by William Boyd
We are staying at the Martinez, a huge art deco construct at the far end of the Croisette from the Palais and the Majestic. On the beach opposite a substantial open-sided TV studio has been built by Canal Plus to house their amazingly popular chat show, Nulle Part Ailleurs. As it happens I have been on Nulle Part Ailleurs once, in Paris—its usual home—and I know its power and its terror. It decamps to Cannes for the two weeks of the festival. It is live and unique—a combination, if that can be imagined, of, let’s say, Parkinson, TGI Friday, Spitting Image, the South Bank Show with a little bit of alternative comedy and soft porn thrown in for good measure. Everybody who is anybody in France obeys the Nulle Part Ailleurs summons. And Everybody is staying in the Martinez, or at least is temporarily present at the Martinez waiting to go on the show—which seems to last about three hours.
Which explains, I quickly realize, why there are several hundred young people corralled around the hotel’s entrance screaming their lungs out. For the serious French punter the Cannes Film Festival actually takes place here, occupying the fifty yards it takes to get from the Martinez lobby to the Canal Plus studio. The rest of the town can be left to the rest of the film industry.
I call a French friend of mine, an eminent film director, to see when he will be arriving. Oh no, he says, I’m not coming. He tells me he took special precautions to ensure his new film would not be ready for Cannes. It’s terrible what they do, the French press, he says. Look how they have massacred Carax and Pola X. “Already?” I say, sceptical. The film was screened on day one and this is only day three. “Le film est mort,” he says in a sober voice.
And it is true that the French are hardest on the French here. No reputation is immune and the attacks can be and are unremittingly savage. Catherine Deneuve—braving the firestorm in several films this year—said that for French film-makers the Cannes Film Festival is a “douloureux et dangereux” experience. Blood on the Croisette. It’s not all parties.
Thank God—because the parties are awful, appalling, a total waste of time. And yet we all go to them. We went to two in the two nights we had available: the MTV party, a modest affair of 1,200 on the Carlton Beach, and the Austin Powers party, in a deserted casino miles away. Rumours had it that there were 7,000 invitations issued for this one. We finally fought our way in, through crowds of desperate liggers, thankful our special invitations allowed us access to the exclusive VIP area where a mere 2,000 privileged guests drank free drinks and chatted sweatily to each other. Actually, the Austin Powers party was worth it, if only for the sight of a grinning, aged, squamous Hugh Hefner, sitting on a sofa, surrounded by four impossibly pert Bunnies, living tribute to the properties and potentials of Viagra and silicone, respectively.
On the morning after our screening, Daniel Craig, Paul Nicholls, James D’Arcy and I reported for duty on the Majestic Hotel beach. We were all—how shall I put it?—a little fragile and unanimously decided a round of Bloody Marys was the best way to get our press call off to a good start.
The Trench is a film about the forty-eight hours before the Battle of the Somme in 1916, concentrating on a group of very young soldiers waiting to go over the top to what is almost certain death. The first day of the Battle of the Somme was the bloodiest day of slaughter—60,000 killed and wounded—in the entire history of the British Army. Daniel Craig drily made the point to me, as we were whizzing between TV crews and journalists, the sun shining, people sunbathing, yachts in the bay, drink-toting waiters running around, that there was a certain baleful incongruity about where we were and what we were talking about. He was right, of course, but at the same time in that realization all the absurdity and the craziness of the festival coalesced. Boys trying to come to terms with the prospect of their imminent death in 1916; young actors trying to explain the import of all this to a Brazilian film crew on a jetty in the sun on the Mediterranean shore in 1999. It was good to note the farcical nature of the juxtaposition. But we carried on. We were in high spirits. The screening had gone well: people clapped, people cried, people stumbled out wordless. That was Cannes, Baby.
