Film-Talk

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Tomas Alfredson, UK 2011

2012-02-06T06:19:00.000-08:00

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is an excellent spy-thriller. That is, if you're into spy-thrillers ...

Jokes aside, it is an outstanding film no doubt - dense, excellently paced, to say nothing of the actors who are all at the top of their game, without exception - but truth be told: as far as I'm concerned Tinker, Tailor falls under that category of films which don't do much for me, yet their brilliance is nevertheless obvious, even to me, and I can see why they are a cut above the rest (of similar such spy-thrillers).

If you are into spy-thrillers - unlike myself - then you may love this film, but be warned: it is the opposite of what you'd expect from your average, run-of-the-mill James Bond movie. That Alfredson has stripped the genre of all the glitz, the pretty girls, the ritzy locations and the gallons of dry martinis which have falsely sugar-coated the genre of the spy-thriller ever since Bond, James Bond first stepped out of his Aston Martin with a Chanel-clad Ursula Andres by his side, surely is part of Tinker, Tailor's brilliance. Alfredson's spies are a tired-looking, lonely, bunch of middle-aged, droopy shouldered, men wearing badly cut suits in various shades of grey and that murky, 1970s, brown. The only pretty girl in sight is an indeed stunningly pretty Russian spy who gets violently killed halfway into the film.

It seems obvious that Aldredson has given Martin Ritt's equally brilliant but equally elliptical, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold a good look for its mood, theme, and general atmosphere, are very reminiscent of Tinker, Tailor, and I don't think that's just because both are based on novels by John le Carre.

Having not seen the 1979 television version of Tinker, Tailor, I have no idea how the two compare. However, I do know that it probably helps if you've seen it - if only to make the plot-line and the goings-on that much clearer. I'm aware that like in most spy-thrillers, the viewer has to just accept some of the unfolding events as a fact. No questions asked. Trying to question or get to the bottom of this, that or the other element in the plot is bound to get you nowhere. At least, I didn't. I tried.

Nevertheless, that I did try, tells you that I liked the movie well enough to care.

Berlinale 2012 - Programme/ Competition/ Now Complete

2012-02-03T03:55:00.000-08:00

The programme for the International Competition is now complete, the Berlin Film Festival has announced.

Though due to the rescheduled date for the Academy Awards ceremony which has once again been brought forward, the programme does feature less US productions than usual. However, in my opinion that is a loss the Berlin film fest can live with. If anything, it's a gain, not because US films are so bad - no! - but because these films will eventually be released the world over, anyway, and therefore don't really need the support of a major film festival as a launching pad at all.

Let's face it, the main reason why Hollywood used to feature so prominently in the Berlinale's Competition was because of the Hollywood glamour these films added to a festival which otherwise has a dearth in star power - stars, that is, that are known the world over. Not that any film festival - let alone one like the Berlinale which for years has been known as a political festival, and one with a focus on Asian and eastern European cinema - necessarily needs star power or Hollywood glamour. But it's the sponsors that require it. Like everywhere else - money talks, and it's the sponsors providing much needed cold, hard cash, that are calling the shots. At least to a degree. For if French cosmetics giant L'Oreal agrees to shell out some dough they expect to be associated with the likes of Scarlett Johannson or, if unavailable, Paris Hilton (or perhaps not Paris Hilton ...), rather than some, in their eyes, C-List ding-dong from some eastern European country Paris Hilton wouldn't even be able to pinpoint on the map. But every time I see these so-called Hollywood stars schlepping across the red carpet in Berlin's - usually - freezing cold weather, answering the - usually - silly questions by the German media, for some Berlinale entry which - usually - had its US release weeks ago, I'm finding this act, put on for the sake of the sponsors, increasingly ludicrous. Let's face it - Berlin will never be Cannes. Temperatures below zero, the non-existent palm-trees and, of course, the relative absence of Hollywood stars, just can't compete with the splendours of La Croisette. It is my opinion - and it has been for some time - that Berlin would be well advised to distance itself from Cannes. In other words, rather than trying to imitate it, the way to go is to focus on its reputation as a political festival and get completely rid of the titbits of glamour there were, including that silly red carpet. Berlinale discoveries that fall under this category are the festival's strong suit and are generally among the best films to be found in the fest's official programme. Best case in point is last year's Nader and Sirin, which went on to garner awards across the globe.

This year, however, there's little the sponsors can do, anyway, as Hollywood films are just not available for reasons mentioned above. All this, I think, is to the Berlinale's benefit which, in addition to being blessed with the strongest jury in years, now also has a Competition programme to match. And while I can't say much regarding the quality of the films selected yet, at least the programme as a whole seems more consistent, if not to say more interesting, featuring, as it does, an impressive number of films of little known directors, thus doing exactly what a film festival is supposed to do: providing an international platform for new talent.

Find the Berlinale Competition programme HERE!

The Artist, Michel Hazanavicius, France, Belgium 2011

2012-01-31T08:12:00.000-08:00

Just a few weeks ago I wrote elsewhere on this blog that I couldn't think of any film off hand that I'd been as much looking forward to seeing as The Artist! First of all, there's all the hype surrounding this film, not to mention the slew of awards and nominations The Artist has received. Next, and more importantly, there's the film's sujet, revolving as it does around a crucial moment in American film history, and one which continues to preoccupy and fascinate me - Hollywood at the transition from silent film to talkies.

Now, having just seen The Artist at long last, I am happy to report that my expectations were met, although to be honest, I'm not even sure I'm able to say what these expectations were or consisted of ... a lesson in film history? (which it isn't), a love story without sound? (which it isn't, either, strictly speaking), a lamento about all that was lost when the pictures started talking (which it is isn't, either, but that's how I felt when leaving the cinema).

Summed up in one of the most famous lines from Hollywood history, the effect The Artist has on the viewer is best described as "they didn't need words - they had faces!". Norma, you were absolutely right, is what I felt like shouting right into the crowd behind me as I was watching the film.

That's how riveted I was!

True, the film's narrative can be told in one or two sentences and as already mentioned, has hardly anything new to say about the subject of silent film or its transition to sound. However, it's not necessarily the story that counts (most of which have been told already, anyway, and many of them several times over) - more often than not it is a case of how the story is told. And this precisely is what makes The Artist such a pleasure to watch. It's the effortless and well-nigh imperceptible switch of perspectives in the film's opening sequence; it's the expert use of music - and sound! - throughout the film; it's how Hazanavicius uses his knowledge of Hollywood history without ever coming across as patronising; and it's of course the actors, most notably Jean Dujardin, who epitomises a 1920s movie star down to the last detail, including the fact that he's foreign-born (in the film as well as of course, in real life) as were Valentino and Emil Jannings, which also, in the film's very last scene, aptly explains why Dujardin's character disappeared from the screen when silent film went out.

And yes, the film's not entirely free of a certain nostalgia but it never drifts into the maudlin or the sentimental. If anything, it's more an homage to silent film than it is a nostalgic look back, let alone a lamento.

What does come as a real surprise to me, though, is the success The Artist enjoys, not just in the US and in France, but the world over. For a silent movie to be this popular in times like these, obsessed with ever new technical inventions and innovations, is rather unusual, to put it mildly.

But then again, maybe it isn't so unusual, after all. For looking more closely at recent US releases what strikes me is, that quite a few of them are indeed looking back - nostalgically or otherwise (Hugo, War Horse, etc.) - as if yearning for a rather more innocent time when life seemed easier, less riddled by the woes, problems, disasters and social inequalities which now hold us firmly in their grip and which we can't seem to find any appropriate answers for.

Seen this way, the success of The Artist may be less surprising, ending as it does, at the cusp of the Great Depression.

Drive, Nicolas Winding Refn, US 2011

2012-01-29T09:06:00.000-08:00

Told in a nutshell, Drive is the story of a heist-gone-awry. As such, it is not revolutionary, but what makes it so, is the way it is told.

Starring Ryan Gosling, who's well on his way to become the Next-Big-Thing in American Cinema, Drive is very much his film as he's seen in literally every single take. Gosling plays The Driver, a car-mechanic-cum-stuntman-cum-getaway-driver, with remarkable restraint, obviously taking his cue from a string of similar anti-heroes in Hollywood Cinema's - Clint Eastwood, for one - to the effect that it makes the tension that's percolating beneath the façade all the more palpable. Taciturn and with a facial expression which remains unchanged throughout the film, The Driver's façade crumbles from time to time, throwing up his other side - his violent rage, his pent-up anger - although, similar to Eastwood or Hayden, this violent side never turns against the underdog or the disadvantaged; The Driver - whose story we never get to know but can easily imagine by way of Gosling's acting - knows who's to be trusted and yet, like another one of his inspirations - Jake Gittes in Polanski's Chinatown - he gets it fatally wrong in the crucial moment.

And yet, we don't even get to know The Driver's name which is one of the film's many gimmicks - for lack of a better word - as well as one of the film's many references to Hollywood Cinema, in this case Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca, in which the heroine's name also is never revealed throughout the entire film. But this is not the only bow to Hitchcock in Refn's film, there are a number of others and you can clearly tell that Nicolas Winding Refn knows his Hollywood history and what's more - loves it! Besides Hitchock, David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino are also quoted - if ever so subtly - Drive betraying the influence these directors have had on Refn.

Having been aware that Refn was awarded the Palme d'Or for Best Director at last year's Cannes Film Festival, my expectations were rather high, although I wisely refrained from reading any reviews. What makes Drive what it is and the reason why it deserves to be included in the cannon of such brilliant heist-gone-wrong classics such as The Killing, Asphalt Jungle or Reservoir Dogs, are its deliberate slow pace, its cast (notably Gosling and Carey Mulligan, but also Albert Brooks) and, of course, the noir-ish cinematography, underscored by the fact that much of the action in Drive takes place at night though, I should add, similar to the cornfield scene in Hitchcock's North By Northwest, the most suspenseful moment in Refn's film takes place in broad daylight.

My only criticism with the film concerns its rather convoluted plot, which turns ever more dense and inscrutable towards the end. But then again, the same could be said of some of the films mentioned above for who can claim to have fully grasped each and every detail of Reservoir Dogs, to say nothing of film noir classics like The Big Sleep ... ?

Berlinale 2012 - Jury/ International Competition

2012-01-26T00:37:00.000-08:00

British film maker Mike Leigh will be head of the international jury of the upcoming Berlin Film Festival. He is joined by French actress Charlotte Gainsbourg, Iranian film maker Asghar Farhadi, French film maker Francois Ozon, Algerian writer Boualem Sansal, German actress Barbara Sukowa, Dutch photographer and film maker Anton Corbijn, and American actor Jake Gyllanhaal.

Mike Leigh

Barbara Sukowa

Boualem Sansal

Charlotte Gainsbourg

Francois Ozon

Jake Gyllenhaal

Anton Corbijn

Asghar Farhadi

It is, in my opinion, the hottest jury in years with big names throughout - big in the sense of both each jury member's fame and popularity as well as their achievements and the quality of their work.

The first-rate jury is matched by a Competition programme which, though not yet complete, sounds very promising consisting as it does almost solely of world premières, thus giving Cannes a run for its money.

It'll be posted here as soon as it's been announced.

Theo Angelopoulos, 1935 - 2012

2012-01-25T01:21:00.000-08:00

Last night, the Greek film director Theo Angelopoulos succumbed to injuries resulting from a car accident which occurred yesterday evening on the outskirts Athenes, where Angelopoulos had been working on location of his new film, The Other Sea.

Angelopoulos was the recipient of many awards, including the Palme d'or and the Golden Lion. Though not very prolific, he was regarded as one of Europe's - if not the world's - most uncompromising film makers.

He was 76 years old.

Oscar Nominations 2012

2012-01-24T06:34:00.000-08:00

Best Picture:

The Artist
Thomas Langmann, Producer
The Descendants
Jim Burke, Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor, Producers
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
Scott Rudin, Producer
The Help
Brunson Green, Chris Columbus and Michael Barnathan, Producers
Hugo
Graham King and Martin Scorsese, Producers
Midnight in Paris
Letty Aronson and Stephen Tenenbaum, Producers
Moneyball
Michael De Luca, Rachael Horovitz and Brad Pitt, Producers
The Tree of Life
Nominees to be determined
War Horse
Steven Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy, Producers

Actress In a Leading Role:

Glenn Close, Albert Nobbs
Viola Davis, The Help
Rooney Mara, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Meryl Streep, The Iron Lady
Michelle Williams, My Week With Marilyn

Actor In a Leading Role:

Demián Bichir, A Better Life
George Clooney, The Descendants
Jean Dujardin, The Artist
Gary Oldman, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Brad Pitt, Moneyball

Actor In a Supporting Role:

Kenneth Branagh, My Week With Marilyn
Jonah Hill, Moneyball
Nick Nolte, Warrior
Christopher Plummer, Beginners
Max von Sydow, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

Actress In a Supporting Role:

Bérénice Bejo, The Artist
Jessica Chastain, The Help
Melissa McCarthy, Bridesmaids
Janet McTeer, Albert Nobbs
Octavia Spencer, The Help

Cinematography:

The Artist, Guillaume Schiffman
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Jeff Cronenweth
Hugo, Robert Richardson
The Tree of Life, Emmanuel Lubezki
War Horse, Janusz Kaminski

Art Direction:

The Artist, Laurence Bennett (Production Design); Robert Gould (Set Decoration)
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2,
Stuart Craig (Production Design); Stephenie McMillan (Set Decoration)
Hugo, Dante Ferretti (Production Design); Francesca Lo Schiavo (Set Decoration)
War Horse, Rick Carter (Production Design); Lee Sandales (Set Decoration)

Costume Design:

Anonymous, Lisy Christl
The Artist, Mark Bridges
Hugo, Sandy Powell
Jane Eyre, Michael O'Connor

Directing:

The Artist, Michel Hazanavicius
The Descendants, Alexander Payne
Hugo, Martin Scorsese
Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen
The Tree of Life, Terrence Malick

Documentary Feature

Hell and Back Again, Danfung Dennis and Mike Lerner
If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front, Marshall Curry and Sam Cullman
Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory, Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky
Pina, Wim Wenders and Gian-Piero Ringel
Undefeated, TJ Martin, Dan Lindsay and Richard Middlemas

Film Editing:

The Artist, Anne-Sophie Bion and Michel Hazanavicius
The Descendants, Kevin Tent
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall
Hugo, Thelma Schoonmaker
Moneyball, Christopher Tellefsen

Foreign Language Film:

Belgium, Bullhead, Michael R. Roskam, director
Canada, Monsieur Lazhar, Philippe Falardeau, director
Iran, A Separation, Asghar Farhadi, director
Israel, Footnote, Joseph Cedar, director
Poland, In Darkness, Agnieszka Holland, director

Music (Original Score):

The Adventures of Tintin, John Williams
The Artist, Ludovic Bource
Hugo, Howard Shore
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Alberto Iglesias
War Horse, John Williams

Kriegerin (Combat Girls), David Wnendt, Germany 2011

2012-01-20T11:29:00.000-08:00

Kriegerin, the first feature length film of Konrad-Wolf Film school graduate David Wnendt, is about a young woman who's an active member of Germany's neo-Nazi movement.

As such, Wnendt's film is very timely for the murders on nine immigrants and a police woman by a neo-Nazi cell are still dominating the news across Germany. As more and more facts about the murderous trio are emerging, both the police and homeland security as well as Germany's secret service have come under fire for their failure to track this cell down earlier. Unbelievably, this group, which called itself National Socialist Underground, went undetected for more than ten years, successfully escaping the radar screen of every official institution set up by the German government in order to protect its citizens - all of them. Needless to say, this threw up a lot of questions as it once more challenged this country's handling of its past and its fascist remnants.

To be sure, a casual visitor to Germany is not very likely to come across any neo-Nazis - they're too small in numbers, largely operating in Germany's thinly populated and economically deprived east. Similarly, unlike in other European countries, the extreme right is not represented in the German parliament. But this is precisely why many German politicians shrugged the neo-Nazi movement off as marginal and never imagined this problem to be as dramatic as it turned out to be. This misjudgement by Germany's politicians turned out to be fatal. For all although 10, 000 neo-Nazis may seem like a - relatively - small number in relation to a population of 82 million, they're of course still 10, 000 too many. Adding insult to injury is the fact that Germany's homeland security is believed to have turned a blind eye, if not to the actual murders but to the time when this neo-Nazi group was yet in its infancy. The point is, if official institutions such as the police or homeland security had been more alert the murders could probably have been prevented - so some believe. However, as the investigation is still ongoing, it remains to be seen to what extent the police, homeland security and the secret service are, in fact, to blame.

Poster for the US release of Kriegerin

So much for the background and debate surrounding the release of Kriegerin. Little did David Wnendt know, of course, when setting out to make a film about women in Germany's neo-Nazi movement, that its release would come on the heels of the revelation regarding the murders of this so-called National Socialist Underground. Had Wnendt known, I'm sure he would have made a different film. Don't get me wrong - Kriegerin is an excellent film with a topic that's long overdue as it's been more or less fully absent from German mainstream cinema. Wnendt deserves credit for the fact alone that he addresses a topic which is as unpopular in Germany as it sits uneasy with the German public who'd like nothing more than to sweep the neo-Nazi issue along with the shadow of its Nazi past - still looming large - under the carpet. But not because they're in denial about it, but rather out of a desire for normality, for being able to pretend that Germany was a country like any other. This may explain why so few German film makers have tackled this issue over the past two decades - even though the German media was full of stories regarding the rising neo-Nazi movement particularly in the east. When some years back, the British film director Shame Maedows, made a film about the neo-Nazi movement as it was in the early 1980s in the UK (This Is England, Shane Meadows, UK 2006), I remember thinking that it would stand Germany's film makers in good stead to follow Meadows' example and come up with something similar.

But no such luck.

Alina Levshin, who (brilliantly!) plays the lead in Kriegerin is a German actress of Ukranian descent. Considering that an estimated 25% of Germany's population are of non-German descent, actors and film workers with an immigrant background are under-represented in the German media, film included.

Wnendt's film, as commendable as it is, does not offer any solutions, nor are his attempts at explaining why so many, especially in Germany's east, seek refuge in neo-Nazi ideology conclusive. Those he suggests are insufficient inasmuch as Marisa (Alina Levshin), the main character of Kriegerin, is drawn into the neo-Nazi maelstrom for lack of any viable alternative and because of her grandfather who, it is suggested, was a Nazi and passed his poisonous thoughts on to his granddaughter. However, it is my conviction that the day-to-day reality is at least as much to blame since, albeit subtle, racism has long found its way into the mainstream. Just consider the popularity Thilo Sarrazin's book has enjoyed in Germany upon its release, subsequently alienating Germany's immigrant communities by also provoking outcries from the left-wing media. Furthermore, look at the - relative - absence of news anchors with an immigrant background from German television, or the increasingly tiresome debate in the German - as well as international - media whether Muslim women should be allowed to wear a headscarf, and so on. All this, I would argue, is used by neo-Nazis as a justification for their thinking, their acts, believing, as they do, that they, finally, do exactly what the public at large would want to do but hasn't got the guts to. No, Kriegerin ain't the adequate response to the ever more horrific revelations that are emerging by and by of the neo-Nazi cell. But as the extent of the neo-Nazi movement was unknown even to David Wnendt, who allegedly did quite a bit of research prior to writing the script, that also could not have been his intention.

That leaves me hoping, that Germany's film makers will rise to the occasion, wake up to their responsibility - they are, after all, largely using government funding for their films! - and not only make films that tackle this issue in their future films but also ensure that film workers and actors with an immigrant background will receive more opportunities to make their voices heard and, most of all, a much larger presence in German films.

Carnage, Roman Polanski, France, Germany, Spain, Poland 2011

2012-01-18T08:08:00.000-08:00

A first-rate, award winning play, a highly talented, seasoned director, and a stellar cast - there's little room for anything to go wrong, is there? And nothing did. Practically. Based on Yasmin Reza's play, God of Carnage, Roman Polanski's latest offering is a sort-of updated version of Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf. Which, to be clear, is not to imply that Reza borrowed from Albee's iconic play. If anything, she took her cue from it, got inspired by it, in order to create something that is entirely her own but which, similar to Albee, also comes very much to live through Reza's relentless, razor-sharp, observations of the debilitatingly political correct times we live in.

However, my one issue with Polanski's film is that it ends rather abruptly ... Since I'm unfamiliar with the original play, I'm unable to say, of course, if this is how Reza intended it. Don't get me wrong - I'm usually all for open endings and for films that tell their story succinctly. Nevertheless, here goes one film which I'd have wished to be a little longer and to have some sort of a closure rather than just stopping smack in the middle, depriving the audience of the last act (e.g the brawl which is about to take place ... or so it seems). But, you may argue, that is exactly why it ends where it does.

Carnage, opening scene

One of the best things about Reza's play is her achievement to well-nigh unnoticeably shift the spectator's sympathies and empathies from one character to another - and back again. Identification is thus tricky if not impossible, for every character is in almost equal parts as likeable as they are dislikeable. I also take my hat off to each and every one of Polanski's cast, for they manage to own up to the play, keeping our sympathies in murky waters, and just when you thought you found the one person in this bizarre, yet very real, bunch of neurotics that offers identification, he - or she - does or says something which renders them completely dislikeable.

Carnage premiered to rave reviews at last year's Venice film fest. All the more astounding that it is strangely and inexplicably absent from the list of Golden Globes nominations and other similar such awards ... if nothing else, at least Jodie Foster as well as Kate Winslet should have received a best acting nod. They, even more so than than John C. Reilly and Christoph Waltz, are especially outstanding in their very own definition and creation of women-on-the-verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown. Yet they didn't ... can it be that America's 30-year grudge held against Polanski should have something to do with it ...? I hope not! It's time for bygones to be let bygones!

Something else that deserves pointing out are the wardrobe and the set design for Polanski managed to bring two dinosaurs on board who are at least as seasoned and top-notch as he himself along with his cast, are: costume designer Milena Canonero and set designer Dean Tavoularis. Canonero, who, for instance, worked with Kubrick on Barry Lyndon, is a woman of impeccable, flawless, taste. Like every talented costume designer - though there are so few - she's an expert in highlighting character traits through costume, which is precisely what she does in Carnage (e.g. black power suits for Waltz's cynical attorney and Winslet's investment broker and softer colours for Foster's would-be writer and Reilly's peddler of household goods).

Dean Tavoularis' set for Carnage looks like straight out of a Woody Allen film, his films usually being set in the exact same New York, upper middle-class surroundings, which form the background of Carnage. Tavoularis' achievement to make Foster's and Reilly's apartment look like your quintessential Brooklyn Heights digs is all the more remarkable as Carnage was, of course, shot entirely on a sound stage outside Paris as to this day Polanski is still unable to enter the US without risking to be arrested upon arrival.

Golden Globes 2012 - Full List Of All Winners

2012-01-16T03:31:00.000-08:00

TV Series, Drama

American Horror Story
Boardwalk Empire
Boss
Game of Thrones
Homeland

Actor In A TV Series, Drama

Steve Buscemi, Boardwalk Empire
Bryan Cranston, Breaking Bad
Kelsey Grammar, Boss
Jeremy Irons, The Borgias
Damian Lewis, Homeland

Actress In A TV Series, Drama

Claire Danes, Homeland
Mireille Enos, The Killing
Julianna Margulies, The Good Wife
Madeleine Stowe, Revenge
Callie Thorne, Necessary Roughness

TV Series, Comedy

New Girl
Enlightened
Episodes
Glee
Modern Family

Actor In A TV Series, Comedy

Alec Baldwin, 30 Rock
David Duchovny, Californication
Johnny Galecki, The Big Bang Theory
Thomas Jane, Hung
Matt LeBlanc, Episodes

Actress In A TV Series, Comedy

Tina Fey, 30 Rock
Amy Poehler, Parks and Recreation
Laura Dern, Enlightened
Zooey Deschanel, New Girl
Laura Linney, The Big C

Best Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for TV
Cinema Verite
Downton Abbey
The Hour
Mildred Pierce
Too Big to Fail

Best Performance by an Actor in a Mini-Series or a Motion Picture Made for TV

Hugh Bonneville, Downton Abbey
Idris Elba, Luther
William Hurt, Too Big to Fail
Bill Nighy, Page Eight
Dominic West, The Hour

Best Performance by an Actress in a Mini-Series or a Motion Picture Made for TV
Romola Garai, The Hour
Diane Lane, Cinema Verite
Elizabeth McGovern, Downton Abbey
Emily Watson, Appropriate Adult
Kate Winslet, Mildred Pierce

Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Series, Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for TV

Peter Dinklage, Game of Thrones
Paul Giamatti, Too Big to Fail
Guy Pearce, Mildred Pierce
Tim Robbins, Cinema Verite
Eric Stonestreet, Modern Family

Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Series, Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for TV

Jessica Lange, American Horror Story
Kelly Macdonald, Boardwalk Empire
Maggie Smith, Downton Abbey
Sofía Vergara, Modern Family
Evan Rachel Wood, Mildred Pierce

Motion Picture, Drama

The Descendants
The Help
Hugo
The Ides Of March
Moneyball
Warhorse

Actor In A Motion Picture, Drama

George Clooney, The Descendants
Leonardo DiCaprio, J. Edgar
Michael Fassbender, Shame
Ryan Gosling, The Ides Of March
Brad Pitt, Moneyball

Actress In A Motion Picture, Drama

Viola Davis, The Help
Meryl Streep, The Iron Lady
Tilda Swinton, We Need To Talk About Kevin
Rooney Mara, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Glenn Close, Albert Nobbs

Motion Picture, Comedy

50/50
The Artist
Bridesmaids
Midnight In Paris
My Week With Marilyn

Actor In A Motion Picture, Comedy

Jean Dujardin, The Artist
Brendan Gleeson, The Guard
Owen Wilson, Midnight In Paris
Joseph Gordon-Levitt, 50/50
Ryan Gosling, Crazy, Stupid, Love

Actress In A Motion Picture, Comedy

Michelle Williams, My Week With Marilyn
Jodie Foster, Carnage
Kristen Wiig, Bridesmaids
Charlize Theron, Young Adult
Kate Winslet, Carnage

Supporting Actor In A Motion Picture

Albert Brooks, Drive
Christopher Plummer, Beginners
Kenneth Branagh, My Week With Marilyn
Jonah Hill, Moneyball
Viggo Mortensen, A Dangerous Method

Supporting Actress In A Motion Picture

Berenice Bejo, The Artist
Octavia Spencer, The Help
Jessica Chastain, The Help
Janet McTeer, Albert Nobbs
Shailene Woodley, The Descendants

Best Director

Martin Scorcese, Hugo
George Clooney, The Ides of March
Michel Hazanvicius, The Artist
Alexander Payne, The Descendants
Woody Allen, Midnight In Paris

The Artist, Michael Hazanavicius, France, Belgium 2011

2012-01-07T13:15:00.000-08:00

There are few films I've awaited with similar anticipation: not only does The Artist go completely against the grain - it is, after all, a silent movie - it also promises to be visually stunning. Moreover, it revolves around a subject which is very dear to me: Hollywood history. Told in a nutshell, The Artist is about the advent of the talkies which subsequently led to the demise of some actors while it led to the rise of others.

