The Big Screen

by David Thomson

  So what is to be said about Eastwood the filmmaker? He is somewhere between a modest and a reluctant actor who understood Gary Cooper’s treasured economy, though he has rivaled it very seldom and never had access to Cooper’s inner anguish. As a director, he is at best efficient, economical, and quick. As an icon, he is often confused: Unforgiven is still talked about as an anti-Western, where men are mortal, flawed, and inept—until his character, Will Munny, reverts to being the angel of death (as if recalling Leone) at the end of the film and shoots down every enemy in sight. Eastwood has played heroic too many times, and entered into that aura so completely, that he lacks an edge of intelligent doubt that marks so many of the best directors. Still, as a director, he has made one outstanding film, Mystic River (2003, derived from a Dennis Lehane novel), where the quality of life penetrates recesses that the regular Eastwood hardly knows exist. The distance between Play Misty for Me and Mystic River is large enough to remind us how hard Eastwood studies. He can be earnest and dogged; there is even a hint in his recent years of Stanley Kramer in his appetite for important subjects. So, moving on from the orangutan, he has made films about Iwo Jima, Nelson Mandela, and J. Edgar Hoover under an increasing cloak of respectability.

  But as a producer, he is without equal—and not just in his own time. He has worked independently a great deal. Even when he helped sustain Warner Bros. fiscally, he lived close to Carmel and had his own small world, Malpaso Productions, at the studio, along with his team, some of whom ended up being fired if they incurred his wrath. He made a fortune for himself and for his studios—his films are said to have grossed $1.68 billion domestically, and he is reported to have a net worth of $85 million. He has enabled several documentaries on jazz and popular music, and he has shown private generosity to people close to him. He is tough, limited yet aware of his limits, ambitious and cautious, practical and decision-oriented, and able to dress his essential conservatism in liberal language and gestures. He might have had a chance of running an old studio, or being president of the United States. But he has done something more than presidents can manage: he has continued to exist in that past where a movie star (or a leader) can be rich, honored, and beloved—trusted, even. It is not sensible to rate him as an artist, but his is exactly the type of career that old Hollywood wanted. There will never be anyone like him again.

  Silence or Sinatra?

  In the previous chapter I considered Clio Barnard and Clint Eastwood, as if they might be contemporaries and colleagues. I’m sure they’d be polite if they met, but they do not have a lot in common. The public knows one and not the other; their degrees of “success” are worlds apart. Yet Barnard’s one film has a depth of intelligence and emotion that I doubt Eastwood has considered. That doesn’t mean she’s a “genius” while he is just a classic entertainer, or that one label is harder to earn than the other. They are both of them dedicated to their attempts to communicate. I suspect there have been moments when Clint sought artistic prestige while Clio longed for a limo. And in this chapter, I want to explore that slippery ground where directors (or even producers) wonder if or how they are noticed.

  Let me suggest someone who has a case for being the most effective director of his time. He was born in 1959 and his name is Tim Van Patten. There is a fair chance you have not heard of him, a reminder that, with television, you are not always watching, even if the set is on and your gaze is more or less given to the screen. Van Patten has never made a theatrical movie, but he has directed some of the best material of our time, twenty episodes of The Sopranos, more than anyone else. That’s about sixteen hours of film (let’s say eight feature films) in the years from 1999 to 2007. There are few movie directors who worked that steadily in those years for the big screen, and Van Patten was doing other work, too, as a director for hire (episodes of Deadwood, The Wire, and Sex and the City, among others). Any professional would say he did a very good job: his episodes were delivered on time, fitting their on-air slot; they maintained the several narratives lines of The Sopranos and kept up with its many characters; they had a tough, elegant, and ironic look, as applied to sex, violence, and the domestic interiors of this family, without venturing into what might be called personal expression. It was not the point of these episodes that the audience noticed individual style, directing, or a single personality (though Van Patten did share in an Emmy for another series, The Pacific). If there was an arresting or unusual episode, it usually came from a concept in the writing. There were other frequent directors for The Sopranos: John Patterson did thirteen episodes; John Coulter made twelve. There were other recognizable names (with credentials in the movie business) who directed: Steve Buscemi did four, and there were single episodes by Lee Tamahori (Mulholland Falls for the big screen), Peter Bogdanovich (The Last Picture Show), and Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas). David Chase directed two episodes: the pilot and the finale.

