Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film
Page 14
dir: Terrence Malick
(w/ Gene Hackman, Barry Brown
and Marlon Brando)
Hal Ashby and Terrence Malick were at the height of their powers when they each filmed these supposedly “unfilmable” novels.
Ashby refused to “contain” human hurricanes like Belushi and Pryor in his heat-haze adaptation of Dunces. Instead, he reportedly played them against each other, expanding the character of Burma Jones from the novel for Pryor to inhabit, and letting Belushi create his own interpretation of Ignatius, which was miraculous for how close it ended up being to John Kennedy Toole’s vision without Belushi’s ever reading the novel. Lily Tomlin, fresh off of The Late Show, is hilarious as Ignatius’s mother. And that’s a very young Frances McDormand as Myrna Minkoff. Sublime.
Malick’s four-and-a-half-hour Blood Meridian, partially financed by star Marlon Brando (he sold off his island), is at once the best Western, historical and horror movie ever made. Brando underwent sumo wrestler training and had his head, eyebrows and body completely waxed to play the massive, hairless, indestructible Judge Holden. The Comanche attack sequence is both beautiful and nearly unwatchable. Watch Barry Brown carefully during the final confrontation scene in Fort Griffin. He had himself hypnotized. Despite the on-screen tension, Hackman and Brando were fast friends on set. The meteor showers that open and close the film were real.
August 3 and 4
Stalingrad (1988)
dir: Sergio Leone
Opening with a close-up of the muzzle of a cannon and closing with a similar close-up of a crying newborn’s mouth, Leone’s Stalingrad is a blazing loop of war and rebirth. No one’s ever been able to spot Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach or Lee Van Cleef among the half a million background actors, but all three stars and the director insist they’re there.
August 5, 6 and 7
ORSON WELLES DOUBLE FEATURE!
Heart of Darkness (1942)
and
Batman: Riddle of the Ghoul (1944)
Welles starved himself down to a human skeleton to play Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. His jittery, no-sleep, diet-pills performance is worth the shadowy slog upriver with Joseph Cotten that makes up the first hour of Heart of Darkness. Welles steals the movie from the movie itself.
And who’d have guessed that Gary Cooper could pull off the roles of the Dark Knight Detective and Bruce Wayne? But somehow he slides perfectly into the tuxedo and the cowl, a tormented, urbane playboy who becomes a driven, taciturn bruiser by night. And leave it to Welles to populate his movie with six of Batman’s cast of villains: Lee Marvin as Two-Face, Edward G. Robinson as the Penguin, Ella Raines as Catwoman, Dwight Frye as the Riddler, Everett Sloane as the Scarecrow and, towering imperiously over the whole mad feast, Welles himself as Ra’s al Ghul. The Richard Widmark cameo, at the end, as the newly scarred Joker, leaping toward the screen from the smoking ruins of the chemical plant, still makes people scream. The costumes that longtime fans wear to midnight showings only add to the chiaroscuro carnival.
August 8 and 9
Weeping Blade, Laughing Bullet
dir: Seijun Suzuki
Whisper of Panic
dir: Allen Baron
Was there ever a loopier, more existential revenge plot than in Suzuki’s lost yakuza drama, set among the go-go clubs and gambling halls of modern-day Tokyo? Jo Shishido is a disgraced yakuza hit man who decides he can regain his honor if he steals a samurai blade from a museum and uses it to kill his beloved prostitute girlfriend, who, he believes, is the last living descendant of a corrupt dynasty of shoguns. If I tried to explain to you how a razor necktie, Spirit’s “I Got a Line on You” and an opium-addicted horse figure into the plot, your head would explode.
And then Whisper of Panic, Allen Baron’s follow-up to his 1961 film Blast of Silence. Peter Falk (whom he originally wanted for Blast) is “Blind” Billy Farnum, a war veteran hotel detective with a piece of shrapnel from a Korean hand grenade embedded in his skull. He talks to it. There are voices from behind the door of one of the suites. A girl in trouble. He kicks in the door and realizes it was the shrapnel, fooling him into becoming a white knight. Except the room isn’t empty. And it’s the last person “Blind” Billy wants to see.
August 10 and 11
CAROLE LOMBARD DOUBLE FEATURE!
Ride a Cockhorse
and
Emma
A plane crash took “the Profane Angel” off the planet when she was thirty-three. Here, in the infinite, she’s ageless and perfect. Perfectly insane in King Vidor’s adaptation of Raymond Kennedy’s Ride a Cockhorse, and perfectly charming (and dimwitted) in Michael Curtiz’s Emma.
August 12 and 13
KENNETH ANGER DOUBLE FEATURE!
On the Road
and
The Ticket That Exploded
(both starring James Dean and Sal Mineo)
We can only show these with Kenneth in attendance. Luckily, he’s one of the few living people allowed to cross over to this side, if only briefly. He’s bringing mescal and fireworks. And yes, we’ve set up the eight projectors needed to show The Ticket That Exploded.
August 14
GRINDHOUSE DOUBLE FEATURE!
Space Jockey
dir: Phil Tucker (1952)
Billy Jack vs. Blacula
dir: Melvin Van Peebles and Tom Laughlin
(1977)
Phil Tucker directed Robot Monster, which jostled shoulders with Plan Nine from Outer Space and The Beast of Yucca Flats as the worst movie ever made. But Phil Tucker, in an interview for the book The Golden Turkey Awards, hinted darkly at another, “lost” film he made, called Space Jockey. And he asserted that it was ten times worse than Robot Monster.
Go watch Robot Monster sometime. Then think about the director of that film bragging that he’s got something even worse. In the movie palace I’m building for you, Sherman, you’re going to be the first to see it.
And, I mean, Billy Jack vs. Blacula. That should have happened long before I ever thought of it here. Tom Laughlin barefoot-kicking the stake through the vampire pimp’s heart in the opening scene still gets applause.
August 15 and 16
Superman
dir: Sam Peckinpah
Doctor Strange
dir: Francis Ford Coppola
Yes, at one point Peckinpah was developing Superman, and Coppola briefly had the rights to Marvel Comics’ Doctor Strange. I want these movies to exist. They won’t. So here they are, in my head.
Steve McQueen is a revelation as the moody, determined, tragic Last Son of Krypton. Warren Oates is loathsome and magnetic as the Parasite. And fuck it, Gene Hackman is still Lex Luthor. Has to be. Ali MacGraw is miscast as Lois Lane, but if you wanted McQueen in the seventies . . .
Coppola’s Doctor Strange. I mean, where do I start? Three hours. Gordon Willis cinematography. A young Christopher Walken, prowling the streets of early-seventies Greenwich Village, fighting demons and the establishment. The hidden Avengers “cameos” are also fun to spot.
August 17 and 18
DISNEY DOUBLE FEATURE!
Half Magic
and
The Phantom Tollbooth
Classic, 2-D cel animation by the Nine Old Men. Edward Eager’s book Half Magic was so truly enchanting that it was the one time Walt ever let the Nine Old Men have carte blanche. What they came up with was so unprecedented, so gorgeous (and such a blockbuster), that when it came time to do The Phantom Tollbooth, Walt reportedly said, “I’ll see it when it premieres.” Again, his instinct didn’t fail him.
August 19, 20 and 21
JERRY LEWIS DOUBLE FEATURE!
The Day the Clown Cried
and
The Catcher in the Rye
I am proud and ashamed that the slang term “Oswalt’s briefcase” has become shorthand for revealing any for
bidden work to the public. Now that I’m older, I think what I did was wrong, that day in Jerry Lewis’s office. But the briefcase is opened, and it’s out there, and even though it isn’t good, The Day the Clown Cried always fills a theater. And I’m a snatch-and-grab thief, forever.
But Lewis’s true dream was to be Holden Caulfield, and watching the nervous, seventeen-year-old Lewis make his film debut (and subsequently pursue a dramatic acting career, only once venturing into comedy when he played opposite John Belushi in Noble Rot) is a wonder. Those eyes, those pain-filled eyes.
August 22 and 23
MICHAEL REEVES DOUBLE FEATURE!
The Wasp Factory
and
The Land of Laughs
Michael Reeves. Twenty-five years old when he died. Barbiturate overdose. Four brilliant films and then gone. Here’s where you get to see his intense, hilarious adaptation of Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory and his hilarious, intense, much-debated version of Jonathan Carroll’s The Land of Laughs.
August 24 and 25
RUSS MEYER DOUBLE FEATURE!
Jaws of Vixen
and
Mmmmmmmounds!
What happens when the breast-obsessed director has a dump truck full of money? I’m not going to spoil either of these with a description. But you get to find out—twice. And that’s Christy Hartburg—SuperLorna from Supervixens—as the Nude in the Tube. Testosterone bliss.
August 26, 27 and 28
HITCHCOCK DOUBLE FEATURE!
The Boy Who Followed Ripley
and
I Was Dora Suarez
Hitchcock at his most subtle (Ripley) and lurid (Suarez). Fascinating to watch back-to-back, since I Was Dora Suarez violates Hitchcock’s principle of making an audience wait for a shock. In The Boy Who Followed Ripley, the shock only comes after the final, tortured fade-out, when you fully realize what has happened. And in I Was Dora Suarez, the opening scene is all shock. And then we slide into inexorable, slow-motion dread until that last graphic scene with the rowing machine and the final judgment of the Nameless Detective—superbly played by Michael Caine.
August 29 and 30
BUSTER KEATON DOUBLE FEATURE!
Hassle Magnet
and
Masters of Atlantis
Hassle Magnet was Keaton’s glorious, roaring return to form after sobering up in the late sixties. It was also a sly love letter to the kung-fu films he secretly loved, hilariously taking the piss out of the concept of the “ballet of violence.” And his stone-faced tour de force in Masters of Atlantis won him a much-deserved Oscar, which he shared with costar Art Carney.
August 31 and September 1
SCORSESE DOUBLE FEATURE!
The Hawkline Monster (1974)
(starring Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel)
The Moviegoer (1978)
(starring John Cazale)
And now we’re at the end of the month. Scorsese’s poisoned love letter to the sixties, The Hawkline Monster is as darkly hilarious as Raging Bull, as well as an elegiac ode to the unrealized, childlike mysticism of the Summer of Love, turned sour and mirrored in De Niro and Keitel’s hit-men duo Cameron and Greer (stand-ins for every Nixonian dirty trickster who smirked behind mirrored sunglasses and went unpunished).
And The Moviegoer is my thank-you to you, Sherman. Cazale’s searching, knowing eyes, blinking from too much time staring at a flickering screen, finally realizing that what he’s searching for lies in the real world and outside of his books and films. You asked me to hand you a script after four years. That question sent me back out into the sunshine. Let’s see if I can bring back something to unspool in the dark.
* * *
I. “He died like an elephant,” said one of his friends.
II. And yes, I’m aware of Conrad’s decidedly unatheistic afterthought, in the very next sentence from this quote: “Or else decoyed.” It’s from The Shadow Line. You ought to read it. No need to see the Andrzej Wajda movie.
SECOND EPILOGUE
The Second-to-Last
Night Café
April 15, 2009
“We’re going to hold her up. Don’t look down.”
That’s the doctor in the delivery room. He’s just cut my daughter out of my wife’s womb. Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab” is playing softly on the sound system. My wife is smiling, drugged and blissful, humming along.
The doctor holds up my daughter. She takes a big gulp of hospital air, her ribs flaring against her pink-and-purple skin from the effort, and lets loose a squalling blast that hits me harder than any Sergio Leone pistol shot, Donald Sutherland pod-person scream or Steve McQueen tire squeal.
I entered this eight-sided, all-white delivery room dressed like a helmetless astronaut. I’m going to emerge a dad. I’m going to see many fewer movies. I still might not ever get to make one. But I came close enough to being consumed by them to know how to raise a human who’s drawn to the wide-angle world stronger than to any flickering movie temple.
We’ll see.
There’s one more Night Café after this one. But none of us return from that one.
We’ll see.
Also by Patton Oswalt
Patton Oswalt laces memoir with uproarious humor in this inventive account of the evolution of his worldview.
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Acknowledgments
I’ve been very lucky in my life in terms of people who are able to tolerate me. How I’ve ended up amid the group of creative, infuriating, hilarious, truly beautiful people I call friends and family is beyond my understanding and outside of logic.
My wife, Michelle McNamara—thank you for being a companion, a sly mom, a safe home, and for being a much better writer than I can dream of being. I aspire to your level of expertise with the English language. So far I’ve made it a fourth of the way there. That failure makes me a highly competent writer.
Alice, who is five years old as I write this—I hope there are still movie theaters in your future. If not, I’ll try to create the experience for you, or at least pass along the excitement and wonder.
My parents—Mom, for letting me watch the original King Kong on TV when I was three, and who had to explain to me that it wasn’t a book where I could turn the page away from the scary/fun parts; Dad, for Sunday afternoons watching The Great Escape and The Longest Yard and The Taking of Pelham 123, which is what dads were supposed to do in the seventies.
My brother, Matt, a sprocket-fiend-come-lately and vengefully. Someone’s going to let you point a camera at those writhing, fantastic screenplays you churn out. A mad billionaire, a wealthy cougar—I don’t care. I just want to see them.
Michael Torgan and Julia Marchese, still manning the furnace and patching the hull of the New Beverly. Thank you for sharing your memories of Sherman and making sure there are memories to come in the future.
Everyone I used to see movies with at the New Beverly—Ben Schwartz; Karen Kilgariff; Drew McQueeney; David Goyer; Harlan Ellison; Josh Olsen; Joe Wagner; my brother, Matt (Once Upon A Time in the West on mushrooms!); Tim Kirk; Edgar Wright; Brian Posehn; Gerry Duggan and Blaine Capatch. Thanks for the arguments, shared disbelief and joy, and shared boxes of Red Vines.
My agent, Daniel Greenburg, for wrestling this second memoir from me; Brant Rumble, for having the patience with all of my blown deadlines, and Aja Pollock, for copyediting it into coherence.
Michael Weldon and Danny Peary and everyone at The Onion A.V. Club and The Dissolve.
And, finally, to the freaks—the ones who make the films and the ones who devour them. I don’t know if I’ll ever become the former, but it won’t be for lack of being the latter.
CUT.
APPENDIX
Four Years of Fi
lms
1995
Saturday, May 20, 1995
Sunset Boulevard and Ace in the Hole
New Beverly Cinema
Tuesday, May 23, 1995
The Nutty Professor
New Beverly Cinema
Sunday, May 28, 1995
Muriel’s Wedding
Balboa Theater, San Francisco
Friday, June 2, 1995
Crimson Tide
Town Center 5, Encino
Saturday, June 3, 1995
Amateur
Sunset 5
Sunday, June 4, 1995
Die Hard with a Vengeance
Sherman Oaks Galleria
Wednesday, June 7, 1995
Touch of Evil
New Beverly Cinema
Thursday, June 8, 1995
Kiss of Death
New Beverly Cinema
Tuesday, June 13, 1995
Buster Keaton Shorts and Steamboat Bill, Jr.
New Beverly Cinema
Thursday, June 15, 1995
Little Odessa
Town Center 5, Encino
Saturday, June 17, 1995
Batman Forever
Sherman Oaks 2
Sunday, June 18, 1995
Bloodsucking Freaks (midnight show)
Sunset 5
Wednesday, June 21, 1995
Repulsion and Knife in the Water
New Beverly Cinema
Saturday, July 1, 1995
Apollo 13
Sherman Oaks 2
Tuesday, July 4, 1995
The Road Warrior
New Beverly Cinema