Being about Hollywood history and the infancy of the studio era, The Artist also emulates the narrative of classic Hollywood films and consequently has a love story at its centre: that of an actress whose career takes off with the arrival of the talking while that of her love interest, a formerly famous actor, starts to decline. I can only guess, of course, but something tells me that Hazanavicius took his cue from the real-life love-affair of Greta Garbo's and John Gilbert whose career went downhill while Garbo's - having managed to make a smooth transition into sound - continued to rise.

With my expectations being sky-high, it remains to be seen if The Artist manages to live up to them.

Opening dates for The Artist across Europe:

Israel: January 12, 2012
Germany: January 26, 2012
Turkey: January 27, 2010
Portugal: February 2, 2012
Denmark: February 9, 2012
Sweden: February 10, 2012
Russia: February 16, 2012
Norway: February 24, 2012

The Artist was released in the UK on December 30, 2011 and - on a limited release - in the US on November 23, 2011.

Meryl Streep To Receive Honorary Golden Bear At The Berlin Film Festival

2012-01-04T02:36:00.000-08:00

The Berlin Film Festival announced that it will bestow an honorary Golden Bear to Meryl Streep. Streep is to receive the award on February 14 at the Berlinale Palace.

Her latest film, The Iron Lady (Phyllida Lloyd, UK 2011), is slated to screen out of competition at this year's film-fest.

Additionally, the following five Meryl Streep films will be shown at select Berlinale theatres across Berlin to commemorate her honorary Golden Bear:

Kramer vs. Kramer (Robert Benton, USA 1979) is the film that put her on the map and the one for which she received her first (of two) Academy Awards. Though only starring in a supporting role, Streep gives a strong performance as the troubled Joanna, a wife and mother who decides to desert her husband and son. Deemed maudlin and mainstream at the time, watching the film today the decision taken by Streep's character seems actually revolutionary. It certainly is a part that's unthinkable to come out of mainstream Hollywood such as it is today.

Sophie's Choice (Alan J. Pakula, USA 1982) was one of the first big Hollywood films to address the topic of the Holocaust. It followed Streep's breakthrough in the US mini series, Holocaust, which is credited with raising the awareness of the mass murder of Jews during WWII, not only in the US but internationally. It wasn't until Holocaust was shown on television across West-Germany that films dealing with the Holocaust slowly started to emerge in that country.

Out Of Africa (Sydney Pollack, USA 1985). It was Streep's biggest hit to date and a huge success in West-Germany. It is also one her most memorable performances, earning her her fifth Academy Award nomination, though in the end Streep lost out to Geraldine Page. On the downside, Out Of Africa is partly responsible for the fact that following her, albeit captivating, performance of the ill-fated Danish writer Karen Blixen, Streep was frequently typecast in tragic roles, belying her extraordinary comic talent and wit.

The Bridges Of Madison County (Clint Eastwood, USA 1995) was the culmination of Streep's parts as the woman struck by tragedy. Though it undoubtedly is once again a very commendable performance by her, had it been up to me, I would have selected Death Becomes Her (Robert Zemeckis, USA 1992), a much underrated film and one which brilliantly showcases Streep's unique talent for camp.

A Prairie Home Companion (Robert Altman, USA 2005), aptly shows Streep's other talent as a singer, though again, to show that particular talent of hers I would have rather selected Silkwood (Mike Nichols, USA 1983), which has, in its end credits, a beautiful rendition of Amazing Grace, sung a capella by Streep. A Prairie Home Companion was Altman's last film. It had its world premiere at that year's Berlin Film Festival, with Streep in attendance.

Lastly, the Berlinale will screen Streep's latest, The Iron Lady (Phyllida Lloyd, UK 2011) which, it is my firm belief, will at long last earn her her third Academy Award:

Melancholia, Lars von Trier, Denmark, France, Germany, Sweden 2011

2011-10-12T02:24:00.000-07:00

The above image may be a still from Lars von Trier's film, but Kirsten Dunst's facial expression approximately mirrors mine while watching it. Put differently, half the time I was fighting severe attacks of sleepiness, and the other half I was racked with the question as to why anyone would shoot such a pointless film and worse, why anyone would invest their own good money into such a venture. This being a European offering and thus largely financed through subidies, the thought that millions of tax-payers' money were spent on this - excuse my French - latter-day masturbation effort is enough to get my back up any time. Especially at a time when half of Europe appears to be on the brink of bankruptcy.

Kirsten Dunst's above facial expression and the alleged topic of the film notwithstanding, Melancholia leaves you not so much depressed as angry - angry at having wasted nearly three hours of your time (to say nothing of the 10 quid spent on the ticket!) sitting through a film which is in dire need of a plot and as a result has nothing whatsoever to say, let alone offering some redemption.

To make matters worse, besides the opening sequence - which, admittedly, is visually stunning - one of the film's biggest disappointments are that it totally lacks von Trier's usual visual artistry. All of it seems as uninspired as the film does as a whole. And though I could live with a film that's visually uninspiring or visually conventional, the least one could expect of any film, is a hint of a plotline which, alas, is wholly absent!

Therefore, there are countless more fruitful ways to kill three hours of your time than sitting through a film that is as unnecessary as it is boring and pretentious.

Blast From The Past: The Go-Between, Joseph Losey, UK 1971

2011-10-02T02:19:00.000-07:00

"The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there".

Thus begins L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between, which was first published in 1953 by Hamish Hamilton, setting the tone for the rest of the novel. The tone, to be sure, is one of nostalgia, though nostalgia in the best of senses for it is to his credit that Hartley refrains from the trait that seems to be inherent to nostalgia: glorifying the past. Glorifying the past is exactly what Hartley does not do. Rather similar to Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, the memory of The Go-Between's main character, Leo, is also being unlocked by a particular incident, in this case it is discovery of an old collar box in which he comes across a diary, written some fifty years earlier, in the summer of 1900, the time when the novel's events unfold.

In its essence, The Go-Between is a critical observation of the British class system such as it was at the dawn of the Victorian age. Hartley's novel is much more than that, however, for it is also a coming-of-age story; a story about the loss of innocence and awakening sexuality.

Coming from a lower middle-class background, Leo receives an invitation to spend the summer at the elegant mansion of his friend Marcus. Leo's encounter with Marcus' beautiful sister, Marian, triggers his sexual awakening, though it must be mentioned that Hartley knows better than to lose himself in tedious analysis and explanations, leaving it up to the reader to draw their own conclusions.

The adult Leo travels back in time, reminiscing on the events that would come to shape his life.

Taking advantage of Leo's growing obsession with her, Marian uses Leo as a go-between to take messages between her and her lover, Ted Burgess, a farmer who lives in an outhouse on the grounds. That Leo is putty in Marian's hands is considerably aided by the fact that Leo's background is decidedly middle-class and that he's far less sophisticated and worldly than, perhaps, his upper-class equivalent would be.

Unaware of what really goes on between Marian and Ted, it nevertheless begins to dawn on Leo that it is something untoward, particularly as he finds out that Marian is supposed to become engaged to the wealthy Viscount Trimingham. Just like mercury's rising on the thermometer as the weather gets hotter and hotter, so Leo's duties as mercury also become ever more frequent, urgent, and dangerous.

Things eventually come to their tragic head, with - perhaps predictably - Leo and Ted as their primary victims as the members of the upper class use the subordinate status of both to mend their chipped facade in order to keep up appearances.

Hartley's book is nothing short of a masterpiece. It is elegiac, nostalgic without ever falling into the trap of glorification. It is a reminiscence, a reflection, and full of symbolism, written in beautiful, elegant English that aptly captures the stimmung at the turn of the century.

Julie Christie as Marian in Losey's The Go-Between (UK 1970)

Later turned into a film, The Go-Between was released in the US well-nigh 30 years ago, in November 1971. It was to be one of Losey's best films and, perhaps, one of the best films ever to come out of the UK - and that is saying a lot. Losey's adaptation of Hartley's novel can hardly be improved upon. Though two entirely different entities, I myself can't help thinking of the film when reading the book. The film's images have burnt themselves into my memory since the visual language, the imagery, Losey chose for his adaptation are quite simply flawless for he captured the spirit and tone of Hartley's novel to perfection.

Alan Bates as Ted Burgess, Dominic Guard as Leo

Similarly the casting. In hindsight it seems of course inconceivable that Losey should have picked anyone but Julie Christie and Alan Bates for the leading roles. Still, there were plenty of other actresses and actors about whom Losey may have chosen over Christie and Bates. Yet, both are the epitome of their respective characters. Christie's sheer beauty, her ability to convey the subtlest hints of arrogance and condescension all fit Marian to a 't'. The same goes for Alan Bates who exudes a masculine, carnal, sexuality which makes Marian's longing and desire for him more than understandable.

While Gerry Fisher's cinematography may be considered conventional, the images, frames, and colours nevertheless match Leo's nostalgic reminiscence something which is highlighted by Michel Legrand's score. Interestingly, a year later Legrand would write the score to Summer of 42, another film that revolves around the remembrance of a male adult whose mind travels back to his childhood.

And last but not least it must be mentioned that the screenplay to The Go-Between was written by none other than the long-time Losey collaborator and future Nobel Prize laureate Harold Pinter. Pinter came up with a very clever device to underscore the relevance events in a person's childhood have for their future and to demonstrate the bearing our past has on the rest of our lives.

The Go-Between deservedly won the Palme d'Or at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival. In the BFI list of the Best British Films of all-time it currently ranges at Nr. 53 while Julie Christie remains the only actress who appears in a total of 6 films on that list.

Julie Christie, Alan Bates in The Go-Between

The Go-Between is available on Amazon.

City of Angels: The Studios - The Studio Era, Part 10

2011-09-18T04:36:00.000-07:00

Read the last instalment of my series on Hollywood, the studios, and the studio era. For all previous posts on this series, please refer to the archives on the bottom of this page!

If anything, through advantageous and synergic takeovers and mergers like Time/ Warner/ AOL, Viacom/ Paramount, and Sony/ Columbia, the studios, and films in general, even benefited from those new media, at least financially.

As for the quality of the films, I can’t help thinking that although not all that glittered was gold in Hollywood’s golden era, what the moguls brought to their jobs was a proficiency and a profound love for the industry they created. A buccaneer-spirit paired with the vigour and pluck of the pioneers they were.

But the Hollywood of the studio era is irrevocably gone.
And after all, it probably never was much more than one huge, gigantic factory of dreams spread out over various parts of The City of Nets as Otto Friedrich referred to Hollywood in his autobiography.

I for my part, however, choose to think of it as another world, another universe, created by Hollywood’s founding fathers and inhabited by one big, enormous, dysfunctional, royal family, in the form of the big studios, with the moguls as the powerful patriarchs of the family’s various branches.

City of Nets by Otto Friedrich is highly recommended reading for anybody interested in Hollywood's golden age. Though very anecdotal, it is a first hand account by someone who lived and worked in the studios but not on the front lines, but rather in the background. Friedrich was a brilliant observer whose scrutinising eye escaped nothing.

For more books on Hollywood there's no better place than Larry Edmunds legendary bookshop on 6644, Hollywood Boulevard.

Click HERE to visit their website!

City of Angels: The Studios - The Studio Era, Part 9

2011-09-07T12:22:00.000-07:00

Pauline Kael

The all pervading atmosphere of terror, brought on by the committee’s shenanigans did nothing to nurture what remained of Tinseltown’s creative spirit, which is exactly what Hollywood needed most to win the battle against television and in its struggle to get audiences back to the big screen.

Today, agencies have replaced the big studios, setting up package deals between writer, director, producer and star, who tend to be all under contract to the same agency. Studios are reduced to a mere distributing role, and to letting space to independent producers, who usually consist of the film’s director or star. As an independent production they rent space, or other studio facilities, at a particular studio over a certain amount of time. And even though studios still produce -or co produce- films, the better part of the activity on the lot is dedicated to television.

Francis Ford Coppola

Alan J. Pakula

Martin Scorsese

Hal Ashby

Re-emerging after the sorry years of the 1950s, Hollywood entered a second golden age towards the end of the 1960s, or, to quote famous film critic Pauline Kael, Hollywood’s only golden age. With the Old Guard gone, the Production Code abolished, and the studios mostly run and owned by huge conglomerations, in which the studio itself was but a minor asset, a new herd of film makers entered the scene, who, with their verve and idealism infused Hollywood with a string of remarkable movies. Influenced by the Vietnam War, the rise of Women’s Lib, and a new sexual freedom, film makers like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, William Friedkin, Alan J. Pakula, Robert Altman, Arthur Penn, and Hal Ashby led the way to what would later be dubbed as the New Hollywood, producing films that went beyond mere entertainment, analysing, scrutinising and dissecting human behaviour and society as a whole. Steven Spielberg changed all that.

When his film Jaws (1975) was released nationwide and subsequently breaking all box-office records, the age of the blockbuster was born, as studios and producers realised that given the right product and an adequate marketing and distributing strategy, millions of dollars could be made with just one film. Spielberg, who had astonished cinema goers with two remarkable, off-beat, low-budget films, done well before he entered blockbuster territory , Duel (1971) and Sugarland Express (1974), went on to become commercially the most successful director of all time.

Entering the 1980s, it is interesting to take a look at the Academy Awards, whose significance as indicator for the excellence of films has greatly diminished, but which have assumed the role of a magnifying glass for the zeitgeist: In comparison to the 1970s, where films that won the Best Picture award were commercial as well as critical successes, the 1980s presented a different scenario, as hardly any of the top box-office grossers were awarded the Oscar for Best Picture. In that respect, the 1980s, the business-orientated politics of the Reagan notwithstanding, reflected the Hollywood of the past, where the Academy tended to value quality higher than box-office returns.

But with society changing constantly, and with a world-wide shift towards the political right, accompanied by an ever-increasing hunger for profit and economic growth, during the 1990s grosses took precedence over quality, and the Academy Awards for Best Picture was usually bestowed upon films that were box-office winners, with little or no regard to their artistic merits. Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1993), and Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1994) being an exception to the rule inasmuch as both works were artistically as well as commercially triumphant.

This trend continues to the very day, and Hollywood today is indeed the factory of films it was thought to have been during the studio era. A lot of money is lavished upon the production of a major studio release, but other than the fact that yet another box-office record was once more broken, the finished result is mostly forgettable. As a reaction to this trend, a new, independent cinema has emerged, producing low budget films with a focus on the story and, luckily, quality, and some studios even set up an independent branch, such as Warner Brothers’ New Line to counterbalance its big budget releases.

Cinema attendance has been soaring for the past twenty years, disproving prophets of doom who, at the onset of the 1950s and the sorry time that followed, predicted the death of cinema and the end of motion pictures. The reverse is true, however. American cinema, after having survived HUAC, successfully battled the onslaught of television, videos, DVD players, and home computers.

City of Angels: The Studios - The Studio Era, Part 8

2011-08-28T10:46:00.000-07:00

John Garfield

The very disappointing stance of the studio heads led to a ten year unofficial blacklist, which was implemented in the most insidious way, as free lance writers stopped receiving assignments from the studios and actors were told that they “were too good for the part”. Blacklisted actresses Anne Revere and Kim Hunter were out of work for years. John Garfield, one of Hollywood’s most outstanding actors, couldn’t get a job because of his steadfast refusal to co-operate with HUAC and to name names. He died under mysterious circumstances in May 1952. Director Abraham Polonsky, whose film, Force of Evil (1948) is now considered a classic, was a victim, and so were Joseph Losey and Charlie Chaplin, who were both forced to leave the Unites States and subsequently settled in Europe. Over 200 film workers were inspected and lost their jobs as a result of the blacklist for their alleged connections to the Communist Party.

Elia Kazan

HUAC’s second wave of investigation in Hollywood took place between 1951 and 1953, this time headed by the infamous Senator Joseph McCarthy. Over a hundred film workers were subpoenaed, Orson Welles, Lucille Ball, Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett, among them. Fifty eight of them gave in to McCarthy’s demands to name names, such as directors Elia Kazan, Robert Rossen, and Edward Dmytryk and even acclaimed writer Budd Schulberg, who would later write On The Waterfront(1954), which, directed by Elia Kazan, was their joint vindication for their decision to fink on their colleagues.

Clifford Odets

Clifford Odets, who had known Kazan during their time at New York’s Group Theatre in the 1930s, also resorted to take the easy way out, naming names and firmly denying his former affiliations with the Communist Party, claiming that he was merely harbouring sympathetic feelings towards the working class. Thus, Odets avoided being blacklisted, and went on working unhindered in Hollywood, unlike many of his colleagues. Although naming names enabled people to continue working, Kazan stated in his autobiography that his decision to rat on his colleagues wasn’t based as much on that, as it was over his aversion towards the Communist Party, of which he had been a member during the 1930s, when he was part of New York’s Group Theatre.

As Katherine Hepburn, a life-long liberal, once said, “I can’t blame anyone for saying things so that he can keep working. But when somebody says things to keep other people from working, he has crossed a line”. The truth was, that some of the blacklisted screen-writers did in fact continue to write. But in order to so they had to work under an assumed name, for their real ones were not supposed to appear on screen. Oscar winning screen writer Howard Koch, for instance, who was blacklisted after writing The Thirteenth Letter (1951), which was a thinly veiled attack on the blacklist, wrote under the pseudonym Peter Howard. This privilege, however, logically, didn’t extend to other professions, least of all acting, as changing their names would have done little to hide their true identity, as their faces would still have been visible on screen.

Dalton Trumbo

Otto Preminger, who was the first one to break free from the shackles of the Production Code, was also a trailblazer when it came to openly hiring blacklisted writers, when he asked Dalton Trumbo in 1959 to write the screenplay for his film Exodus (1960). Preminger, whatever his merits as a film maker may be, was a trailblazer in other ways, too, as he also broke new ground by being one of the first directors to work with an entire black cast for his musical Porgy and Bess (1959), and later, in 1962, being the first Hollywood director to tackle the subject of homosexuality in his film Advise and Consent (1962).

The Communist witch hunt, which befell America in the years after the Second World War, was a dark chapter not only in the history of Hollywood but in the history of the country as a whole, and one that changed the film community forever. The saddest part being, that it brought out the worst - and in a few cases – the best in people, and all over a cause that in a country set out to be the world’s arbiter of democracy should never have been an issue in the first place, for the primary principles of any democracy are freedom of speech and freedom of opinion. Sadder, still, is the fact, that by succumbing to HUAC’s demands and playing by HUAC’s rules, the studio chiefs headed straight for the disaster, which they so desperately wanted to avoid.

>>> check back in next week to learn more about Hollywood and the demise of the studio era!

City of Angels: The Studios - The Studio Era, Part 7, Witch-Hunt In Hollywood

2011-08-22T01:09:00.000-07:00

Among the friendly witnesses called up to testify were Gary Cooper, Jack Warner and novelist Ayn Rand, who was Russian by birth, but who had moved to the US in 1926, and whose subsequent commercial success as a writer turned her into a staunch anti-Communist, leading her to heavily attack MGM’s film Song of Russia (1944), which was in fact nothing but a harmless romance between an American soldier and a Russian peasant girl. Song of Russia was filmed in the light of the two countries’ short lived alliance in their war against Nazi Germany, which had prompted President Roosevelt to encourage the studios to paint a somewhat friendlier picture of Russia to make Americans feel more at ease with their erstwhile enemy-turned ally.

Ayn Rand

The studio heads, always willing to comply with the Government’s requests, produced a number of pictures between 1943 and 1945 that were indeed pro-Russian, such as Mission to Moscow (1943), The North Star (1943), and Tender Comrade (1943) as well as the abovementioned Song Of Russia. Little did they know, however, that once the war was over, they would find themselves under attack for something they merely did at the Government’s instigation.

MGM’s Louis B. Mayer himself was summoned before the Committee to justify the making of Song Of Russia, which was deemed Communist propaganda by the Committee, a view ardently shared by Ayn Rand. Ronald Reagan, once a member of the Democratic Party, was also asked to testify in his position as President of the Screen Actors Guild. His disgust with Communism made him one of HUAC’s keenest supporters, and subsequently turned him into a Republican.

Of the nineteen unfriendly witnesses, eleven were called up to take the stand. However, only one of them, the German playwright Bertolt Brecht, did. Making a brief appearance before the Committee, during which he denied all ties to the Communist Party, he boarded a plane back to Europe shortly after and based himself in East Berlin, where he went on to become the pride and joy of East Germany’s Communist Government. The remaining ten (writers Alvah Bessie, Dalton Trumbo, Samuel Orvitz, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Adrian Scott, John Howard Lawson, Ring Lardner Jr., Albert Maltz, and director Edward Dmytryk) refused to testify and claimed their Fifth Amendment Rights. They were held in contempt and had to serve prison terms between six and eight months. Their studio contracts were suspended, and after being released from prison they found themselves blacklisted.

Herbert Biberman

Ring Lardner

Alvah Bessie

Edward Dmytryk

Bertolt Brecht

Dalton Trumbo

John Howard Lawson

Alarmed by the Committee’s findings, and fearful of the damage it could do to Hollywood’s reputation, not to mention the already unstable box-office returns, all studio heads and some executives gathered in New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel on November 24, 1947, to discuss the situation and think about a unified response. The following statement was released to the press:

“We will not knowingly employ a Communist or a member of any party or group which advocates the overthrow of the Government of the United States by force, or by any illegal or unconstitutional method”.

Read today, the moguls’ response seems ridiculous and unfathomable. Yet, the hysterical fear of Communism led to a fanatical witch hunt which made red baiting the new National Religion.

To read more on HUAC and the witch-hunt in Hollywood, log on again to FILM-TALK this Saturday!

City of Angels: The Studios - The Studio Era, Part 6

2011-08-13T08:07:00.000-07:00

Trust Hitchcock to find his own way of getting around the two second restriction that the code put upon a kiss by having Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman briefly interrupting their endless kissing scene in Notorious (1945) after every two seconds.

Otto Preminger

It would take the hard-headedness of an Otto Preminger to defy the restrictive rules of the code in 1954 with his film The Moon is Blue, in which he dared showing an ex-marital couple living under the same roof - which is something that was still strictly verboten. United Artists, the film’s distributor, decided to release the film without the production seal, thus setting a trend that gradually spilled over to other directors and studios. But after Preminger’s film proved to be a major box-office hit, studios had to face the fact that with the onslaught of television, and cinema attendance in rapid decline, the general public expected to be shown something that the family orientated TV didn’t yet provide. The result was an increasing disregard of the Production Code, until it eventually became obsolete altogether. It wasn’t until the mid-1960s, however, that the Production Code entirely lost its impact and control over American film, to be replaced by a rating system, modelled on that of Great Britain.

1950 marked the end of the studio era and Hollywood’s golden age, and the beginning of the free-wheeling age, where independent producers and agents called the shots. The film moguls who had ruled the studios for three decades had grown old, had to face the fact that their own studios had outgrown them. They withdrew from the film industry, and in some cases were even forced into retirement, like Louis B. Meyer. The ones who stayed put, like Jack Warner, who was the last one of the first generation’s moguls to step down in 1967, were simply overwhelmed by the turning tides, and found it difficult to keep up with the ever more unpredictable tastes of the fickle public.

Jack Warner

1947 saw the dawn of television, which by 1950 had become a veritable threat to the big screen, resulting in slipping cinema attendance, which the studios, already weakened by the Government’s Consent Decree, forcing them to divest themselves of their theatre chains, found difficult to stomach. The vertical integration of production, distribution and exhibition, in which Paramount’s Adolph Zukor once pioneered, was ruled illegal by the government by setting up strict anti-trust laws, which led to the disintegration of the studio system. Studios like Columbia, that didn’t own any theatres, had an easier time, as the Government’s ruling obviously didn’t affect them.

In addition to Hollywood’s considerable travails, the House Committee of Un-American Activities (HUAC) had started its hearings in Hollywood in 1947 and resumed them in 1951, sending shock waves through the film community, and the resulting atmosphere of fear that descended over Hollywood was a death knell to what it most needed to survive: art and creativity. As it turned out, the HUAC hearings were akin to the kiss of death of the already battered film industry. Founded in 1938, HUAC’s aim was to investigate all areas in American society with public exposure for their possible ties to Communism and the Communist party. Needless to say, the film industry with their millions of viewers posed an obvious target for HUAC. HUAC’s fervour cooled down during the Second World War when Russia and America became temporary allies in their war against Nazi Germany, only to resurge after 1945, which, with the world map once more reshuffled, marked the beginning of the Cold War, subsequently turning Russia from ally to enemy.

J. Parnell Thomas

HUAC, headed by J. Parnell Thomas, began its hearings in October 1947, probing the film community’s involvement with Communism and Hollywood’s possibility to insert Communist propaganda into its films. HUAC polarised Hollywood, splitting it in two – the right wing, conservative circle around Robert Taylor, Cecil B. DeMille, John Wayne, Adolphe Menjou, Ginger Rogers, and Sam Wood, who avidly supported its doings and purpose, and the liberal, left wing group around John Huston, Humphrey Bogart and his wife Lauren Bacall, John Garfield, William Wyler and Myrna Loy. Consequently, when HUAC picked certain film workers to take the stand, the field was divided in friendly witnesses, who were willing to co-operate with HUAC’s requests, and unfriendly ones, who refused.

Read more on HUAC and its impact on Hollywood next week!

City of Angels: The Studio Era, Part 5

2011-08-08T00:28:00.000-07:00

However, there were others, directors who established a very close bond with their respective writers with whom they worked hand in glove, such as John Ford with Dudley Nichols or Frank Capra with Robert Riskin. Their repeated collaboration resulted in profoundly personal films which unmistakably bore the director’s trademark.

Orson Welles

And there were those like Orson Welles, who had never been anything but an auteur, for he produced, wrote, directed and even starred in his own films from the moment he set foot on Hollywood. Therefore, strictly speaking Alfred Hitchcock, who had a tendency to change his writers from project to project, didn’t really fall into the auteur bracket. Yet, since he possessed the rare gift of visualising the finished film long before the writer got a chance to take down even a single word, it was he who greatly influenced the screenwriter, steering him in such a way that left the writer little room for manoeuvre. Thus, in François Truffaut’s eyes Hitchcock was the epitome of the auteur, the quintessential director-cum-artist, who managed to turn his obsessions and visions into a work of art.

