This Savage Art

Every man needs a website. Check out his Writings section for film criticism.

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Director Abel Ferrara talks shop at the Apple Soho store this Friday, September 28th.

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Look at this poster¹, amazing.

Remakes are nothing new. They’re hardly worth commenting on because of their diluted nature and lack of adaptability to the modern world. They usually suffer from a studio’s feeble attempt to cash in on some hot young tv actor’s “hotness” and introduce a new generation to uh, something. I could care less. Just heap it onto the junk pile.

Invasion shares the same DNA of a fantastical story that can be told over and over again, generation after generation. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) at its core dealt with the paranoia of one loosing one’s soul to the masses, mob rule’s style. The original was directed by Don Siegel, with a script co-written by Daniel Mainwaring and (uncredited) Sam Peckinpah, based on the novel “The Body Snatchers” (aka “Sleep No More”) by Jack Finney. Whether it was subversive in nature and Siegel was really commenting on Communism or McCarthyism it’s hard to say. Counting the current incarnation it has been remade three times.

In a game of connect the dots I’ll clumsily segue into the current abomination that is in the planning stages as we speak. The recent news of Rod Lurie‘s remake of Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs has officially sent me over the top. It’s not so much the news of a remake, I most likely won’t be seeing it because I hold the original in such high regard. Peckinpah’s craftily twisted film plays on the audiences perceptions of their own moral code. He took shit for it but he challenged the audience. I know that’s not the job of every single director out there, to challenge an audience, but he did, unapologetically. I guess what really gets to me and many who find the original version a great piece of American cinema is Lurie’s attitude towards it.

It’s an interesting film, isn’t it? But it was pretty much killed by a two-second moment on screen where his wife is being raped and she smiles. That was the end of that movie. You can be certain that she’s not going to be smiling in the rape in my film.

If you aren’t acquainted with the the 1971 film it stars Dustin Hoffman as a mild-mannered professor living in the English countryside with his attractive wife (Susan George). A gang of locals harasses them both, graphically rapes the wife and attacks their home. Hoffman fights back with great vengeance and furious anger. The scene is a much debated one. The rapist is an ex-boyfriend of the wife and at one point in this horrific event Susan George gives a half-smile² associating this rape with pleasure. At face value you can read this as the character asked for it and the bitch got what she deserved, that’s if you can pick your knuckles up off the ground long enough to scratch your head. Peckinpah turns an obvious playing-it-straight-to-the-audience moment into a layered, psychotically ambiguous deviation where the woman is manipulating the rapist to get herself out of this heinous situation intact. And that’s only one interpretation! The scene turns everything upside-down, my head exploded the first time I saw it. That’s art baby! Don’t misunderstand my issues with this remake. This isn’t about tampering with the precious work of some revered director, we all know nothing is sacred. This is about just getting it wrong so Rod Lurie, good luck with that. Maybe you should just decide for yourself.³

How long do you think it will be before some genius wants to make an American version of a Bergman or Antonioni film using it as a bargaining chip with an audience to gain some sort of respectability? Good luck with that too.

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Related: Rod Lurie clarifies, sort of. Mr. Lurie, the stage is yours.

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1. That striking movie poster above proudly hangs in my home studio. [↩]
2. Which is just as debatable. [↩]
3. If you live in New York and want to see Straw Dogs along with a collection of some great American films from the early 70′s check out The Museum of the Moving Image – Uneasy Riders: American Film In The Nixon Years, 1970-1974 – July 28-September 2, 2007. [↩]

Screenwriter and director John August gives us the technical details of what went into getting his new film, The Nines, to the screen.

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Creative Screenwriting interviews director Danny Boyle.

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Director Alex Cox writes about the reality of punk, the failure of the surrealists and how to burn the film industry to the ground in four easy steps. It’s about time don’t you think?

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Check out the first seven minutes of writer/director Paul Schrader‘s The Walker.

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Note: This is my entry for The Ambitious Failure Blog-a-thon. To further enhance the experience of this post play the .mp3 of “The End” from The Doors while reading.

Apocalypse Now (1979)
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola

 

 The Doors - The End [11:45m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Never get out of the boat. Absolutely goddamn right. Unless you were goin’ all the way — Captain Willard

In Francis Ford Coppola exploratory journey into self backdropped against the Vietnam War he almost lost his most valuable asset – himself. Its turbulent history is recognized in the documentary, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse which can be considered a companion piece and should be required viewing before anyone considers picking up a camera. In the documentary, Eleanor Coppola, wife of the director and credited co-director, points the camera on her husband as he expresses his frustration with questions he has created in the screenplay but feels he cannot answer. You feel the dread. Private conversations are recorded without his knowledge over the course of 238 days of production. This is where we start to see the wheels spinning and the man cracking:

“My greatest fear is to make a really shitty, embarrassing, pompous film on an important subject”

In his mind he was doing just that but it didn’t just end there, it was real, for him, his family and his cast and crew. The self-financed film went over budget and that was just the beginning. Two weeks into production in the Philippines, the original actor playing Captain Willard, Harvey Keitel, was replaced by Martin Sheen. The production forged ahead. Sheen continued, doing a scene that required him to lose himself in his character. He did. He lost all control of his faculties in a self-medicated meltdown on his 36th birthday. The results: a scene that will live in infamy and a heart attack that almost cost Sheen his life and Coppola the picture.