  Born in Mount Vernon, New York, in 1945 (and then raised in New Jersey), Chase was the man behind The Sopranos, after a career that had spent years on The Rockford Files and Northern Exposure, without making him known outside the television business. But by the time he came to The Sopranos, he was called its “creator,” a term that is generally too sweeping for the film industry. Moreover, Chase would say later that the series emerged from his own experiences growing up and was often rooted in his life—Tony’s mother, Livia (Nancy Marchand), was said to be based on Chase’s own mother. But his aim was to propose that a leader in organized crime might be a very ordinary man instead of an epic figure—thus at the start of the first series, Tony has decided to see a shrink (Lorraine Bracco) because he’s afraid of being dysfunctional. He’s depressed, a condition that never occurs to Jimmy Cagney in the 1930s or Michael Corleone in The Godfather.

  We think of The Sopranos now as a certain success, not just the winner of twenty-one Emmys or what David Remnick in The New Yorker would call “the richest achievement in the history of television,” but a show that did so much to establish cable television: the average audience went from over three million on the first series to as high as twelve million. Still, nothing is certain at the start.

  Chase had a deal with HBO to write and direct the pilot. But when he turned in the script, HBO hesitated: formed in 1972, the cable channel had developed slowly. Chase was worried about their commitment and looking to get some extra funding to turn that pilot into a movie for theaters. Only then did the channel decide to move ahead. Chase was an intense and untiring controller, and not the easiest leader of a team—but maybe he had his own anxieties about being dysfunctional, too. You can’t be a creator for six series without a symbiotic exchange between you and your chief character.

  Six series (and eighty-six episodes) sounds grand in hindsight, but it was never clear-cut at the time. Any TV series waits in trepidation for its first renewal; and every TV success is then under pressure to keep going after that because the revenue is so great, especially with the bonus of syndication and boxed DVDs. The Sopranos has been called a great modern novel (though it had more purchasers than any novel could dream of), but that doesn’t mean Chase was always confident about its dramatic arc or literary shape. There were slow stretches on-screen, resting periods, and delays in its production. You could miss a run of episodes without losing touch. And yet a key to the show was that millions of people tried to watch every episode, and this was before we had easy access to storing television shows and watching them on demand at our convenience. Just as Hollywood was giving up the ghost on narrative, David Chase had created a serial, and found an audience eager for it. It had participant suspense, that old asset of the movies. The Sopranos also indicated the new leverage of cable television, with language, sexuality, and violence that the movie business (and that dinosaur, network television) were fearful of matching. By today, HBO has nearly thirty million subscribers (more than the number of people who go to the movies in a week).

  I daresay Chase had fluctuating ideas about how to end his story, or whether any endi
ng would satisfy his wish to deal with an “ordinary” man. After eighty-six episodes, life gets heightened or stressed. So many television series get crazier as they dig deeper into themselves but respond to the pressure to be different. Trails were laid for several ways of closing, but when it came to it, Chase directed the finale himself with an enigmatic fadeaway (one of the most stylistically self-conscious moments in all the seasons) that left us uncertain. Death might be coming, or another cup of coffee: it is the vagary of life itself, even if The Sopranos never gave a hint of being documentary, and rarely looked like anything except a movie from the 1970s. Said Chase:

  My goal was never to create a show. Television…was never part of my life goal. I wanted to be a filmmaker. I wanted to make movies. I got hired to do a TV show. The money got into my head, and I kept snorting that money for a long time. I went from term deal to development deal to development deal. I wasn’t Aaron Spelling [a prolific TV producer—Charlie’s Angels, Dynasty, Starsky and Hutch, The Love Boat, and many others], but that didn’t matter. I didn’t want to be that. I never wanted to be somebody who had more than one show. I don’t know how people do that. I never wanted to have a series.