Ida Lupino

The profession of a film director in Hollywood -as much as elsewhere- was still pretty much a man’s prerogative. But two women broke that tradition, successfully asserting themselves in a world dominated by men. One was Dorothy Arzner, who had been under contract to Paramount between 1927 and 1932, but worked independently afterwards, and who is best known today for her film Christopher Strong(1933), done at RKO, in which she directed a young and aspiring Katherine Hepburn. Some years later, Ida Lupino followed her footsteps. Starting out as an actress at Warner’s where she was unflatteringly nicknamed “the poor man’s Bette Davis”, reflecting the unsatisfactory assignments she was given which, more often than not, were handed-down roles Davis had rejected. Arguably her best film as an actress was in Raoul Walsh’s atmospheric and sinister High Sierra (1941), where she played alongside Humphrey Bogart. Her assignments failing to improve, together with her husband she founded their own production company, aptly called The Filmmakers, and Ida went on to blaze new trails by becoming one of the most respected B-movie directors, and the second woman in Hollywood history to be admitted to the Directors Guild of America. Her modestly budgeted films had a tendency to deal with -at the time- controversial subjects, such as rape (Outrage, 1950) and bigamy (The Bigamist, 1953), which the restrictions imposed by the Production Code made difficult to tackle on screen. In a pun to her earlier nickname, Lupino jokingly referred to herself as “the poor man’s Don Siegel”. She continued to appear in front of the screen, albeit sporadically, and among her most notable assignments as an actress during the 1950s are Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground (1951), which included a meaty part for her playing a blind woman, and Jack Palance’s wife in the film adaptation of Clifford Odets’ corrosive take on Hollywood, The Big Knife (1955), directed by Robert Aldrich.

Will Hays

The Hollywood of the studio era was really a time when a director who wanted to express anything to do with sex, morals and gender found himself on slippery ground.
A certain artistic genius was indeed required to get around the censors and to widen the narrow margin the Hays Code imposed upon the film makers and screenwriters.
Although the Hays Code was officially introduced in 1934, Will Hays had been the spokesman for the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association since 1922, when the former Postmaster General was summoned to Hollywood to represent the studios to the outside world. His job was Hollywood’s answer to a public outcry following a number of scandals -notably the Fatty Arbuckle rape case- which shook the fledgling film community in the early 1920, making it vulnerable to criticism and attacks by the press as well as various religious organisations. However, by 1930 first steps were taken by Hays to set up a code that would regulate and determine what could be shown on screen, and by 1934, the Production Code -or Hays Code, as it is usually referred to- became operational with Joseph Breen as director.

The Production Code was also supposed to exclude violence from the screens, and “to use popular entertainment films to reinforce conservative moral and political values”, which to some extent, was like a prelude to the events that later wreaked havoc in Hollywood, when the House Committee of Un-American Activities (HUAC) started investigating the film community for possible Communist infiltrations, as the Production strictly forbade any depiction of radical or socially critical behaviour.
The code stipulated that every screenplay had to be submitted to the Breen Office for approval. And without Breen’s seal and blessing, sending a script into production was pointless for if the Breen office deemed the contents morally offensive, it would have been impossible to release the finished product. It was not by accident that Mae West’s films after 1934 were harmless, almost bloodless, comedies that lacked the bite and vigour of her previous efforts (I’m No Angel, She Done Him Wrong, both 1933), whose innuendo and double entendre would have never found the approval of the Joseph Breen.

Mae West

The Production Code didn’t tolerate any mention of homosexuality, nor unmarried couples living together. And a woman, who even to the most clueless viewer couldn’t be anything but a hooker, became a ‘woman of leisure’ or, at best, a showgirl, as no allusions whatsoever could be dropped to the woman’s true profession. Double Indemnity (1944), Wilder’s masterpiece based on James M. Cain’s novel, was considered un-filmable for years because of its subject which was deemed debauched and depraved. That it found Breen’s approval -and its way to the screen- is due to the genius of Wilder and his collaborator Raymond Chandler, who both managed to find a way of expressing everything by saying and showing nothing.

Thus, subtlety became an art-from in itself.

And, I’m inclined to add, Hollywood, became all the richer for it, for certain directors like Berlin-import Ernst Lubitsch, whose skill and finesse made him Hollywood’s uncrowned king of innuendo, seemed to bloom and flourish when it came to beating the code at its own game and turning the code’s confinement to his advantage.

Ernst Lubitsch

This series continues on Saturday! Be sure to be back!

City of Angels: The Studio Era, Part 4

2011-07-31T07:22:00.000-07:00

Nathaniel West

To stock up on talented writers, studio executives started raiding New York’s Broadway and the publishing industry, and lured by Hollywood’s tempting salaries -which far exceeded Broadway’s - the writers came in droves. The Hollywood of the 1930s and 40s reads like the Who’s Who in American literature, as virtually every major American novelist passed through Hollywood at some point, having been snatched up by one of the major studios: F.Scott Fitzgerald, Nathaniel West, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Aldous Huxley, Raymond Chandler, Clifford Odets, Budd Schulberg, among many others, all tried their hand at screenplays, some of them being more successful at it than others. However, only a few among them ever took to Hollywood. Most of them despised the town, deploring its lack of high culture as well the working conditions. These working conditions notwithstanding, being a so-called studio slave inspired some writers to turn their experiences and observations in Tinseltown into their best work.

Budd Schulberg

Nathaniel West’s scathing The Day of the Locust paints a dark picture of Hollywood’s gold-digger years, while Budd Schulberg’s gripping What Makes Sammy Run tells the story of a fast and furious parvenu with a fire in his head, determined to become a big-time Hollywood producer whose burning ambition is a direct result of him having been born into an impoverished Jewish family living in New York’s Lower East Side. Like the majority of the moguls, the book’s hero - Sammy Glick - also wants to keep his Jewish origins under wraps, changing his name from Glickstein to Glick as he's assimilated to the point where his Jewish heritage is all but erased.

Jerry Wald

Ever since Schulberg’s novel was first published in 1941, it has been widely known that Sammy Glick’s character is but a thinly veiled portrayal of a real-life Hollywood personality and rumour has it that Jerry Wald, the producer of Key Largo (1947) and The Best of Everything (1959) was in fact the model for Schulberg’s hero. Schulberg himself was born into one of Hollywood’s foremost families, and consequently he knew the film business inside out even before he started out as screenwriter himself, his father, B.P. Schulberg, having been the head of Paramount for a short period during the 1920/ 30s.

Raymond Chandler

Although Raymond Chandler never wrote a book about Hollywood other than an essay, titled Oscar Night in Hollywood, published in Atlantic Monthly in 1948, Chandler's hard-boiled crime novels struck a chord with war audiences, resulting in a contract with Paramount for which he wrote a couple of screenplays which stood at the centre of what eventually became known as Film Noir.
Having lived and worked in Los Angeles for the better part of his life, when Raymond Chandler followed Hollywood’s call he was already well into his fifties. Akin to his fellow writers he found it difficult to adapt to life in the film community and as a result, he had frequent run-ins with his directors.

Film Noir, "where the streets are dark with something darker than night" (Raymond Chandler)

The term Film Noir originated with a number of young French film enthusiasts during the mid 1940s who were in the process of rediscovering and reevaluating the Hollywood films of the war years, namely the long list of thrillers and crime movies which, drenched in darkness and perfidy, reflected the disquieting effect the war had on America.

Some time later, French directors Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard would become very influential in establishing the Nouvelle Vague, which injected new life into the French film industry. Their admiration for American Cinema was boundless, for they saw and read meanings into those films that so far had been invisible to the ordinary cinema-goer. It surely is no exaggeration saying, that had it not been for people like Louis Malle, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, André Bazin, and Claude Chabrol, film criticism would be the poorer for it, for even though they all eventually became directors in their own right, they were conducive in the foundation of Cahiers du Cinéma, a periodical which unlike the better part of most film magazines around today, doesn’t resemble a publicity pamphlet from a film studio.
It all culminated, of course, in Truffaut’s book about Alfred Hitchcock, How Did You Do It, which has become a milestone in film theory.

Francois Truffaut

After Hitler’s rise to power in January 1933, Hollywood’s impressive stable of writers was joined by an ever increasing number of film working immigrants from Europe - many of whom writers - who began arriving in Hollywood following the Nazi-takeover, thus adding to Hollywood’s already well established list of ex-patriots, like Marlene Dietrich, Ernst Lubitsch, Maurice Chevalier, Bertolt and Salka Viertel, Greta Garbo, Wilhelm and Charlotte Dieterle, and many others. Aided by the European Film Fund, writers like Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Doeblin, Heinrich Mann, and Walter Mehring, all ended up getting a job in Hollywood’s film industry, but found it wearisome to adjust not only to the working methods, but also to having to write in a foreign language of which most of them had little knowledge.

Bertolt Brecht

Billy Wilder on the other hand, who also spoke hardly any English upon his arrival in the US in 1934, wound up with a command of the English language which far exceeded that of his compatriots, enabling him to turn into a full-fledged screenwriter, and in time, director, thus joining a select group of talented film workers who made the successful yet difficult transition from writer to director: Preston Sturges, John Huston and Joseph L. Mankiewicz, also were among them. A writer-turned-director would later be dubbed auteur by the same group of French film enthusiasts who were also responsible for the re-discovery of the films which they classified as Noir.

This series continues next week!

City of Angels: The Studio Era, Part 3

2011-07-24T03:08:00.000-07:00

In 1913, the Jesse Lasky Feature Play Company, which included Lasky himself, Cecil B. DeMille, and Samuel Goldwyn, reached Hollywood by way of Flagstaff/ Arizona, to shoot The Squaw Man. The film has since been remade twice and on both occasions by DeMille himself. It is the filming of The Squaw Man more than anything else that we have come to associate with the dawn of Hollywood as the world’s Mecca of Film. But this, as we've seen, is not entirely true for there were a large number of film pioneers who beat Mr. DeMille to being the first filmmaker to discover Hollywood’s merits as a film location. The Squaw Man, however, was the first-ever feature film (= four reels or more) to be shot in Hollywood. Other feature films of that period such as Griffith’s Judith of Bethulia (1913) having been shot in the San Fernando Valley while Adoph Zukor’s trailblazing Queen Elizabeth (1912), starring legendary actress Sarah Bernhard, was shot way back in New York!

The Lasky-DeMille barn, now the Hollywood Heritage Museum, located on 2100 North Highland Avenue in Hollywood

Initially bound for Flagstaff, in order to escape the Trust as well as New York’s whimsical weather conditions, they quickly made up their mind that the dry, deserted, flats of Arizona wouldn’t do and headed straight to California. To shoot their film, DeMille and his peers rented the barn of a German settler, Jakob Stern, located at the corner of what is known today as Selma and Vine, just a stone’s throw away from bustling Hollywood Boulevard, or rather, Prospect Avenue, as it was called then. The now legendary Lasky-DeMille barn is still standing, although not on its original location. Having been moved to its new site across from the Hollywood Bowl, the Washington Mutual Bank now occupies the barn’s former ground. In deference to Hollywood’s film pioneers and their film, The Squaw Man, the bank’s entire façade has been tiled in a mosaic that depicts various scenes from the landmark film that was shot there nearly a hundred years ago.

In 1916 the Lasky Feature Play Company merged with Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players to form Famous Players Lasky, with Zukor as president, Lasky as vice president, Goldwyn as chairman, and DeMille as director-general. But, as Zukor’s biographer Will Irwin, puts it, “even this large company was too small, however, long to include four such able and positive characters”, and before long Goldwyn sold out to his partners and merged with Edgar Selwyn to found the Goldwyn Company, which eventually was fused into Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1924. Goldwyn, obviously a free spirit, soon dropped out from the company that would thereafter bear his name to become the most charismatic of Hollywood’s independent producers. Zukor on the other hand, slyly merged his Famous Players Lasky Company with Hodkinson’s distribution company called Paramount, thus pioneering in the vertical integration of production, exhibition and distribution, a concept that would later be adopted by most other Hollywood studios.
As a name for his giant corporation Zukor opted for Paramount, which swiftly turned into the most influential and most powerful motion picture company, a position it held until the formation of MGM in 1924.

Things were developing at rapid speed when in 1915 William Fox founded his Fox Film Corporation, and took over the Selig studios in Edendale in 1916, joined by Louis B. Mayer in 1918, who became Selig’s tenant for a while, before building his own studio on Mission Road a year later. Metro rented its first studios in Hollywood in 1916, but was acquired by the cunning Marcus Loew in 1920, who four years later orchestrated the deal between Metro, Mayer, and Goldwyn, with himself as president, which led to the foundation of MGM, which in time, became almost a synonym for Hollywood itself.

Barbara Stanwyck, dressed by Edith Head, in Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944)

Film scholars generally name 1923/ 24 as the juncture the studio era began. All major studios were in place, except RKO, which joined the ranks of the majors a few years later- and literally all major studios followed the same pattern: the vertical integration of production, distribution and exhibition, which means that films were produced on the studio’s lot, distributed by the company’s distribution arm, and largely shown in cinemas owned by each respective studio. Not all studios were equally strong in each division, with some studios possessing a cinema chain smaller than that of other studios, while others had back lots and production facilities that were far superior to that of a rival studio.

Hedda Hopper, who wittily titled her autobiography From Under My Hat

Louella Parsons

In addition to that, all talent -from actors, directors, producers, to cameramen, set-designers, costume-designers and technical staff- was under contract to the studio. Again, not all studios equalled each other in their employment practices. Columbia, for instance, had scant talent under contract to the studio, and operated mostly by borrowing actors from other studios. A common practice, as it enabled the lending studio to, either make money on a contract player for whom no suitable project could be found. Or, in many cases, even a profit, as the asking price usually far exceeded the star’s salary, or else, punish a star who had gotten too big for his breeches by sending them off to a minor studio. Besides actors who were under contract to a studio, there were also a number of free-lancers like Cary Grant or Barbara Stanwyck. But free-lancing didn’t really become common procedure until the decline of the studio system gave rise to the more free-wheeling methods of the 1950s and 60s, when deals were struck between a studio, an independent producer like, for instance, Sam Spiegel, and a cast of bankable actors.

Travis Banton

Even though a lot of actors complained -and some famously even sued their studios for what they considered malpractice- to be under contract to a studio was in fact a blessing in disguise, as it meant steady work with a regular salary under the protection and guidance of a big studio whose aim it was to build up a face into a name and, eventually, into a star. Still, glorifying the contract system would be as wrong as flatly condemning it. Truth is, that it was a double-edged sword, since protection and a steady flow of work was only guaranteed as long as the star’s pictures continued to make money. While the duration of the contract was usually seven years -for that was the time the studios deemed necessary to build up a star-, the commitment on the studio’s side was only six months. This meant that a star, tied to a studio by a standard seven-year-contract, could be dropped by a studio with only six months notice.

Also, building up a star included complying with the demands of the studio’s publicity department, which could include anything from having your teeth fixed or your hair dyed to changing your name and completely reinventing your background. In order to get a young, promising actress’s name into the papers, the publicity department often saw to it that she would occasionally be escorted by one of the studio’s top-ranking male stars to a movie premiere, some lavish party, or even the Academy Award ceremony, thus also fostering the possibility of a romance between two contract actors, which was deemed very advantageous for the studio.

Dietrich - in Sternberg's extravaganza The Devil Is A Woman (1935)

Romances between actors -and the break-ups thereof- were the territory of gossip columnists Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper. Feared for their sharp tongue and poison pen, they were among Hollywood’s most weighty figures as their columns - Parson’s in Hearst’s Los Angeles Examiner and Hopper’s in the L.A. Times, and both columns syndicated in newspapers all across the U.S. - were read by millions of eager readers every day, and their word had the power to make or break a career.

With the stars at the mercy of two gossip columnists, the studios’ respective publicity departments implored their stable of actors to comply with the columnists’ every request and demand, something which was next to impossible, for trying to satisfy the hunger for news of one, automatically entailed falling out of the other one’s favour, for the simple reason that both columnists were arch rivals, and getting the story first first was what it was all about. Tell It To Louella, is the adequately named title of Parsons’ second volume of her autobiography, published in 1961. Rumour has it, that the ties between Parsons and her boss, William Randolph Hearst, were closer than one might think, for she is said to have witnessed the notorious shooting, involving Thomas Ince, Hearst and his mistress Marion Davies, during which Ince was fatally injured, and to silence her, the newspaper magnate offered her a life-long position at the Los Angeles Examiner, one of his many publications. Parsons was unrivalled in her station as the queen of gossip, until in 1937 Hedda Hopper decided to hang her acting career and throw her fancy hat into the gossip-ring.

Legendary Edith Head whose influence on fashion was as as far-reaching as Paris

In spite of their rivalry, both women had more in common than they cared to admit. Equally relentless when it came to squeezing out the gossip out of their victims, both also held extremely conservative convictions, about which they made no bones, and which rose to the surface during the red baiting, with both vigorously supporting the House Committee of Un-American Activities(HUAC). Both loyal employees, Parsons’ flagrantly slandered Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane(1941) for its thinly veiled portrayal of her boss, William Randolph Hearst. Hedda Hopper, whose dim career as an actress had ended after she started working for the L.A. Examiner, was offered a bit part in Billy Wilder’s landmark Sunset Boulevard (1950), in which she plays herself, wearing one of the flamboyant hats that became her trademark.

In the case of directors, being under contract to a studio could be particularly frustrating as their individual influence varied from studio to studio. Some studios like MGM, or Warner’s under Darryl F. Zanuck, were very producer orientated, leaving the director with little or no say over the finished product. Others, like Columbia or RKO, gave their directors a fair amount of freedom, relying on their vision and skill to come up with a film that was both beautifully crafted yet also successful at the box-office. It goes without saying that a visionary, strong willed producer can be as important to a film as a visionary, strong willed director, and as both positions were generally filled with in-house staff, it was in the studio’s interest to ensure their compatibility.

Bette Davis wearing one of Head's typical gowns of understated elegance in All About Eve (1950)

Like producers, directors and actors, costume designers and set designers, too, were a vital part of the intrinsically woven studio net. They substantially contributed to giving the studio’s output its distinctive look. To recreate a certain period, they had large research libraries at their disposal as well as a prop department, where furniture and interior decorations from all eras and countries were available to them. Most noteworthy among the set designers was Cedric Gibbons, who in his position as MGM’s head of the art department, supervised all releases, and no product would reach the screen without his approval. He was responsible for giving MGM’s films its glossy, luxurious finish, making them easily identifiable, even to the casual viewer, as an MGM product. Gibbons famously also designed the Academy Award statuette, known as Oscar, when his boss, Louis B. Mayer, together with 35 other dignitaries from the film community, founded the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1927, as a response to the growing power of the unions.

Art directors Lyle Wheeler at Fox, and Hans Dreier at Paramount, both held equally powerful positions as Gibbons, but in neither studio was the emphasis on a film’s look as high as it was at MGM. Gibbons’ sumptuous sets were highlighted by the extravagant gowns MGM’s chief costume designer, Adrian created for in-house stars like Greta Garbo, Jean Harlow and Joan Crawford. Orry Kelly had a similar role at Warner Brothers, being responsible for Bette Davis’ wardrobe during her Warner Brothers period.

Grace Kelly in Hitchcock's Rear Window (1953)

Paramount, however, was home to two of Hollywood’s most outstanding costume designers: Travis Banton was responsible for creating Marlene Dietrich’s extravagant costumes in the films she made for her mentor, Josef von Sternberg, most memorable among them, The Devil is a Woman (1935), in which Banton turned Dietrich into a sequined siren, replete with towering mantillas and veils. The young woman Banton had taken under his wing would later become the most celebrated costume designers of them all: Edith Head. Her trademark of pure, understated elegance would eventually earn her eight Oscars and thirty-four nominations. She went on to dress Bette Davis in All About Eve (1950), Stanwyck in Double Indemnity (1944), and Grace Kelly in Rear Window (1953), to name only three.

Just like all other divisions, writers had their own building, working in tiny, adjoining, offices, expected to churn out stories, rewrite scripts, or add dialogue to an already finished screenplay. At times, more than one writer was assigned to the same project. The position of a screenwriter gained considerably in importance with the advent of sound, as the studios were in dire need of well-crafted stories, spiced up with meaty dialogue.

This series will continue next week, Wednesday. For previous blog entries on Hollywood and Hollywood history, please visit the archives at the bottom of this page!

My Father, Charlie Chaplin: Geraldine Chaplin In Conversation With David Robinson, Babylon Cinema, Berlin

2011-07-16T11:39:00.000-07:00

Geraldine Chaplin

As part of the Babylon Cinema's Charlie Chaplin Retrospective - CHAPLIN COMPLETE - the Babylon Cinema's director, Timothy Grossman, invited Chaplin's daughter Geraldine and film historian and Chaplin biographer, David Robinson, to talk about the life and work of the artist in question.

I should mention that apart from being a great admirer of the films of Charlie Chaplin, I'm an equally great admirer of his daughter. Hence, seeing Geraldine Chaplin live for the first time was an opportunity not to be missed. And I must say that I wasn't disappointed. Seeing and listening to Geraldine talking about her childhood and upbringing and what it meant to grow up as the daughter of one one of the greatest film artists who ever lived, was as entertaining as it was fascinating and insightful.

Very often, coming face-to-face with someone you've always admired from afar can be an anticlimactic experience, to say the least. In Geraldine's case, however, it was different for she turned out to be one of the most gracious, radiant, authentic, and also the nicest, celebrities - for lack of a better word - I've ever encountered on a panel or a press conference.

Asked about if her name was of any help when she herself decided to become an actress, Geraldine Chaplin openly admitted that her name didn't just open doors, but that because her father was widely admired in the film industry, not just for his films but also for his political stance, the admiration for her father extended to her, making her start in movies relatively easy. Or easier than it would have been otherwise.

Here, Geraldine Chaplin talks to a 95-year old audience member who met Geraldine's father when he visited Berlin in 1931 to promote his film, City Lights

I'm tempted to add that Geraldine more than lived up to the somewhat preferential treatment she may have received in those days, and one of the most remarkable things about her is the fact that instead of embarking on a career in mainstream Hollywood, she managed to keep her name out of the blockbuster business and always opted for young, new, or independent, directors and films. As a result, she became a great actress in her own right. Her collaboration with her former partner Carlos Saura resulted in a number of memorable masterpieces, notably Cria Cuervos and Ana y Los Lobos. Moreover, because she chose a different career path - and because she wisely never underwent plastic surgery - she is still going strong today, now in her mid-sixties, when many other actresses of her generation can no longer be cast because they look like freaks. In fact, she's just completed another film, set in a retirement home, of all places, in which she stars alongside Daniel Bruehl and Jane Fonda. Apparently, it's Jane Fonda (at 70!) who gets the boy, and not her ...

Asked about her father's reaction to her collaboration with Saura plus the fact that they'd become lovers, Geraldine Chaplin admitted that her father wasn't all that happy at first, but once he saw Peppermint Frappe (Geraldine's and Saura's first film together), he wrote Saura a postcard, saying, "You're a poet!".

The panel: on the left, Timothy Grossman; in the middle, David Robinson, and to the right: Geraldine Chaplin

Considering that Charlie Chaplin was politically left-leaning, to say nothing of him being expelled from the US for allegedly being a Communist (Geraldine calls him "a humanist", which is aptly put), it was surprising to learn that as a father he was rather strict ("Victorian"), which most probably was a result of his own upbringing, which was spent in utter destitution with no education to speak of. Growing up in the US and in Switzerland as well as in English boarding schools, Geraldine not only enjoyed a privileged upbringing, she also grew up bi-lingual. I was surprised to hear that apparently, her father never mastered French properly, despite the fact that following his expulsion from the US, he spent the remainder of his life in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, in Vevey, which Geraldine still calls home to this day.

Geraldine Chaplin in her element

Geraldine Chaplin is a fascinating personality and a captivating raconteur, and I could have gladly sat there all afternoon listening to her. Additionally, she's done her father proud with the films she made and last but not least, it is wonderful - as well as reassuring - to see how she keeps the memory of her father alive. As far as I'm concerned, Charlie Chaplin's work should be included in the UNESCO list of
"world cultural heritage".

Charlie Chaplin Retrospective, Babylon, Berlin-Mitte

2011-07-15T05:22:00.000-07:00

From tonight until August 7, the Babylon in Berlin-Mitte is hosting a Charlie Chaplin retrospective, showing all of his films in the original version with German subtitles. For silent films, live music will be provided by an orchestra or an organ player.

The Chaplin retrospective kicks off tonight at 7.30pm with Gold Rush. Charlie Chaplin's wonderful daughter Geraldine will be in attendance. Later, at 10pm, there's a - free! - open-air screening of The Great Dictator in front of the Brandenburg Gate.

Tomorrow, Saturday, there's a conversation between film-historian David Robinson and Geraldine Chaplin about the work and influence of her father at 2pm, also at the Babylon.

For the full programme of the Charlie Chaplin retrospective, please click HERE!

City of Angels: The Studio Era, Part 2

2011-07-13T01:36:00.000-07:00

The first film crew to set up shop in the Los Angeles area was the Chicago-based Selig Company. They shot outdoor scenes for their film The Count of Monte Christo (1907). A year later, in 1908, they erected a small film studio on what was then Alessandro Street (now Glendale Boulevard) in Edendale (now called Glendale). Their first film entirely shot in California was called The Heart of a Race
Trout (1908). Selig was joined a year later by the New York Motion Picture Company, who built their own studio on a nearby lot, but eventually relocated to Santa Monica in 1911, after fusing with film pioneer Thomas Ince.The New York Motion Picture Company’s deserted Edendale studio changed hands and was used by Mack Sennett for his Keystone productions, founded in 1912. Keystone’s most famous member of staff would later be Charlie Chaplin, who joined the company in 1913, but left to sign up with Essanay in 1915, before enlisting with Henry Aitken’s Mutual Company the year after.

Thomas Ince

In 1910 the Biograph Company sent their own David Wark Griffith out to California to take some outdoor location shots for The Thread of Destiny. Griffith returned to New York, only to come back for more the next two winters, until, in 1913, he was here to stay, shooting his first feature film(four reels), Judith of Bethulia (1913) in the San Fernando Valley.Having started out as an actor for Biograph in New York, Griffith was also known as somebody who would supply the odd idea for what is now known as a screenplay, but what, back then, were just synopses or summaries of a plot that would serve as a basis for the final film. It quickly became obvious that his true vocation lay elsewhere than acting, and so it happened that little by little Griffith began directing the one and two reelers Biograph specialised in, until he came into his own as the company’s chief director, in charge of Biograph’s entire output.

Without being able to pinpoint what it was, everybody who watched a Griffith film immediately realised that they were seeing something new and altogether different, something out of the ordinary. Over the years, Griffith has been credited with various inventions in movie-making, which we now take for granted, but which substantially revolutionised the film industry, dragging it out from the back yard into the drawing room, by elevating it into an art form. Close-ups, panorama shots, back-lighting, the process of editing a film, aptly called montage by the French, are all attributed to Griffith.

