Bruce Dern: Breaking from the Pack

06/01/2013

by Glenn Lovell

The best actors, metaphorically speaking, are long-distance runners. They possess stamina, staying power. They start out in juicy character parts, surge to the front in starring roles in their 30s, then finish out the race in critically acclaimed supporting turns. Melvyn Douglas was such an actor; Gene Hackman and Jack Nicholson also fit that description.

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Dern

Bruce Dern, however, may have run the smartest race of all. The 76 (going on 77) -year-old actor, who in recent years seemed to be fading in the homestretch, is now having the last laugh. He expanded his chest, made a lunge for the tape, and came in first last week at the Cannes Film Festival, winning the Best Actor prize for his performance in Alexander Payne’s “Nebraska.”

Not surprisingly, Dern, a decent half-miler in college, has always been a runner. It’s an addiction, he says. Even today he can be seen chugging along Malibu trails. Everyone calls him “Crazy Bruce.” He twitted, “I’ve been running thousands of miles and am so bored with people who shout, ‘Watch your heart,’ and then drive on.”

The half-mile is the perfect metaphor for Dern’s long career. Runners clump together during the first lap, and then, if you have the heart, you break away from the pack.

Consider Dern’s body of work. He made his screen debut in 1960 as a smarmy thug in Elia Kazan’s “Wild River” and died famously in Hitchcock’s “Marnie” and Robert Aldrich’s “Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte.” After six years of AIP quickies (“Wild Angeles,” “Psych-Out,” “The Incredible 2-Headed Transplant”), he, at long last, was given more sympathetic roles: a marathon dancer in “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?,” a basketball coach in “Drive, He Said,” and Tom Buchanan, the rich playboy in the 1974 “Great Gatsby.”

In 1972, he returned to villainy, memorably. He shot Duke Wayne in the back in “The Cowboys.” Asked how it felt to off the screen icon, he chortled, “They may have booed me in Orange County, but they cheered me in Berkeley.”

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Betrayed in “Coming Home”?

The same year he had his first bona fide lead, as the astronaut-botanist in “Silent Running.” This led to leads in Hitchcock’s last film, “Family Plot,” John Frankenheimer’s “Black Sunday,” Hal Ashby’s “Coming Home,” and, personal favorites, Bob Rafelson’s “King of Marvin Gardens” and Michael Ritchie’s “Smile.” I met Dern for the first time during the Chicago junket for “Coming Home,” which co-starred Jane Fonda and Jon Voight. Fonda and Voight took shots at their co-star because he defended his character, a Marine captain who feels betrayed by wife and country and eventually loses it. Dern wanted the character to go out in a blaze of glory (as he does in the script). Ashby shot a more melancholic ending, an ocean suicide a la “A Star is Born.” All three actors were nominated for Oscars. Fonda and Voight won; Dern didn’t.

Dern’s stint at the top lasted about four years. He was never considered bankable, especially after appearing in such bombs as “Middle Age Crazy” and “Tattoo.” He rode out the ’80s and ’90s in character parts, the best being the obsessed runner in “On the Edge” and the conniving Uncle Bud in “After Dark, My Sweet.” These roles should have netted him second and third Oscar nominations. They didn’t because nobody saw the films. Consigned mostly to crotchety neighbor roles and glorified cameos in recent years ‒ he’s in “Monster” and “Django Unchained” ‒ Dern joked that he was best known for being Laura Dern’s father.

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Resurrected in “Nebraska”

And then, miraculously, along came “Nebraska,” starring Dern as the grizzled, at times vacant Woody Grant, who hits the road with his son (“SNL” alum Will Forte) to cash in what he thinks is a winning sweepstake number. Dern calls it “the best role I’ve ever had” and his best buddy movie since teaming with Nicholson in “Marvin Gardens.”

Will it make him another late-in-life Oscar-winner, like Alan Arkin and Jack Palance? That would be nice, but Dern isn’t slowing down for the laurel. He’s in it for the long haul. He won’t stop acting, or running. Some days you feel the burn, some days you cramp up. His next release: “Coffin Baby” (aka as “Toolbox Murders 2”).

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Ray Harryhausen (1920-2013): Now in lap of gods

05/08/2013

Here’s an interview I did with Ray Harryhausen when he visited San Jose for a film festival devoted to fantasy and sci-fi. The legendary stop-motion artist, best known for “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad” (1958), died Tuesday in London at age 92. Among those who embraced Harryhausen as a key influence were Steven Spielberg, Tim Burton, George Lucas and, representing the next generation f/x specialists, Phil Tippett.

by Glenn Lovell

If, like many a giddy adolescent, you’ve never been able to quite shake the horned cyclops and saber-rattling skeleton in “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad,” you’ll want to know more about their creator Ray Harryhausen, the meticulous stop-motion artist who has given life to some of Hollywood’s harry2most memorable oddities, including an undulating snake woman, reptilian Martian and, on Mysterious Island, a giant crab.

