wrong Number,” “The Snake Pit”), a tight script by Robert Rossen (“Johnny O’Clock,” “All the King’s Men” and another who would later name names before HUAC), a fabulous Arlen and Mercer soundtrack (five songs total with the title tune, a recurring theme) and a crackerjack ensemble combine for a tense rhythmic journey to the murky side of life.

Much more murder and mayhem unfold, of course, over the course of the two-week festival. Among the other highlights:

I Wake Up Screaming (1941) – Sharing the bill with Blues in the Night” is this nifty little thriller starring Victor Mature as a man accused of murdering a model (Carole Landis). Her sister (Betty Grable) starts to believe his innocence, but the detective in charge of the case (creepy Laird Cregar, reason enough to see the movie) has already made up his mind to do everything in his power to send Mature to the death chamber. Edgy and atmospheric, the film costars Elisha Cook Jr., Alan Mowbray and Allyn Joslyn.

Johnny O’Clock (1947) – This genuine rarity stars Dick Powell (Murder My Sweet‘s Philip Marlowe) as the title character, a gambler who co-owns a casino with the shady Guido Marchettis (Thomas Gomez). When crooked cop Chuck Blayden (Jim Bannon) tries to horn in on the casino action and Blayden’s girl Harriet Hobson (Nina Foch) turns up dead not long after, dogged homicide cop Inspector Koch (Lee J. Cobb) is convinced that Johnny is the doer. If that wasn’t enough grief, Johnny also has business troubles with his partner and two women – Marchettis’ heedless wife Nelle (Ellen Drew) and the dead girl’s sister Nancy (Evelyn Keyes) – competing for his attention. Robert Rossen wrote the screenplay and made his directing debut with this thriller that traps Johnny in a nasty little web of intrigue.

The Monster and the Girl (1941) – Weird and wonderful, this hybrid blend of crime drama and horror, stars Ellen Drew as a country girl whose move to the big city comes to disaster when she is forced into prostitution. It only gets worse when her brother (Phillip Terry) is framed for murder by her gangster pimps and executed. So far, so noir – but then a gorilla nursing a grudge declares war on the mob.

Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948) – Edward G. Robinson stars as a carny fortuneteller who gradually realizes that he has an actual gift for foreseeing the future – and that is not necessarily a good thing. After retreating from society for decades, his visions lead him back to Los Angeles first to a Bunker Hill flophouse and then to a mansion where he tries to convince a police detective (William Demarest) that his prophecies are real and that his late best friend’s heiress daughter (Gail Russell) is in mortal danger.

Black Angel (1946) – Dan Duryea is terrific as an alcoholic musician who has no memory of the night his stone-hearted wife was murdered, apparently by a man (John Phillips) she was blackmailing. Duryea offers to help the wife (June Vincent) of the condemned man clear his name, only to be plunged into a nightmare that his blackout has kept hidden.

All Through the Night (1941) – Humphrey Bogart is Gloves Donahue, a New York gambler on the hunt for cheesecake who stumbles on a Nazi conspiracy instead in this breezy, action-packed comic noir. Deprived of dessert, the Damon Runyon-esque man about Manhattan instead rallies his buddies to take on the spies. Conrad Veidt and Peter Lorre are two of the Nazis, while Bogie’s pals include William Demarest, Jackie Gleason and Phil Silvers.

Sweet Smell of Success (1957) – Alexander Mackendrick’s evocative portrait of black-hearted Walter Winchell-like New York columnist J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) and his “cookie full of arsenic” publicist toady Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) is one of cinema’s great achievements, the perfect blend of cast, director, screenplay (by Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman), cinematography (James Wong Howe), score (Elmer Bernstein) and the drama’s uncredited star – Manhattan in the 1950s.

Autumn Leaves (1956) – A year after the one-two punch in the gut of “Kiss Me Deadly” and “The Big Knife,” director Robert Aldrich returned with this romantic melodrama full of noirish foreboding as Joan Crawford plays a middle-aged spinster typist swept off her feet by the charming, younger Cliff Robertson. It isn’t tell after the couple has said their “I dos” that she begins to suspect that there is something off about her new husband, a revelation that could endanger more than just her new marriage. Nat King Cole sings the title song, providing an elegant counterpoint to some nasty bits of business.

My Gun Is Quick (1957) – Little-known Robert Bray steps into Mike Hammer’s gumshoes in this obscure Mickey Spillane adaptation. After a woman he briefly encounters in a diner turns up dead, Hammer is on the hunt for her killer in this low-budget, but thrilling and moody noir that gets a lot of mileage out of its Los Angeles’ locations.