Eventually, Griffith quit Biograph to join Henry Aitken’s Mutual Company.
Mutual eventually took over Charles Urban Kinemacolor studio at 4500 Sunset, which is where Griffith shot his seminal The Birth of a Nation (1915) and a year later, Intolerance (1916). The famous Babylonian set of Intolerance had been standing there for many years, but was torn down eventually, and the site now houses the Vista movie theatre, whose oriental interior décor pays homage to Griffith’s masterpiece.

In 1916, Henry Aitken founded Triangle, joined by Thomas Ince, Mack Sennett and David Wark Griffith. Later they erected a lavish film studio in Culver City, which would eventually be taken over by Samuel Goldwyn, who threw the studio into the package when he merged his company with MGM in 1924, which subsequently turned it into their headquarters. That year, after just having been put in charge of William Randolph Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Productions, Thomas Ince fell mysteriously ill on board of Hearst’s yacht, and tragically died a few days later in his house in Benedict Canyon.
Legend has it, that Ince was shot over a lovers’ quarrel involving Hearst, his mistress, Marion Davies and Charlie Chaplin. However, in his biography Chaplin claims to have not even been on the yacht. However, speculations about the tragic incident persist to the very day, and gained again momentum when they became the subject of Peter Bogdanovich’s film The Cat’s Meow (2001). Triangle, however, proved to be a short-lived experience, when after a couple of expensive box-office disasters the company was dissolved, and Aitken vanished into oblivion.

Kalem and Essanay, two smaller companies, previously based in New York, both arrived in 1910 and also settled in Edendale, which was on its way to become the first Hollywood. Even though accounts vary, it was the Nestor Company, owned by William and David Horsley, who is said to be the first film troupe to ever set foot on Hollywood proper in 1911, building their modest film studio on the intersection of Sunset & Gower. Following Nestor’s example, an influx of yet more film companies set in, led by Pat Powers, the Éclair Company, and Lux, to name just a few, all flocking to the promised land.

A lot has been written, said, and speculated about Thomas Edison, to whom by 1907 all American producers were under licence, save one, Biograph, which had a patent for a camera of their own. Edison’s attempt to sue Biograph for patent infringement was rejected, and subsequently the two companies negotiated a truce, which in turn resulted in the Motion Picture Patent Company (= MPPC), or Trust, of which ten companies were members (Edison himself, Vitagraph, Essanay, Selig, Lubin, Pathé, Méliès, Biograph and George Kleine), founded in 1908, and held 16 patents:
one for film, two for cameras, thirteen for projectors. What’s more, the MPPC reached a shrewd agreement with Kodak, at the time the only American manufacturer of raw film stock, limiting sales to licensed producers only, who then in turn could rent their product to licensed exchanges(= distributors) alone. It goes without saying that the exchanges were not supposed to deal with exhibitors, showing unlicensed product.

Thomas Alva Edison

However, there was a cluster of independent companies that grew stronger and more confident over the years. Unlike the MPPC, which largely produced one or two reelers (= films that consist of only one or two reels, which translates into roughly ten, or twenty minutes respectively), the independents began focusing on feature films of three reels and more. Luckily for the independents, the MPPC controlled only around fifty to fifty-five percent of all theatres in the US, which made it easier for them to stand their ground.

Carl Laemmle was the biggest among the independent distributers, and in dire need of (unlicensed) films, which were difficult to obtain, he was supplied by the International Projecting and Producing Company, which specialised in importing films of Trust-excluded European producers. When the French brothers’ Lumière film stock became available in the US, Laemmle founded IMP (= Independent Moving Picture Company) and henceforth started to produce films himself. He lured Mary Pickford away from Biograph by doubling her salary, and she quickly became known as the Imp-Girl.
As a result of Laemmle’s success, other independents sprang up, like the New York Motion Picture Company (founded by Adam Kessel, Charles Baumann, Fred Balshofer in 1909), which cranked out westerns, under their Bison trademark, Defender, founded by Edwin S. Porter (of The Great Train Robbery-fame), who defected from Edison, Nestor, and Pat Powers.

Bison, IMP, and Powers emerged as the biggest among the independents.
Apart from using Lumière film stock, the independents operated with non-infringing European cameras. But, as results were sometimes unsatisfactory, they began using licensed machinery, which got them into trouble with Edison, who went to great lengths in his efforts to track down anybody who didn’t comply with his rules.

To protect their equipment, not to mention themselves, the independents covered their cameras, hired bodyguards, and some of them even fled to places which were out of the Trust’s reach, like Cuba, Florida, or, eventually, California, in order to continue with the shooting of their films. In 1910 Laemmle, Kessel, and Baumann set up the Motion Picture Distributing and Sales Company, which became the sole exchange for independent films, offering an average of 27 films per week, and by 1912 the independents’ share of the total film production rose to fifty percent. In tandem with the independents ascent, the Trust’s power began to be on the wane, as the valiant Laemmle was poised to beat Edison at his own game by challenging him in court, and it seemed that it was just a matter of having enough staying power to defeat him.

That same year the independents split into two rival camps, the Aitken/ Mutual Corporation which included ten companies, and Universal, which consisted of seven companies, headed by Carl Laemmle, who opened Universal’s West Coast branch in the same year by swallowing the Nestor Company and taking over their studio at the southwest corner of Sunset & Gower. However, in 1915, the year Edison’s hold over the infant film industry swiftly subsided when the Federal Court ruled that the Trust was an illegal conspiracy in restraint of trade, Laemmle moved to the San Fernando Valley, where he purchased a large parcel of land, erected a new studio and called it Universal City. The first to desert Hollywood in favour of the relatively undeveloped hinterland behind the Hollywood Hills, Laemmle allegedly was somewhat uneasy that his adventure might prove to be a failure.

But as we all know, he needn’t have worried!

Film historian Robert Sklar claims, that it wasn’t so much the Trust the film pioneers intended to escape by their exodus to Southern California, rather than the bad weather conditions in both New York and Chicago where the bulk of the film companies were based at the time. On top of that, unlike New York, which would always remain what it is, and could never be mistaken for anything else, Los Angeles had all the makings of a film metropolis, providing the film pioneers with ample space and a variety of sceneries, which were not unlike all the world’s landscapes rolled into one: an ocean with a jagged and cliffy coast-line; lush, subtropical vegetation, resembling anything between Turkey and the south of Spain; nearby lakes; deserts; and even snow-capped mountains could be found in the not too distant vicinity of Los Angeles.

And as if this wasn’t enough, the Los Angeles of those days also was a free-for-all, inasmuch as it was a city where unions were next to nonexistent, thus supplying the filmmakers with cheap labour galore.

To learn more about early Hollywood history, visit FILM-TALK again on Friday, July 22 when this series continues with City of Angels: The Studios - The Studio Era, Part 3, telling you all about Hollywood's first feature film, the birth of the studio system, and how Hollywood became the world's foremost hub for intellectuals during the 1930s!

Les Petits Mouchoirs (Little White Lies), Guillaume Canet, France 2011

2011-07-11T05:12:00.000-07:00

It's one thing to have a film with an interesting premise and another to take this premise and turn it into a tight, coherent, screenplay.

While Canet succeeded in the first point, he failed utterly in the second. Although, to be fair, his film starts off on the right foot: For about 90 minutes or so Les petits Mouchoirs comes along as a latter-day version of Woody Allen's best soul-searching tragicomedies of the 1980s. But about one and a half hours into the film, Canet runs out of steam, and what until then was a witty, often funny, yet light attempt at dealing with the mishaps and shortcomings of today's city-dwellers, becomes heavy-handed, almost maudlin, conventional, family entertainment, one that ties up all the loose ends in the plot, making the direct opposite of Allen's films, where more often than not, no problems are solved; if anything, they've become worse over the course of the film. But then, that's life, isn't it?

I've wondered if it was the producers, with their eye forever on the box-office, who requested Les petits mouchoirs to have a more upbeat ending. The result however, is an ending that comes across as hopelessly contrived and unrealistic and, worse, tacked-on, so as if it was added as an afterthought.

And yet, Les petits mouchoirs was this close to becoming a French version of Hannah And Her Sisters - if only it ended after 90 minutes, as do literally all Woody Allen films. Well, it was Shakespeare after all who already knew that "brevity is the soul of wit" ... and I couldn't agree with him more.

City of Angels: The Studio Era, Part 1

2011-07-08T09:47:00.000-07:00

Films arrived in Southern California in 1907.

The completion of the Santa Fe railway in 1885 triggered a massive land boom within the Los Angeles area, and was fuelled by the subsequent discovery of oil wells, all of which had already begun to alter the nervous system of the prospering city prior to the arrival of the first film folk.

There can be little doubt, however, that the Pacific metropolis wouldn't be what it is today without its film industry.

The studio era officially began in 1923/ 24, a time that marks the formation of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Columbia, Warner Brothers, and the arrival of Joseph Schenk at United Artists. During its heyday, the Hollywood studios were divided into majors and minors. The so-called Big Five were MGM, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Twentieth Century Fox, and RKO, the latter of which joined the ranks of the majors with the advent of sound. The three minors consisted of Columbia, Universal, and United Artists. One of the things all studios had in common is the fact that the corporate power was divided between the money boys in New York and the moguls who presided over the studios in Los Angeles. Not only was New York America’s, if not the world’s, financial hub as much back then as it is now, but before the centre of movie-making shifted from the East Coast to the West Coast, most of the companies were based in New York.

On the fringes there were a number of others, also-rans, like Republic, Eagle Lion and Monogram, film companies which operated on a much smaller scale, cranked out B-pictures, and whose company history was in many cases even more bumpy than that of their bigger brothers and sisters. In the pool of majors and minors, almost each studio had its own specific handwriting, serving as a signature or stamp, which made it relatively easy to identify a film’s birthplace.

MGM, with its impressive line-up of skilled technicians, its awe-inspiring roster of stars, and its charismatic production chief, Irving G.Thalberg, quickly established itself as the glamour studio and the proverbial dream factory, while Warner’s toiled mainly on the dark and gloomy side of the street, focusing on jailbirds, crooks, and gangster molls.

Fox, under the tutelage of Darryl F. Zanuck, for many years lacked a specific look other than being the studio of Sonia Henie and Shirley Temple, until later Zanuck acquired a certain reputation for producing message pictures. Columbia, with a tiny roster of stars, operating on a single block, and the miserly Harry Cohn at the helm, was simply known as the black hole of Calcutta, until, of course, the tremendous success of Frank Capra’s films changed all that.

Universal, besides being the home of Deanna Durbin, whose musicals saved the studio from ruin during the 1930s, also made a name for itself as the studio of horror movies. Paramount, referred to as the country-club of studios, had a wide range of European talent under its roof, and became known as the studio with the continental sheen.

Apart from the big dream factories, Hollywood also hosted a number of independent producers like David O. Selznick, Samuel Goldwyn and Orson Welles Mercury Productions. United Artists, RKO, and Columbia would all become havens for independent producers. Lacking sufficient resident talent to keep their operations going, they rented out their facilities to independents, and often co-produced and distributed their films. With the onslaught of television, which arrived in tandem with the Hollywood witch hunt and the Government Consent Decree that forced the studios to divest themselves of their theatre chains, all of which spelling the end of the studio era, independent productions became the norm in Hollywood. As Billy Wilder once observed, “In the olden days you went to see an MGM picture. It had its own handwriting. Or you knew it was a Warner Bros.picture – Cagney and Bogart and the small actors that were under contract there. Now studios are nothing but the Ramada Inn – you rent space there, you shoot, and out you go”. Billy Wilder chose to ignore the fact that independent productions were precisely what -rightfully- made him the rich man he eventually became.

Billy Wilder

After the studio system had become dust, Hollywood was up for grabs as independent producers were calling the shots, striking up deals between director, studio, actors and writers, each of whom was entitled to their share of the cake, whereas during the studio era, it was the studio that reaped the profits of other people’s labour, but it also shouldered the potential risks. Looking at Hollywood’s output today, it stands to reason that the quality of the films during the studio era was superior, and that today’s free-for-all atmosphere has turned Hollywood into a very shallow gold-mine. Not that all that glittered was gold, of course. And yet, it seems to me that every so often art was being produced not in spite, but because of the studio system. Outside the mogul’s genuine interest in film and their willingness to take risks, with an annual average of forty to fifty releases per studio, they could afford a few box-office duds without losing too much sleep over it. Besides, everybody involved in a film was usually under contract to the studio, which greatly minimised a film’s cost. The studio system’s finely wrought mesh of rules, regulations and restrictions were a safety net as well as a cobweb from time to time.

D.W. Griffith

Above all, the story of Hollywood and its studios is a story of immigration, and thus reflects the story of America itself, as a fact virtually all moguls had in common was, even though they chose to play it down, that they were all first or second generation Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, with the exception of Twentieth Century Fox’s Darryl F. Zanuck and the founders of United Artists: Pickford, Fairbanks, Griffith, and Chaplin.

Darryl F. Zanuck

The Tsar of all moguls, MGM’s Louis B. Mayer, was born in Russia in 1885, but left his native village of Demre a mere three years later to settle in the US by way of Nova Scotia. He started his career by working in his father’s scrap iron business before selling tickets at a Boston cinema, and buying his own movie theatre as early as 1907.

Paramount’s Adolph Zukor, born in Ricse, Hungary, arrived in the US in 1888, and started working in the fur trade before investing in a penny arcade in 1904.

Coming from the Polish village of Krasnashiltz, the Warner family emigrated to the United States 1882, settling first in Baltimore, were the four Warner brothers eked out a living by doing menial work ranging from shining shoes and selling soap to cobbling. In 1904 Sam Warner opened up a nickelodeon in Youngstown, Ohio. Joined by his brothers, they eventually ran a larger cinema, until they gradually expanded into distribution.

Samuel Goldwyn

Also born in Poland, Schmuel Gelbfisz grew up in a Warsaw ghetto. At the age of twenty, in 1899, by way of Hamburg, London, Birmingham and Liverpool, he arrived in New York, where, changing his name to Samuel Goldwyn, he began working as a gloves salesman. Later, he got married to Blanche Lasky, the sister of film pioneer Jesse Lasky, with whom we would eventually go into business. In the eyes of Katherine Hepburn, Goldwyn was “the most compelling and colourful of all the movie moguls”. And, she added, “of all those pirates, and they were all pirates, he was the only one with a sense of humour”.

Goldwyn went on to enchant and amuse Hollywood with what was dubbed Goldwynisms, which were largely the result of his struggle with the English language. Not only did he refer to Miss Brontë’s classic as "Withering Heights”, when he was about to acquire the film rights to Lilian Hellmann’s The Little Foxes, he was cautioned by Edwin Knopf that "it is a very caustic play", prompting Goldwyn to reply, “I don’t care how much it costs. Buy it!”. In fact, Goldwynisms have become classics just like most of his films. When showing a painting he recently purchased to one of his friends, he proudly announced that this was his “new Toujours Lautrec”. During the House Committee of Un-American Activities(HUAC) hearings, Goldwyn was the only one of Hollywood’s producers to speak up against its activities, releasing a press statement that said, “…The most un-American activity which I have observed in connection with the hearings has been the activity of the Committee itself…. I assure you that as long as I live no one will ever be able to dictate what I put on the screen as long as I continue to honour and obey the laws of our country”.

Unlike most of his peers, Columbia’s Harry Cohn was born in the United States, in 1891 in New York, to a Russian-Jewish mother and a German-Jewish father. Having been a pool hustler and song plugger along the way, Harry Cohn wound up in Hollywood, where he started out on Poverty Row, a label which he didn’t manage to shake off for a long time.

Carl Laemmle

Carl Laemmle, founder of Universal, was born in 1867 in the South-German village of Laupheim. Coming to the United States in 1884, he began his career as an errand boy, and by 1906 worked as a nickelodeon operator in Chicago.

None of the film industry’s founding fathers had much of an education to speak of, although not for want of trying but simply because they lacked the necessary means.
Having grown up in poverty, all of them shared a determination combined with an astute business sense and a willingness to take risks. Fascinated by the fledgling film industry, which is hardly what it could be called back then, through hard labour and foresight they slowly became part of it, and eventually shaped it and made it their own. As screenwriter Nunnally Johnson’s daughter, Marjorie Fowler, observed, “The Cohns and Mayers may have been tough sons-of-bitches, but they had instinct".

For Part 2 of City Of Angels: The Studios - The Studio Era, please log on to FILM-TALK on Tuesday!

Larry Crowne, Tom Hanks, US 2011

2011-07-01T13:48:00.000-07:00

When I first saw the trailer to Larry Crowne, I had high hopes that Tom Hank's new stab at directing might actually turn out to be a feel-good movie with some relevance and, also, with some credibility. One that doesn't - as these films have a tendency to do - underestimate its audience by dismissing them with the felling that in actual fact, what they've just seen was yet another fairytale with a Hollywood ending.

Alas, I'm sorry to say, this is precisely what Larry Crowne is: A fairytale, and one that isn't even particularly well told.

It's a real pity, for a film that tackles the subject of economic depression and unemployment has long been overdue, but sadly, Hanks and his fellow-scriptwriter Nia Vardalos (My Big Fat Greek Wedding) have wasted a first-rate opportunity to comment on the world we live in, a world that is run by big corporations and where losing one's job is not just a dim possibility but a reality for many, including all its dire consequences.

Tom Hanks plays Larry Crowne, who is part of the security staff in a Walmart-like company. Because he has never been to college he is deemed expendable and so he is the first one to be let go. Eager to catch up on the college education he never had the privilege to enjoy, Larry enrols in a class that is supposed to teach him free speech. That is where the problem starts already. I would have thought that for a man in his early fifties, enrolling in such a class is of little help, if any. To succeed in the college-degree obsessed world of today - a fact which the film did well to point out - Larry would have been better off, in my opinion, to work towards a degree, one that offers a realistic chance of future employment. Julia Roberts plays Larry's teacher, Mercedes Tainot, and needless to say, they eventually end up falling in love. However, equally needless to say, they both have to go through the all too familiar ups-and-downs, required by the 'Hollywood-School-Of-Scriptwriting', before they're finally allowed their first kiss. This being a movie aimed at a somewhat more mature audience, a kiss is consequently all we get to see. Not that that would be of any importance. It is just another indicator of how predictable the screenplay is and to what extent it follows a pattern that has become at least as stale and as boring as Mercedes Tainot's marriage has become over the years - the perfect match, one should think, a disenchanted teacher and wife and a washed-up, middle-aged, security officer on the dole. Only that with all due respect to Julia Roberts - who to me remains one of the major attractions to come out of Hollywood within the past 25 years - theirs is not a relationship that's in any way believable. Unless you assume that following insult and humiliation by her husband, it is pure desperation that prompts Tainot to fall for Larry.

Tainot's marriage is thus another level where the film falls apart. While I concede that it may be possible to get bored with being married to even so beautiful a woman as Julia Roberts, accusing her, as her husband does, of not having 'big enough knockers' to hold his attention, is completely ridiculous. Since Larry Crowne never pretended to be a sequel to Scenes From A Marriage, the film can be excused for not delving into the marital problems of the Tainots, let alone discussing them at length. However, rendering these problems at least remotely believable is something that any film owes its audience. This lack of credibility is reflected in another sub-plot, involving a hip, trendy, 20-something girl, at least 30 years Larry's junior, he meets on his first day at college and who takes him under her wings to teach him how to dress, subsequently making him over entirely including even Larry's house. Stuff like this may happen in a fairytale, but I don't think I can be accused of cynicism if I say that this has little bearing on reality.

Having ripped this film apart, I have to say that Larry Crowne is at least entertaining - as long as you switch off your brain - and even has moments of which I simply wish there would have been more: interesting and also relevant comments on our society dominated by Facebook and Twitter rather than literature, as well as some scenes that expose the shenanigans of Larry's bank - or any bank, for that matter - which, his unemployment notwithstanding, still tries to squeeze a buck out of him. Unfortunately, the screenwriters either didn't think it worthwhile to make more of these points or else, didn't deem them 'box-office'. But focussing on these themes would have turned Larry Crowne from a run-of-the-mill Hollywood 'product' into an important social commentary.

And in times like these, an audience deserves those at least as much as fairytales.

The Tree Of Life, Terrence Malick, US 2011

2011-06-20T15:28:00.000-07:00

Having not been to the Cannes Film Festival I am of course unable to say anything about all other films in this year's Competition, let alone comment on their quality. However, I can only presume that the members of this year's jury, still in a daze provoked by the ballyhoo surrounding Lars von Trier's press conference that somehow, they ended up awarding the Palme D'Or to Malick's film for reasons I am entirely incapable to comprehend.

The Tree of Life is a film in search of a story, for its narrative can be told in just a few sentences: In 1950's Texas a father, played by Brad Pitt, keeps his sons on a tight leash raising them in a strict manner. Some 40 years down the line, the eldest of the three sons Jack, played by Sean Penn, looks back on his childhood and starts to question - you guessed it! - the meaning of life.

Malick takes nearly three hours to tell this story which apparently is partly autobiographical, filling the gaps with psychedelic images which at times come across as a blend between Jurassic Park and 2001, A Space Odyssey. Others have suggested that Malick's film seems like a Discovery Channel Special, a comparison that is not far off the mark.

While Malick takes great pains to forge a link between the film's actual narrative and its imagery, to me, at least, there is little connection between the two. The incessant stream of psychedelic and Discovery Channel images, employed to visualise Jack's reflection on the meaning of life, come across as hopelessly pretentious and disconnected, and only the consumer of substantial amounts of illegal substances may be able to see the link between the film's - pitifully thin - storyline and the endless succession of images of deserts, waterfalls, rain forests and the like and, more importantly, to perceive these as mesmerizing or in any way relevant to what the film may want to say.

I feel compelled to add here that I am not usually a fan of typical conventional, linear, Hollywood storytelling. On the same token, putting images where the story ought be by making the film twice as long as necessary, doesn't automatically result in art.

On Polanski

2011-06-16T06:58:00.000-07:00

After having recently finished reading Isaac Bashevis Singer's The Manor, I wondered what to read next. Having just read a novel - Singer's - I decided I needed to go back again to the topic I feel passionate about most - Film - and somehow I ended up buying Christopher Sandford's monography on Roman Polanski.

For as long as I can think of, Polanski has always been among the directors whose work I most admire. Others include Kubrick, Hitchcock, Chaplin, Lynch, Lumet and Wilder. This doesn't necessarily mean that I love all of their films - though I do most of them - it's simply that these directors' level of artistry has been unusually high and just as consistent. Certainly in comparison to most of their peers. In my opinion, anyway!

Paul Werner's book on Polanski was one of the first film-books I picked up when I was still in my early twenties. Although I'd already been obsessed with Polanski prior to reading it, Werner's book really opened my eyes. His insight, his analysis of Polanski's films and the way he forges links to Polanski's life without reading too much into them, helped me to better understand not only Polanski's work but also Polanski, the man. Additionally, it buttressed my opinion - already firm back then - that Chinatown, Rosemary's Baby and Repulsion are masterpieces and quite simply milestones in film history. To this day, they remain among my all-time favourite films: Excellently crafted stories which never underestimate the viewer, keeping you at the edge of your seat from beginning to end.

Once I'd started reading Sandford's book it dawned on me that my subconscious must have been playing a trick on me as Sandford's book took me straight back to Poland, though not the Poland of The Manor, but rather the Poland of the German invasion and subsequent occupation. I'd previously known, of course, that Polanksi was of Polish descent and that he spent part of his youth in the Warsaw Ghetto, but it nevertheless startled me how neatly Sandford's account picked up where Singer's book left off.

Roman Polanski and his second wife, Sharon Tate, who was brutally murdered by the Manson family in 1968

Anyhow, unlike Werner's, Sandford's book focusses on Polanski rather than offering sharp analyses of his films. However, it is one of the strengths of his book that Sandford manages to avoid one of the biggest pitfalls in biography-writing: The tendency to become anecdotal. While avoiding anecdotes is, of course, almost impossible in any biography, Polanski - such is the apt title of Sandford's book - introduces these anecdotes with caution and, where possible, even offering corroboration. Moreover, Sandford's is not one of those kiss-and-tell stories - the literary equivalent of a bodice ripper - but rather a well researched account of the life of one of the greatest directors of our time, told by someone who has nothing but admiration for his subject, something which suffuses every page of Sandford's book.

Roman Polanski and Ewan McGregor on location on the German island of Sylt, shooting Polanski's latest, The Ghost. To read my review of The Ghost, click HERE!

Somehow life's full of coincidences ... or is it? After reading up on Polanski had got me back into the mood of watching some vintage Polanski on the big screen - Polanksi is strictly for the movie theatre only! - I ran a google search and what did it throw up? Sadly no Polanksi retrospective anywhere near my home, but nevertheless, I found out that there currently is an exhibition on Polanski, organised by the film museums of Potsdam and Duesseldorf in collaboration with Polanski's alma mater, the Lodz Film School.

Deneuve going off the rails in Repulsion (1965)

The Beckett-inspired Cul-De-Sac (1966), which won the Grand Prix at that year's Berlin Film Festival

Mia Farrow playing the girl who, to use former Paramount executive Charles Bluhdorn's words, "was shtupped by the devil" in Rosemary's Baby (1967)

Until his untimely death in 1968 composer Kryzstof Komeda was a friend and frequent collaborator of Polanski's. Listen to Komeda's hauntingly beautiful score for Rosemary's Baby which much contributes to the cult status the film has since attained:

Faye Dunaway, playing the tragic heroine Evelyn Mulwray in Polanski's film-noir-to-end-all-film-noirs - Chinatown (1974)

Watch an original 1974 trailer of Chinatown here:

Yet another tragic heroine. Polanski's early films are full of women at the verge of a nervous breakdown. In the case of The Tenant (1976), this woman's called Simone Choule (though he's actually called Trelkovsky ...) and is played by none other than Polanski himself.

Adrian Brody walking the streets of the Warsaw Ghetto in one of The Pianist's most devastating scenes.

Recommended books about Roman Polanski:

Sandford, Christopher: Polanski, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009 (in English)
Werner, Paul, Roman Polanski, Fischer Cinema, 1984 (in German)

Roman Polanski, An Exhibition:

- Filmmuseum Potsdam, until 3 July 2011

City of Angels: The Studios, Part 8: Universal

2011-06-15T12:02:00.000-07:00

Universal Pictures was founded in 1912 when Carl Laemmle, a German-Jewish immigrant born in Laupheim in the South-German state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, merged his IMP (= Independent Motion Picture Company) with a string of smaller film companies like Bison, Powers, and Nestor, with himself at the helm.

Prior to that, back in 1906 Laemmle ran a nickelodeon in Chicago before moving on to opening a chain of cinemas and subsequently branching out into distribution shortly after. His outfit, Laemmle Film Service, eventually turned into the country’s biggest distribution company.