Harryhausen’s last screen credit was 1981′s “Clash of the Titans,” another of his beloved Greek mythology adventures.  Prior to that he oversaw the Dynamation (three-dimensional animation) on 1977′s “Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger.” Before that he labored on “The Golden Voyage of Sinbad,” released in 1974.

One movie approximately every three years — or, as Harryhausen breaks it down, “One year of pre-production (scouting European locales, polishing the script, etc.), one year of arranging for financing — ‘Clash’ was in the $12 million bracket — and 16 months alone with my models and assistants.”

Jason’s battle with the children of the Hydra’s teeth in “Jason and the Argonauts” lasts five minutes on screen and took four-and-a-half months to orchestrate (or two days for one second of movement). The dreaded Medusa, with rattlesnake tail and individually animated viper curls, has about six minutes in “Clash of the Titans.” Harryhausen lived with the Gorgon for three months.

“That’s why I’m working less and less now,” he explained. “It cost so much to do one of our fantasies, and they’re not everybody’s cup of tea, you know. The studios are more interested in science fiction hardware these days.”

What about three-dimensional computer animation, the kind of thing being done at Lucasfilm? “Doesn’t appemysteriousal to me,” said Harryhausen. “That takes the humanity out of fantasy.”

So he sticks with the time-consuming “old-fashioned methods,” some learned while apprenticing with mentor Willis O’Brien on “Mighty Joe Young.” These techniques enabled him to mangle the Golden Gate Bridge in “It Came from Beneath the Sea” and trash the Washington Monument and Capitol Building in “Earth vs. the Flying Saucers.” Referring to the latter unpatriotic act, Harryhausen laughed, “No, there’s no hidden symbolism there. That wasn’t the reason I left the country.” (He moved to London 20 years ago because it’s centrally located and allows him to scout locations in Spain and Italy.)

None of Harryhausen’s films has received the praise and attention of “7th Voyage,” which, though heavily censored in England as too violent, “earned an enormous amount of money and became the year’s big sleeper … In England they cut the whole skeleton sequence, some of the fight between the Cyclops and dragon and the scene where the Cyclops roasts one of Sinbad’s men on a spit. They just said those scenes would frighten children. Fantasy never hurts anyone. It’s healthy, cathartic. Children enjoy the grotesque.”

Speaking of the grotesque, where did Harryhausen get the inspiration for “7th Voyage’s” ill-tempered Cyclops? “I just wanted to make him as belligerent as some people I’d met — belligerent and primitive.”

“Jason,” he recalled, was released in a market already glutted with poorly dubbed “Hercules” clones from Italy. Adding insult to injury, critics cited liberties with Greek mythology. As an acknowledged expert in the area, Harryhausen was livid. Vindication came when several university scholars rushed to his defense.

“It’s obvious from their writing that most critics have no idea what Greek mythology is all about,” he said. “They also wrote that I borrowed my mechanical owl in ‘Clash’ from R2D2. The idea of the mechanical owl goes way back to Greek mythology, which came a little before ‘Star War.’”

Further disappointment has come from studio publicity mills that have either ignored his movies or misrepresented them as standard sword-and-sandal fare. Harryhausen called “Valley of the Gwangi,” a 1969 Lost World western, and “First Men in the Moon,” a fanciful 1964 adaptation of the H.G. Wells story, “my most neglected films.”

“Warner Bros. didn’t know how to sell ‘Valley,’” charged Harryhausen. “When they saw the word ‘gwangi,’ people thought it was a Japanese monster film. When ‘First Men in the Moon’ came out just at the time when man set foot on the moon. So that destroyed the fantasy element. Suddenly moon travel was a real proposition.”

Harryhausen smiled and hedged when asked about his next screen project. “I don’t know. Don’t hold your breath. It’s in the lap of the gods.”

For some of Harryhausen’s best work in “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad,” check out YouTube footage of Cyclops, Snake Woman and Dueling Skeleton, all set to the unforgettable music of Bernard Herrmann.