  How good was it? The answer hardly mattered if enough people had decided with David Remnick that it had vindicated and transformed television. I would say that Tony never became as commanding or as disturbing as Michael Corleone. But we should recall that the second part of The Godfather was itself an afterthought and an attempt to offset some of the reactions to the first film. (Both The Godfather and The Sopranos raised fears that anyone might think they represented all Italian Americans.) No question that David Chase was in charge—of writing, casting, and production of anything a controller noticed—but I don’t think I know anything more about him than that. He’s like that other Creator: he did an astonishing job, and did it quickly, and there it was, from “Let there be light” to De Niro’s matching mauve shirts and ties in Casino. But you don’t know the kind of person the creator was, and more or less he left the game for us to play with.

  As a team effort, The Sopranos was beyond dispute, and it reminded us that, throughout its history, television has worked fuller and more cost-conscious days than the movies, with standing crews as ever-present as Chase himself. By the end of the show, Chase was reportedly on a salary of $15 million a season. He has talked about making a movie—is that like Tony seeking a shrink? Equally, by 2011, HBO was generating $1 billion a year from the international market alone.

  In the same era, HBO has had many other series to proclaim: Oz and Sex and the City (which actually started before The Sopranos), The Wire, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Entourage, Deadwood, Six Feet Under, Big Love, Boardwalk Empire, and True Blood. To say nothing of a lively documentary enterprise and movies, many of which had a historical or biographical slant: I’ve mentioned Conspiracy already, but then there’s Introducing Dorothy Dandridge (with Halle Berry); Wit (directed by Mike Nichols and starring Emma Thompson as a cancer patient); John Adams, a seven-part miniseries with Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney (directed by Tom Hooper); Longford (another Hooper film, written by Peter Morgan), with Samantha Morton and Andy Serkis as the Moors murderers, Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, and Jim Broadbent as Lord Longford; Citizen Cohn, with James Woods as Roy Cohn; and Barbarians at the Gate, a pioneering account of modern business fraud, a trend that leads to Too Big to Fail (directed by Curtis Hanson), with William Hurt playing Hank Paulson.

  It is probable that if you are reading this book, you subscribe to HBO, and to other “premium” channels: Showtime has created Weeds, Dexter, and Homeland; AMC made Rubicon, though that was so dense and enigmatic it failed to be renewed. David Chase is not the only creator—David Milch originated Deadwood, cocreated NYPD Blue with Steven Bochco, and introduced Luck with Michael Mann; David Simon created Homicide: Life on the Street (that was NBC) and The Wire; Boardwalk Empire comes from Terence Winter, who wrote twenty episodes of The Sopranos; Alan Ball devised Six Feet Under and True Blood (he also wrote the movie American Beauty); Sex and the City was originated by Darren Star.

  Downton Abbey was created by Julian Fellowes (who scripted Altman’s Gosford Park). That show is an exception in that it played on PBS, but it reminds us how far the creative and business models for premium cable series are British. In fact, Downton Abbey feels like a BBC show, though actually it was made for Britain’s commercial television network. But the old tradition of British drama or plays that were really films and of the serialization of classic literature is vital to the HBO model and what PBS in America called “Masterpiece Theatre.” Another landmark was Brideshead Revisited (1981), 659 minutes in 11 episodes, adapted from Evelyn Waugh by John Mortimer, and directed by Charles Sturridge and Michael Lindsay-Hogg. (It, too, was made by a commercial channel, Granada.) Maybe the best of all the BBC movies was The Singing Detective (1986), written by Dennis Potter, the finest playwright for British television, directed by Jon Amiel, and with Michael Gambon as Philip Marlow, a hospital-imprisoned writer of private-eye fiction unable to escape memories of his past. I’m not sure there has ever been anything more searching or troubling on being caught up in the movies than this six-part drama.