With Edison’s Motion Picture Patents Company (referred to as The Trust), formed in 1908, out to get anybody who wouldn’t play by the rules and regulations imposed by The Trust, it was a sorry time for anybody trying to break into film. Undeterred by The Trust’s shenanigans, Laemmle started to produce his own pictures in 1909, signing The Biograph Girl, Florence Lawrence, (so called because she had heretofore starred in flicks of the Biograph Company) in 1910, and putting Mary Pickford under contract soon after.

Carl Laemmle Senior

Laemmle's efforts to defy the Trust’s monopoly proved successful when in 1912 the Justice Department deemed Edison’s practices unlawful, giving Laemmle wings to further expand his ever-growing company, which subsequently led to the foundation of Universal.

In 1914 Laemmle bought a 230 acre parcel of land north of Hollywood in the San Fernando Valley, with the intention of building an enormous film studio, called Universal City, which he opened in 1915. In about 1920 a young Irving Thalberg, who would soon makes waves at Metro, was appointed manager of the studio, after having previously worked at Universal’s head office in New York. Driven, and with a fire in his head, Thalberg ran the studio efficiently, which was reflected in the high box office returns, enabling Universal to further assert its position on the increasingly competitive motion picture market.

Irving G. Thalberg

Thalberg went on to run a tight ship during his relatively brief stint at Universal, and his torrid run-ins with Erich von Stroheim, one of Universal’s resident directors, are legend. Thalberg firmly believed that a director was nothing but a hired hand, and any attempt on his side to let his imagination, not to mention the cost of the film, run wild, had to be nipped in the bud. After having gone way over budget already on his opulent Foolish Wives (1922), where Stroheim insisted on a painstakingly precise recreation of Monte Carlo, on his next picture, Merry-Go-Round (1923), Stroheim found himself discharged by the hard-headed Thalberg. The Merry-Go-Round disaster spelled the end of Stroheim’s career in the US. But before returning to Europe he would go on to do a couple of films for MGM where he clashed once again with Thalberg, who had since joined the Mayer Company just prior to its merger with Goldwyn and Loew.

To be sure, Thalberg’s tight reign at Universal was a prelude to his years at MGM, where he was known for keeping its directors on an equally tight leash, exercising his power as production chief wherever and whenever he saw fit. History, however, has been kinder to Stroheim than to his nemesis, Thalberg, as his films are hailed by critics and film historians alike as unique and outstanding masterpieces, while Thalberg’s input and influence has of late become regarded as overvalued.

Other pictures of note of that period in Universal’s history include Wallace Worsley’s The Hunchback Of Notre Dame (1923), and Paul Leni’s films, The Cat And The Canary (1927), and The Man Who Laughs (1928), starring fellow-German Conrad Veidt (of The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari fame). Thus started Universal’s love affair with the bizarre, the macabre and the twisted.

James Whale

Carl Laemmle had a reputation for filling all kinds of positions in his company with family members, inspiring a witty unknown to coin the term, “Carl Laemmle has a very big faemmle”. In 1929, the ageing Carl Laemmle Sr. put his son, Carl Jr. in charge of production, who went on to win the studio its first best picture Oscar in 1930 with the anti-war drama All Quiet on the Western Front, based on Erich-Maria Remarque best-selling novel. A year later Laemmle’s nephew, William Wyler, arrived from Europe, to begin what would eventually turn into a successful career as one of Hollywood's leading film directors. His western Hell’s Heroes (1930), stands out amidst all the monsters and dead bodies that tended to fill Universal’s screen during the early 1930s. British import James Whale, since then elegantly and aptly portrayed on screen by fellow Brit Ian McEllan in the elegiac Gods And Monsters (1999), was largely responsible for Universal's reputation as the studio of horror flicks as his string of horror movies, beginning with Dracula (1931), followed by Frankenstein (1931) and The Bride Of Frankenstein (1932) rippled the film world.

Bette Davis in the early 1930s

In 1930 Universal lured the young Bette Davis, then appearing on the New York stage, to Hollywood in order to add her name to the studio’s pitiful roster of stars. Legend has it, that once the aspiring actress, accompanied by her mother, Ruthie, arrived at the Pasadena station, after a strenuous five-day journey from New York, nobody from Universal bothered to show up to greet them. Universal’s negligent treatment of the budding actress was an antecedent of the studio’s cluelessness as to what to do with her, studio boss Laemmle being said to have uttered that “she has as much sex appeal as Slim Summerville”. Consequently, after only a few pictures, most of which on loan-out to other studios, and not one even remotely exploiting her potential, Universal dropped her contract and Bette Davis was ready to go back east, when, in the nick of time, Warner Brothers snapped her up, and turned her into their Queen of the lot.

During the mid-1930s Universal had little to offer in terms of quality pictures.
My Man Godfrey (1936), Gregory LaCava’s hilarious screw-ball comedy, starring Carole Lombard and William Powell, both on loan-out from Paramount and MGM respectively, was one of the rare exceptions. And with box-office returns slackening continuously, there was no denying the fact that Universal was in dire need of funds. The year My Man Godfrey was released, Carl Laemmle Sr. was pressed to sell his interest in the company he founded.

By 1938 Universal was run by Nate Blumberg, and the company slowly climbed out of the red, but with the ailing studio in dire need of stars and talented directors, its output would remain second-rate until the mid/ late forties, when Universal released a couple of exciting thrillers, thereby once again resorting to the dark side of the screen. Fritz Lang’s classic Scarlet Street (1946) and Robert Siodmak’s The Killers (1946) were among the most outstanding Universal releases during that period.

Joan Bennett and Edward G. Robinson in Fritz Lang's Scarlett Street (1945)

Bearing in mind that the history of the Hollywood studios being also part of the history of corporate America, it was in 1946 that Universal merged with International Pictures, founded a mere three years earlier by William Goetz and Leo Spitz, who both took control over the studio operations in Hollywood while Nate Blumberg continued to be president of Universal, based at the company’s New York headquarters. In an attempt to boost Universal’s performance at the box-office, the studio reached an agreement with the British film company J. Arthur Rank to distribute its films in the US, which also added some much needed cachet to Universal’s chipped reputation.
The deal quickly paid off, though not necessarily in cash, but in giving Universal a long overdue ego-boost, when Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet (1948) won a best picture Oscar in 1948. Other British productions released by Universal included like David Lean’s Great Expectations (1948), Emeric Pressburger’s Black Narcissus (1948), and Carol Reed’s masterpiece Odd Man Out (1947).

Douglas Sirk

In 1952 Universal was in for yet another shake-up when Decca Records seized control over the studio by becoming its major shareholder. The old guard exited, and Milton Rackmil and Edward Muhl entered the studio, the former being its new president and the latter Universal’s new studio chief. It was during the 1950s that Universal finally became a major player again and a force to be reckoned with, when a new breed of producers and directors marched in, headed by Ross Hunter and Douglas Sirk, who brought a new meaning to the term melodrama dazzling 1950s audiences with their polished, impeccably staged soap operas such as Magnificent Obsession (1954), Written On The Wind (1956), and Imitation Of Life (1959). Their films would have a lasting influence on future generations of directors. German film-maker Rainer Werner Fassbinder is said to have been greatly influenced by the films of his fellow-German, inspiring him to his acclaimed Veronica Voss (1981) and The Marriage Of Maria Braun (1978).

Marlene Dietrich in Welles' A Touch of Evil (1958)

Another remarkable film of Universal’s 1950s period is Orson Welles’ A Touch Of Evil (1958). A low-key thriller with a brilliantly crafted screenplay -including a meaty part for Orson Welles’ pal Marlene Dietrich- the film is every bit a masterpiece. But, of course, as Welles’ films go, A Touch Of Evil wasn’t exactly breaking records at the box-office.

Ten years after Decca took control of Universal, it was now the giant Music Corporation of America (MCA), run by the charismatic Lew Wasserman, that swallowed up both companies in one fell swoop in 1962. A highly regarded and well respected man, the bespectacled, magnetic Lew Wasserman was generally agreed to be the most powerful man in Hollywood, in fact, its King. He would continue to run MCA until 1995, five years after the conglomeration’s takeover by Japanese electronics behemoth Matsushita, when Wassermann was named ‘chairman emeritus’.

Like an ancient rock in the surf, Universal stood firm in spite of the numerous takeovers the company had been through over the years, and if anything, these seem to have injected some new life into the ailing film studio, as the 1960s went off to an even better start than the previous decade.

Tippi Hedren in Hitchock's The Birds (1963)

Alfred Hitchcock began his association with Universal in 1962 with his shocker The Birds. Universal granted Hitchcock the freedom he craved, and in turn Hitchcock’s films reaped healthy profits. It was thus a partnership both sides were happy with, and one that would last until Hitchcock’s last film 14 years later, Family Plot (1976).

The Doris Day and Rock Hudson comedies were also universally popular, Miss Day having been rated the most popular film star in three consecutive years, between 1960 and 1963. In terms of artistic merits, however, another Universal release of the 1960s which more than warrants a mention, is Robert Mulligan’s subtle adaptation of Harper Lee's instant classic, To Kill A Mockingbird (1963), for which Gregory Peck rightly won the Academy Award for best actor.
To Kill A Mockingbird also won for best picture, which was the studio’s first best picture Oscar after 43 years.
It was clear that Universal was finally out of the woods.

Steven Spielberg came on board in the 1970s, ringing in the block-buster age with hits like Jaws (1975), and later, E.T. (1982) and Jurassic Park (1993). His much subtler, and better, film, Schindler’s List (1994) was also produced by Universal, winning the studio yet another best picture Oscar, its fifth, after having won again in 1979 for the melancholy The Deer Hunter, and also in 1985, for the melodrama to end all melodramas, Out Of Africa, in which Meryl Streep gives a towering performance of the Danish writer Tania Blixen’s years in East Africa.

Meryl Streep and Robert Redford in Sydney Pollack's Out of Africa (1985)

Universal’s unbroken string of successes made it a likely, not to mention lucrative, object of desire for investors, and in 1990, after almost 30 years of MCA’s unswerving reign, Universal and MCA were both bought up by Matsushita.
But after only 5 years the electronic giant lost interest in the film company and sold it to the Canadian Seagram Corporation, managed by Edgar Bronfman Jr.
The financial success of Apollo 13 (1995) was dampened by the departure of Spielberg, who left to form Dreamworks with partners Devid Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg. However, an agreement was reached that their pictures would continue to be released through Universal.

Julia Roberts in Soderbergh's Erin Brockovich (2000)

Five shaky years later, in 2000, the French media giant Vivendi swallowed Seagrams’ drinks along with Universal’s films, gulping it down to the tune of $ 34 billion.
With the company bouncing back and forth, and a lot of back-scratching as well as back-stabbing going on at the top, Universal had a couple of respectable hits over the past few years, most noteworthy of which is Steven Soderbergh’s Erin Brockovich (2000), which won Julia Roberts her richly deserved Oscar as best actress. Universal was also one of the first Hollywood studios to tap the public’s fascination with films and filmmaking, and already during Carl Laemmle’s times as studio chief, the public was granted a peek behind the scenes.

However, 1964 marks the year Universal officially began their organised studio tours, which now have evolved into a theme park emulating Disneyland. There is little, unfortunately, in terms of studio history, as the tour - and the rides - focus on recent studio successes as Back To The Future, Jurassic Park, and the like.

City of Angels: The Studios, Part 7: Pickford & Fairbanks Studios (United Artists), Now: The Lot

2011-06-09T12:12:00.000-07:00

In 1922 Hollywood’s royal couple, Mary Pickford and Dougals Fairbanks, purchased this modestly sized studio which had been built two years earlier by Jesse Hampton, a now sadly forgotten film pioneer.

Fairbanks’ Robin Hood (1922) and The Thief Of Baghdad (1924) were both filmed here.
In 1927 the studio was renamed United Artists, after the company Pickford and Fairbanks had founded in 1919 in partnership with David Wark Griffith and Charlie Chaplin, who continued producing his films in his own studio on La Brea, but releasing them through United Artists.

The Lot, today

While space on their studio could be rented, United Artists was first and foremost a distribution company, the vertical integration of production, distribution and exhibition was never a priority. The purpose of United Artists, as the choice of its name suggests, was gaining complete control over the marketing and distribution of their own pictures without having to report to an array of studio bosses and production chiefs yet at the same time enabling United Artists to keep a larger share of the grosses.

Mary Pickford

Although they relished the complete artistic control their own company afforded them, with only a handful of talent under its roof, United Artists was in dire need of product to meet the minimum amount of releases to keep their operation going.
To solve the problem, next to a few new arrivals on the lot such as Gloria Swanson, they were also attracting early independents like Walt Disney, Samuel Goldwyn, David O.Selznick, or British producer Alexander Korda, and, much later, Walter Mirisch.

D.W. Griffith

In 1924 Griffith left United Artists to sign up with Paramount. Left in the lurch, independent producer Joseph Schenk (brother of MGM’s Nicholas, who would replace Marcus Loew in 1927) joined the company, bringing with him his associate, Buster Keaton.

One should imagine that with this high voltage of talent united under one roof, the studio was on a sure-fire road to success. But if anything, the high voltage led to personality clashes and ensuing fights over the way United Artists should be run, as the wispy Pickford was in reality a shrewd business woman, whereas Charlie Chaplin simply cherished the creative freedom United Artists provided him with. That, to him, who loathed working for large conglomerations for their artistic shackles, would always have precedence over profits.

Joseph Schenk, having shunted the startled Keaton off to MGM in 1928, left United Artists in 1935, to fuse his independent Twentieth Century Pictures (formed with Darryl F. Zanuck) with the Fox Corporation. Schenk’s departure left a void, and an endless wrangling started over United Artists’ management that, in a way, is spilling over to the present day.

The incessant management changes, the constant bickering and fights, are also reflected in the equally frequent changes of the company logo. While most other Hollywood studios would hang on to their logo even in the most tempestuous of times, United Artists seems to have changed their with every change of management. All this casts a shadow over the studio’s history, belying the fact that as a distributor, United Artists probably released more quality pictures than any other studio in Hollywood. Among its impressive output are classics like The Gold Rush (Chaplin, 1925), Nothing Sacred (La Cava, 1937), Spellbound (Hitchcock, 1945), Red River (Hawks, 1948), and Some like it Hot (Wilder, 1959). It has more best picture Oscars to its name than any of its rivals, including Rebecca (Hitchcock, 1940), The Apartment (Wilder, 1960), West Side Story (Wise, 1961), Tom Jones (Richardson, 1963), and Midnight Cowboy (Schlesinger, 1969). The fact that they are all independent productions goes to show that the founders of United Artists seem to have realised at an early stage that a certain level of artistic freedom is required in order to produce art.

Samuel Goldwyn

Having first joined United Artists as an independent producer in 1925, Samuel Goldwyn bought the United Artists studio in 1955 for a reported $1.92 million, outbidding Pickford by $400.000.

Purchased in 1980 by Warner Brothers, it was commonly known as the Warner Hollywood studio(complementing their headquarters in Burbank).

In the meantime it finally became a registered historical landmark, but was sold once more in 1999, and is since named simply, The Lot, with Warner Brothers as a tenant, continuing to use its post-production facilities.

City of Angels: The Studios, Part 6: RKO

2011-05-30T02:01:00.000-07:00

Considered one of the five major studios during Hollywood's golden age, RKO is mostly identified today as the studio that produced Orson Welles’ masterpiece Citizen Kane (1941), Merian C. Cooper’s and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s King Kong (1933) and the lavish Fred Astaire Ginger Rogers musicals, which struck a chord with Depression audiences.

RKO during its heyday

But RKO was also the studio of the young and zany Katherine Hepburn, and Lucille Ball, who would later buy the studio when it was on the skids. Besides its strong focus on black-and-white features, the most remarkable thing about RKO probably is the fact that during its brief, torn and torrid history (1928 – 1957), it went through more presidents and reshuffles than any other studio, inducing Andrew Sarris to quip that “Rko is the closest thing we have in Hollywood to a schizophrenic studio experiencing nervous breakdowns”. Although the founding of RKO was preceded by a merger of RCA(= Radio Corporation of America) and FBO(= Film Booking Office), its history officially starts in 1928, when the RKO/ FBO conglomeration fused with the Keith-Albee-Orpheum chain to form the Radio-Keith-Orpheum Corporation, or RKO.

With practically no stars or talent of note under contract to the studio, RKO was lucky to start at a time when proceeds were high, tapping the audience’s hunger for the newly invented sound pictures. Concentrating on musicals RKO did well, and in an act of folly took over the Pathé studio in 1930. With it came a modest roster of stars like Ann Harding and Constance Bennett. The same year the studio landed a critical hit with Cimarron (1930), which garnered a couple Oscars, among which the one for best picture. In 1931 David O. Selznick replaced William LeBaron as head of production, and with his go-getter temperament he was quick in changing things around by plundering the New York stages in order for RKO to sign up a line-up of promising stars and directors.
Joining the roster of stars inherited from Pathé were Katherine Hepburn and Mary Astor, enrolling in 1932, and 1930, respectively. RKO went the way of all film studios, when a - you guessed it! - reorganisation took place in 1932, and RKO’s president Hiram Brown was replaced by Aylesworth, who soon started breathing down Selznick’s neck, causing the latter to join MGM, where Louis B. Mayer was desperate to find a capable replacement to fill in for the missing prowess of Irving G. Thalberg, who had suffered a heart attack and was on an extended leave of absence.

Katherine Hepburn

Katherine Hepburn turned into the company’s most reliable actress, winning an Oscar (her first of four) for her performance in Morning Glory (1933). The studios had a reputation for keeping their stars busy - especially if they were new on the scene - and so the very same year Hepburn also starred in Christopher Strong and Little Women, which was directed by her friend and RKO colleague, George Cukor.

Weathering the storms of the Depression, the studio had a good year in 1935, releasing three films which all went on to become classics. Alice Adams won Hepburn yet another Oscar nod, the Fred Astaire/ Ginger Rogers musical Top Hat was nominated in four categories, while John Ford’s masterpiece The Informer ended up winning four, including one for its director and one for Victor McLaglen, who played the title role. The Atlas Corporation, headed by Floyd Odlum, bought a major stake in the studio, which led to yet another reshuffle, with Leo Spitz emerging as the new president.
But being RKO, this constellation was to last for a mere 3 years, before the next restructuring brought on the ousting of Spitz, who was succeeded by George Schaefer.

Amidst all this muddle at the top, the studio nevertheless managed to come up with a number of memorable pictures, among which one that led to Bette Davis’ (on loan out from Warners) breakthrough as an actress, Of Human Bondage (1935). Based on Somerset Maugham’s novel and directed by RKO’s John Cromwell, the part of the ferocious Mildred Rogers paved the way to turn her into Hollywood’s Grande Dame of Sturm and Drang. Gregory LaCava’s hilarious screwball comedy Stage Door (1937), which united in-house actresses Hepburn, Ball and Rogers in a hilarious romp about the travails of aspiring actresses, room-mating in New York. Stage Door, like many of RKO’s films, catered mainly to women. Having turned the studio’s chronical lack of male talent into a virtue, RKO churned out a string of films aimed at female audiences. The much underrated LaCava also directed the witty morale raiser Fifth Avenue Girl (1939), in which Ginger Rogers has this to say about the upper crust, “Rich people are just poor people with money”.

Bette Davis as the villainous Regina Giddens in The Little Foxes

To make up for the shortage of talent, studio boss Schaefer was adept at encouraging independent producers to work for RKO, thus being a trail-blazer in the Hollywood landscape, for independent productions would only start to become popular with the demise of the studio system in the early 1950s. He struck up deals with early independents like Samuel Goldwyn, Walt Disney and David Selznick’s Vanguard Company, thus limiting RKO’s risks as well as limiting its profits, while at the same time substantially adding to the studio’s cachet, as Goldwyn’s films like The Little Foxes (William Wyler, 1941) and The Best Years Of Our Lives (William Wyler, 1946) went on to be showered with praise, not to mention a multitude of Oscars and Oscar nods. His association with Orson Welles’ Mercury Productions, however, led to Schaefer’s downfall, as due to a smear campaign by the Hearst press in which Louella Parsons’ poison pen infamously panned Welles’ masterpiece Citizen Kane (1941), RKO suffered sizeable losses, which led to Schaefer’s resignation in 1942. Floyd Odlum became chairman of the board, with N. Peter Rathvon in the position of corporate president, as his helpmate.

Orson Welles in Citizen Kane

With the US entering the war in 1941, President Roosevelt encouraged the film studios to contribute to the war effort by producing morale-boosting, patriotic films. RKO’s offerings included Edward Dmytryk’s film Tender Comrade (1943), which in the end turned out to be part anti-Nazi, part women’s picture. In it Ginger Rogers had to utter the now famous line “share and share alike, that’s’ democracy”, which with Russia still an ally, went completely unnoticed. When, however, once the war was over the tides rapidly turned, Dmytryk’s patriotic effort backfired, and it was held against him when the House Committee on Un-American Activities investigated against Communist infiltration among the film community. Ginger Rogers’ mother, Lela, used those very lines against the film’s director, Edward Dmytryk, who subsequently was subpoenaed before the Committee on charges of being a Communist (which, as a matter of fact, he was, but that should never have been the point).

Dore Schary

Milking the high cinema attendance during the war years, reaching its peak in 1946, RKO did well, releasing now classic films like Fritz Lang’s The Woman In The Window (1945) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946). By 1947, RKO was in trouble again, resulting in Dore Schary being hired as production chief. Schary, however, didn’t last long. Odlum’s decision to sell the studio to aviator-turned-tycoon Howard Hughes in 1948 spelled the end of Schary’s stint at RKO, and he left to come to MGM’s rescue, which, with the studio era coming to a close, had also fallen on hard times.
Schary’s departure was followed by a succession of production chiefs and presidents, none of whom managed to rise to the occasion of dealing with the whimsical and elusive Hughes. The difficulties of the incessant change of management notwithstanding, RKO released a string of memorable pictures during its last years, most significant among which are the films by Fritz Lang (Clash By Night, 1952, While The City Sleeps, 1956, Beyond A Reasonable Doubt, 1956), Howard Hawks(The Thing From Another World, 1951), Nicholas Ray (They Live By Night, 1948, On Dangerous Ground, 1952), Otto Preminger (Angel Face, 1952, Sudden Fear, 1953), and Robert Wise’s brilliant boxing-film-noir, The Set-Up(1949).

In 1952, with red baiting still rampant, Hughes, a notorious Communist hater, closed the studio, laid off over a thousand people, in order to implement a screening system with the aim to get rid of possible Communists on the lot. Having run the studio to the ground, Hughes sold RKO to the General Teleradio Corporation in 1955. But failing at injecting new life into the suffering studio, RKO was acquired by Lucille Ball and her husband Desi Arnaz in 1958. Renamed DeSiLu Productions, they went on to produce their highly successful and profitable I Love Lucy TV series, until a mere few years later they sold the studio to their next-door neighbour, Paramount, which has since restored the famous RKO globe to its former splendour.

The former RKO lot has become fully and un-distinguishably integrated in the Paramount grounds. However, when director Billy Wilder was told that Paramount had named a building after him, he was touched at first, until he found out that the building in question was on the RKO part of the property.

The RKO globe today

City of Angels: The Studios, Part 5: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

2011-05-16T05:04:00.000-07:00

Metro Goldwyn Mayer, or MGM, as it is generally referred to, was founded in 1924, when Metro Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures and Louis B. Mayer Productions merged into what would become Hollywood’s biggest, most influential motion picture studio. The merger was very advantageous inasmuch as each individual arm of the future corporation had their own invaluable assets, to be absorbed by the new studio and thereby much contributed to MGM’s meteoric rise.

Louis B. Mayer

Metro’s Marcus Loew and Louis B. Mayer both had an impressive line-up of stars and craftsmen, while Samuel Goldwyn contributed a modest-sized studio on 10202 Washington Avenue, in Culver City (which had previously belonged to film pioneer Thomas Ince), a small chain of cinemas, and a company logo of a roaring lion, which the new corporation quickly turned into their own. However, before MGM got off the ground, Goldwyn dropped out over a falling out with Mayer. According to his biographer, Scott A. Berg, “Goldwyn was bought out of the company, which would thereafter not only bear his name, but also use his grounds, being paid one million dollars”.

Hence, MGM’s lion would roar without Goldwyn.

Samuel Goldwyn

The imperial Louis B. Mayer became head of the studio, assisted by Eddie Mannix, who was the studio’s general manager, and Benny Thau, in charge of labour relations, both of whom would stay with MGM for many years to come. Mayer’s most important sidekick, however, was the feverish Irving G. Thalberg, who had tagged along from Mayer’s previous outfit, and continued in his old job as head of production.

Irving G. Thalberg marrying MGM star, Norma Shearer

A lot has been written about Thalberg’s role in the MGM conglomeration, and his real value appears to be difficult to assess. Considering the relatively few films of artistic value that were produced under his reign, it might well be that Thalberg was “as overvalued as Columbia’s Harry Cohn was undervalued”, as film historian Andrew Sarris states in his book You Ain’t Heard Nothing Yet, and I think Sarris does indeed have a point.

Marcus Loew was appointed MGM’s president, pulling the financial strings from the company’s headquarters in New York, thereby following a well established pattern, adopted by most other major film studios, whose financial and artistic power was divided between New York and Los Angeles. Mayer and Thalberg saw eye to eye in terms of their vision for MGM’s future, which was “making beautiful pictures for beautiful people”, and together they turned MGM into the studio of sequined sirens and knights in shining armour. And indeed, besides their technical polish, MGM’s films had a distinct look, almost like a signature, which made it next to impossible for the viewer to mistake them for what they were: MGM motion pictures. Lavish musicals and glossy, escapist visions of an idealised world were the company’s stock in trade, and they were worlds apart from the gritty realism of Warner’s gangster movies or the gritty look of Universal’s horror flicks.

Cedric Gibbons

Cedric Gibbons, who was the head of the art department, was largely responsible for the uniform, sumptuous look of MGM’s films, and next to Thalberg and Mayer himself, he probably was the most important man on the lot, supervising literally every production to make sure it was up to MGM’s high standard.

With so much emphasis on the film’s look, it is hardly a surprise that directors had a tough time at the studio as their artistic freedom was very much curtailed. As a result, directors, who are visionaries by nature were the only creative force MGM had a perpetual lack of, as they chose the artistic freedom at studios like Warner's or Columbia, over MGM’s glitz. Consequently, only few of the early films the studio produced are at all memorable.

MGM’s biggest asset, though, was its massive line-up of stars.

“More stars than there are in heaven” ran the company’s ad-campaign during its golden age, and with names like Joan Crawford, Jean Harlow, Clark Gable, Greta Garbo, Marion Davies, and Norma Shearer, all under contract to the studio, the statement wasn’t far off the mark.