Criss Cross (1949) – Lavine brings the 2013 edition of “I Wake Up Screaming” to a close with one of noirdom’s all-time greats. “The Killers” (1946) team of director Robert Siodmak and star Burt Lancaster reunite for this taut, complex drama that casts Lancaster as an armored car driver who will go to any length to win back his former wife (Yvonne DeCarlo) – even going so far as to plot an armored car heist with her new husband (Dan Duryea). What could possibly go wrong?

*For more information about “I Wake Up Dreaming 2013: 99 44/100% Noir” or to buy tickets, visit roxie.com.

Jazz Hot? Jazz Not. A Not So GREAT GATSBY

10 Friday May 2013

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There are a lot of things that you can say about Baz Luhrmann’s take on The Great Gatsby: It is cheesy as a block of Velveeta. It is a triumph of art direction over common sense; art directed, in fact, to death. (And not a natural death, either. The whole movie is a crime scene.) Leonardo DiCaprio is miscast, playing Gatsby in the same exaggerated manner that he played notorious eccentric Howard Hughes in The Aviator, making Daisy’s attraction to him mystifying. Perhaps in a better movie the actor’s odd choice to underline the fact that Gatsby is a stalker might have worked, but not in the context of Luhrmann’s glittering empty vessel. Well over two hours long, The Great Gatsby is one of those movies that aspires to be an epic, but only manages to be an epic bore.

It is also a movie that offers a tease, and this may be the worst thing about it: There is a bandleader at Jay Gatsby’s parties who is clearly supposed to be Cab Calloway, the body language is so exact. And yet there is no Cab Calloway on the soundtrack. This is a Jazz Age drama with no apparent love for the era beyond its fashions. Of course, given what’s on the soundtrack, it is entirely possible that Luhrmann simply misread it as the Jay-Z Age. He no doubt hopes that Beyoncé‘s old man will help lure the young ones into a movie that is not youthful at all. Calloway’s effervescent jazz might not have aided that cause either, but it would have injected life into a movie that desperately needs some. – Pam Grady

Skyped Polanski charms SF crowd with CHINATOWN memories

07 Sunday Apr 2013

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Roman at the RoxieRoman Polanski and screenwriter Robert Towne fought over the ending of Chinatown. Towne wanted a happy ending, and Polanski—in a Skype conversation with former Universal Pictures head (and producer on several Polanski films, including Frantic and Death and the Maiden) Thom Mount before a packed and ecstatic audience at San Francisco’s Roxie Theater on Saturday, April 6—agrees that that is what audiences typically want.

“They will always choose the happy version with no conflict from the beginning to the end,” he says. “In fact, that would be more or less like Muzak in an elevator.”

chinatownPolanski prevailed with the darker ending he envisioned and a classic was born. The film screened just prior to the Skype call, part of a weekend-long retrospective of the director’ work, and it is one of those movies that retains its power even through repeated viewings (maybe 30 for this writer). This tragic neo-noir about a private eye’s involvement with political scandal and a client’s personal tragedy is as close to perfection as cinema ever gets, the perfect blend of director, screenwriter,producer (then Paramount Pictures head Robert Evans), cast (stars Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway and John Huston were never better, and neither was a supporting cast that included Diane Ladd, Burt Young, Perry Lopez, John Hillerman, Bruce Glover, Richard Bakalyan and Joe Mantell), cinematographer (John A. Alonzo), composer (Jerry Goldsmith), production designer (Richard Sylbert), editor (Sam O’Steen) and 1930s Los Angeles setting.

“That L.A. existed,” Polanski bristles when Mount suggests Chinatown‘s Los Angeles is make believe. “We were trying to be historically correct. Bob loves the city of Los Angeles and he was inspired by it.”

Chinatown began with a group of friends—Polanski, Towne, Nicholson and Evans—who wanted to make a movie together. It was shortly after Polanski’s wife, actress Sharon Tate, and their unborn child became victims to Charles Manson and his followers during their 1969 murder spree. In his grief, Polanski had moved to Rome and really didn’t want to return to Los Angeles. Ideas were proposed and rejected, then Nicholson lured his friend back to California when he called to tell Polanski about Towne’s latest screenplay, one that both he and Evans were high on.

“I read the script. It was quite a long draft and needed lots of work,” Polanski says. “But the film was there, the idea was there, the dialogue was terrific. Robert Towne has a great talent for dialogue.”

It was enough to lure Polanski back to the United States and a meeting with his friends at Nate ‘n Al’s delicatessen in Beverly Hills where it was decided that Towne would rewrite his script. He did, but his new draft was still too lengthy to shoot.

“At that point, Bob Evans said we just had to sit together and try to pull a draft together that was tighter and more shootable,” says Polanski. “That’s what happened. I sat with Bob for eight weeks. There was a tremendous heat in L.A., I remember. We worked very hard on the script, which we finally shot. But it wasn’t completed. We had some divergency on a couple of things. One was whether they should go to bed together. The other was the ending.

“We started shooting without having completed the script. I said, ‘OK, don’t worry. I’ll come up with some ideas.’ Bob Evans was getting more and more preoccupied as we progressed and at some point he said, ‘Roman, we need the ending. We must have the ending.’

“My point was that we must have at least a scene in Chinatown or it makes no sense to call it Chinatown. I wanted to make the ending in Chinatown.

“I wrote the ending briefly and I told Jack, ‘I’ll bring you the dialogue and you fix it your way.’ By that point Robert was not involved at all in the making of the film, Robert Towne, the screenwriter. On the night, I gave those three or four pages to Bob Evans and to Jack, literally in his trailer, and Jack somehow adapted the dialogue for his voice. We shot it in one night, maybe two. We did it very quickly.”

Polanski’s instincts about the ending turned out to be spot on. Chinatown is a high point in a lot of storied careers; gorgeous, tragic and resonant. Roxie patrons on Saturday were lucky, not just for the rare chance to see and hear an exiled artist talk about his work live, but also for the rare opportunity to view this masterpiece on the big screen. – Pam Grady

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sundance 2013: Swag, Skype and Pussy Riot

19 Saturday Jan 2013

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Pussy RiotThe first swag of Sundance 2013 is hilarious, the Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer balaclava in neon pink, just like the brightly colored ones that the Pussy Riot collective members wear in performance as a sign, so says Pussy Riot’s Nadia in the film of their intent to “bring joy to the world.” My joke is that everyone who gets one of these should participate in a flash mob – robbing banks. We’d get caught, of course, and go to prison, but at least we’d have committed an actual crime, unlike Nadia, Masha and Katia, imprisoned ostensibly for a 40-second performance in Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral that offended the faithful. There is much more to it than that, of course, as directors Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin demonstrate in their insightful, thoroughly entertaining, and enraging documentary.
Watching Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer is a little bit like falling down a rabbit hole as the Russian state and the Russian Orthodox church ally themselves against these three young women – proving the point of the performance that church and state are far too entwined. It was not just that performance that got the trio and their confederates (their unindicted co-conspirators as it were, since they were never caught) into trouble, but that was the tipping point. Feminist performance artists in firm opposition to Russian President Vladimir Putin, the women of Pussy Riot had a loud and flamboyant way of getting their point across, upsetting a society that values social order. Or as the prosecutor in their trial put it, “We want to live in a calm place where we can feel protected.”

While Nadia and Masha still languish in prison after their convictions for “hooliganism,” Katia was released on appeal and made an appearance at Sundance via Skype. She laughed when asked if she and the others ever debated whether they deserved any punishment for their actions.

“We used to joke about this a lot,” she says. “No, we didn’t deserve any punishment. We were just performing feminist art.” – Pam Grady

GANGSTER SQUAD: Style and Spatter

11 Friday Jan 2013

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GANGSTER SQUADGangster Squad gets points for style. It looks great in its depiction of postwar Los Angeles as a sleek, glamorous snake pit of crime and sin, never more so than when the camera lingers on Ryan Gosling’s Jerry Wooters, a cheerfully cynical, impeccably tailored lounge lizard of a police detective, a man who spends his off hours soaking up nightclub ambiance. Too bad that more thought went into costume design, art direction and recreating landmarks of the era than into Will Beall’s shallow and often ludicrous adaptation of Paul Lieberman’s “Tales from the Gangster Squad,” a 2008 Los Angeles Times true-crime series.

At least Gangster Squad gets the players’ names right, but very little else, as it reduces an irresistible saga of crime and punishment to blood-spattered fantasy. By this film’s reckoning, World War II combat veterans have returned so damaged by their experience that – whether cop or criminal – they are good for little else than killing people (it is Josh Brolin as Gangster Squad head Sgt. John O’Mara who puts forth that absurd theory), corruption in Los Angeles is but a brief 1940s phenomenon (oh really?), and gangster Mickey Cohen – the mob kingpin Sean Penn plays with such rage that he often appears to be close to stroking out – is so out of control that he is as apt to kill his own people as his enemies. It is also a movie that rewrites history purely to amp up the level of brutality.