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“Simon” Director Mines “Killer Inside Me”

05/02/2013

by Glenn Lovell

For a guy who grew up in relative comfort ‒ privates schools, successful middle-class parents ‒ Antonio Campos shows an unexpected affinity for society’s walking wounded, the alienated and dejected. Five years ago, he directed the festival favorite “Afterschool,” about a painfully shy prep-school student who spends too much time online, with tragic results. His noir-tinged “Simon Killer” (now in theaters and on PPV) is about a weaselly American in Paris who freeloads off a young prostitute. Again, with tragic results.

Between assignments, Campos,  29, produced the award-winning “Martha Macy May Marlene,” about a young woman adjusting to life after a Manson-like cult. You guessed it ‒ tragic results.

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Campos

To get to the bottom of this attraction for damaged outsiders, we talked to Campos at San Francisco’s 15th annual IndieFest. He referred to his new film, which was virtually made up by director and stars as they went along (“We sometimes showed up with just lines written on a notebook page”), as a “companion piece” to “Afterschool.” Main literary influences? The brainy mystery novels of Georges Simenon, as well as the more hard-boiled pulps of Jim Thompson.

“Thompson’s ‘The Killer Inside Me’ was a huge turning point; I’d never read anything like that,” Campos said. “How well we could understand that (psychotic sheriff) was kind of a revelation … Simenon deals with very similar characters but in a more opaque way. And somewhere in-between there, Simon was born … “

Campos says he’s always been drawn to the dark side, to everyday monsters lurking just beneath the surface. His second short “Buy It Now” is about a teenager who sells her virginity on eBay. “Why am drawn to dark subjects? I’m not sure. I’ve always been a fan of horror films. Creating horror out of real life is a challenge … You have these ideas, you write them down, and then on the day you have to shoot it, it’s incredibly uncomfortable. You go, ‘Why did I ever think of this? Why am I making my life so difficult?’ ”

There are certainly squirm-worthy scenes in his latest. In one, Simon’s prostitute girlfriend recalls being raped by her husband the moment she starts to go into labor with their first child. He got the story from a woman who worked in a Paris hostess bar. “She was very open and she told me that story and I was pretty shocked by it … After coming out of a very abusive relationship, being a prostitute in Pigalle was, as difficult as it is to believe, somehow liberating.”

Simon, played by co-writer Brady Corbet, has some serious psychological issues. In one scene, he bumps a stranger on the street and the encounter escalates. The guy is like a magnet for trouble.

“I’d say that Simon is manipulative and scared. He’s convinced that he’s doing the right thing and actually he’s jot. I don’t think Simon’s a sociopath. That’s what’s scary about him: It’s harder to pinpoint what it is. For me, the story is not about someone becoming a serial killer, it’s more about someone becoming capable of killing if he needs to.”

Campos grew up in Greenwich Village and, through a scholarship, attended a private school on the Upper West Side. Mingling with the haves and have-nots, witnessing the disparity, proved a turning point. “A lot of what you see in ‘Afterschool’ came from the hypocrisy of that school, the way that certain students got away with certain things and other students didn’t … That made myself and a lot of my friends very cynical because we saw that the way the system worked is if you have money, you have means, you can usually get away with anything … and the rest of us are left to fend for ourselves.”

Campos’s next film may be a murder mystery based on the 2004 documentary “The Staircase.” It’s bound to be dark, brooding.

And then? “I’d love to do a comedy, but … no one thinks I can be funny, unfortunately.”

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Johnny Depp as “Greasepaint Injun”?

03/14/2013

by Glenn Lovell

There’s much gnashing of teeth in our house during Cleveland Indians games. It’s not that we can’t stand the team, it’s their longtime logo, that deeply offensive caricature of a Native American “Injun” ‒ red face, stupid grin, prominent, beak-like nose.

How it is possible in the age of political correctness that a major league team could get away with something so insulting?

Answer: In the 21st Century, the PC police have still not gotten around to our country’s indigenous people. Native Americans remain the one minority it’s still OK to ridicule. Imagine the hue and cry if a team wore a WorlJohnnyDeppTontod War 2 caricature of a Japanese (buckteeth, thick glasses, slit eyes) or an African-American on its jersey?

Need more proof of our culture’s lingering insensitivity to American Indians?

Look no further than Disney’s “The Lone Ranger,” due out this summer. If I’m not mistaken that’s Johnny Depp in the old Jay Silverheels role of Tonto, the Indian who saves a Texas lawman and then rides into battle with the masked man. Last I checked Depp was a Caucasian, as in lily W-H-I-T-E. Who over at Central Casting could have thought it was a good idea to have Depp slather himself in bronze body makeup to play an Indian? His Tonto ‒ under long black wig, artfully applied war paint, stuffed-crow bonnet ‒ looks like Captain Jack Sparrow crossed with Conan the Barbarian. (Not surprisingly, Depp’s “Pirates of the Caribbean” makeup man had a hand in the preposterous get-up.)

Depp’s justification? As a kid, he hated the way Tonto was portrayed in the Lone Ranger TV series and, since there’s a drop or two of Indian blood coursing through his veins ‒ “maybe Cherokee or some Creek” ‒ he’s taken it upon himself to right this wrong. No mention of the millions he’s being paid or a monstrously oversized star ego.

Of course, Depp is only the latest in a long line of “Hollywood Indians.” (See “Dances with Deception” on this site.) Other white actors who claim Indian heritage to justify taking Indian roles include Val Kilmer, Lou Diamond Phillips, Fred Ward and Frederic Forrest.

Reminds me of an interview I did with Doris Leader Charge, the Lakota Sioux teacher who appeared in “Dances with Wolves.”

“White actors playing Indians are all Cherokee,” she laughed. “That must have been one huge tribe.”

The $200 million-plus “Lone Ranger”  is hardly the first Disney film to feature whites as Indians. The practice goes back to the studio’s “Tonka” (1958), starring Sal Mineo as a Sioux warrior, and includes “Running Brave” (1983), with Robby Benson as Sioux Olympian Billy Mills.

“If asked to do it again, I would in a second,” said Benson when I asked him about whites playing Indian roles. “It’s what an actor does, become something they’re not. If you’re worried about the political fallout every time you take a role, you might as well hang it up.”

Make yourself heard if you’re offended by this ongoing practice — by boycotting the film.

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Arnie: Still Talking Tall

11/10/2012

by Glenn Lovell

I never thought I’d be saying this … but I’m pleased to have Arnold Schwarzenegger back in the fold — first in those lug-headed “Expendables” actioners, now in “The Last Stand,” which opened Friday.

Well pleased may be pushing it a tad.

Let’s just say I’m feeling pleasantly reassured by his return in these uncertain times.

I mean, if you can’t rely on Arnie for formulaic thrills peppered with “Hasta la vista, baby” punchlines, who can you rely on?

After six years as California’s Governator, I was skeptical about a comeback. Wouldn’t the acting chops go all flabby, like those 65-year-old quadriceps?

What I failed to acknowledge: Arnold’s no more an actor than a dancing bear is a ballerina. He gets by on snarled ‒ rather, garbled ‒ rejoinders, such as “I’m the sheriff!” in his latest display of over-the-top pyrotechnics.

Say what you will about the guy, he knows how to package himself as bodybuilder/politico/grunt-meister. For “The Last Stand,” he plays a border-town lawman who has to step up when a drug-cartel baddie (Eduardo Noriega) breaks out of prison and attempts to blast his way through Arizona. The character, named Ray Owens, sounds like a variant on Buford Pusser, the Tennessee sheriff who wielded a nasty baseball bat in “Walking Tall.”

Yeah, I know ‒ been there, seen that. But judging from the trailer, the thing has production values, hellacious stunts, firepower and a first-rate ensemble, including Forest Whitaker, Rodrigo Santoro, Peter Stormare, Harry Dean Stanton, Johnny Knoxville and the ever-reliable Luis Guzman.

What’s more it was directed by South Korea’s Jee-woon Kim, who floored us last year with “I Saw the Devil,” a first-rate fusion of horror and renegade cop thriller. Kim is the new John Woo when it comes to action set pieces.

And if “The Last Stand” doesn’t click with audiences, stick around. Arnie has another half-dozen titles in various stages of production, including a prison-break movie with Stallone and that long hinted at sequel to “Twins” ‒ titled, what else, “Triplets.”

Schwarzenegger’s ability to laser-focus remains intact.

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Sweet (Bloody) Dreams, Children

10/13/2012

by Glenn Lovell

Here’s one for the books. I think a child shrink would have a field day with this scenario.

This weekend at an AMC showing of the gruesome new horror film “Smiley,” I spied a mother and four children down front. One of the kids appeared to be as young as 7 or 8. The others were about 12 and 14.

When the titular urban legend, who sports a mask with stitched eyes and mouth, plunged a knife into the heroine (Caitlin Gerard) during one of several nightmare sequences, the youngest child could clearly be heard to sob in fright.

When I reminded an usher that this film was unrated ‒ usually signifying NC-17 material ‒ and totally inappropriate viewing matter for children, he just threw up his hands. Not surprising. The AMC chain brokered a deal with the film’s producers and is releasing and promoting “Smiley” in its major markets. (MPAA alert: Isn’t this a conflict of interest?)

The mother, on the way out, explained: “Oh, we’re friends of Shane (Dawson, who plays the dorky boyfriend). We’re huge fans. We went to Comic-Com to see him. To prepare the girls, we looked at scenes from the film on the Internet. They know it’s all pretend … all in fun.”

At this, the mother shook her head and laughed, as if to say, “Sheesh, buddy, get a life!”

Dawson, of course, has a cult following from his YouTube channel and clever video spoofs. So it’s understandable that kids would anticipate his next big career move, just as an earlier generation flocked to Pee-wee Herman’s first film.

But does that translate into “Hey, grab the little ones, we’re spending the afternoon watching Uncle Shane and others get their throats cut”?

You be the judge.

What would you have done when confronted with children at a slasher film?

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Coming to a Theater Near You: Wholesale Paranoia

07/20/2012

by Glenn Lovell

The audience emitted a collective gasp Friday morning as the exit door at the front of a northern California multiplex opened about 30 minutes into “The Dark Knight Rises.”

With CNN updates of the overnight massacre at a theater in Aurora, Colorado, fresh in our minds, those of us in attendance at Santa Clara’s Mercado 20 had our focus snapped when a pool of bright sunlight poured into the auditorium. A figure exited furtively through the door, leaving it slightly ajar for a minute or two, and then reentered ‒ the shooter’s M.O. at the midnight showing of the new Batman movie.

Of course it turned out to be a theater employee doing a security check.

Still, for a moment there, suspecting a copycat crime, our hearts were in our throats.

I’m sure the above scenario will play out at hundreds of theaters around the country this weekend.

And while they won’t admit it, box office analysts are right now wondering how the horrific events in Colorado will affect ticket sales. Will they keep people away from the dour, plenty violent Warner Bros. release co-starring Christian Bale and Anne Hathaway? Will potential ticket-buyers say, “Not on your life ‒ I go to the movies to escape, not to be reminded of a real-life movie massacre!”

Or, God forbid, will the mass shooting add a filament of danger, morbidity, making the new Batman saga all the more alluring to young thrill-seekers?

Warner Bros.’ front office won’t own up to this, but I would wager it’s secretly banking on the latter response. After all, it’s in the business of making money and “The Dark Knight Rises” was highly touted as the summer blockbuster.

To the studio’s credit, it wasted no time yanking most of the trailers for its fall release “Gangster Squad.” The tease includes a St. Valentine’s Day Massacre variation, with gangsters positioned behind a movie screen, spraying an audience with machine-gun fire.

Will the sequence be cut from the feature, much as domestic terrorism scenes was deleted from movies released in the wake of 9/11? Probably. Audiences wouldn’t be able to look at it now without being reminded of the carnage in the Aurora strip mall.

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Auteur! Auteur! Andrew Sarris (1928-2012)

06/22/2012

By Glenn Lovell

Andrew Sarris, who died Wednesday at age 83, wrote about movies his entire life but most notably during the 1960s-1970s. It was a heady time, a time of spirited debate over the merits of Bergman, Antonioni and Kubrick. And the scrappy Sarris was at the center of it all, driving and informing the dialogue with his long, rambling, impassioned columns for the Village Voice. The following is an interview I did with Sarris in 1994.

FOR THOSE OF US who began thinking seriously about film in the ’60s, he was the guru, the man who somehow made it all make sense. For his opposite numbers across the Atlantic ‒ Cahiers du Cinéma critics Francois Truffaut and Jean- Luc Godard ‒ he was the chief American proponent of the “auteur theory,” which downgraded Hollywood’s more self-conscious “artists” and made heroes of Howard Hawks, Otto Preminger and especially Alfred Hitchcock.

Sarris

At “65 going on 66,” Andrew Sarris is still hard at it, writing a weekly column for the New York Observer, teaching at Columbia University and putting the finishing touches on his 11th book, “The American Sound Film.”

Sarris, who will be speaking tonight on “The Iridescence of Irene Dunne” (Stanford Theatre, 7:30 p.m.), refers to his latest tome as “my magnum opus.” It was supposed to be out last year, but Sarris being one of the great dreamers and procrastinators pushed the deadline to this summer. “I haven’t done as much as I should have,” he says of his career in general, “but I’m a very late starter.”

Initially, he saw himself as a novelist. But the “real writing” didn’t come. At 27, after a stint in the Army Signal Corps, he submitted a review of “The Country Girl” to Film Culture (“I really panned it”). Remuneration: zilch. But that was OK; he was living with his mother in Brooklyn and working as a script reader for 20th Century Fox.

Four years later, he walked into the editorial offices of the Village Voice, then all of eight pages. Under his arm was a review of Hitchcock’s “Psycho.” Not only was it a rave, it argued that the “master of suspense” should be placed on a pedestal with the likes of Jean Renoir and Ingmar Bergman.

“It caused a great storm,” he recalls from his East Side apartment, which he shares with wife and fellow critic Molly Haskell (also a guest speaker for Stanford’s on-going screwball-comedy series). “I was treating Hitchcock as a major artist. Their idea of an art film was something by Bergman or Fellini. The idea of Hitchcock as a great artist was anathema.”

Those early reviews ‒ now described as “very crude, clumsy” ‒ caused quite a commotion among New York film buffs and left their author with a feeling of euphoria, power. A year later, Sarris began his reign as the Voice’s regular film critic. From 1961 to 1989, he wrote the “Films in Focus” column, which became required reading for fledgling critics and sparked very public feuds with anti-auteurists Pauline Kael and John Simon.

In 1968, Sarris loosed a salvo that reverberated throughout the critical community: “The American Cinema: Directors and Directions.” Beginning with the line, “The need for an updated film history is self-evident,” Sarris juggled the standings of Hollywood’s most celebrated directors. The darlings of the critics ‒ John Huston and Elia Kazan, among them ‒ were lumped under the heading “Less Than Meets the Eye.” Studio workhorses, such as Michael Curtiz and Henry Hathaway, were downgraded to “Lightly Likable.” Cerebral mavericks ‒ Richard Brooks, John Frankenheimer, Stanley Kubrick ‒ were consigned to “Strained Seriousness.”

And the new residents of Sarris’ Pantheon? Such previously underrated entertainers as Chaplin, Keaton, Hawks, Fritz Lang and, of course, Hitchcock. Their personal vision of “a self-contained world” earned them a place beside Orson Welles, F.W. Murnau, D.W. Griffith. Reissued in 1985 with a new afterword by the author, “American Cinema” is required reading in most film aesthetics classes and, along with “What is Cinema?” by André Bazin and the collected reviews of James Agee, a seminal work in film scholarship.

Sarris himself believes the “cult of the auteur” has gone too far. All directors, even the hacks, are revered over screenwriters now. “It was never meant to be the last word, and I was never meant to be a prophet.”

Pressed for changes he would make in his rankings, Sarris says he’d leave the Pantheon category alone, but would be kinder to Wilder, Wellman, Frankenheimer, Leo McCarey, William Wyler.

“I’m always changing. Times change. Movies change. I think differently today than I did when I started out.”

As for the widely hailed Kubrick (“Dr. Strangelove,” “2001: A Space Odyssey”), he’s still an overrated “superego.” Ditto David Lean, whose “Lawrence of Arabia” was panned by Sarris when it opened in 1962. He considered the epic gaseous and pretentious then, and still does.

Sarris’ recent favorites: Stephen Frears’ “The Snapper,” Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven,” Harold Ramis’ “Groundhog Day” and (as he’s a dyed-in-the-wool Francophile) anything by Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer. Critics who measure up by combining “intelligence and intelligibility”: Kael, Vincent Canby, Richard Corliss, Manny Farber, David Kehr and Haskell (who chronicled her husband’s prolonged hospitalization in ’85 with a mystery virus in the unique memoir “Love and Other Infectious Diseases”).

At a time when many are decrying the state of film criticism ‒ where gossip and the direction of one’s thumb have replaced learned discourse ‒ Sarris is surprisingly upbeat. “I think film criticism has improved enormously,” he says. Sarris’ assessment of his own writing: idiosyncratic, a weakness for alliteration. “I’m lazy ‒ I don’t work hard enough on my writing.” He believes such traits kept him from breaking into mainstream publications. He would have joined The New Yorker or The New York Times (like buddy Canby) “in a second.” He left the Voice, he says, because he was “tired of that atmosphere. It was too political, too radical, for my taste. I’ve always been sort of a centrist, an anomaly.”

The key to his longevity, he believes, is that, for him, film was always a means to an end: self-awareness. “Film enabled me to find myself. Through film, I’ve been telling the story of my life, like an ongoing memoir.”

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Classic Ray Bradbury on “Fahrenheit 451″ Redo

06/06/2012

by Glenn Lovell

Eloquent, profane, blustery, eternally boyish — Ray Bradbury, who died Tuesday at age 91, proved all of the above in our numerous chats. I met the science fiction-fantasy author in 1983, upon the release of the long-stalled adaptation of “Something Wicked This Way Comes.” Our interview was set for late afternoon at a San Francisco hotel.

But it didn’t come off as planned because Bradbury, by 4 p.m., was happily in his cups, slurring his words after one too many martinis. We rescheduled for two weeks later — at his office-cum-warehouse on Wilshire Blvd. Bradbury couldn’t have been more gracious, regaling his guest with stories of his love/hate relationship with Hollywood. A child at heart, the author surrounded himself with toys and movie memorabilia, including, on his large, cluttered mahogany desk, a model of the Nautilus from Disney’s “20,000 Leagues under the Sea.”

Though we talked numerous times after that meeting, the last story I wrote about Bradbury was on a proposed remake of “Fahrenheit 451″ by Mel Gibson. Excerpts from that never-before-published 2001 interview show Bradbury in rare form, at once caustic and testy.

RAY BRADBURY IS FUMING mad at Mel Gibson’s Icon Productions. “One of their scripts for ‘Fahrenheit 451’ should be seen by people to show how dumb studios can be,” the author grouses. “And please quote me on that!”

Bradbury was hoping things would go smoother this time around with Icon holding the rights to his 1953 sci-fi classic and Frank Darabont now set to direct for Castle Rock Ent. But so far, the author reports, the new “F-451” has been more exasperating than the 1966 Francois Truffaut version with Oskar Werner as Montag and Julie Christie — in what Bradbury calls “a stupid bit of miscasting” — as both Montag’s wife Mildred and the 16-year-old girl next door.

“F-451,” about a dystopian society in which reading is outlawed, was optioned four years ago by Icon as a possible “Braveheart” follow-up for Gibson. Bradbury lunched with Gibson in 1998 to discuss the project. “We had a terrific meeting,” the author recalls. “He seemed very enthused. He showed me plans for the sets and a design for the mechanical hound, which was cut from Truffaut’s version.”

But then, complete silence. “Every six months I call them and they say the same thing: ‘Oh, we were just about to call you.’ Yeah, sure. Can you believe they’ve let so much time go by, when the novel is in every school in America?”

Bradbury says there are now nine “F-451” scripts circulating, plus his own. “How can you write 10 screenplays on ‘F-451,’ when all you have to do is open the book and shoot the pages? It’s stupid.”

Adding insult to injury, none of the scripts has been sent to Bradbury for comment. He did, however, receive a bootlegged copy of draft six from a bookseller in Atlanta. It was very “un-Bradbury-like,” in the author’s words.

“I was afraid to open it. Finally I turned to page 42, very gingerly. It’s where Fire Chief Beatty comes to Montag’s house and Mildred asks, ‘Would you like some coffee?’ Beatty replies, ‘Does a bear s— in the woods?’ I closed the script and didn’t read the rest. I couldn’t believe it.”

Now that the highly regarded Darabont (“The Shawshank Redemption”) is connected with the project, as well as a proposed $70-million HBO serialization of Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles,” the author is more optimistic. “He’s does beautiful work. When I saw ‘The Green Mile,’ I called him and said, ‘Is the ending a Bradbury ending?’ He said, ‘Yes, I read you in high school.’ ”

Among the actors periodically mentioned for the Montag role – after Gibson bowed out as director or star – are Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. Sean Connery once expressed interest in the Beatty role. “Either Cruise or Pitt would be great,” says Bradbury. “Especially Cruise – he’s a very good actor.”

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“Alien” vs. “It! The Terror …”: Feud Revisited

06/03/2012

With Ridley Scott’s “Prometheus” about to set down, I thought it might be fun to revisit my 1979 story about “Alien” and “It! The Terror from Beyond Space.” This story originally appeared in the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, where I worked as entertainment editor. A second version appeared in “Cinefantastique” magazine.

by Glenn Lovell

Here’s a riddle for you. What came first, the creature or the alien egg?

Put another way, is “Alien,” 20th Century-Fox’s $9-million release, the innovative shock show critics from coast to coast have rushed to call it? Or, is it simply a flashy retread of a number of low-budget 1950s creature features, like “The Thing from Another World” and “It! The Terror from Beyond Space”? With the alien-hitches-a-ride movie already well over the $40 million mark and reaching daily for a spot beside “Jaws,” “Close Encounters” and “Star Wars,” a backlash has begun among onetime admirers who are now asking, “Just how original is ‘Alien’ anyway?”

What they’re discovering ‒ with a little help from horror/sci-fi aficionados ‒ is that “Alien” is not only a first cousin to some of the seedier ’50s monster movies, it is also something of a rip-off of these exploitation numbers.

Although other titles have been bandied about ‒ like “This Island Earth” and “Forbidden Planet” ‒ the two films “Alien” most resembles are “It! The Terror from Beyond Space” (1958)  and “Planet of the Vampires” (1965). The storyline, almost scene for scene, comes from “It!”; the eerie lighting and stylized, expressionistic landscapes are pure “Planet,” an Italian SF/fantasy shocker by Mario Bava.

For those of us who can recall the summer of 1958 and the release by United Artists of a $110,000 quickie titled “It! The Terror from Beyond Space,” watching “Alien” for the first time evoked a strong sense of déjà vu. The new script, credited to Dan O’Bannon, seemed nothing less than a verbatim replay of what director Edward L. Cahn and screenwriter Jerome Bixby had supplied in the way of extraterrestrial fright.

Briefly, in “It!” a spaceship lands on an uncharted planet to search for survivors of a downed rocket and, unbeknown to the crew, picks up a deadly, blood-sucking hitchhiker. As in “Alien,” the thing from another world hides in the ventilation shaft, is warded off by a crew member with a blow torch, and is finally sucked into deep space where it dies from lack of oxygen. What the makers of “Alien” have done is change the shape of the creature (theirs is insectoid, Cahn’s was humanoid with reptilian features) and assault us with more sophisticated shock effects.

Still, the stories bear an uncanny resemblance.

Aware of this, we contacted 20th Century’s “Alien” office for the official word on whether the brains behind the hit were conscious of copying an earlier film or had latched onto a project they assumed was original. British director Ridley Scott escapes complicity because he is unacquainted with most American sci-fi. His U.S. collaborators, however, are another matter. At least three were aware of the striking similarities between “Alien” and “It!” One of the film’s producers even admitted screening portions of “It!” during production “to make sure we weren’t  doing a bald remake.”

Producer David Giler: “We only began to hear about ‘It!’ toward the end of production. I haven’t seen it, but t I know of the film. We were convinced we were doing something new stylistically, even if the basic outlines were the same. I gather the alien-hiding-on-a-spaceship idea is pretty much a classic premise with science fiction writers, like the gunfight in the Western. So the similarities you refer to didn’t bother us.”

Interestingly, Giler was only too happy to brand O’Bannon “a fake” and “rip-off artist.” Giler said he and co-producer Walter Hill wrote most of the script but lost out to O’Bannon in an “idiotic” Writers Guild arbitration. He called O’Bannon’s original draft “amateurishly written ‒ just awful! Basically, it was a pastiche of ’50s movies thrown together. If we had shot the original script we would have had a remake of ‘It! The Terror from Beyond Space.’ ”

When pressed, Giler confided: “I know some of the more esoteric SF magazines have commented on tie-ins between ‘It!’ and ‘Alien.’ But I’m not a regular reader of these magazines. Personally, I think that’s a question you ought to put to O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett (co-author of the ‘original story’). If somebody is responsible for stealing the idea, it’s them. They signed a paper saying it was an original idea. If it isn’t, they lied to us. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn that Dan O’Bannon stole the idea, I must tell you.”

For a different perspective, we contacted “It!” screenwriter Jerome Bixby. He had not seen “Alien” but, through his sons, was aware of plot similarities. We talked him into viewing the film, then reporting back to us. He called two days later.

“Frankly, I feel like the grandfather of ‘Alien,’” chuckled Bixby, whose credits include 1,300 short stories and segments of “Star Trek” and “The Twilight Zone.” “There’s a whole roster of similarities between what I wrote and the new film. They’re both about a small group of people trapped aboard a spacecraft with an inimical creature out to get them and which, in fact, knocks them off one by one. No problem there; that’s a pretty general plot outline. In both stories the creatures use the ship’s air ducts. In both stories they are held off with gas and electricity. And at the end of both stories, they’re dispatched by suffocation, by evacuating the creatures from the ship and depriving them of air.”

Although Bixby wouldn’t say whether he intended to take action against O’Bannon and 20th Century, he did say he was in touch with his lawyer about the matter.

“In all honesty, my story was also derivative,” he allowed. “Essentially what I did was take Howard Hawks’ ‘The Thing’ and play it aboard a spaceship. But I didn’t copy the storyline; I used the film ‒ a masterpiece in the genre ‒ as inspiration for my story. The Hawks film has long been a model for SF writers.”

Bixby said he enjoyed “Alien” but believed the film’s extravagant budget and f/x covered for a weak storyline. “When I think what we could have done with that kind of money …,” he mused. “A lot of people saw our little grade-B flick because there was something of a science-fiction boom back then. But it was nothing like we have today.”

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