But there were casualties, too.

Buster Keaton

When Joseph Schenk announced to Buster Keaton in 1928 that he would no longer continue to produce his films, and that Keaton would henceforth be under contract to MGM, whose president Joseph’s brother, Nicholas became, the stunned comedian couldn’t quite fully grasp what he was in for. Used to unbridled freedom, the “man who never laughed” would soon have even less reason to do so, when in 1933, over one last run-in with Mayer, Keaton walked out on the MGM colossus, - never to return there ever again.

The “one big, happy family” the belligerent Mayer deluded himself in having, was only so as long as all the staff complied with his demands and orders. And there are indeed numerous examples - mainly stars and craftsmen - for whom this set-up worked brilliantly. But when it came to having visions and ideas of one’s own, the family ties proved to be more brittle than Mayer cared to admit. MGM’s was Hollywood’s best-oiled, most sophisticated assembly line. But it was nevertheless an assembly line.

The rather tyrannical reign at MGM notwithstanding, during its infancy the company did turn out a small handful of outstanding features, notably Victor Sjöström’s unsettling masterpiece The Wind (1928), starring the legendary Lilian Gish, Todd Browning’s eerie masterpiece Freaks (1932), and King Vidor’s riveting Halleluja (1929), and his equally astonishing The Crowd (1928), which was nominated for two Academy Awards at the first Oscar ceremony.

King Vidor was somewhat an oddity on the MGM lot. Influenced by the German expressionism of the early 1920s, he regarded silent films as superior to sound, labelling the tempo and composition of his films “silent music”. Primarily a visualist, he was one of MGM’s hottest properties, and he would later direct the opulent western melodrama Duel In The Sun (1944), on which he ended up walking out, put off by the incessant meddling of his boss, David O. Selznick.

Boasting an all-star cast, Edmund Goulding’s Grand Hotel (1932), revolving around the travails of a handful of illustrious guests at a Berlin-based luxury accommodation, based on Vicki Baum’s novel, won the studio its second Best Picture Oscar.

Irving Thalberg suffered a massive heart attack in late 1932, which required him to take a long leave of absence, prompting the industrious Mayer to restructure the company and replace Thalberg with David O. Selznick, then married to Mayer’s daughter, Irene. When the stalwart Thalberg returned to MGM, he found a different company with his authority greatly diminished.

David O. Selznick

He died in 1936, the same year Selznick left MGM to found his own production company, though releasing his pictures through MGM. F. Scott Fitzgerald, who had been living and working in Hollywood during the 1930s, immortalised the MGM wunderkind in his novel, The Last Tycoon, whose hero, Monroe Stahr, is modelled on Thalberg.

After Thalberg’s death, Mayer decided to oversee the production of MGM’s films himself, and although box-office returns remained stable, the quality of the pictures didn’t much improve. However, the company landed a huge commercial and critical hit with the original Mutiny On The Bounty (1935), starring the brilliant Charles Laughton, winning the company yet another Best Picture Oscar, followed the year after with The Great Ziegfeld (1936), a musical based on the life of legendary theatre entrepreneur, Florenz Ziegfeld.

Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz

From early on MGM had focused on musicals. However, with the pairing of producer Arthur Freed, director Vincente Minnelli, and the company’s new asset, Judy Garland, signed in 1937, and soon to become Minnelli’s wife, musicals became MGM’s biggest artistic contribution during the 1940s. The Wizard Of Oz(1939), Meet Me In St.Louis (1944), and Easter Parade (1948) have since become landmarks in movie history.

Taylor in Lassie

With the arrival of the young British import Elizabeth Taylor in 1943, MGM had yet another asset in its ever-growing stable of stars, with her films Lassie Come Home (1943) and National Velvet (1944) turning out to be immensely successful box-office winners.

Motion picture attendance in the US reached its peak in 1946. Over the years MGM, like most other film companies in Hollywood, had expanded on a steady basis, its lot in Culver City having grown to almost 190 acres, from its original 40, boasting a lake including a harbour, a railway station, a small jungle, and various streets and parks, making it the biggest studio in Hollywood.

In 1951 MGM won yet another best picture Oscar. For a musical, to be sure! An American In Paris struck a chord with post-war audiences, when an American artist, played by the incomparable Gene Kelly falls for a young French waif, played by the elfin Leslie Caron. The film also scored Oscars for Cedric Gibbons and Vincente Minelli, who at that time was still married to Judy Garland, but would divorce her a year later. The Government Consent Decree in 1950 didn’t leave MGM untouched, either, and in 1951, with profits at an all time low, Mayer was asked to leave by Nicholas Schenk.

Dore Schary

Replaced by Dore Schary, who himself would only last until 1956, Mayer’s demise echoed that of his peers, and he died in 1957. However, even after Mayer and Schary had left the sinking ship it was business as usual for MGM, still focusing on sleek and glossy colour productions. Only that now they were shot in 70mm, in a last attempt to draw lost audiences back into the cinemas.

Outside its musicals, MGM also joined other film companies in investing in religious and historical epics, which not only lent themselves to the new widescreen formats, they also went very well with the right-wing leaning political climate of the time. It was hardly a surprise that a rehash of Ben Hur (1959), starring Charlton Heston, who made no bones about his political leanings, won MGM yet another best picture Oscar in 1959, after having scored one for the innocuous musical Gigi (1958) the year before.

But the success of those films couldn’t disguise the fact that the crisp and glossy crust had become very brittle, and that underneath was the festering wound of a company that more than ever lacked talented directors to draw the increasingly fastidious audiences back into the theatres. And with most everyone gone, discharged, or dead to give the company some much needed artistic input, MGM eventually turned into a company run by business men and tycoons, who had little or no interest, let alone the know-how, in running a film studio.

By the late 1960s a fresh and new breeze, coming from the left, caught Hollywood. During that time MGM released two outstanding, noteworthy pictures, which also did more than respectable business, not to mention winning a handful of Oscars. Though old fashioned, Dr. Zhivago (1965), David Lean’s tightly woven epic, was as engrossing as Stanley Kubrick’s space opera 2001, A Space Odyssey (1968) was disquieting and disturbing. However the box-office failure of Lean’s follow-up, the much underrated Ryan’s Daughter (1970), set MGM back another 14 million and further contributed to its demise.

By 1969 the Las Vegas behemoth Kirk Kerkorian seized control over the studio, and branching out into television and record deals, MGM ceased distributing its own pictures in 1973, just shortly before in 50th anniversary, which was nevertheless celebrated with the highly profitable release of That’s Entertainment (1974), a revelry of fifty years of MGM musical making. Even though continuously losing its clout, MGM still came up with the odd masterpiece, most notably among them are the uncanny, clever science-fiction thriller Soylent Green (1973)and the sardonic Network (1976). Both films were way ahead of their time, and sadly, did hardly anything to give the company’s box-office returns the much-needed boost.

After having added United Artists to his shopping cart, billionaire Kerkorian sold both companies to media tycoon Ted Turner, who promptly re-sold them to Kerkorian, who then sold them once again, this time to Pathé Communications in 1990. Eventually Crédit Lyonnais took control of MGM in 1991, but sold its back lot to Sony Pictures in 1993, forcing MGM to relocate temporarily to Santa Monica, until a few years later, the company finally settled in their new headquarters, which, ironically, are located in Century City, sitting on what used to be part of the Twentieth Century Fox back lot!

Unbelievable but true, in 1996 Kerkorian bought the much messed-about company for a third time.

Kirk Kerkorian

To add a sad coda to MGM’s story, what used to be the studio’s back lot and headquarters, is now home to Columbia Pictures, or rather Columbia-Tri-Star, as it is now named, with the whole mash owned by Sony Pictures Entertainment. And even though classics like The Great Ziegfeld (1936), The Wizard Of Oz (1939), and Some Came Running (1960), were all shot on the lot, there is little mention of the studio’s historical link to MGM during the two-hour studio-tour, as it focuses chiefly on recent Sony productions, and of course, television.

It is no surprise that there was little time or room for artistry within all this big-time money traffic and business shenanigans. Norman Jewison’s old-fashioned love-story Moonstruck(1988), Ridley Scott’s feminist road-movie-turned-cult-film Thelma And Louise(1991), and Get Shorty (1995) were among the few artistically interesting films of note that stood out amidst the flood of life-less entertainment.

City of Angels: The Studios, Part 4: 20th Century Fox

2011-05-09T09:12:00.000-07:00

Looking at the history of the major Hollywood studios, it quickly becomes apparent that the one thing they all had in common was the fact that, being the product of a fledgling industry, they all expanded rapidly while trying to adapt to the shifting tastes of an ever fickle audience.

Depending as they did, of course, on an ever erratic economy, this usually resulted in a number of sudden changes of ownership and takeovers.

This applies in particular to Twentieth Century Fox, and hardly any studio - with the possible exception of RKO - matched its extraordinary ups and downs. The choppy and inconsistent history of Twentieth Century Fox was reflected in the quality of its product. Unlike Warner Brothers, MGM, or Paramount, whose output during the golden age of Hollywood often bore a distinct, idiosyncratic look, the films of Twentieth Century Fox were as incongruous in quality as their look was interchangeable.

William Fox

The Fox Film Corporation was founded by William Fox in 1914, who, similar to his competitor, Adolph Zukor, also was of Hungarian-Jewish descent. Like Zukor, Fox had once owned a chain of penny arcades and nickelodeons before breaking into distribution, and later, production. Operating from his studio on Staten Island, Fox then relocated to New York. He is credited with discovering the sultry siren Theda Bara, whose box-office appeal was contributory to the company’s speedy growth. Also under contract to Fox were Raoul Walsh and J. Gordon Edwards, Blake’s father, who became Bara’s main director. Like MGM and Paramount, Fox, too, acquired a chain of theatres to ensure his company’s presence on the ever-expanding film-market.

Theda Bara

But after years of steady expansion, by 1924 the studio began to face strong competition from its rivals, which, unlike Fox, had the advantage of having an impressive array of bankable stars and directors. John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Frank Borzage joined the line-up of directors, and in 1927 Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau arrived from Germany. Murnau’s films of his German period, Nosferatu (1921), Der Letzte Mann (The Last Laugh, 1924), and Faust (1926), were resounding triumphs that didn’t go unnoticed in Hollywood, which was forever on the hunt for new talent.

Friedrich-Wilhelm Murnau

Murnau’s first film for Fox, Sunrise (1927) was enthusiastically received. At the first Academy Awards ceremony, held in the Blossom Room of the newly built Roosevelt Hotel, Sunrise won in three categories,including one for the film’s leading actress, Janet Gaynor. Following up on the success of Sunrise , Murnau shot Four Devils (1928) and Our Daily Bread (1929), which were both box-office failures. Tragically, just shortly after the completion of his masterpiece Tabu (1931), Murnau died in a car crash outside Santa Barbara.

The late 1920s were a highly competitive period for the ever-expanding studios, which one by one left their - silent - infancy behind and broke into sound. Fox had embraced sound early on, developing its own sound system, called Fox Movietone. In order to accommodate the requirements of the fledgling technique, Fox built a new studio, including sound stages, in the Westwood neighbourhood of Los Angeles.

The year 1929 was a bad one for William Fox: Not only was he seriously injured in a car accident, his company was also badly hit by the stock market crash. To make matters worse, the Justice Department sued him for his monopolistic dealings, and he was eventually forced to sell his shares in the company. Harley Clarke, who apparently had a hand in ousting Fox, took over as president, only to be replaced by Sydney Kent a few years later.

Financially however, the studio was prospering again, due mainly to the commercial hits of Janet Gaynor’s films and the arrival of Will Rogers in 1929, who was the studio’s biggest box-office draw until his premature death a mere 6 years later.
Cavalcade (1933), based on Noel Coward’s play, won Fox its first Best Picture Oscar to date, also resulting in big box-office receipts. In 1935, the Fox Film Corporation merged with Twentieth Century Pictures, headed by Joseph Schenk and the fast and furious Darryl F. Zanuck, who, prior to founding his own company, had been production chief at Warner Brothers.

Thus, Twentieth Century-Fox was born.

Zanuck, along with Kent, became the company’s presidents, and he went on to oversee the better part of the company’s 50 or so A features a year, supervising everything from production to editing. During the second half of the 1930s, the films of Shirley Temple became the company’s bread and butter. In dire need of stars, Zanuck signed Don Ameche, Tyrone Power, Alice Faye and Loretta Young, whom he had brought along from his former company, Twentieth Century Pictures. Even tough Zanuck’s pictures were successful in terms of box office receipts, their artistic merits remain somewhat debatable, and apart from John Ford’s efforts such as Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), and The Grapes of Wrath (1940), the bulk of Fox's fare was sheer escapist entertainment.

In 1941 Syndey Kent died, and with Zanuck being called into war service, Spyros Skouras, formerly running the company’s theatre chains, was appointed president.

"Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night!"

The 1940s saw an artistically more interesting period for the company, releasing films like The Oxbow Incident (1943), Wilson (1944), and the sinister film-noirs Laura (1944) and Leave Her To Heaven (1946), to name but a few. The quality of the films during that decade is unparalleled in the studio’s history. This is underlined by the fact that three Best Picture Oscars would go to the studio during that period, starting with John Ford’s Going My Way in 1941, followed up by Kazan's Gentlemen’s Agreement in 1947, leading up to the classic All About Eve (1950), which currently ranks at number 16 of the American Film Institute’s list of the best American films of the past 100 years. In addition to that, in-house director Joseph L. Mankiewicz, won the Academy Award for best director twice in a row, first for A Letter To Three Wives in 1949, and a year later for All About Eve.

The 1950s got off to a bad start when Twentieth Century Fox, too, was forced to get rid of its theatre chain, which, with the advent of television, resulted in a box office slump. However, with a young, so far neglected starlet under contract to the studio, the fate of Twentieth Century Fox would soon turn around again.

Her name was Marilyn Monroe.

Marilyn was first signed up by Zanuck in 1946, who, failing to fully realise her potential, put her in the mediocre Scudda-Hoo!, Scudda-Hay!, where she had a mere decorative part, only to drop her contract the following year yet again. Passed around from studio to studio, and doing a pin-up calendar in between, by 1950, Monroe had met a number of influential honchos and executives. One of them, Johnny Hyde, was a big shot at the William Morris Agency. Upon reading the screenplay to All about Eve, he persuaded Zanuck to give his protégée the part of Claudia Casswell, the famous “graduate of the Copacabana School of Acting”. Zanuck bowed, and so Monroe was back at Fox, with a seven-year contract and the part of Miss Casswell in her pocket. Of course, Marilyn went on to become the studio’s biggest draw since the days of Will Rogers and Shirley Temple, and her films How To Marry A Millionaire (1953), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1954), River Of No Return (1954), and Bus Stop (1955) were among the studio’s biggest grossers during the 1950s.

La Monroe

But apart from Monroe, who, to be sure, would end up doing her best work for other studios (Some like it Hot, 1959, and The Misfits, 1960, both United Artists), there was little else the studio had going for itself. Elia Kazan and Joseph L. Mankiewicz, the studio’s most notable directors, both left in 1953 and 1951, respectively. Resident actors were few and far between. They included bomb shells Jayne Mansfield and Joan Collins, as well as the no doubt brilliant Joanne Woodward. With Zanuck’s exit in 1956, there was no disguising the fact that the studio was in trouble and in dire need of some much needed artistic input and talent.

The extravagant production of Cleopatra (1960-1962), whose costs were skyrocketing by the minute, turned out to be the studio’s downfall. In order to pay for the extraordinarily expensive film, the studio had to sell off a part of its back lot while the film’s star, Elizabeth Taylor, was hospitalised in London, fighting for her life. Hence, what used to be a thriving film studio was subsequently turned into a sprawling new neighbourhood, called Century City, abounding with hotels, offices and apartment buildings. Cleopatra remains the most expensive production to date by any studio. And even the four Oscars, which the film ended up receiving, didn’t help to boost its box-office receipts.

To stop the bankers from further pulling the rug from beneath the sinking studio, Spyros Skouras was sacked and Zanuck was called back from his self-imposed exile in France. Running the studio in collaboration with his son Richard as his sidekick, they slimmed Twentieth Century Fox down by getting rid of overheads and staff, and nixing unpromising projects. During his second coming at his old studio, Darryl F. Zanuck produced the second world war drama The Longest Day (1962), which became a respectable hit, and prevented the studio from further collapse. The extraordinary financial success of The Sound Of Music in 1965, however, was of little help when a couple of expensive flops at the end of the 1960s (Hello Dolly!, 1970, Tora! Tora! Tora!, 1970) threatened once more to ruin the shaky studio, which resulted in the departure of the Zanuck-duo, to be replaced by Alan Ladd Jr.

Under Ladd’s reign Fox regained ground financially, but lost further ground artistically. While the New Hollywood movement was in full swing, Fox had already subscribed to the soon-to-be-popular blockbuster rage, producing escapist fare like The Towering Inferno (1974), Star Wars (1977), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), and Nine to Five (1980), which were all tremendously successful at the box office, but did little to live up to the studio’s quality pictures of the past.

Alan Ladd left Fox in 1979 to found his own production company. Then, media magnate Marvin Davis acquired the studio only to sell it a mere few years later to another media tycoon, Rupert Murdoch, in 1985. The studio’s artistic output has since declined with films like The War Of The Roses (1989), The Thin Red Line (1998) and Moulin Rouge (2001) being the exception rather than the rule, as Murdoch is reaping the profits of light-weight fare like Independence Day (1996), Titanic (1997), Ice Age (2002), and I, Robot (2004).

City of Angels: The Studios, Part 3: Warner Brothers

2011-05-02T02:05:00.000-07:00

Like other major Hollywood studios, Warner Brothers, as the name indicates, was originally a family-run operation. Albert, Harry and Jack Warner all having started out in different fields, joined their brother Sam when he opened a Nickelodeon in Youngstown, Ohio in 1904. Moving on to a travelling picture show they eventually ran a cinema, before they ventured into distribution, which then led to producing their first feature film in 1917, cashing in on the Anti–German sentiment at the time, called, My Four Years In Germany.

The subsequent success of that film led to the opening of their first, modest, Hollywood studio, located on Sunset Boulevard. The building, which still exists today, is now called Tribune Entertainment. The company was incorporated as Warner Brothers in 1923,with Jack Warner as studio head, releasing an average of around 15 films per year, among which were the profitable Rin-Tin-Tin pictures.

With the studio gradually expanding, and thus in dire need of talent, they poached Ernst Lubitsch from Mary Pickford, who in turn had lured him away from his native Berlin, where he had already established himself as a successful director. Warner sweetened the deal by offering Lubitsch a plum contract that granted him complete control over his films. Hiring the sophisticated European seemed a very unlikely move for the young company, still operating on shoe-string budgets, and to nobody’s surprise Lubitsch soon left for Paramount, whose European touch proved a much better home for his talent.

Darryl F. Zanuck

The following year Jack hired an ambitious young man, who had previously worked as a writer, Darryl F. Zanuck, who would soon infuse the fledgling studio with his boundless energy. Shortly after, in 1925, the ever-growing corporation acquired the Vitagraph company and began experimenting with sound, and a mere two years later, released the landmark film, The Jazz Singer (1927), commonly known as the first sound film (although that is not entirely correct, for Warner’s had already experimented with sound the year before, which resulted in the filming of several operas, among which Don Juan and Manon Lescaut, both 1926), which was made in partnership with Western Electric.

Sam Warner, who had played such a vital role in the company’s humble beginnings and who was also instrumental in the studio’s foray into sound, died unexpectedly in 1927, the night prior to the opening of the Jazz Singer, thus never able to hear Al Jolson utter the magic words that were to change the face of Hollywood, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, folks. You ain’t heard nothin’ yet, you ain’t heard a thing”, which officially not only marked the beginning of the age of sound, but also turned Warner Brothers overnight into a so-called ‘major’ studio, next to MGM and Paramount.

Movie attendance grew rapidly after the introduction of sound, and with Zanuck’s rise from writer to producer, by and by he went on to give the studio’s output the distinct look with which Warner Brothers films of that period are identified with.

Hiring new and promising talent, like Paul Muni, James Cagney, and Edward G. Robinson, Zanuck introduced an altogether different style of hard-boiled gangster films with titles like Doorway To Hell (1930), Public Enemy (1931) and I’m a Fugitive From A Chain Gang (1932), that breathed new, deadly, life into the glossy world of Hollywood. Warner’s, under Zanuck’s reign, is indeed credited with having invented the modern gangster film, a claim which is not altogether correct, as Josef von Sternberg’s Underworld (Paramount, 1927) predated Warner’s films by a number of years. But even though Underworld opened to a cascade of rave reviews and also was a box office winner, nobody picked up on it, until Warner Brothers made the genre their own and would henceforth be forever identified with them.

Busby Berkeley's Gold Diggers of 1933

The tough and hard-boiled gangster films were counter-balanced by the visually stunning and beautifully choreographed musicals of Busby Berkeley, like Gold Diggers Of Broadway (1929), and Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933).

The year 1928 saw Warner’s takeover of the Stanley theatre chain, followed a year later by the acquisition of First National, including its theatres, stars and production facilities in Burbank, which then became Warner Brothers new headquarters, famously immortalised on the cover of the Pink Floyd album, Wish You Were Here (1972).

The Depression hit the studio hard, resulting in record losses of $14 million in 1932, which prompted Jack Warner to cut the employees’ salaries during an eight–week period. However, when Jack Warner failed to restore them a heavy fight erupted between Zanuck and his boss, leading to Zanuck’s resignation after having been the studio’s head of production for four years.

Zanuck was replaced by Hal Wallis, who would operate as the studio’s production chief for the following ten years, shepherding most of the Bette Davis vehicles, which became the company’s bread and butter during the 1930s and early 40s.
Signed by Zanuck in 1932, the unlikely Davis went on to turn into the Queen of the lot, winning Oscars for the studio in 1935 for Dangerous, and a second one in 1938 for Jezebel, which was Warner’s answer to MGM’s Gone With The Wind (1939).

"Shall we have a cigarette on it?", the signature scene from one of Bette Davis' greatest triumphs during her reign at Warner's Now, Voyager

Apart from the Davis vehicles, the studio scored with its William Dieterle-directed biopics such as The Story Of Louis Pasteur(1935), and The Life Of Emile Zola (1937), the latter of which won the studio an Oscar for Best Picture. Another Best Picture Oscar followed in 1943 with Casablanca. When the winner was announced, Jack Warner got up to accept the award, which understandably enraged the picture’s producer, Hal Wallis, who subsequently left Warner Brothers to become an independent producer.

With Bette Davis’ career on the wane, John Huston’s (The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre, 1948) and Howard Hawks’ (The Big Sleep, 1946) pictures provided more or less the only sparkle in an otherwise lacklustre output in A –movies.

John Huston

However, Warner Brothers, after having been influential in the rise of the gangster film, is the one studio, next to RKO, that is most identified with film noir, a movement that had its origins in the Warner gangster films, but was also heavily influenced by the German expressionism of the 1920ies and the poetic realism that suffused French films in the late 1930s. John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941) is generally quoted as the first film noir, but the movement reached its peak after the war, and Huston, as well as Hawks, are both responsible for some of the genre’s finest films. Clear definitions of the genre, however, remain somewhat vague, and they have been the subject of countless discussions and disputes between film historians. Mildred Pierce (1945) is no exception: Drama, melodrama or film-noir? Curtiz' classic transcends clear genre definitions. Starring Warner’s latest addition, Joan Crawford, who had recently arrived on the lot after having been let go by her alma mater, MGM, Michael Curtiz’ film noir–drama won her the Academy Award for Best Actress.

Like all the other studios, Warner Brothers, too, was forced to divest themselves of their string of movie theatres by the Government’s anti-Trust laws in 1950, which inconveniently came in the same year that television found its way into the ordinary American household, thus spelling the end of the studio-era. Jack Warner was relatively slow in breaking into the lucrative television market, setting up Warner’s TV division in 1955, with his son-in-law, William Orr in charge.

But even though movie attendance was in decline, the studio had a number of impressive hits during the 1950s, most significant among which are the films of Elia Kazan and George Stevens, whose Giant was Warner’s biggest box-office of that period, earning $12 million dollars in North American rentals. The year Giant was released Harry and Albert Warner resolved to retire, selling their shares in Warner Brothers to an investment group. Their brother, Jack, stayed on as president, but with the new part-owners on board, his power was considerably reduced.

Davis and Crawford, the divine feud during the shooting of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

Bette Davis, who had contributed considerably to turn Warner’s into what it is today, returned to her old studio in 1962 for the garish Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?. The film’s director, Robert Aldrich, had great difficulties in getting the picture financed, as he couldn’t convince anybody to invest in a film starring the “two old broads”, Davis and Crawford. Eventually, Warner agreed to come up with the money, and the film, made on a shoestring budget, became one of the studio’s biggest hits, reigniting Bette Davis career in the process.

Dunaway, about to write fashion history with her iconic look in Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde

In 1964 the studio was awarded a third Best Picture Academy Award for the glossy musical My Fair Lady. The studio’s biggest grosser of the 1960s, however, was a film Jack Warner hated, Bonnie And Clyde (1967), which rang in an altogether new era in Hollywood film making. Even though the picture was directed by Arthur Penn, it had been Warren Beatty’s baby, and he did everything to get the project off the ground, running into severe road blocks on the way, as the ageing Jack Warner, who by that stage was hopelessly out of touch with the public’s taste, didn’t believe in the picture’s potential. As it was, the picture not only raked in millions, but also garnered a total of ten Oscar nods. And maybe it was this misjudgement that finally caused Jack Warner to sell his share in the company to the Canadian based Seven Arts Corporation in 1967.

The eve of the 1970s was a tricky and trying time for any Hollywood studio as audience tastes shifted rapidly and most of what was held dear by Hollywood’s old guard had to be violently thrown overboard if the studios wanted to survive.
And like most other film companies, Warner’s went through a myriad of takeovers and changes over the years to come, which had former employees and movie buffs alike nostalgically reminiscing about the golden days of the studio era, for even though the former studio bosses might have been autocrats and even hated by some, at least they loved and believed in what they were doing.

Nevertheless, the studio had a couple of commercial as well as artistic hits with films like Deliverance (1972), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), All the President’s Men (1976), The Goodbye Girl (1977), and most famously, with The Exorcist (1973), which apart from making millions also made waves by causing people to faint and commit suicide, as it brought an entirely new meaning to the word ‘horror film’.