Working with a property set in a time period during which film noir flowered, an era that novelist James Ellroy has claimed as his own, director Ruben Fleischer has a strong grasp of the period. Again, this is a movie that looks good. Perhaps he hoped that with enough outsized violence and a stellar enough cast – that in addition to Gosling, Brolin and Penn, includes Emma Stone, Nick Nolte, Michael Pena, Robert Patrick, Giovanni Ribisi, and Anthony Mackie – he could muscle through the deficiencies in the script. No dice. Like so many of the movie’s characters and nameless extras, Gangster Squad is dead on arrival, the victim of ludicrous plotting, rice-paper-thin characters and often pointless bloodshed.

If you must get your Mickey Cohen fix – and why not? The real guy was a fascinating character – skip Gangster Squad. Instead, watch L.A. Confidential, Curtis Hanson’s seductive 1997 Ellroy adaptation that casts Paul Guilfoyle as the notorious mobster or Barry Levinson’s stylish, James Toback-penned 1991 crime drama Bugsy in which Harvey Keitel steps into Cohen’s shoes in a bravura, Oscar-nominated performance. Or rent The Racket, a 1951 noir starring Robert Mitchum as a kind of one-man gangster squad, one of the few honest cops on a corrupt force, who squares off against mob boss Robert Ryan, a psychopath in the same mold as Penn’s Cohen (albeit one who appears to have a better handle on his blood pressure). Skipping Gangster Squad does mean missing Gosling swanning about in his exquisite threads (he does wear clothes well), but it also means missing an empty exercise in cutthroat style. – Pam Grady

Bang, Bang: Not Necessarily Noir 3 blasts its way into the Roxie

19 Friday Oct 2012

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This band of thieves doesn’t know each other’s real names or much of anything about one another’s past crimes. They have been brought together by a criminal mastermind whose meticulously planned “perfect” heist goes awry. Sound familiar? It is the plot of Reservoir Dogs, Quentin Tarantino’s indelible 1992 debut, but it also describes Ferde Grofe’s little-known crime drama, 1971’s The Day of the Wolves. One of the many influences that went into the recipe that Tarantino transformed into something uniquely his own, it is also, along with Reservoir Dogs, one of the opening night features of “Not Necessarily Noir 3.” Elliot Lavine’s latest series highlighting crime and horror in the contemporary era – 26 movies over 13 nights – opens Friday, October 19 at San Francisco’s Roxie Theater and runs through Halloween.

The series gets off to a memorable start with the heist movie pairing. Grofe is not the artist Tarantino is. Heck, he is barely a craftsman, and yet The Day of the Wolves is compulsively watchable, a modest B-movie that moves briskly and offers a novel twist on the genre – these thieves have their sights set not on a mere bank or business, but on an entire town. No. 1 (Jan Murray) recruits six strangers for the job, sending them plane tickets and ordering them to grow beards, identifying them each by numbers instead of names, making them wear gloves to conceal their fingerprints and even blindfolding them to keep the location of their hideout a secret. His plan is such that even if one or more of them is caught, no one will have enough information to rat out any of the others. On the surface, the plot to rob the isolated, desert community that No. 1 has identified seems foolproof.

Lawrence Tierney’s Joe Cabot in Reservoir Dogs similarly tries to insure himself against capture by also recruiting strangers and using colors in place of real names. There are more variables to the bank job he plans, though, and some of the biggest are in the gang itself. In putting less than the ideal crew together, Cabot is already halfway to hell before the movie even begins.

The contrasts between The Day of the Wolves and Reservoir Dogs is fascinating and not just because while Tarantino populated his thieves with a fledgling auteur’s dream of a cast including noir great Tierney, Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Steve Buscemi and Michael Madsen, Frode had to make do with the likes of Murray (a stand-up comedian who made 248 appearance on Hollywood Squares, according to the IMDB), San Francisco native Richard Egan on the downside of his career and journeyman actor Rick Jason. The approaches the two filmmakers (both of whom penned their scripts) to violence is another telling difference, Tarantino’s ebullient embrace of gore is a million miles away from Grofe’s reticence to shed blood at all. Reservoir Dog‘s sharp dialogue, heightened suspense, arresting imagery and unforgettable performances put it in another league from The Day of the Wolves, but both movies are tense and entertaining in their very different ways and it is kick to see just where Tarantino took some of his inspiration.

All of the pairings in “Not Necessarily Noir 3” – a bargain at $11 per double feature – are as beguiling as opening night. Lavine has crafted an irresistible group of double features: dangerous, dark, devastating and wildly thrilling – oh, and nearly all are being projected in 35mm, just the way the movie gods intended. — Pam Grady

For tickets or further information about Not Necessarily Noir 3, visit www.roxie.com.