  Now, it’s hard to conceive of Alistair Cooke introducing The Sopranos in a Masterpiece format, but it is a mark of cultural failure that PBS has originated so few important or dangerous series, let alone things that smack of the actual, dysfunctional America, such as The Sopranos, The Wire, or Big Love. (By contrast, The Singing Detective dwells with such hurt, such mixed feelings, on the influence America has exerted on the world in its dreams.)

  It is a tribute to America’s premier cable channels that they have made money, and terrific entertainment, from views of a country in growing trouble. (HBO’s most characteristic Everyman figure may be Larry David!) No wonder so many ambitious and creative filmmakers have given up on the condescending attitude toward television that prevailed in mainstream American filmmaking from the first days of the small screen until the 1990s.

  One of the most intriguing directorial debuts for a premier cable channel was the pilot episode of Boardwalk Empire, shown in September 2010 and directed by Martin Scorsese, who is also an executive producer on the series. That year, Scorsese was sixty-eight, yet he also opened a feature film, Shutter Island, and two documentaries, A Letter to Elia (on what Kazan had meant to Scorsese growing up) and Public Speaking (about Fran Lebowitz). Was this a busy year, or one in which the maestro might have assigned some projects to associates? A Letter to Elia was codirected with Kent Jones, but Scorsese’s appetite for film is not much drawn to delegation. Thus, in 2011, he completed and opened a documentary, George Harrison: Living in the Material World, and a 3-D feature film, Hugo, adapted from The Invention of Hugo Cabret, a novel in pictures by Brian Selznick (a first cousin, twice removed, of David O. Selznick). By the time the latter opened, in November 2011, Scorsese was in preproduction for Silence, a project he had been nursing for years, about Jesuit priests in seventeenth-century Japan. As he spoke about it, Silence seemed like a project along the austere lines of Kundun (1997) or The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), and a mark of the director’s early desire to be a priest. “It’s about the very essence of Christianity. It’s about who Jesus really is, in a sense. It’s based on a true story. Some priests went there in his name and tried to bring ‘salvation’ to the Japanese. At a certain point the Japanese turn on them, try to kill them, and the priests felt they had to leave.” But in case that spiritual material might seem to compromise his marketability, or prove too hard to make (even with Daniel Day-Lewis), Scorsese had other projects being developed, Sinatra, with Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead role, and The Wolf of Wall Street.

  Silence or Sinatra? It’s the imprint of a versatility or split personality that prevails in the American movie world two decades after Steven Spielberg did Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List at nearly the same time. It’s also a proof of Scorsese’s restless energy, his headlong way of speaking, the nervousn
ess of his authority, money problems, and his attempt to fulfill an old Hollywood goal, that of making high art and a crowd-pleaser at the same time. Along with his rapturous knowledge of film history, his meticulous facility with the medium, and his pitch-perfect imitation of a movie-mad kid, this is what has made Scorsese the cherished godfather and role model in modern American film. And Hugo is an unashamed celebration of being film-mad as well as a plea to save all the old movies, using the despondent figure of Georges Méliès at the close of his life as a central character. There was widespread relief among directors when Scorsese at last got an Oscar for directing and the Best Picture award for The Departed. He deserved so much more, even if The Departed was not his best work.

  The tumult or torment in Scorsese may be too interesting to settle for words like “genius” or “creator.” It is the striving and the endless tension in “Marty” that are most impressive, and that drive the violence in his work. This is not just the various ways of killing or abusing people, though no one can deny that compulsive habit in films from Goodfellas (1990) to Casino (1995) to The Departed (2006). I suggested, in talking about Raging Bull (1980), that Scorsese could not separate himself from fraternal rivalry and its hidden attractions. He is haunted by the life and death of gangsters, and endlessly drawn to filming killings. But this is not just shooting spectacular deaths, or needing them in his stories. It is as if filming and story are a pretext for fearful rhapsodies of violence—consider the repetition of De Niro catching fire at the close of Casino, and then the sumptuous brutality in the disposal of the Joe Pesci character and his brother in a hole in the desert.