Marisa Berenson, in one of the Gainsborough-inspired images created by John Alcott for Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece, Barry Lyndon

In 1971 Warner Brothers started its affiliation with Stanley Kubrick, who henceforth produced and released all his films through Warner’s, without ever having to leave his adopted country, England, where he settled at the beginning of the 1960s.
Clockwork Orange (1971) was the first of the five films he would make for Warner’s. And even though an outsider, and much older than most of the so-called ‘New Hollywood’ directors, he moved with the times, his films like The Shining (1980) and the aforementioned Clockwork Orange being as controversial as they were commercially successful. Kubrick’s best film, however, the elegiac Barry Lyndon (1976) proved to be a box-office failure, even though it deservedly ended up with a handful of Oscar Nominations, of which it received four.

Today Warner Brothers is part of the world’s biggest media conglomeration, Time Warner AOL. And after having gone through a rough patch, financially during the 1990s, things are looking up again, due to the overwhelming success of the Harry Potter and The Matrix series. More noteworthy, though, is the studio’s independent company, New Line, producing exciting, off-beat films like Boogie Nights (1997), Wag The Dog (1998), and Magnolia (1999), and, more recently, the Lord Of The Rings trilogy.

Warner Brothers is one of the remaining Hollywood studios that offers studio tours, and unlike Paramount, where I didn’t find the tour-guide to be particularly knowledgeable, the one at Warner’s was willing to delve deep into the history of Warner Brothers rather than concentrating on the recent activities on the lot, which, like in most other studios, mainly revolve around television and a number of blockbusters.

City of Angels: The Studios, Part 2: Paramount

2011-04-26T05:41:00.000-07:00

PARAMOUNT

In its heyday Paramount was nicknamed “the country club of the Hollywood Studios”, and by looking at the photos, revealing the beautifully manicured lawns, it becomes evident why. However, the nickname doesn’t just refer to the studio’s impeccably maintained grounds, but also to Paramount’s output of films, which were rivalling the sleek and polished look MGM’s pictures were known for, but also belied the fact that, as film-historian Andrew Sarris puts it, “the films of Lubitsch, Sternberg, Wilder, McCarey, and Leisen have put a gloss on the Paramount logo that the bulk of its productions doesn’t deserve”.

Paramount’s founding father, Adolph Zukor was a true film pioneer. A Hungarian-Jewish immigrant, he arrived in the United States in 1888, barely sixteen years old.
Hooking up with distant family members, who had settled in New York a few years earlier, Zukor started out in the fur business before he began investing in a Penny Arcade, located on New York’s Union Square as early 1903, the year Edwin S. Porter directed his groundbreaking film The Great Train Robbery.

Adolph Zukor

Moving with the times, Zukor switched to Nickelodeons, and later combined vaudeville with one-reelers, until in 1912 he had the trailblazing idea of turning a stage play, Queen Elizabeth, starring the legendary actress Sarah Bernhard, into a feature-length film. Although filmed statically, with the camera fixed on a tripod, the film was a raging success, leading to the foundation of the Famous Players Film Company, named after the company’s motto to film “famous players starring in famous plays”.

Mary Pickford, dubbed America's Sweetheart

At about that time Mary Pickford, who had already been working with David Wark Griffith, starred with great success in a Broadway play, A Good Little Devil, which is why he decided to sign her, thus establishing the contract system, which later would be adapted, and pushed to the limit, by all the big studios. With Edison’s Motion Picture Patents Company still pulling the strings in the fledgling film business, Zukor successfully joined Carl Laemmle and William Fox in challenging Edison’s power, and asserted himself as one of the industry’s leading figures. While Zukor was building his first film studio on 26th Street in New York, another bunch of film pioneers, led by Cecil B. DeMille and Jesse Lasky was busy getting Hollywood’s first feature length film, The Squaw Man, off the ground.

Cecil B. DeMille, the Steven Spielberg of his day

A few years later, in 1916, Zukor merged his Famous Players Company with DeMille and Lasky’s Jesse Lasky Feature Play Company, and together they founded Famous Players Lasky, with Zukor as president, DeMille as director and Goldwyn as chairman, the latter of whom would soon drop out to go into business with the Selwyn Brothers.
Famous Players Lasky’s films were distributed by Paramount Pictures, a distributing company founded by W.W. Hodkinson, through which the newly founded Famous Players-Lasky made their films accessible to the public.

As with every industry, its infancy is usually marked by a myriad of sudden changes and takeovers, the film business being no exception. Zukor, always a few steps ahead of his competitors, soon began to realise the advantages of a vertically operated film company and swallowed Hodkinson’s Paramount Pictures, allowing him to combine production, distribution and exhibition all under the same roof. His new company, now called Paramount, quickly signed another fleet of rising stars, among them the now forgotten William S. Hart, Douglas Fairbanks, Clara Bow, and Fatty Arbuckle, enabling Zukor to increase his output of films, of which only some were big, prestigious productions. However, by shrewdly inventing the so-called block-booking system, which also would later find its way into the other film companies, he forced exhibitors to take the smaller, less prestigious pictures in order to get the big ones.

Continuing to acquire various theatre chains (which later, with the Government Decree in 1950 would backfire), the company grew steadily, establishing itself as the largest movie corporation in the United States, operating unrivalled until the foundation of MGM in 1924.

With Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford creating their own company, United Artists, in 1919, and a handful of other stars gone as well, it was Gloria Swanson who, by becoming De Mille’s muse and starring in hits like Male And Female (1919), and The Affairs Of Anatol (1921), became temporarily Queen of the lot, and Paramount’s biggest draw, along with Valentino, whose films The Sheik (1921) and Blood And Sand (1922) were huge hits, ensuring Paramount’s constant expansion. In 1926, the company moved from its location on Sunset and Vine to its present location on Melrose and Gower. B.P. Schulberg (Budd Schulberg’s father) was hired as the new head of production.

The man with the cigar: Ernst Lubitsch

This was a clever move, for it was Schulberg who signed directors like Josef von Sternberg, Ernst Lubitsch, and William Wellman, whose film, Wings (1927) went on to win the first Academy Award for Best Picture. And it was Sternberg, who, while on a loan-out to UFA Studios in Berlin, Germany, with which Paramount was affiliated, brought his newly found muse Marlene Dietrich to the US, with one of the famous 7-year- studio-contract stashed in her pocket.

Berlin import: Marlene Dietrich, seen here in Paramount's Shanghai Express (1932)

Box-offices receipts peaked in 1930, before they dropped sharply as the country was ravaged by the Great Depression. Of the many stars Paramount had under contract, it was Mae West whose films, I’m No Angel (1933) and She Done Him wrong (1933), helped substantially to see the company through those meagre years. With the company in serious trouble, solutions to help Paramount were few and far between. As a result of the slump in business, Paramount went bankrupt, and in 1932 Schulberg and Lasky were ousted, and Barny Balaban was named president, a position he would hold for almost thirty years, with Adolph Zukor himself being pushed into the harmless position of chairman of the board of the reorganised company.

A number of production chiefs were brought in to help Paramount to get back on its feet, and at one time the post fell to Ernst Lubitsch, who held the job down for a year (1935-36), before he ran into roadblocks and went back again to his old job as a director. And even though it wasn’t Lubitsch himself who brought Billy Wilder on board, it was the screenplays Wilder and his colleague wrote for Lubitsch, and also for Mitchell Leisen, that turned out to become some of the biggest Paramount hits during the late 1930s.

Polish film poster for Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950)

Poster for Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944), which he co-wrote with Raymond Chandler

Other outstanding directors during that period included Preston Sturges, Leo McCarey, and the unsinkable Cecil B. DeMille, whose films, even though their artistic merits might be somewhat doubtful, were money in the bank. By the mid-1940s, with Sturges and Lubitsch gone, Wilder had established himself as the leading force on the lot, becoming one of Paramount’s most prolific and successful directors. His films Double Indemnity (1944), The Lost Weekend (1946), and Sunset Boulevard (1950), not only won the studio praise and a handful of Academy Awards, but they were also among the studio’s biggest money makers during that period.

With the multitude of cinemas Paramount owned, it was hardly a surprise that the studio suffered greatly from the Government Consent Decree, issued in 1950, that forced the studios to separate themselves from their theatre chains. The introduction of television at around that time made matters worse, prompting millions of Americans to stay home and enjoy the pleasures of the new medium. As a response to lure the audience back into the cinemas, most big Hollywood Studios launched a wide screen system, which in Paramount’s case was VistaVision, introduced in 1954 with big fanfare with the musical White Christmas, featuring Danny Kaye and Bing Crosby.

The famous RKO globe on the corner of Gower and Melrose

Eventually, Paramount took over the adjacent RKO studios, which had previously belonged to Howard Hughes and Lucille Ball, who co-owned them with her husband Desi Arnaz. Having painted over the famous RKO trademark globe, thereby erasing all traces of the once glorious neighbour, the globe has since been restored to its original colours.

The Bates mansion from Psycho (1960), which was built on the Universal lot where it still stands today

Alfred Hitchcock’s landmark shocker, Psycho (1960), was, even though shot on rented space on the Universal lot, essentially a Paramount production. The film, containing the most discussed and analysed scene in film history - the stabbing in the shower - went on to become a major commercial hit for Paramount as well as for Hitchcock. Shot on a shoestring budget of just over a million dollars, Psycho took in more than $9 million in American rentals.

One of the best films of all time, Chinatown (1974)

In 1966 Paramount was yet another film company that fell prey to being taken over by a big conglomeration. Gulf Western, an oil company, became the new owner, with Charles Bluhdorn as president, and Robert Evans, a former actor, as head of production. Under the valiant Evans Paramount was thriving again and the studio entered its most profitable and artistically riveting period since the 1940s. Landmark films like Rosemary’s Baby(1968), Love Story (1970), The Godfather (1971), The Godfather 2 (1974), and Chinatown (1974), were all produced under Evans’ helm. The flamboyant Evans left Paramount in 1975 to operate as independent producer, distributing his highly successful films such as Marathon Man (1976) through Paramount.

John Schlesinger's landmark thriller Marathon Man (1976)

In 1976, Paramount’s founding father Adolph Zukor died at the age of 103, having outlived all other first generation moguls.

Robert Redford’s Ordinary People won Paramount an Academy Award for best picture in 1980, repeated three years later by James L. Brooks’ high-class soap opera Terms Of Endearment (1983), which finally also won the incomparable Shirley McLaine her long-overdue best actress Oscar. Like all the other film studios, Paramount would go through a swarm of presidents and chairmen, until in 1992 Sherry Lansing was appointed Chairman of Paramount, a position she held until 2004, withstanding even the studio’s merger with Viacom in 1994. In 2005, Paramount purchased Dreamworks, which was owned by erstwhile Paramount executive Jeffrey Katzenberg.

Among the few noteworthy films Paramount has produced over the past 20 years are Lasse Hallström’s truly remarkable What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1993), Zemeckis’ Forrest Gump (1994), and Peter Weir’s clever The Truman Show (1998).

City of Angels: The Studios, Part 1: Columbia

2011-04-21T01:49:00.000-07:00

Last year, I ran a series on Los Angeles and how it became the film capital of the world. The series included postings on Santa Monica, Hollywood, Beverly Hills and Downtown LA and a detailed look into Hollywood Boulevard, which is Hollywood's main artery and lnked, in more than just one way, to the birth and the history of American Film.

You can find all articles of that series if you go to archives > 2010 > and search for City of Angels.

What follows is the continuation that series, discussing the hubs of the movie capital: The studios, starting with Columbia.

COLUMBIA:

What today is called the Sunset & Gower studios - located, as the name suggests, on the corner of Sunset Blvd. and Gower Street - used to be the headquarters of Columbia Pictures.

Founded in 1924, Columbia Pictures emerged from the CBC (Cohn-Brandt-Cohn) Film Sales Company, headed by Jack and Harry Cohn and their business partner Joe Brandt, all three having previously worked for Carl Laemmle’s Universal. Setting up shop on Sunset and Gower, Harry became head of the studio, while his brother, Jack, joined by Joe Brandt, operated from New York, pulling the business strings of the infant company. Known as a so-called poverty row studio, Columbia churned out cheap fare, and the films were forgotten as quickly as they were made.

Unlike its rivals at Paramount, United Artists or MGM, Columbia had very few actors and directors under contract, as Cohn preferred to hire them for one-picture deals.
However, in 1927 Harry signed up a young, ambitious director of Italian descent, Frank Capra, whose biggest dream it was to make films, which is why he didn’t mind being paid a mere $1.000 per picture by the miserly Cohn. Cohn soon realised that by hiring the enthusiastic Capra he was tapping into a gold mine, as it turned out that all of Capra's pictures made money, enabling the studio to expand.

In the meantime, ensuing business conflicts between the head-office in New York and the Los Angeles operated studio prompted Joe Brandt to resign which subsequently made Harry Cohn the Olympian figure at Columbia, being the president as well as the studio boss, making brother Jack the studio’s vice-president.

With Capra producing one hit after another, Columbia gained momentum in 1934 when his film It Happened One Night won all five major awards at that year’s Oscar Ceremony, including Best Picture, turning Columbia into a major studio in a snap. But It Happened One Night also won Oscars for its leads, Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable, who were both on loan-out to Columbia, Colbert being under contract to Paramount and Gable coming from MGM, the latter having been lent to Cohn by Louis B. Mayer with the intention to put him in his place, as Gable had grown far too arrogant for Mayer’s liking. And thus, as a means to punish him, Mayer sent Gable “to Siberia”, as Columbia was referred to, hoping that this would teach him a lesson. Little did Mayer suspect, however, that Gable would win the coveted Oscar, returning from Siberia not only with an ego-boost but also with substantial box-office clout, which the shrewd Mayer quickly turned into hard cash.

Even though a lot has been written about Harry Cohn and his shenanigans - his stinginess, and his office which was reportedly modelled after the Duce’s, whom Cohn greatly admired - fact remains that Cohn was a very committed studio boss, known to give those directors whom he trusted a lot of leeway, and it can be said that both actors as well as directors enjoyed a kind of freedom that a larger studio seldom permitted. As Capra himself put it, “A handshake from Cohn is worth more than a signature from most other Hollywood studio bosses”.

The fact that during the second of the 1930s, Cohn was instrumental in helping newly arrived refugees from Europe find a job in the thriving film community, is also worth mentioning. Having already persuaded Jack Warner and L.B. Mayer to take on some of the writers such as Friedrich Torberg, Lenhard Frank, Alfred Polgar, and Jan Lustig, to name but a few, given Cohn’s poor reputation in Hollywood, Paul Kohner didn’t expect the temperamental Columbia boss to take very well to the idea. However, not to be outdone, Cohn topped Jack Warner and L.B. Mayer, who had agreed to take on four and six writers respectively, by hiring ten writers and offering them a one-year contract ... or so the story goes ...!

Weathering the storms of the Depression, thanks to Frank Capra, who continued his unrivalled reign at Columbia - his ‘Capra-corn’ raking in millions at the box office - until his resignation in 1939. The studio had its first major female contract player when Cohn signed Rita Hayworth in 1938, turning her into Columbia’s major asset and eventually one of Hollywood’s biggest stars. Before Hayworth entered the scene, the comely Jean Arthur had been the studio’s leading lady during the 1930s, but she never took to the autocratic studio-chief, and the two of them often clashed, eventually leading to their separation.

Outside Capra’s films, which garnered Oscar Nominations during the 1930s year after year, Cohn continued hiring directors as well as actors on a one-picture deal basis, landing hits with Leo McCarey’s The Awful Truth (1938), or George Cukor’s Holiday (1939). With Capra gone, and with Rita Hayworth, who was treated with kid-gloves by Cohn, as the studio’s only draw, the 1940s were a rather sorry time for Columbia. Her films, Cover Girl(1941), You Were Never Lovelier (1942), and the sultry film-noir Gilda (1946) became Columbia’s bread and butter, doing well critically as well as commercially.
But even though the year 1950 spelled the end of the studio era and the dawn of the Television Age, things were looking up again when in 1949 Robert Rossen’s All The King’s Men scored an Oscar for Best Picture, and a year later Judy Holiday walked away with the Best Actress Oscar for Columbia’s Born Yesterday, much to the distress of fellow-nominees Bette Davis and Gloria Swanson.

With no theatre chain to speak of, Columbia wasn’t affected by the US Government’s Consent Decree, which forced all the big studios to divest themselves of their film theatres, and, unlike most other studios, ergo was protected from a further slump in business. Also, the astute Cohn, having seen the writing on the TV screen, was one of the first studio bosses to venture into the new medium, creating a subsidiary, Screen Gems, that was operated by Jack’s son, Ralph, and would soon turn out huge profits.

In 1952 Columbia landed another huge hit with From Here to Eternity, which was showered with Oscars, repeated a few years later by Elia Kazan’s masterpiece On The Waterfront, Elia Kazan having already done the studio proud by earning laudatory reviews - and a handful of Academy Awards - for his screen adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire in 1951. Much less praiseworthy than his films was Kazan’s stance during Hollywood’s red baiting. Pressured by the House of Un-American Activities Committee, he famously agreed to name names in order to keep working, which left a great many of his disciples disappointed with the great director’s poor character.

Harry Cohn, the man who had said "I don’t have ulcers – I give them!", was operated for cancer in 1954, his recovery being aggravated by Jack’s death in 1956. But the show went on, and astute business man that he was, Cohn started investing in British films, which would prove highly successful in the years to come, for The Bridge On The River Kwai (1957), as well as a few years later Lawrence Of Arabia (1960) were both lavished with praise and awards alike. An era came to an end when Harry died in 1958, leaving the studio in the hands of Sam Briskin, a former collaborator of Cohn. With Harry Cohn hated as much as he was during his lifetime, there was some well-founded concern that hardly anybody would show up for his funeral, which is why Columbia staff was reportedly requested to attend. However, when the crowd at the then-named Hollywood Memorial Cemetery turned out to be much bigger than expected, a Columbia staff-member famously quipped, “As Cohn always said, Give people what they want, and they come!”

But as with most other studios, whose bosses perished along with the era they created, things would never be the same again at Columbia. And although Cohn sure wasn’t an easy man, he was nevertheless somebody who knew - and loved - the picture business inside out, which is something that cannot be said about the majority of his successors. The year Harry died Columbia was in the reds for the first time in history, but soon got back on its feet again when A Man For All Seasons (1960), and Oliver! (1968) won multiple Oscars which also translated into respectable box-office receipts.

Columbia abandoned its Sunset & Gower headquarters in 1972 to settle permanently in Burbank, adjacent to Warner Brothers. Their former lot was sold to a private bidder who named it somewhat unimaginatively The Sunset And Gower Studios.

In 1973, the year the studio had its worst annual loss, Columbia was saved from bankruptcy by Herbert Allen Jr., who obtained ownership and subsequently named Alan Hirschfield and David Begelman heads of the studio.

After having led Columbia to a couple of hits like Warren Beatty’s Shampoo(1973) and Spielberg’s Close Encounters Of The Third Kind (1978), Begelman was accused of having embezzled large sums of money and subsequently resigned, followed soon after by Hirschfield, details of which can be read in Julia Philips’ no-holds-barred tale, You’ll never Eat Lunch In This Town Again.

Replaced by Frank Price, who came from Universal’s Television Division, he went on to produce a string of profitable and critically acclaimed pictures, like Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), and Tootsie (1982).

The Coca-Cola Company purchased the studio in 1984, picking British producer David Putnam as chairman in 1986, only to be ousted a year later when Columbia merged with Tri-Star, which opted for Dawn Steel instead. It took the Coca-Cola Company three years to realise that selling films is not quite the same as selling soft drinks, and in 1987, disenchanted with toiling in films, they sold Columbia Pictures - an American Institution- to the Sony Corporation of Japan. Sony relocated to Culver City after acquiring the former MGM headquarters and combined both operations - Columbia/ Tristar and Sony Pictures - renaming their alliance, Sony Pictures Corporation.

Cannes Film Festival, 11 - 22 May 2011

2011-04-18T03:18:00.000-07:00

There are few things left in life that are as predictable as the Competition line-up of the Cannes Film Festival. Almodovar, von Trier, van Sant, Allen, Ceylan, Cavalier, Malick, Moretti. While these are all great film makers, no doubt, should it not be the aim of a film festival to discover new talent, to give new directors a showcase for their films? Granted, there are a number of relatively new names to be found in thus year's line-up, yet the surprises are few and far between.

What Berlin doesn't have enough of, Cannes is having in spades - glamour and big names. But to bank on glamour and big names only, means turning what once was the world's most prestigious film festival into yet another star-studded extravaganza which may draw gazillions of paparazzi and attract coverage from (all the wrong) media while increasingly missing the point of a film festival in the process. The focus on glitz and glamour is almost blatantly reflected in the poster which - admittedly - is beautiful. Very stylish. Very tasteful. Very Cannes. It shows a still of Faye Dunaway - in her day, one of the most beautiful actresses I can think of and, as all blog-followers will know, also a longtime favourite of mine - in Puzzle of a Downfall Child, a film from 1967 by Dunaway's then-lover Jerry Schatzberg. Schatzberg's film - then also shown in Cannes - is about the downsides of being a model. Dunaway's role in the film anticipated the scandals and the notoriety that would surround Kate Moss some 30 years on. The poster aptly, and almost ironically, symbolises the shift of focus in what the Cannes Film Festival is all about. No longer a mere film festival for the sake of it, to celebrate film as art - today, Cannes is a free-for-all for anybody who has sufficient clout - not to mention dough - to generate headlines and ensure a maximum of coverage. Media coverage translates into cold hard cash in the form of ads, commercials, and most of all: Sponsors. As such, it is indeed a reflection of the world we're living in where it's all about money, marketing and packaging, while substance and content have been relegated to the back burner ...

Opening Film

Woody ALLEN, MIDNIGHT IN PARIS (Out of Competition)

COMPETITION

Pedro ALMODÓVAR, LA PIEL QUE HABITO

Bertrand BONELLO, L'APOLLONIDE - SOUVENIRS DE LA MAISON CLOSE

Alain CAVALIER, PATER

Joseph CEDAR, HEARAT SHULAYIM

Nuri Bilge CEYLAN, BIR ZAMANLAR ANADOLU'DA

Jean-Pierre et Luc DARDENNE, LE GAMIN AU VÉLO

Aki KAURISMÄKI, LE HAVRE

Naomi KAWASE, HANEZU NO TSUKI

Julia LEIGH, SLEEPING BEAUTY -

MAÏWENN, POLISSE

Terrence MALICK, THE TREE OF LIFE

Radu MIHAILEANU, LA SOURCE DES FEMMES

Takashi MIIKE, ICHIMEI

Nanni MORETTI, HABEMUS PAPAM

Lynne RAMSAY, WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN

Markus SCHLEINZER, MICHAEL

Paolo SORRENTINO, THIS MUST BE THE PLACE

Lars VON TRIER, MELANCHOLIA

Nicolas WINDING REFN, DRIVE

UN CERTAIN REGARD

Gus VAN SANT, RESTLESS - Opening Film - 1h31

Bakur BAKURADZE, THE HUNTER

Andreas DRESEN, HALT AUF FREIER STRECKE

Bruno DUMONT, HORS SATAN

Sean DURKIN, MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE

Robert GUÉDIGUIAN, LES NEIGES DU KILIMANDJARO

Oliver HERMANUS, SKOONHEID

HONG Sangsoo, THE DAY HE ARRIVES

Cristián JIMÉNEZ, BONSÁI

Eric KHOO, TATSUMI

KIM Ki-duk, ARIRANG

Nadine LABAKI, ET MAINTENANT ON VA OÚ ?

Catalin MITULESCU, LOVERBOY

NA Hong-jin, THE YELLOW SEA

Gerardo NARANJO, MISS BALA

Juliana ROJAS, Marco DUTRA TRABALHAR CANSA

Pierre SCHOELLER, L'EXERCICE DE L'ETAT

Ivan SEN, TOOMELAH

Joachim TRIER, OSLO, AUGUST 31ST

OUT OF COMPETITION

Xavier DURRINGER, LA CONQUÊTE

Jodie FOSTER, THE BEAVER

Michel HAZANAVICIUS, THE ARTIST

Rob MARSHALL, PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: ON STRANGER TIDES

Sydney Lumet, 1924 - 2011

2011-04-13T02:39:00.000-07:00

It just doesn't stop - just over a week after Elizabeth Taylor's passing, another true cinema great has passed away.

While Sydney Lumet's name is not necessarily associated with the cinema of New Hollywood - as is, for instance, Arthur Penn's or Hal Ashby's - Lumet was nevertheless responsible for some of the most remarkable films of that period, many of which - such as Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon and especially Network - have since rightly become American classics.

Not only has Network always been one of my favourite Sydney Lumet films, but it actually is, in my own opinion, one of the best and most significant, films ever - period. For those who don't know it, I'd strongly advise to go and catch the DVD. Hopefully, following Lumet's passing some cinemas across the world will have the common sense to run a retrospective of Lumet's films.

Considering that Network was released in 1976, it is a film that was much ahead of its time. Watching it today, it doesn't in the least come across as dated and, in fact, seems as fresh and relevant as it did then. With Network, Lumet anticipated many other films (for instance Broadcast News, to name but a one) that tackled the topic of television and its corrupt and cynical goings-on behind the scenes and the effect it has on society at large. Lumet and his screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky crafted a screenplay so meaty, so alive, so full of cynicism and - most of all: humour - making Network a film that grabs you from the start, a unique blend between social criticism, drama, thriller, and satire. It won Faye Dunaway a much deserved Academy Award for her role as the twisted, unsound, TV producer Diane Christensen, a signature role and widely believed to be one of the most iconic and most important parts written for an actress in the 1970s. Hence, like the film as a whole, Dunaway's character is a role that was quite unusual for its time as Diane Christensen is a woman in power who does not shirk from anything to stay there. She only thinks in ratings and, of course - cold, hard cash. Yet, Lumet and Chayefsky were way too clever and subtle to portray Christensen as a one-dimensional, evil, bitch but rather as the product of a society which raises its off-spring on a constant diet of TV and all its glittering promises which it fails to keep. Christensen is as power-ridden as she's hell-bent on success. Yet she's also vulnerable and in need of male companionship. However, unforgettable is the scene when while making love with William Holden all she's able to think about are next day's TV ratings.

Sydney Lumet was a true master of the art of film-making. He's also published a book to that effect where he discusses his craft and his approach to making movies. Having read many a book about film and practical film-making, I can safely that I have read few which are so comprehensive and insightful, so easy to follow, and so logical in the way Lumet explains what film-making - to him - is all about. For all those who intend to break into movie-making, I'd also strongly recommend reading Lumet's book - aptly titled Making Movies - and in between watching some of his films!

His best are:

1. Network
2. Serpico
3. Dog Day Afternoon
4. The Verdict
5. The Pawnbroker
6. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
7. Garbo Talks
8. Running on Empty
9. 12 Angry Men
Also recommended are Murder on the Orient Express, The Wiz, and The Morning After, in which Jane Fonda plays an alcoholic accused of murder.