The film was originally intended to be shot over six weeks but ended up taking 16 months. Typhoons destroyed sets, causing delays of several months. This list of catastrophes is endless. The film dying a slow death wasn’t just paranoia or insecurity in the mind of director or the cast and crew — it was exacerbated by the Hollywood press from back home. The media was caught up in the great American malady of predicting failure before it actual happens, if not actually rooting for it. The film did get shot, all 200 hours of it. Upon completion of production Coppola had his hands full. It took 2 years for editor Walter Murch to bring the troubled film to a final cut.

Ambition¹ has never been a problem for Coppola. He went to the Philippines coming off the success of the first two Godfather films — classics by anyone’s measure. He was accepted and adored by the industry probably even cocky but I bet he never anticipated his own personal journey into madness up river. The film divided audiences. Upon the film’s initial screenings it was considered obnoxious and self-indulgent² by some. The hot topic of Vietnam was still a fresh and bloody wound in America and the film seemed to be rubbing salt in it with its perceived grotesque theatrics and arrogant self-importance³.

A three hour work-in-progress cut of Apocalypse Now was screened for an international festival audience in Cannes in 1979. It won the Palme d’Or that year for best film, the most prestigious prize a film could be awarded. It also went on to win Best Sound and Best Cinematography at the Academy Awards in 1980. Maybe now you’re probably asking yourself, “and how is this a failure?”

Before you accuse me of a cutting to black moment, hear me out. I took a contrarian approach when picking Apocalypse Now to hopefully make a point for further reflection. When is it considered a failure and by whom? Maybe it’s just semantics but there have been many films over the course of time that have suffered similar problems but didn’t succeed. Art is perception. The 1968 Stanley Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey debuted to theater goers walking out and scratching their collective heads. It was lambasted in the reviews. Weeks later it started to gain underground popularity and to this day is considered a masterful triumph yet to be matched. There’s no denying there are films that just flat out fail in every way; financially, critically and artistically. The other side of the overlooked masterpiece is a film like Waterworld but those aren’t necessarily the films I’m thinking of. Again it’s back to perception. Whose to say what works or doesn’t? Did The Fountain fail? Not in my book. But to some it did. Who validates failure and when is it valid? To quote the infinite wisdom of a screenwriter far greater in talent than most, “Nobody knows anything.”

So is Apocalypse Now considered an ambitious failure? In its overall history — absolutely not. I was obsessed with this film when I was all of maybe 13 years old. Its spectacle ignited my interest in cinema and to this day I still get lost in its allegory. Lets just say it made an impression. Part Odyssey, part Joseph Conrad-inspired nightmare of obsession gone awry, throw in a little Werner Herzog and you have classic storytelling at its core, audaciously revealing the mess that took place what might as well have been a million miles away in some foreign land (hmmm) — a film I consider a must see before you die. So…ambitious? As all hell. A failure? Not by a long shot but there was a time when it was considered to be, by its creators and by its naysayers and critics. We all came around.

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1. The director, according to archival materials in the recent “Complete Dossier” edition, also stated that his plan was to create a single theater, in the geographical center of the United States (likely Kansas) that would show Apocalypse Now, and only Apocalypse Now. It would be specially tailored to the film, with 3D 70mm projectors, 5.1 surround sound, and the Sensurround system, which would vibrate the seats at the appropriate intervals. In his eyes, it would be “an event”, and he likened it to travelling to Mount Rushmore. — from Wikipedia[↩]
2. Gerald Perry interviews Francis Ford Coppola at a press conference for Redux[↩]
3. In Hearts of Darkness we see Coppola at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival press conference with his view of the film claiming, “My film is not about Vietnam, it is Vietnam.”[↩]

There’s a line in the play Hurlyburly, David Rabe‘s scolding indictment of Hollywood’s penchant for the vacuous:

They got all these bullshit stories they want to fill the air with, they want to give them some sense of reality, some fucking air of authenticity, don’t they? So they take some guy like you and stick him around the set to make the whole load of shit look real. Don’t you know that? You’re a prop.

Director Michael Corrente’s sentiments about why it took two years to get his film Brooklyn Rules to the screen hit a similar note:

It’s shot anamorphic by a cinematographer who’s the president of the ASC…you’ve got an amazing cast. You’ve got one of the better writers out there writing right now. And it’s a great story, but they will release piece of shit after piece of shit onto 1,000 to 2,000 screens. It’s disgusting. It’s sad…homogenized, rinsed-off, bullshit, formulaic fucking movies.

Well, you got me hooked. No, Corrente is not from New York but screenwriter and Sopranos staffer Terrence Winter is. The Reeler gives a fair and insightful review of what sounds like a solid coming-of-age in the borough crime drama that finally opens today in NYC.

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And in more “you can’t keep me down” news, Queens born James Gray comes out of the gate at Cannes [update 5.19: Columbia pick up at Cannes] with his new NYC crime thriller We Own The Night. I’m a big fan of Little Odessa and it’s great to hear he’s developing new work. Really looking forward to Alphabet City. From Gray:

I’m just not willing to give up on myself. If I’m going to fail, then I want to fail to the limits of my talent.

Gotta love it. Who here wants to go out and make a movie!?! Whose with me!?!

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I’ve been going to the Tribeca Film Festival for five years now and been quietly gauging the changes. This year? Quiet. The festival has slowly been relocating and expanding to the point that the Triangle Below Canal is just one of the many stops. There has been so much coverage of the festival with its price hikes and celebrity outshining its initial purpose I’m just going to stick to the subject at hand, the films.

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