1999
Hollywood Excess
(Review of High Concept by Charles Fleming)
Recently, a wily old producer told me in all seriousness that, in his opinion, Hollywood should be looked at purely and simply as a river of gold, endlessly flowing; all one has to do is, from time to time, stroll down to the river bank, reach in and grab a handful of money. In its single-mindedness, its brutal candour, this theory seems reasonably astute. And it is true that, for a small minority, Hollywood and the movie business are indeed a source of endless, profligate wealth. Of course, this theory only functions if you have already succeeded, and it could be said to be true of any successful person in any successful enterprise (banking, plastic surgery, hamburger franchises, undertaking). But it is worth recalling that what takes place in Hollywood is the creation of an art form, not, as might reasonably be thought, drug-dealing or trading pork-belly futures—yet, of the seven arts, only the cinema proffers the alluring, tantalizing prospect of a permanent Klondike.
There is another, related theory of Hollywood: “Anyone can be a film producer.” All it requires is the assertion, “I am a film producer” and—bingo—you are one. All you really need is a business card, a telephone and the vaguest idea of the film you plan to “produce” and a degree of self-confidence coupled with social plausibility. Which brings us to Don Simpson and Charles Fleming’s book about him and the environment that allowed him first to flourish and then to self-destruct.
Simpson was the co-producer of a series of loud, action-packed, mind-numbingly simple Hollywood films that made vast sums of money: Flashdance, Beverly Hills Cop (and BHC II), Top Gun, Days of Thunder, Crimson Tide and a few others which will inevitably slide into movie oblivion. In the 1980s, together with his partner Jerry Bruckheimer, he was regarded as the most successful independent producer in town, and was royally rewarded (formidable perks aside, they each received, at the apex of their careers, a fee of $9 million per film). Simpson was a small, aggressive man with a tendency to obesity, who played the “bad cop” in the partnership. Bruckheimer produced the films (did the work) while Don hogged the limelight. What is remarkable about Fleming’s racily written, but diligent, account of Simpson’s short life is that, try as one might, one can perceive nothing remarkable about it. You don’t have to live in Hollywood to be a scumbag; you don’t have to be a film producer to be a cocaine addict and an S&M enthusiast; you don’t have to have untold millions in the bank to be consumed with self-loathing and behave like a spoilt child (Simpson, staying in a hotel in Hawaii, would call his assistant in Los Angeles and get her to order room service for him). The world is full of such people and sometimes, unfortunately, such tendencies congregate in one body. But, if they do, is it necessary to chronicle their inadequacies over 300 pages?
Flashdance, Beverly Hills Cop, Top Gun… money and power seemed mainly to fuel Simpson’s vices: for cocaine, for expensive call girls, for boozing, bingeing and bad behaviour and, inevitably, more and more rehab. When Days of Thunder (Tom Cruise in racing cars) went massively over-budget, the magic seemed to leave the Simpson-Bruckheimer formula. They moved their deal to Disney. There was still a ton of money swilling around but no films got made. What’s a guy to do? Some plastic surgery, more hookers, massive weight gain, buy a Ferrari, porn videos, three jars of peanut butter a day, rehab, cocaine, more hookers… The litany of Simpson’s relentless over-indulgence gets boring. Even when, at the end of his life, in an effort to alleviate his addiction to illegal drugs, Simpson became addicted instead to prescription drugs (he was spending $75,000 a month in pharmacies), the ironies accruing around his sad, over-privileged existence provoke a kind of weary pity rather than moral outrage.
High Concept is the book’s title and it is suggested that Simpson (and Bruckheimer) invented the genre—if that is not too grandiose a label for what the veteran producer Dick Sylbert has called extended MTV videos: �
��It’s ‘rock and roll in a steel mill,’ or ‘rock and roll in a jet airplane,’ or ‘rock and roll in a race car.’” The “high-concept” film is one where the “idea is king,” as Simpson once eloquently phrased it. One of his champions put it this way: “Don made up this logarithm [sic]. There is the hot first act with an exciting incident and the second act with the crisis and the dark bad moments in which our hero is challenged, and the third act with the triumphant moment and the redemption and the freeze frame ending.” Although Simpson claimed to be the only begetter of this category of film he had, and has, a host of angry rivals who say they got there first.
There are many wealthy, powerful people in Hollywood, far more famous than Simpson ever was, who behave just as badly as he did, who have the same bizarre sexual proclivities and consume equal amounts of drugs. Charles Fleming’s wider point in this book is that there is something inherent in the culture of Hollywood which makes such excesses tolerable, inevitable or even encouraged. My own hunch—my theory—is that it is not so much the fault of Hollywood as that of human nature. Put vulnerable, dysfunctional people in positions of immense power, provide them with every available venal temptation, give them more money than they know what to do with and there’s a fair chance they will go off the rails. But, despite the horror stories, it should be stated that the Hollywood film business is also populated by many hardworking, intelligent, honourable souls who don’t do drugs, and whose idea of an evening out does not include weird sex with a $10,000-a-night call girl. Simpson was not one of these, but his story is ultimately banal because he personally achieved nothing concrete—in his life or his work—and, crucially, in a creative world filled with creative people, he did nothing creative. I suspect it was this sense of fraudulence, of worthlessness, that provoked the demons that drove him. He died in 1996 of a heart attack brought on by massive drug-abuse, at the age of fifty-two.
“He had everything, but he had nothing,” as one ex-girlfriend reflected on hearing of his death. Perhaps such a contrary figure deserves two epitaphs. One of his cronies said, “For all his drug derangement [Don] was adamant about not being full of shit.” Another less partial acquaintance, who encountered him at Simpson’s favourite rehab ranch, described him as “the epitome—as a successful man, as a representative of Hollywood, as a male animal—of the kind of person who made your skin crawl.” Take your pick.
1999
Basquiat
The bio-pic is a difficult genre, perhaps as difficult as it comes in the film world, and the longer and more familiar the life to be filmed, the tougher the challenge. Films are rarely over two hours long; at two and a half hours you are probably at the maximum length for these times of ours, stretching the tolerance of studio, exhibitor and—possibly—audience as well; and to encompass an entire life, public and private, and do it some justice (let alone produce an interesting or watchable or memorable film) within that frame is a daunting challenge.
The modern exemplar of the bio-pic—in my opinion—is Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull. Scorsese was initially fortunate in that his subject was virtually unknown outside the fight game. Secondly, the area of Jake La Motta’s life that he chose to treat was comparatively short—the rise and fall of a professional boxer, a decade or so. And third, Scorsese showed real astuteness in opting to eschew traditional narrative chronology. The film is a series of vignettes, punctuated by flash-forwards to the bloated, ageing Jake in his premature dotage as a nightclub raconteur. The style of the film is fractured and eclectic: sometimes naturalistic, almost cinéma-vérité, sometimes stylized (particularly the fights), but as a portrait of a man and his life it is remarkably successful. It could only have been bettered in that most fluid, capacious and malleable of art forms, the novel, but, in Scorsese’s hands, film—and I don’t mean this as faint praise—takes on a rare depth and texture (Robert de Niro has a lot to do with this, it goes without saying). It is nuanced, it resonates, it is both banal and passionate, it is full of complexities and ambiguities—we do not understand everything. It resembles, in short, life.
All this is by way of preamble to Julian Schnabel’s film Basquiat. A bio-pic also, and one that shares many features with—however paradoxical this may seem — Raging Bull. Basquiat is comparatively unknown: certainly, outside of an art-world coterie, the details of his life are unfamiliar territory. Furthermore, his life was short, dramatic and controversial. Schnabel’s film needs only to concentrate on the few years—approximately 1981 to 1987—that chart his discovery, sudden fame, exploitation and ultimate drug-propelled downfall and death. Wisely, too, the style of the film is fractured and impressionistic. Basquiat’s story is presented in a series of episodes, often concentrating around encounters with friends, or girlfriends, artists, dealers, etc., who move in and out of the story at random. One of the film’s most memorable shots is visionary: Basquiat, contemplating Manhattan’s vast roofscape, sees the sky replaced by sea, with a solitary surfer riding a creaming breaker, high above the skyscrapers. Is this a vision of happiness? Of mere wishful thinking? Or simply the kind of aesthetic epiphany that can visit any artist, however down and out?
These ambiguities complement the film’s tone and atmosphere well, and Schnabel is excellently served by his cast too. Jeffrey Wright is superb as Basquiat: understated, befuddled, endearing, he can move effortlessly through the range of emotions from sweetness and charm to the manic, spoilt selfishness of the drug-dependent. One’s sympathy is thoroughly engaged, rarely the case with addicts, and Wright’s fraught depiction of a desperate soul on self-destruct rivals Ray Milland’s great portrayal of an alcoholic in The Lost Weekend.
The supporting cast solidly buttresses Wright’s central position. The luminously beautiful Claire Forlani as Basquiat’s girlfriend is touchingly, edgily vulnerable. Benicio del Toro for once keeps his mannerisms under control as Basquiat’s friend from his graffiti-spraying days. Christopher Walken, playing a journalist, manages to invest a two-minute interview with such an amazing freight of off-beat menace and downright weird-ness that it almost steals the show. Dennis Hopper and Gary Oldman, old reliables, do not let the side down. Special mention must be made of David Bowie as Andy Warhol. This expertly pitched performance is kept well this side of caricature (very hard to do with a white fright-wig on your head). More importantly, you see a version of Warhol that for once makes sense. Warhol emerges, not as some spaced-out party-animal, but as Basquiat’s only real, unconditional friend in the sea of sharks that is the New York art world. The friendship is played as manifestly genuine, without a trace of quid pro quo. And Warhol’s death, when it comes, provokes a vicarious sense of loss. And one understands vividly why this may well have been the factor that pushed Basquiat over the edge.
The film further benefits from an easy, unforced authenticity. Julian Schnabel knew Basquiat well, and has thrived and suffered (to a degree) in the same world. Tellingly, in the production notes to the film, Schnabel describes that world as an “arena.” In which artists as gladiators are pitted against a succession of wild beasts, perhaps?
As an oblique demonstration of biting the hand that feeds you, or of fouling your own nest, Schnabel’s take on the art scene of the eighties is unsparingly harsh. One wonders if it is fuelled by a personal bitterness, or perhaps a retrospective wisdom, but whatever the motivation, his portrayal of the gang of asset strippers that gathered round the frail personality and modest talent of Jean-Michel Basquiat makes other sinks of iniquity—Hollywood, the music business, oriental sweat shops—seem positively perfumed.
And this provides the material for the searching subtext that runs beneath the film. At another level it can be seen as a Hogarthian satire, a dire moral warning to the unsuspecting artist. And here we encounter the vexed question of Basquiat’s reputation, both while he was alive and posthumously. Basquiat died at the age of twenty-seven, a year older than Keats was when he died, but Basquiat is no Keatsian figure. Basquiat’s own idols were doomed, drugged musicians like Jimi Hendrix
and Charlie Parker, and perhaps there the parallels are more valid, but not entirely. One would hesitate to call Charlie Parker the Basquiat of the jazz world. The inversion is revealing—it tends to diminish Charlie Parker—for what it tells us, both about Basquiat’s “gift,” whatever that may have been, and the world he moved in, where it became a commodity of huge value.
The fact is that Basquiat belonged to that category of artist who traded in, for want of a better term, one smart idea. It is a recent phenomenon, this, perhaps only prevalent in the last four decades or so, and posterity is already marking down the dividends sharply. Artists of this category offer a quick fix of appreciation and that quick fix can be relied upon to pack many a gallery and fuel many column inches for a limited period of time. I do not deny that the frisson such work generates may be genuine, but it is like a firework rocket, refulgently, gloriously there for a short time, and then darkness, and then the faint distant thump of the wooden stick and scorched cardboard falling back to earth.
Scenes in the film of Basquiat frenziedly producing his huge, vivid, scribbled upon canvases are excellently done and fascinatingly revealing (canvases on the floor, paint slapped on, scribbled words and phrases randomly added). Basquiat was unusual—young and black in a white, highbrow world. He would have liked to claim to have come up from the street, but his origins were bourgeois. He had a certain wit, a certain worldly cynicism and an artful enough faux-naïf style. And that was it. But it was enough to provoke an engineered feeding frenzy amongst the dealers and their patrons, the critics and the gallery crowd.