I'm finding it difficult nowadays to name a director whose whole body of work I admire, but Lumet has always been one of the few. That's kind of strange, because there are few directors who worked in so many genres and who were as versatile as him. Nevertheless, the quality of Lumet's films never suffered and was, in fact, almost persistently top-notch. He excelled no matter which genre he tackled. Even in his last film, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, Lumet was at the top his game, coming up with a thriller the likes of which I hadn't seen in a while. Sadly and unfairly, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead went mostly unnoticed, yet it is a masterpiece in tight, edge-of-your-seat, story-telling which will leave you gaping - if you haven't seen it already!

Faye Dunaway as the TV producer from hell, Diane Christensen, in Network

Al Pacino as the cop, who single-handedly decides to take on NYPD in Serpico

Al Pacino robs a bank to pay for the sex-change of his boyfriend in Dog Day Afternoon

Sydney Lumet directing Charlotte Rampling in The Verdict

Rod Steiger as a Holocaust survivor who can't forget the past in The Pawnbroker

Henry Fonda in 12 Angry Men

German Film Awards 2011

2011-04-08T16:54:00.000-07:00

Tonight, the German Film Awards - also known as Lola, after Marlene Dietrich's iconic role in Sternberg's The Blue Angel - were awarded at Berlin's Friedrichstadt-Palast.

These are the results:

Best Film - Gold
VINCENT WILL MEER (Vincent Wants More), produced by Harald Kügler, Viola Jäger – Olga Film – director: Ralf Huettner

Bester Film - Silver
ALMANYA – Welcome to Germany, produced by Andreas Richter, Ursula Woerner, Annie Brunner – Roxy Film – director: Yasemin Samdereli

Best Film - Bronze
WER WENN NICHT WIR (If Not Us, Who), produced by zero one film, Thomas Kufus – director: Andres Veiel

Best Documentary
PINA, produced by Neue Road Movies, Wim Wenders, Gian Piero Ringel - director: Wim Wenders

Best Screenplay
Nesrin Samdereli, Yasemin Samdereli for ALMANYA – Welcome to Germany

Best Director
Tom Tykwer for Drei (Three)

Best Actress
Sophie Rois for DREI (Three)

Best Actor
Florian David Fitz for VINCENT WILL MEER (Vincent Wants More)

Best Supporting Actress
Beatriz Spelzini for DAS LIED IN MIR (The Song Inside of Me)

Best Supporting Actor
Richy Müller for POLL

Best Cinematography
Daniela Knapp for POLL

Best Editing
Mathilde Bonnefoy for DREI (Three)

Best Production Design
Silke Buhr for POLL

Best Costumes
Gioia Raspé for POLL

Best Make-Up
Kitty Kratschke, Heike Merker for GOETHE!

Best Score
Matthias Klein for DAS LIED IN MIR (The Song Inside of me)

Red carpet arrivals tonight, outside the Friedrichstadt-Palast:

Alexander Fehling:

Aylin Tezel:

Anastasia Zampounidis:

Jasmin Tabatabai and Andreas Pietschmann:

Bruno Ganz and Iris Berben:

Dani Levy and Sabine Lidl:

Lisa Martinek and Guiglio Ricciarelli

Kostja Ullman and Janine Reinhardt:

Minu Barati-Fischer:

Michael Degen:

Nadja Uhl:

Sibel Kekilli:

Director Tom Tykwer and Marie Steinhoff:

Volker Schloendorff:

Wim Wender and his wife, Donata:

Wladimir Klitschko:

Wolfgang Kohlhaase:

Winter's Bone, Debra Granik, USA 2010

2011-04-04T06:45:00.000-07:00

One of the few - positive - upshots of the recent credit crunch and subsequent depression is that it gave birth to a string of films that deal with the flipside of the American dream, among them are Welcome to the Rileys, The Fighter, or indeed Winter's Bone.

Winter's Bone revolves around 17-year old Ree, who takes care of her two siblings and a depression-stricken mother while struggling to hang on to their house which Ree's father put up for his bail. Much of the story of Winter's Bone reminded me of a modern-day version of The Third Man since similar to Carol Reed's classic, in Winter's Bone, too, the film's central character - or rather, the elephant in the room: Ree's father - never shows and you're never quite sure whether he actually does exist or not, and if so, in what physical shape and condition ... This is, of course, the only difference between the two films, and not meaning to spoil things for those who have yet to see the Granik's film I won't give away any details regarding the whereabouts of Ree's father. Moreover, even though much depends on Ree having to find Jessup, her father, it is not the main point of the film for Winter's Bone is decidedly not a thriller, notwithstanding the fact that Ree's hunt for Jessup does keep the viewer on tenterhooks, but more so as an undercurrent rather than as the film's leitmotif. Winter's Bone is all about the struggle for sheer survival by Ree in the face of a relentlessly adverse and hostile world, which has all but forgotten about its disenfranchised inhabitants who have little left but the wretched, run-down, houses they live in and the handful of drugs to keep them going, making them forget about the misery that surrounds them.

Given its theme, Winter's Bone is by definition a rather bleak film. It is to Granik's credit that she managed to shirk any sentimentality which a film that revolves around a teenage girl who has no one but herself to rely on, would have lent itself to all too easily. That Winter's Bone does nevertheless end on a somewhat upbeat note may strike some viewers as unrealistic or too laboured. However, it struck me as a much needed and well-deserved dose of serendipity on Ree's part, restoring at least some of the faith in life and mankind you're likely to lose over the course of the film.

Potiche (Trophy Wife), Francois Ozon, France 2010

2011-03-29T11:50:00.000-07:00

François Ozon can always be relied on to deliver first-rate entertainment. This also applies to his new film, Potiche.

In Potiche, Catherine Deneuve plays Suzanne Pujol, the bored trophy wife to Fabrice Lucchini's Robert Pujol, a chauvinist, small-minded, factory manager. A heart attack forces Robert Pujol to temporarily retire, prompting his wife to take over. Lo and behold, at the factory things are suddenly going smoothly again as Suzanne breathes new life into the factory which was founded by her father in the first place. Perhaps, it is no accident that the factory produces umbrellas, a reminiscence I'd suggest, to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, one of Deneuve's greatest triumphs - a triumph, it should be added, she repeats in her role as Suzanne Pujol.

You could be forgiven for thinking that this sounds all like a grave - and dated? - lesson in feminism. But don't worry. François Ozon set his film in the 1970s with all the usual ingredients, including bell bottoms and some hefty disco beats by Baccara. Moreover, Potiche is above all a comedy - a hilarious one at times - although behind its comic façade there are nevertheless a lesson or two Ozon wants us to pick up on.

For how many women can you name that are running a factory, bearing in mind that this is 2011 and not 1978 ... ...?

Elizabeth Taylor, 1932 - 2011

2011-03-23T12:38:00.000-07:00

Elizabeth Taylor in Suddenly, Last Summer (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, USA 1959)

Some 20 years ago I came across John Parker's book, Five for Hollywood, in which Parker compares the lives and careers of five Hollywood stars who dominated Hollywood during the 1950s: Natalie Wood, Rock Hudson, James Dean, Montgomery Clift - and Elizabeth Taylor. The chapter on Taylor concludes Parker's book. It is entitled 'The Last Survivor'.

Today, the last survivor died in Los Angeles at the age of 79.

Considering what Elizabeth Taylor had gone through over the course of her life - e.g. over 30 major surgeries, including a brain tumour removal 14 years ago - I was confident that she would live up to 90. At least. She seemed invincible indeed. Like the proverbial rock in the surf.

The use of any kind of pathos at this stage would be cheap, nor would it do her justice. Hence, I deliberately refrain from saying that Taylor's death equals the death of an era for that era, Hollywood's Golden Age, already died a long time ago. But there surely can't be any doubt that she was the last true, bonafide, Hollywood star, with everything that term entails and connotes. And yet, I admired Taylor not so much for her films, although she does have a small handful of masterpieces to her credit, neither more nor less than do most other so-called Hollywood stars, but for Taylor's persona, her personality. For someone of her stature, she had the admirable - and possibly rare - trait of not taking herself too seriously. She had the ability to laugh at herself. Her wit was unmatched. My favourite Taylorism goes: "If people say they don't have any vices you can be sure they have some pretty annoying virtues", or something to that effect.

And it fits Taylor's unique personality to have stood up for the likes of Rock Hudson, when he was stricken with AIDS, when very few others were prepared to do so. It came naturally to Taylor. After all, she had done the same some thirty years earlier for her friend Montgomery Clift when she fought on his behalf when producers were already reluctant to cast him on account of his alcoholism.

The fabulous Elizabeth Taylor, such as she was in the early 1970s

It didn't matter that she hadn't made any films in at least 15 years, anything Taylor did or said was still considered newsworthy. In fact, if there's one reproach I have on her, it is that she wasted her considerable talent and didn't make more (good) films. Taylor's active career in films more or less ended when she was only in her forties. I wondered sometimes, if it was for a lack of parts or if she simply didn't want to. She certainly didn't need to, for she was one of the wealthiest actresses ever to come out of Hollywood. And not just because of the diamonds Richard Burton so lavishly bestowed on her. She was the first actress - or actor, for that matter - to command the princely salary of $1,000,000. It was unheard of at the time, and the story goes that Taylor asked for it just by sheer audacity, simply to annoy the producers and, in fact, never expected to actually get it. But she did!

For all of the above I confess that Taylor's death touched me more than a death by an actor or actress whom I never even met usually does.

Elizabeth Taylor was more than just a movie star. Much more. She was the icon of an era, who, in her prime, lived life to the full. Her name is synonymous with glamour, beauty and excess. But reducing her to that would be unfair. For Elizabeth Taylor also stands for unbridled passion. Besides, Taylor wouldn't be the same without her wit, her sharp mind, which many weren't aware of since the glitter of her diamonds often threatened to outshine her intelligence.

Elizabeth Taylor truly was in a league of her own.

Her departure leaves an irreplaceable gap in more sense than just one. She'll be greatly missed.

Elizabeth Taylor after her brain tumour removal in 1997, in a photo taken by the late Herb Ritts

Wer wenn nicht wir (If Not Us, Who), Andres Veiel, Germany 2011

2011-03-22T12:43:00.000-07:00

Expectations had been high for Veiel's much anticipated Red Army Faction drama. Veiel's aim was, to tell the "previously untold story of what went on before Gudrun Ensslin took to violence" as a last resort against the state in which she seemed to detect more than just a few remnants of fascism. Yet, from the first I was struck by Veiel's claim of Ensslin's story having never been told. In fact, in what surely was one of the few high points of post-war German cinema, in Die bleierne Zeit (English title: Marianne and Juliane), Margarethe von Trotta does exactly that. Granted, she changed the names of her two female protagonists to Marianne and Juliane - hence the English title - and she may have taken some liberties here and there regarding Ensslin's biography, but in her film she told the exact same story, at least, as far as the basics are concerned. More than that, unlike Veiel's film, von Trotta's transcends the borders of a mere biopic, allowing for some glimpses, not only into Ensslin's psyche, but into the German psyche as a whole. The scene even, in which in Veiel's film Lauzemis is seen attending a screening of a French film, struck me as a direct reference to Marianne and Juliane. Only that in the latter von Trotta has the two sisters watching Alain Resnais' Nuit et Brouillards, which was one of the first documentaries about the Holocaust. Similarly to Veiel, von Trotta already linked the founding of the RAF to the crimes of the Nazis. Even if the crime consisted merely in turning a blind eye, as was the case with Ensslin's father rather than active collaboration.

While this may seem unduly harsh on Veiel, his film does have its merits, if not surprises. But they have more to do with Ensslin's boyfriend, Bernward Vesper, rather than Ensslin herself. I'd even go so far as to call Veiel's film more a film about Vesper than about Ensslin. But that may be because ever since her death she's dominated the German media by varying degrees whilst Vesper virtually disappeared into oblivion, which is why Veiel's film amounts to a rediscovery of Vesper and his work, notably Die Reise (The Journey). He certainly was a fascinating character. Fascinating, because he defies easy labelling. Unlike Ensslin's, Vesper's father, Will, was an admirer of Hitler, a heritage which Bernward Vesper struggled with for the remainder of his short life. While watching Veiel's film, I couldn't quite shed the impression that Veiel himself seems to have become increasingly engrossed by this torn and tormented figure, which may explain why - to me at least - the focus in If Not Us, Who seems to shift from Ensslin to Vesper as the story unfolds. Certainly, his is the more intriguing story, but not only because Vesper has almost completely disappeared from the radar screen of German history. More interesting, however, is the fact that due to his family background, Vesper's biography isn't as straight forward as Ensslin's. Although needless to say, he condemned the crimes of Hitler and Nazi Germany just like Ensslin, passing judgement on his father and his generation didn't come as easy to Vesper as it did to Ensslin. Nor did he he believe in violence as a means to fight society.

It is this, this grey zone in which Vesper moved which makes him a remarkable, fascinating, figure and uncovering it is the true achievement of Veiel's film.

Almanya, Yasemin & Nesrin Samdereli, Germany 2011

2011-03-11T09:12:00.000-08:00

"Islam is part of Germany, and I am the President of all Germans, Muslims included", thus spoke German President Christian Wulff in his speech to commemorate the 20th anniversary of German reunification last October. Though long overdue, Wulff's words were greeted by a collective sigh of relief by the country's well-nigh 5 million Muslims. However, in a climate where much of Europe is gripped by Islamophobia, Wulff's speech was not equally welcomed by all parts of German society. To underline his point of view, Wulff made it a point to attend the world premiere of Almanya along with his wife Bettina. Not exactly known to be a cineaste, his appearance was therefore rightly read as a (political) statement, and again, one that didn't come a minute too soon.

The team of Almanya at the film's world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival three weeks ago. On the right is German President Christian Wulff and his wife Bettina.

Not dissimilar to Wulff, Almanya, too, can be seen as political statement, or rather, an outstretched hand by Germany's Turkish community whose relationship with its host country - which has long become home to many - has been a choppy one, to put it mildly. Almanya is worth seeing for a whole number of reasons. Not only does it offer those Germans whose contact with their Turkish neighbours have been, shall we say, infrequent, a rare glimpse into the world of Germany's primary immigrant community. By so doing, the film makes clear that the lives of the Turkish family next door isn't that different from their own. Almanya shows how - usually - unfounded prejudices on both sides have characterised, if not marred, the relationship between Germans and Turks from the first. What's more, more Turks have made ample efforts to assimilate, including partaking in annual Christmas celebrations and so forth, than one is led to believe by reading the daily press.

What else is new?, you might understandably ask, but bearing in mind that misconceptions about Islam have reached fever pitch, never mind that most of it is based on ignorance, Almanya is a crucial contribution regarding the understanding between both, Germans and Turks. I realise as I'm writing this that this sounds like a text written by a human rights activist some 50 years ago. And yet, such is the debate and the anti-Muslim sentiment here in Europe that a film such as Almanya comes as much needed comic relief, not to mention that its educational role cannot be overestimated as it shows, for instance, that religion plays as little a role in the average Turkish family as it does in its German counterpart. But for all its merit and good intentions, Almanya's messages are easy to digest since they come with a twinkle in the eye rather than wrapped in bitterness or with a wagging finger.

Given its very positive reception at the Berlin Film Festival, the film's nominations for the German Film Awards, not to mention the considerable editorial coverage Almanya has received in the German media, I sincerely hope that the film will be seen by a multitude of people as it's not only interesting and often hilariously funny, but also beautiful to look at and highly entertaining.

Yasemin and Nesrin Samdereli, the writer-directors of Almanya

Unknown, Jaume Collet-Serra, Germany/ France/ UK 2011

2011-03-04T10:59:00.000-08:00

As a Berlin resident, I awaited the opening of Collet-Serra's film with high anticipation. Tickets for its world premiere during the Berlin Film Festival two weeks were sold out within minutes. Finally, yesterday Unknown opened nation-wide across Germany, one week after its US release, whose more than respectable box-office figures exceeded all expectations while it sent my own soaring. But to come straight to the point, these were in no way met. In fact, Unknown disappointed on almost every level. Notably the screenplay and the dialogues were completely lacking in logic and imagination as every opportunity to add some much needed suspense was wasted. For the basic plot-line of Unknown is not without promise. Quite the opposite. A skilled screenwriter may have turned this story of a scientist whose identity gets stolen into a tightly woven psycho-thriller a la Hitchcock, full of suspense and nerve-racking story-twists. As it is, the nerve-racking parts were entirely left to the special effects department which, along with the cinematographer, injected the film with some much needed drama. Though these skilfully staged car races through Berlin are of limited consequence for the film's narrative and come across disjointed as their sole function seems to be to fill the voids in between.

The biggest disappointment to me, though, is how little the screenwriter and the director made of the location, the city of Berlin, whose many mysterious, eerie and iconic places, areas and buildings are pregnant with possibilities and would have lent themselves perfectly for this kind of film. Instead, they opted for locations which did little to further the plot and which bear nor surprises for the viewer. Worse yet, in the - it seems mandatory club scene (the film is, after all, set in Berlin!) - instead of using, for instance, the fabulous BergHain club as a set, the scene takes place in an interchangeable location which, for all we know, could be anywhere in the world.

Which brings me to the next point. Berlin is full of DJ's from all over the world who work in the city's many clubs. And if there's one thing today's Berlin is most famous for - besides its art scene - it's the music. So why didn't it occur to Collet-Serra to use a more inspired, less overused, tune than Blue Monday? The result being that the club scene, too, offered plenty of opportunities to lift his film above the ordinary, but Collet-Serra wasted it yet again.

On the bottom-line, the only reason that kept me from leaving the cinema were Sebastian Koch, Bruno Ganz and especially Diane Kruger, who gets better with every film. Playing an illegal immigrant, Diane Kruger excels at assuming a Bosnian accent and she has a presence which a few years ago I would have never thought was in her.

Pina, Wim Wenders, Germany/ France 2011

2011-03-02T12:57:00.000-08:00

Wim Wenders' homage to the late German choreographer Pina Bausch is nothing short of a masterpiece. Calling it a documentary is not quite doing it justice. It really is an homage to her life, her work, her vision. Focussing on a small number of her choreographies - Cafe Mueller, Kontakthof, Sacre du Printemps and Vollmond among them - Wenders takes Pina's creations out of the theatre and into and around the city Pina was born in and which she loved - Wuppertal. The dance sequences alternate with statements from some of her dancers who come from all around the world. In short comments and observations they talk about their collaboration with Pina Bausch, her influence on them, and Pina's own particular way of inspiring them.

In several interviews Wenders gave in the last few weeks, he has stated that he'd long pondered over how to tackle the difficult task of adequately capturing dance on film - until it came to him that the new developments in 3D technology would be able to do justice to Pina's work and legacy. And having seen his film twice, I couldn't agree more with Wenders. Never before has dance on film looked so beautiful, so mesmerising, and so evocative. Pina is highly recommended and highly addictive viewing!

Pina's world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival was attended by the German chancellor Angela Merkel as well as by the German president, Christian Wulff. Neither of them are film aficionados in any way. However, this goes to show to what extent Pina Bausch and her creations have become an integral and crucial part of German culture and identity.

See a trailer of Pina here:

Ingmar Bergman Exhibition at the Film Museum, Berlin

2011-02-25T12:26:00.000-08:00

Ingmar Bergman was born on July 14, 1918 in Uppsala, Sweden, the son of a Lutheran pastor, Erik Bergman and his wife Karin, née Åkerblom. His strict, Protestant parental home lastingly influenced him and Bergman made reference to childhood memories many times in his oeuvre. The sensitive, imaginative boy frequently protected himself from hurt and humiliation by fibbing. Later, the fine line between truth and lies – becoming slander, deceit and self-deception – would run through Bergman’s work as leitmotifs.

Throughout his career Ingmar Bergman produced 130 stage productions, 42 radio productions, 23 television plays and 39 movies. His work has received numerous international awards, including three Academy Awards (Oscars) for Best Foreign Language Film. Directors, such as Woody Allen, Federico Fellini, Stanley Kubrick and Billy Wilder, have shown admiration for Bergman. In 1997, at the Cannes Film Festival, he was the first person in the history of the festival to be awarded its highest prize, the “Palme des Palmes,” for his life’s work. Bergman’s films, spanning from dramas to comedies and intimate plays to opulent costume films, are strongly inspired by the landscape and literature of Scandinavia, yet they are universal.

The exhibition includes select items from Bergman's personal correspondence, costumes and props from Bergman's films, stills, screenplays and film clips. Below are some examples:

Costumes by Marik Vos-Lundh for Virgin Spring (1960)

Costumes by Mark Vos-Lundh for Bergman's film Fanny and Alexander (1960)

Letter by Ingmar Bergman to Lotte Eisner in which he calls the Cannes Festival "a meat market and mental humiliation".

Altar Piece designed for Winter Light (1960) by P.A. Lundgren

The exhibition runs from January 27 to May 29, 2011

Sources:

Text - Museum fuer Film und Fernsehen
Fotos - Martin Sauter

The King's Speech, Tom Hooper, UK/ Australia 2011

2011-02-21T11:33:00.000-08:00

I'm not quite sure I'm prepared to also jump on the bandwagon and heap praise after praise on Hooper's film. It's not that The King's Speech is a bad film - no! - but it simply isn't as brilliant or as special as it's made out to be. In actual fact, The King's Speech pretty much follows all the conventions of the traditional narrative, with very little surprises, let alone innovations on a cinematic level which may have involved anything from lighting, sound, cinematography or a deviation of the, in my opinion, way too traditional and predictable, narrative. The screenplay of The King's Speech could be the screenplay of any old love story that comes out of Hollywood inasmuch as it generally starts with the girl rejecting the boy, followed by the two eventually coming together, but somewhere around the middle of the film the girl has second thoughts and dumps the boy only for both of them to finally commit to each other for good at long last during the film's climactic moments - usually in the final 20 minutes - at the expense of the bad guy . Now replace the girl with King George VI and the bad guy with the archbishop of Canterbury and there you have it: the screenplay of The King's Speech!

Next, throw in a decent dose of the Brits favourite topic - Nazi-Germany and WWII - and you've got the recipe for the most successful film ever to come out of the UK (that's referring to the box-office grosses, of course, - but what else counts nowadays ...?) Anyone could have thought of that, right? Well, fact is nobody has, until David Seidler, this film's screenwriter, came along. Although it says in the credits that it's based on actual events, I'm of course unable to verify every single detail in the script for their historical accuracy besides the - easily verifiable - fact that Lionel Logue was King George VI's speech therapist. But one thing I do know, life seldom plays out like a movie - and the twists and turns in this film's screenplay simply have 'story development' written all over them. Which is fine by me. But don't try to sell me this film as the masterpiece it's claimed to be because it ain't.

In fact, the greatness of Hooper's film lies not so much in the writing, but - you guessed it! - in the acting. Both Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush are outstanding and a pleasure to watch. And so is Helena Bonham-Carter, never mind that she's playing her usual flippant, witty, self. Thing is, she does it well. It's this trio, their interactions, that makes Hooper's film exceptional.

The King's Speech is a nostalgic if not sentimental, look back in history. Heritage film-making at top-level. Conventional, yes - but also very entertaining and beautiful to look at, too.

Berlinale 2011, Day 10, Awards Ceremony

2011-02-19T10:26:00.000-08:00

Alfred Bauer Award, named after the founder of the Berlin Film Festival, bestowed to a film that's opening new perspectives in film making:

Who If Not Us (Wer wenn nicht wir), Andres Veiel, Germany 2011

Silver Bear for Best Screenplay:

Joshua Marston for The Forgiveness of Blood, Joshua Marston, US 2011

Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Achievement:

- Wojciech Staron, Cinematography and Barbara Enriques, Production Design, both for The Prize (El Premio), Mexico/ France/ Poland/ Germany 2011

Silver Bear for Best Actress:

- the female ensemble of A Separation, Asghar Farhadi, Iran 2011: Leila Hatami, Sarina Farhadi, Sareh Bayat

Silver Bear for Best Actor:

- the male ensemble of A Separation, Asghar Farhadi, Iran 2011: Peyman Moaadi, Babak Karimi, Ali-Asghar Shahbazi

Silver Bear for Best Director:

Ulrich Koehler for Sleeping Sickness (Schlafkrankheit), Germany/ France 2011

Grand Prix of the Jury:

The Turin Horse, Bela Tarr, Hungary/ France/ Switzerland/ Germany 2011

Golden Bear for Best Film:

A Separation, Asghar Farhadi, Iran 2011

Berlinale 2011, Day 8, Panorama: Light-Flight, Annette Frick, Germany 2010

2011-02-17T14:39:00.000-08:00

The rather poetic - original German - title of Annette Frick's film Leicht muss man sein, fliegen muss man koennen - which loosely translates into Light-Flight - refers to a quote by the late German photographer Herbert Tobias who died in 1982 as one of the early victims of AIDS. But AIDS is not the subject of Frick's documentary. Her film homes in on the life and work of Tobias who, though all but forgotten today, was not only ahead of his time but also quite influential, anticipating as he did, for instance, the work of Robert Mapplethorpe.

By way of numerous interviews Frick conducted over the years, she traces Tobias' life and work. Born in 1924, Herbert Tobias was drafted towards the end of WWII and spent time as a Russian prisoner of war until he managed to escape. He took to photography in the early 1950s while living in Berlin. Equally fascinated by masculinity as he was of haute couture, Tobias earned his living as a fashion photographer while at the same time photographing leather-clad men in images which Mapplethorpe would later become famous for. Tobias was as flamboyant as he was creative, getting up at noon with his models arriving in the late afternoon. Work was seldom finished before midnight, followed by long nights out on the town. Annette Frick searched all available archives to unearth as much material on Tobias as well as of him as possible. Her admiration for her subject is evident. Given its topic, it is shameful that Frick had to shoot her film on a shoestring budget. That it was made at all is thanks to Annette Frick's determination and the generosity of her friends, many of whom contributed either by working for free or by donating money. Why in a country like Germany, which often subsidises the most insignificant films through government funds, it proved impossible to get public funding for an important film like Frick's which, after all, revolves around a neglected part of Germany's cultural heritage, will forever remain a mystery to me. It seems to me, there's a project the guys from WikiLeaks may want to sink their teeth into ... I have a feeling that with regard to the disbursement of the much coveted German government film funds we'd all be in for a few surprises!

Annette Frick on stage after the screening of her film last night in Berlin

Annette Frick, next to her the painter and photographer Juergen Draeger, a friend of Tobias whom Frick interviewed for her film

Annette Frick and her collaborators

Berlinale 2011, Day 7, Helena Bonham-Carter

2011-02-16T12:26:00.000-08:00

British actress Helena Bonham-Carter hounded by autograph hunters as she's leaving the press conference of her film, Toast, screened in the section Berlinale Special (directer: S.J. Clarkson, UK 2011), through the back entrance of the Grand Hyatt, Berlin: