Personal Velocity (2002)
Screenplay by Rebecca Miller, based on her book
Directed by Rebecca Miller
Produced by Blue Magic Pictures/ Goldheart Pictures/ InDigEnt
Running time: 86 minutes

So, What’s This About?
In the first of three portraits of women in a state of flux, Delia (Kyra Sedgwick) leaves an abusive husband with her three children in tow. She moves into the garage of a childhood friend and takes a job as a waitress, where Delia gains control of her life by reasserting herself sexually. Greta (Parker Posey) is a moderately successful book editor plucked out of obscurity by a red hot novelist to work with him on his latest book. Her changing fortunes gain Greta the respect of a powerful attorney father (Ron Leibman) but further alienate her from an unremarkable husband (Tim Guinee).

Paula (Fairuza Balk) drives upstate in a daze with a mute teenage hitchhiker (Lou Taylor Pucci) in the passenger seat. She reaches the home of her mother (Patti D’Arbanville) whom Paula hasn’t seen since fleeing to New York City two years ago. Now expecting a baby with her compassionate Haitian boyfriend (Seth Gilliam), Paula is distraught by the death of a man she chatted up at a bar and was struck by a car while walking her down a sidewalk. Paula is pulled back to earth when she realizes her scarred passenger is in a far more damaged condition than she is.

Who Made It?
Rebecca Miller is the only child of playwright Arthur Miller and photographer Inge Morath. A Yale graduate, Miller for a time chose painting over writing, but while on an art fellowship in Germany at the age of 21, discovered a love for filmmaking. She developed her craft by making short films and — with her father’s agent lining up auditions — earned a living as an actress, winning roles in Regarding Henry (1991) as Harrison Ford’s mistress and Consenting Adults (1992) as Kevin Spacey’s mysterious wife. Miller’s first feature film as a writer/director Angela won her a Dramatic Filmmaker’s Trophy at the Sundance Film Festival in 1995, but her screenplays went unproduced.

Miller started a family with her husband Daniel Day-Lewis and turned away from screenwriting. Producer/director Gary Winick — whose New York based company InDigEnt financed low budget features to be shot on mini-DV — called Miller to see if she had any projects to contribute. While none of her scripts fit the InDigEnt mandate, Miller sent Winick three of seven short stories from her forthcoming book Grove Press was set to publish in 2002. Adapted into a screenplay and directed by Miller in 17 days and on a shoestring of only $150,000, Personal Velocity was a sensation at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2002 and would put her on the map as a filmmaker.

How’d They Do It?
The segueway Rebecca Miller took from painting to acting to screenwriting would change again in the late ‘90s. The writer-director recalled, “I had basically given up, at least for the time being, the idea of making films, because it was so hard for me to get my films made at that point. I had made one film, called Angela, which had won the Filmmaker’s Prize at Sundance.” She added, “Angela did well with some critics and things, but it didn’t make money. It was a very uncommercial film … So I had gotten to the point where I just felt like I didn’t want to just wait and wait to make films and tell stories. All I did all day was write these screenplays that nobody seemed to want. So I decided to write short stories.”

Several years passed and Miller received a phone call from producer-director Gary Winick, who had launched a new production company. Winick recalled, “InDigEnt was inspired after I saw the Dogme film, The Celebration. And I also thought about how John Cassavetes worked in the ’60s, with the 16mm cameras and the repertoire of actors and the small crews. I thought with this new medium that there was an opportunity here, because in New York there’s this great theater and independent film community. My idea was to form a collective where everybody gets paid the same amount, but also owns a piece of the film.”

Winick added, “Creatively, I was interested in using these new tools for experienced filmmakers to tell stories they normally couldn’t tell, or to tell stories in a different way because of these tools. I went to John Sloss, my lawyer, and we became partners and we partnered with IFC. IFC was the perfect partner because they wanted to be a part of the DV movement.” Winick’s plan had been to produce 10 films a year for $1 million each. 19 InDigEnt films ended up being made from 2000 to 2007 for roughly $250,000 each, including Richard Linklater’s Tape (2001) starring Ethan Hawke & Uma Thurman and the award winning Pieces of April (2003) with Katie Holmes and Patricia Clarkson.

Miller recalled, “I was sick of writing screenplays that no one was going to make, I said, ‘If you want to look at the stories that I’m writing, I could maybe do something out of one of them.’ So I gave him a few stories from the collection and he read them and he really liked them. He ended up giving them to Caroline Kaplan, who was running InDigEnt with him, and they ended up green lighting the film. It was also Gary’s idea to use three stories at once and make a trilogy, and when he said that my mind took off.” After laboring intensely on her book for two years, Miller adapted a screenplay for Personal Velocity in two months.

“I chose the ones that were the most dynamic in terms of action, where there was conflict that was externalized, because some of them were very interior. And also where I thought that there was a good clash; like I thought there was a very good clash between Delia, which is a story about a working-class woman struggling with an abusive marriage, and Greta, which is about an upper-middle class woman struggling with the clash between her own ambition and a marriage which is feeling increasingly stultifying, and finally her ambition propels her out of her own marriage.”

Producer Lemore Syvan — who’d founded Goldheart Pictures in 1995 and Blue Magic Pictures in 2002 – came aboard, with InDigEnt’s Gary Winick and Alexis Alexanian also serving as producers. While Winick maintained that the difficult subject matter Miller was exploring fit the intimacy and thrift of digital filmmaking perfectly, the format presented a host of challenges. Syvan admitted, “Well, the question came up every day when we were shooting Personal Velocity: why can’t we just shoot this on Super 16? But Personal Velocity was designed for video. The way the movie was born was by a mandate that was given to us by InDigEnt, which we all know is a company that makes movies on digital.”

Cinematographer Ellen Kuras recalled, “I had to talk to Rebecca about the limitations of the medium. Having worked on Bamboozled, I knew what we could and couldn’t get away with. On the wide-angle part of the lens, the image just falls apart, especially when you go to a 35mm blowup, so I told her that we really wanted to shoot on the longer part of the lens. You can’t verify the focus on the cameras; what’s on the viewfinder is not 1-to-1 with what you’re getting on the chip. The contrast is hard to deal with. And when you shoot at a certain shutter speed, you get this kind of stepping of the lines in the image.”

With a budget of $150,000, Personal Velocity commenced shooting May 2001 in New York using two Sony DSR-PD150P cameras. Ellen Kuras revealed, “I knew that creatively, my palette would be very limited. I just said, ‘You know what, I’m shooting with this mini DV medium, I’m going to think of these as a short story and I’m going to try to make it look and feel like a poem.’ And that would be my way of saying anything goes. ‘I’m making a poem so … ‘ That means I don’t have to form full sentences. That means I don’t have to put periods where you’re supposed to put periods at the end of sentences. That means I’m not going to do what everybody says you’re supposed to do. I’m just going to do what I think feels right for the movie.”

When screened at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2002, Personal Velocity was greeted as a sensation. Rebecca Miller was awarded the Dramatic Grand Jury Prize and Ellen Kuras the Cinematography Award. Miller would dedicate the film to her mother, who passed away days after the festival. She mused, “I probably will be thinking and talking and writing about my mother for the rest of my life. That’s one thing I find about having children — it does unlock a door that separates you from other women who’ve had children. There’s some basic feminist thing that’s the same for all women who’ve had children, it doesn’t matter what their class is or what their situation is.”

Opening November 2002 in the United States, Personal Velocity met a mixed response from critics. Elvis Mitchell, The New York Times: “The cumulative effect is that of watching misspent lives disintegrate before your eyes. Ms. Miller’s canny accomplishment is a triumph, giving the material weight and heart. This is one of the finest pictures of the year.” Mark Caro, The Chicago Tribune: “Miller’s movie has its moments of impressive velocity, but it never quite takes off.” Scott Tobias, The Onion A.V. Club: “Taken together, the stories are a watershed of feminist clichés, composed of half-hour sections that are too tidy by half, and overlaid with writerly voiceovers that suggest an author too enamored of her own narration.”

Should I Care?
Never expanding beyond 43 theaters in the U.S., Personal Velocity grossed $811,299 domestically, but became Rebecca Miller’s calling card to the film industry, evenly demonstrating her unique voice as a writer and intuitiveness as a director, casting Parker Posey and enabling her to deliver the strongest performance of her career. This is a success as a project, but uneven and a bit appalling as a film. Miller’s prose — read by John Ventimiglia (Artie Bucco from The Sopranos) — has a simple clarity and keeps things interesting, but there’s no getting around how sloppy some of Miller’s narrative sensibilities pan out or how bad digital video makes them look.

The second segment — featuring Parker Posey as a daffy but distraught book editor who begins cutting the fat from her newly empowered life — is the best reason to see the film, with Posey coolly emitting the wit and sensuality that the other two segments desperately lack. If there was some confusion over how harried and unfocused this material was at its core, the Radio Shack technology imposed on the filmmakers by InDigEnt doesn’t help make Personal Velocity any more watchable. The fact that neither Miller nor her producer Lemore Syvan has made another movie on DV says everything about the limitations of the format.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Storytelling By Women Filmmakers Evolves with DV” By Philippa Bourke. MoviesByWomen.com, August 2002

“Digital Portraits” By John Calhoun. LiveDesign, 1 November 2002

“Miller’s Own Tale” By Gaby Woods. The Observer, 9 March 2003

“Crazy Like a Fox” By Jennifer M. Wood. MovieMaker Magazine, 3 February 2007

“Bucking the Digital Trend” By Pat Thompson. MovieMaker Magazine, 3 February 2007

“Rebecca Miller on Personal Velocity: Three Portraits” By John Gaspard. Fast, Cheap Movie Thoughts, 20 November 2008

Wendy and Lucy (2008)
Screenplay by Kelly Reichardt & Jon Raymond, based on the short story Train Choir by Jon Raymond
Directed by Kelly Reichardt
Produced by filmscience/ Glass Eye Pix
Running time: 80 minutes

So, What’s This About?
Wendy Carroll (Michelle Williams) treks through the woods near a town in Oregon with her dog, Lucy. They stumble onto some young hobos gathered around a campfire, and Wendy reveals that she’s headed to Ketchikan, Alaska for summer work. She spends the night in her ’88 Honda Accord in a Walgreens parking lot. Come morning, an elderly security guard (Walter Dalton) politely asks her to move along, but Wendy’s car stalls. Marking time until a mechanic opens shop, she makes a decision that lands her in jail for several hours. By the time Wendy returns to the spot where she left Lucy, she discovers her traveling partner is missing.

Wendy puts in a call to her brother-in-law and antagonistic sister in Indiana, but we learn little about her background except where she came from, where she’s headed and that she has very little cash to make it on her own much longer. When Lucy fails to turn up at the local pound, Wendy spreads “lost dog” notices all over town. She finds the kindness of strangers in the security guard, as well as an honest mechanic (Will Patton) who regrettably has bad news about her car. Wendy finally reunites with Lucy, but the difficulties on the road ahead prompt her to reconsider taking the dog along on the journey.

Who Made It?
Kelly Reichardt grew up in Miami. The daughter of homicide detective father and narcotics agent mother, she immersed herself in photography after borrowing her dad’s crime scene camera in the 5th grade. Reichardt would drop out of high school and move to Boston, where she enrolled in the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Making non-narrative films on Super 8 led to a BFA. Reichardt returned to Florida in 1993 to shoot a feature film, River of Grass. Rather than making filmmaking her focus, Reichardt entered teaching — first at the School of Visual Arts in New York, later at Columbia and NYU. She returned to directing in 1999 with a 48-minute short she’d filmed in North Carolina titled Ode.

Reichardt met Portland based author Jon Raymond through her friend Todd Haynes. The positive experience on Ode led her to ask Raymond if he had any short stories they might adapt into a film together. Their collaboration resulted in Reichardt’s second feature: Old Joy (2006). They came up with the idea for another feature — Wendy and Lucy — together, with Reichardt working on a script while Raymond realized it as a short story titled Train Choir. Producer Anish Savjani secured financing and with Michelle Williams starring, Wendy and Lucy would prove Reichardt’s most critically and commercially successful work to date.

How’d They Do It?
After college, Kelly Reichardt worked as a property master and set dresser on Todd Haynes’ first live action feature, Poison. Reichardt went on to teach while Haynes rose to acclaim as director of Safe and Velvet Goldmine. Haynes later met Jon Raymond, editor of a Portland arts magazine called Plazm. Credited as “Slats Grobnik”, Raymond would serve as Haynes’ assistant on Far From Heaven in 2001 and publish a novel titled The Half Life in 2004. Haynes stated, “After reading The Half Life, I was amazed at Jon’s strong sense of regional identity, and then I spent some time around him and saw the sort of old-school way he related to his friends, the intimacy and warmth they shared.”

Raymond recalled, “I met Kelly through Todd, both here and then when I moved back East. Kelly was actively looking for a story to adapt for a new project. She had read a novel I had written called The Half Life, in 2004, and she liked that and was looking for something to do with people she knows. She wanted a story that had very few characters, largely took place out doors — so she would not have to deal with a lot of sets — and would have room for a dog to be written in. I had this story, Old Joy, although I couldn’t imagine anyone seeing a feature in it. But she did and went off and made it. It was an amazing surprise and blessing for me.”

Discovering Jon Raymond, Reichardt mused, “There is something elliptical about his writing. His stories are very open and leave a lot of room for the reader to bring their own experiences to the subject. This translates well to my approach to filmmaking. He also is very good at setting people into their environments so that whatever is going on with them internally is linked to where they happen to be. The landscape becomes more than just a place, but something like a character in the story. Which fits with my own long-term interest in representing the American landscape.” The success of Old Joy — a study of alienation between two friends on a camping trip — left Reichardt eager to collaborate with Raymond again.

Reichardt recalled, “It was very post-Katrina — what it was for everyone just to be watching, but also the conversation of, you know, ‘Those people, living in such peril,’ they wouldn’t be in the shape they’re in, the position they’re in. We just started pondering: If you don’t have a net and you’ve had a shitty education and you don’t have the benefit of family that’s in any better situation than you’re in, how does one improve their lot? Not even reaching the middle class, but how do you just get a toehold in the next level? That was the seed, and then Jon went off and wrote the story. The screenplay was just an adaptation of his story.”

Reichardt’s own traveling companion — a golden Labrador retriever mix named Lucy — had made her screen debut in Old Joy. The director added, “Two elements were there from the beginning: the dog and economics. We knew we had to have Lucy in the movie, since she came along anyway, and we felt like the times were right for a real financially driven plot-line. Jon wrote a few drafts of the story, with editing and commentary from me. And then I wrote the screenplay, making additions and subtractions, with editing and commentary from Jon. Once shooting began, the actors also made their own contributions to the dialogue and characterization.”

A former assistant to producer Scott Rudin named Anish Savjani established a production company — filmscience — in 2005. Producer of Old Joy, Savjani wanted to be involved in Kelly Reichardt’s next film as well. “With Old Joy, I came into the project during the post-production stage in order to raise money, and we stretched the budget. But Wendy and Lucy needed all encompassing financing, and the budget was a combination of financing from filmscience and private equity.” Todd Haynes again served as executive producer, putting Reichardt in touch with an actor he was eager to cast in I’m Not There – Michelle Williams.

Wendy and Lucy commenced an 18-day shooting schedule August 2007 in and around Portland on a budget of $300,000. Reichardt recalled, “It’s a small crew and we’re shooting on location so you just try and make the limits work for you aesthetically. That’s all you can do. Which it does, I think. I mean, we’re small enough that we can go shoot in these public places and nobody really notices us. I mean, it’s a struggle certainly, but the reward is that it’s a really private process. Jon and I, we don’t have anyone giving us script notes.” Reichardt then spent six months editing the film by herself in her apartment in Astoria, Queens. She added, “The process can continue and it’s just done when I’m like, ‘Okay, it’s done.’ There are very few hands in the pot and I’d say that it is the payoff.”

After screening Wendy and Lucy at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2008, Reichardt’s teaching semester was over and she was driving from New York to Portland when her “shitty cell phone” rang. Oscilloscope Laboratories — the film distributor founded and owned by Adam Yauch (alias MCA) of hip-hop pioneers The Beastie Boys — was calling. The company had distributed two documentaries — Dear Zachary and Flow: For Love of Water – but Wendy and Lucy would be their first narrative release. Reichardt recalled, “I sat in this parking lot, ironically, since the whole film takes place in parking lots and you know, it sounded like they just had a lot of energy and they seemed like they were really interested in focusing on theatrical. And that was really appealing to me.”

Premiering at New York’s Film Forum in December 2008 and expanding to other cities through January 2009, Wendy and Lucy was championed by critics. A.O. (Tony) Scott, The New York Times: “Much as Old Joy turned a simple encounter between two longtime friends into a meditation on manhood and responsibility at a time of war and political confusion, so does Wendy and Lucy find, in one woman’s partly self-created hard luck, an intimation of more widespread hard times ahead.” Michael Phillips, The Chicago Tribune: “If a Warner Bros. social-protest film from the early 1930s somehow got into bed with an American indie from the 1970s, how would the love-child turn out? Like this.”

Without expanding beyond 40 theaters in the United States, Wendy and Lucy grossed $865,695 domestically, and added $323,948 internationally. Kelly Reichardt remained humble about aspirations for her next film. “I don’t consider myself to be working in this industry. I didn’t find the industry that inviting. So to me it’s just been trying to figure out how to make films outside of it. Do it yourself. By any means necessary. And, you know, it’s nice. It’s been a really good ride.” She added, “I’m always prepared that I’ll go back to making smaller films at any given time. In between my two features I was making these sorts of films, but on Super 8. And when the well dries up, that’s where I’ll go back.”

Should I Care?
Wendy and Lucy stands apart from a lot of recent indie films by simply rejecting the quirk that has become standard issue for so many of them. This is a fine example of addition by subtraction. There’s no contrived romance with a young hunk Lucy meets at the laundromat. No local yokels are trotted out to provide laughs. There are no hugs, no lessons. There’s no hip music on the soundtrack. There isn’t any music, actually. As spare as this effort is, I can’t call it a great film, but it is great work, benefiting from the uncanny timing of the worst economic recession in anyone’s memory, as well as a beautiful performance by former teen soap opera star Michelle Williams.

Kelly Reichardt has the heart of a jazz artist, both to her credit and detriment. There’s a tremendous sense of freedom in setting her film outdoors, with shots of Michelle Williams lingering where it seems obvious the production had no permits to shoot. But like a lot of jazz, the movie is pretentious to the point of being anti-people. Will Patton is outstanding in his two scenes, but I would have preferred fewer shots of trains or trees and more time with the people Wendy encounters on her journey. In the plus column, Williams — who received an Academy Award nomination for her role in Brokeback Mountain — again conveys the restraint of an actor who’s at the top of her craft.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“By Any Means Necessary: Wendy & Lucy Director Kelly Reichardt” By Peter Knegt. indieWIRE, 10 December 2008

“Interview: Kelly Reichardt on Wendy and Lucy” By Alison Willmore. IFC, 10 December 2008

“Writer Jon Raymond sees his work realized in Oregon films” By Jeff Baker. The Oregonian, 5 January 2009

“Interview with Anish Savjani, the producer of Wendy and Lucy” By Eren Gulfidan. Film Annex, 19 January 2009

“Filmmaker Eyes The Frayed Edge Of Social Fabric” By Laura Winters. The Washington Post, 25 January 2009

“Jon Raymond’s Portland” Film In Focus, 27 February 2009

Wendy and Lucy – Production Notes

What the *&#! Is This About?
In Antarctica, a Siberian Husky races across a field of ice. In the sky above, a helicopter appears, with a man on board shooting at the dog. The animal makes it to a United States research station manned by 12 men. These include a burnt out pilot named MacReady (Kurt Russell), who rather than let a computer beat him at chess, pours a bottle of Jim Beam into the wiring. The circling helicopter gets the attention of the men and when it lands, a man steps out babbling in Norwegian. He opens fire on the dog and when he hits one of the Americans, is shot and killed by the base commander (Donald Moffat). Fearing the Norwegian camp might be in serious trouble, physician Dr. Copper (Richard Dysart) has MacReady fly him there to investigate.

MacReady and Copper discover the camp gutted by fire and most of its inhabitants dead. They also uncover a block of ice that appears to have been thawed out, while outside in a burn pile, they find the remains of something that looks like it might have been human. The men take the specimen and stacks of videotape back for study. The men don’t know exactly what happened to the Norwegians, but are getting the drift that it was bad. After wandering the station all day, the Siberian Husky is placed in a kennel with the other dogs. There, it transforms into a hideous creature, part crab, part spider, part dog. By the time the men get there, the Thing has attacked and partially absorbed two of the dogs. The ill-tempered Childs (Keith David) blasts it with a flamethrower, but the Thing escapes into the ceiling.

The station biologist Blair (Wilford Brimley) theorizes what they’re dealing with is an organism that imitates other life forms, absorbing its prey and producing a perfect imitation. Studying the Norwegian tapes, MacReady flies to a dig site, where he finds a massive spacecraft buried in the ice. By the time the station realizes that the alien remains may not be dead, at least one of the men is partially absorbed by the Thing. Calculating that if it were to reach a populated area, the organism could infect all life on Earth within 27,000 hours, Blair smashes the radio. Isolated and unsure who they can trust, the men look to MacReady, who comes up with a test he believes will prove who’s who.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
Who Goes There? was a short story by John W. Campbell Jr., published under the pen name “Don A. Stuart” in Astounding Science Fiction magazine in 1938. The story concerned scientists in Antarctica who discover a spacecraft buried in the ice. They thaw out an occupant, only to find the alien has the ability to assume the shape and memories of anything it devours. The men are unsure who among them has been taken over by an alien. Campbell’s story became the inspiration for a Howard Hawks production released in 1951 as The Thing From Another World. The film version presented the Thing as a lumbering monster played by James Arness. The picture was a great commercial success and along with The Day The Earth Stood Still, ushered in an era of science fiction – sometimes provocative, almost always cheaply produced – in Hollywood.

25 years later, producer Stuart Cohen optioned the screen rights to Campbell’s original story. He brought in producers Lawrence Turman and David Foster, securing a development deal with Universal Pictures. Kim Henkel & Tobe Hooper worked on the project, but Cohen wasn’t impressed with the script they delivered. A classmate of Cohen’s from USC Film School named John Carpenter had been a fan of The Thing most of his life, particularly after reading the short story that inspired the movie while he was in high school. Having directed one low budget hit after another – Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, The Fog, Escape From New York – Carpenter was offered the job of updating The Thing for Universal. The director recalled, “The John W. Campbell story Who Goes There? was basically an Agatha Christie, kind of Ten Little Indians: This creature is in your midst and he’s imitating either one or all of us. Who’s human and who isn’t? And that kind of an idea really fascinated me. So we went in that sense back to that idea, with Bill Lancaster and his screenplay.”

Bill Lancaster recalled, “Well the short story itself was, I wouldn’t say it’s a really great, although it’s a very admired one in the science fiction realm. Back in the late ‘30s and I think it was the first story to deal with this shape shifting, body snatcher type element and all that stuff. Seriously, that’s not what 100% attracted me to the piece, it was more the ambiance and this, all the characters involved and the mood of it, and the enclosure, and elements of the paranoia. And the short story was a stepping stone to take advantage of all those elements. From the story and the film, I loved the idea of being trapped in Antarctica, these people working up there for whatever reasons, horrible winter, freezing conditions, cold, and there’s a monster lurking.”

With Kurt Russell heading the ensemble cast and a $13.7 million budget, second unit shooting for The Thing commenced June 1981 on a glacier above Juneau, Alaska. Interiors began filming August 1981 on the Universal lot in Los Angeles before the production moved to Stewart, British Columbia in December for two weeks of shooting the ice camp exteriors. Carpenter felt his challenge was making the Thing seem as real as possible. “See, I grew up as a kid watching science fiction and monster movies and it was always a guy in a suit. Or sometimes it was kind of a bad puppet, like It Conquered The World comes to mind right now, Roger Corman’s movie, this kind of vegetable monster, kind of going like this woodenly, and my fear was, they’ll laugh at us, you know, they’ll laugh at it, it’ll be a joke. I mean, even as great as the movie was – and Alien was a terrific movie – it’s still in the very end, up stood this big guy in a suit. I don’t want a suit, I want something that’s alive.”

John Carpenter turned to makeup effects artist Rob Bottin, whose pioneering transformations for The Howling had been devised the year previous when Bottin was only 20 years old. The director remembered, “He came in with a wild concept, which is that the Thing can look like anything. It doesn’t look like one monster, it looks like anything, and out of this changing shape, this imitation, comes all the creatures throughout the universe that the Thing has ever imitated and it uses these various forms. And Rob was very daring in his approach. Let’s say even sometimes I was doubtful as to whether he’d pull it off.” Rob Bottin recalled, “The interesting thing about The Thing, right, and the fact that it was actually done a long time ago, you know, people actually think that the imaging and special effects and creature work or whatever hold up to this day. Even in light of the fact that there are computer graphics and things now. And I think part of the reason for that is you just can’t beat wild imagination, you know?”

Director of photography Dean Cundey recalled, “One of the tricks of working with rubber – whether it’s a mask or a makeup appliance, or whether it’s a completely fabricated creature – is lighting it carefully so that it looks real, so that there’s a, so you don’t give away the tricks, the little seams and paint and wires and all the things that are necessary to make it work. And Rob was always very sensitive about his creatures, whether there was too much light on them. We always sort of joked that if it was up to Rob, he would build the creatures, you know, to be incredibly interesting and imaginative, and then not put any light on them, because he was afraid of showing them. So it was always a case of Rob wanting less light, less light. So we developed techniques of little tiny spots of light and shadows, and also that you never really looked blatantly at a rubber creature.”

When The Thing went before audiences for two test screenings, it became apparent that the film might have done its job too well. It was so unsettling, John Carpenter remembered a man running out of a screening to throw up. Kurt Russell stated, “A lot of the things though that bothered the audience – more than the monster – were the poking around the monster, you know, and poking around human beings that had been burnt.” Speaking in 1999, Carpenter put the film’s reception in historical perspective. “Two weeks before our movie comes out, they release this other movie called E.T. And there’s this burst of love all around this movie. I guess the country was going through a recession and there were tough times. Audiences wanted an up/cry and E.T. gave it to them. Two weeks later, out comes my movie. And my movie is exactly just the opposite of E.T. It is not an up/cry. It is a downer. It is the grimmest thing you have ever seen. Here I thought I had made this really great movie, right? “

Arriving in theaters June 1982, the picture was reviled by critics. Vincent Canby, the New York Times: “John Carpenter’s The Thing is a foolish, depressing, overproduced movie that mixes horror with science fiction to make something that is fun as neither one thing or the other … There may be a metaphor in all this, but I doubt it.” Pauline Kael, the New Yorker: “In its own putting-the-squeeze-on-the-audience terms, Alien was effective. This picture isn’t (except for an early episode with a husky trying to escape the hunters shooting at it from a plane). It appears to be a film of limited imagination with unlimited horror effects.” Roger Ebert, the Chicago Sun Times: “The Thing is a great barf-bag movie, all right, but is it any good? I found it disappointing, for two reasons: the superficial characterizations and the implausible behavior of the scientists on that icy outpost.”

John Carpenter added, “But even during the preview stage I knew something was wrong because I had this sixteen year old ask me what happened at the end – which one of them was the Thing? I told her she had to use her imagination. She told me she hated that. So I realized I was in deep trouble with that film. And I was right. The industry turned against me because they thought I had gone too far with the gore. I think it probably changed my career. I had made a deal during the filming of The Thing to make another film for Universal called Firestarter, a Stephen King novel. A friend of mine, Bill Phillips, had written a great screenplay and we already were scouting locations. Universal was so upset and so shocked by the reviews and the fact that The Thing had not made the kind of money they expected. I lost the directing job on Firestarter, even though they had to pay me my salary. I was in shock. I didn’t work for eight or nine months. I didn’t have anything. I thought my career was going to end.”

Hit by the hostile reaction and the film’s dismal $13 million take at the box office in the U.S., Carpenter’s career never made a full recovery. Looking back 17 years later, the director recalled, “My reaction, I was pretty stunned by it at the time because I made a really grueling, dark film and I just don’t think audiences in 1982 wanted to see that. They wanted to see E.T. And The Thing was the opposite of that. The thing that disturbed me about it was that the fans turned out hating it so much. There was a famous magazine back then called Cinemafantastique which was loved and hated by various directors and they had a cover with a story that said ‘Is this the most hated film of all time?’ which didn’t do a lot to assuage my ego, but I’m very proud of the movie. I’ve always loved it.”

Joining Carpenter in 1995 to record an audio commentary for the film’s release on laserdisc, Kurt Russell remarked, “There are some movies that you do – I’ve done more I guess than my fair share of them – and I do think that, you know, maybe that I sort of have to look at that and realize something; that I have a tendency to like movies that perhaps aren’t going to be accepted at the time and – if they’re done well though – they will be accepted later on. And I think that with the advent of video, that’s a great, I’m very happy about that because ultimately you’re making movies for the enjoyment of as many people as possible. And I like that there’s video and that people can take it and make their judgment later on and perhaps without the politics of the time or without whatever’s in the air at the time to set a tone to get in the way of just the project and just the story itself.”

Should I Care?
With Conan the Barbarian and Poltergeist both selling popcorn the same month The Thing was unleashed in theaters, only someone with selective memory would suggest that gore or visceral intensity were somehow responsible for its box office failure. But just as The Thing From Another World would still be a terrific movie without the monster, you could cut the violence out of John Carpenter’s remake and still find – with its unremittingly stark chords and pulsating doomsday pace – one dark fucking movie audiences just weren’t in the mood for at the time. It refuses to trump good over evil, clarity over ambiguity, and that becomes what is most troubling about it, as well as special. Now regarded as a masterpiece by many of the fans who rejected this dose of strong medicine on its original release, The Thing remains a masterwork of technical acuity, pioneering makeup effects and most of all story, which probes what it means to be human, and whether or not you’d even realize you were an imitation if the Thing took you over.

The apocalyptic vision of The Thing has grabbed hold of me and as the years pass, refuses to let go. The gothic lighting by cinematographer Dean Cundey, rich production design by John Lloyd and the ominous musical score by Ennio Morricone are all just perfect. The fact that the makeup effects still hold up as some of the most amazing ever captured on camera is a testament to Rob Bottin; without his imagination, the movie would not be nearly as nightmarish as it turned out to be. As for John Carpenter, this represents the director at the peak of his creative energy. While his career may have taken a different turn had the movie gone over well, The Thing has inspired directors Robert Rodriguez, Frank Darabont, Neil Marshall and others with its unmistakable tenor of doom and relentlessness. It’s still schooling the horror moviemakers of today.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
The Thing – Collector’s Edition. Universal Home Video (1998)

The Directors: Take One. By Robert J. Emery. TV Books (1999)

What the *&#! Is This About?
In the town of “Castle Rock,” Maine, a powerful electrical storm sends a tree through the lakeside home of graphic designer David Drayton (Thomas Jane), his wife (Kelly Collins Lintz) and their nine-year-old son Billy (Nathan Gamble). Surveying the damage the next morning, David tells her, “It’s just stuff, you know. We’re safe, that’s all that matters.” His wife appears anxious about a strange mist drifting off the mountains and headed toward them across the lake. Father and son are more interested in a tree belonging to their obstinate attorney neighbor Norton (Andre Braugher) that has flattened the Drayton boathouse. The men put aside past differences when David offers Norton a ride into town for supplies. Taking Billy along, they pass an army convoy. The soldiers are stationed at a base in the mountains known to the locals only as “the Arrowhead Project”. The convoy appears to be in a hurry, prompting Norton to comment, “Maybe their power’s out too.”

At the Food House, David chats with a teenage clerk (Alexa Davalos), amiable assistant manager (Toby Jones), Castle Rock’s resident nutter Mrs. Carmody (Marcia Gay Harden), schoolteacher (Frances Sternhagen) and realtor (Susan Watkins). David also observes an MP abruptly cancel leave for three soldiers. Everything at the store comes to a dead halt when an air raid siren sounds. A monstrous mist overtakes the town on the heels of a panic stricken local (Jeffrey DeMunn) who makes it to the store covered in blood. Warning the others to shut the doors and not to go outside, a shopper decides to make a break for his car. Disappearing in the mist, the last that’s heard of him are his terrified screams. One theory voiced is that the mist may be a chemical explosion from the local mill. Mrs. Carmody believes this is the end of days. Norton tries to keep the crowd calm, while David is more focused on trying to calm his hysterical son.

Searching for a blanket in the storeroom, David hears something outside attempt to rip down the loading dock door. A mechanic (William Sadler) copes with the disaster by trying to get the store’s generator working, with a bag boy (Chris Owen) eager to go outside and clear whatever’s blocking the duct. When David is unable to convince them that this is a bad idea, the door is raised; tentacles slither inside, tear into Norm’s skin and drag him into the mist. When confronting Norton with this, the attorney’s logic prevents him from accepting it. He organizes a group to venture outside for help, but a rope one of them ties to their waist only makes it 300 feet before returning a torso. As Mrs. Carmody begins spreading her Old Testament gospel of a stern and vengeful god – slowly converting frightened followers – David, a third grade teacher (Laurie Holden) and a few others start worrying more about the monsters inside the store than the ones in the mist.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
The Mist began with a phone call Stephen King received in 1980 from his literary agent Kirby McCauley. King recalled, “Kirby McCauley was putting together an anthology called Dark Forces and he wanted all these original stories from people who wrote in the genre. I said, ‘You know, Kirby, I don’t think I can do that because I’m blocked, I’m not writing anything.’ And I hadn’t. I had just finished three books. There was Carrie, ‘Salem’s Lot, Night Shift, and I was kind of stuck, really. I happened to be in the local market one time and a lot of people were shopping. I looked at the front windows and thought, if something bad happened, those windows would all blow in — because that’s the way I think. It’s not necessarily a good thing, but it’s been a profitable thing over the years.” The resulting story – The Mist – unblocked the author and a slightly re-edited version appeared in King’s 1985 short story collection Skeleton Crew. At 155 pages, it qualified as a novella.

A couple of years later, Frank Darabont was getting his feet wet as a screenwriter. He recalled, “Nightmare on Elm Street 3 was my very first credit as a writer and there was The Blob remake and there was The Fly II. I remember sitting on the set of Nightmare on Elm Street 3 one night and thinking I’d love to have something in my pocket that I could nurse along and try to get made as a director.” Darabont had taken advantage of Stephen King’s “Dollar Babies” initiative, in which the author makes available to student filmmakers the movie rights to select King short stories for the fee of only $1. In 1983, Darabont directed a short based on The Woman In the Room. Searching for a feature length project, it came down to either The Mist or Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption. In choosing the latter, the emotionally resonant 1994 prison drama starring Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman earned seven Academy Award nominations and set Darabont on the path to prestige.

Darabont’s company Darkwoods Productions entered into a first-look development deal with Paramount Pictures, which was where the filmmaker brought The Mist in 2004 when he was ready to return to his horror roots. Darabont recalled, “What always appealed to me about it was, okay, here’s this story about monsters, very basically, on the surface of it. Underneath, Steve King was telling a completely different story. He was telling a story about the fragility of human behavior under pressure. What he was saying was that civilization has a very thin veneer and it can crumble very quickly, especially when you apply fear. And people turn against one another when subjected to stress and fear. It winds up being great sociological context for how we are as a species, how screwed up we are, how fearful we are.” Paramount agreed to put up $30 million to produce The Mist, provided Darabont reconsider the ending he’d written, which was … downbeat, to say the least.

Darabont concluded, “Obviously not a studio movie. That’s the ultimate horror for a studio, is a horror movie that might actually horrify people. You give ‘em something that might upset the audience they run screaming in the other direction.” He added, “Through this whole set of circumstances I wound up with Bob Weinstein at Dimension. He was the only guy who said, who had the balls to say, ‘Yeah, I love this ending, I love this movie, let’s make it.’ With the understanding of course that it had to be done very quickly and very inexpensively. Let me put it this way: A lot of great horror movies that I love, that I grew up watching have a tradition of being done under extreme duress of time and on very, very low budgets. And I thought, okay, if we’re really going to embrace what I love – horror movies – let’s embrace that tradition as well. Let’s embrace the tradition of shoot it as fast as you can, shoot it as cheaply as you can.”

In October 2006, it was announced that Dimension Films would bankroll The Mist, with a spring 2007 start date. The budget was roughly $17 million. Casting the lead, Darabont’s first choice was Thomas Jane. “I had met him a few times and he read for The Green Mile I always remembered his work. I’ve seen roles that he’s done, smallish roles in other movies. He’s one of those guys that I just knew had way more depth that he’s generally been elicited to show in other roles that he’s done. So I called him and I said, ‘I got this script and I’d love for you to play the lead. Let’s read it and let’s discuss it.’ And our very first conversation once he’d read it was, ‘Tom I think you have more depth than something like Deep Blue Sea allowed you to show. What I don’t want is a square-jawed action hero here. What I want is a really flawed, well intentioned guy who loves his son and it’s a movie about a guy trying to protect his little boy. As far as you’re concerned that’s what the whole movie is about. Are you ready to take that leap?’ And indeed it was something he had been hungry to do.”

The rest of the cast quickly fell into place. Darabont recalled, “Jeff DeMunn and Bill Sadler, both of them were those roles, and Laurie Holden, she was also always in my head for the role of Amanda. Others you have to think about a little bit, and there’s where you really have to depend on a great casting director, is, okay, who’s going to play Mrs. Carmody? Who’s going to play Billy? Where do we find a nine-year-old boy who’s got that kind of ability? Deb Aquilla and her associates, they found Nathan Gamble and she brought him to my attention and we hired him immediately. It was Deb’s inspiration to cast Toby Jones as Ollie, which I couldn’t be more delighted with. Toby’s a brilliant guy and gave us a fantastic performance, but he’s not the obvious actor. I’m also the very grateful beneficiary of a lot of good will, so I get to work with people like Andre Braugher and Marcia Gay Harden who wouldn’t necessarily be lookin’ for a horror movie to do, but suddenly, bam, they’re there.”

Darabont added, “We prepped the movie in six weeks, folks. I’ve never prepped a movie in less than five months, but this was part of the spirit of this movie: Get in, do it, don’t over think it, don’t second guess, do it fast, do it loose, and that’s pretty much the way it went.” Darabont signed up for a crash course in guerilla style filmmaking by directing an episode of the FX cop drama The Shield in late 2006. The experience proved so invigorating, Darabont tapped the show’s cinematographer – Rohn Schmidt – and camera operators Bill Gierhart and Richard Cantu to shoot The Mist. Filming commenced February 2007, mostly on a soundstage at StageWorks of Louisiana in downtown Shreveport. Nearby Cross Lake doubled for lakeside Maine, while the exteriors of the Food House were shot in the Louisiana town of Vivian.

Opening November 2007 in the U.S., even critics who admired The Mist seemed to object to it, in part. Anthony Lane, the New Yorker: “The Mist is itself a supermarket of B-movie essentials, handsomely stocked with bad science, stupid behavior, chewable lines of dialogue, religious fruitcakes, and a fine display of monsters.” Marjorie Baumgarten, the Austin Chronicle: “The Mist has extended passages that pause to preach, to demonstrate the dark impulses of irrationality, magical thinking, and mob mentality. Sadly, these interludes only take away from the magnificent moments in which the stunningly crafted beasties in the mist … come out to prey.” Justin Chang, Variety: “Much nastier and less genteel than his best-known Stephen King adaptations (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile), Frank Darabont’s screw-loose doomsday thriller works better as a gross-out B-movie than as a psychological portrait of mankind under siege, marred by one-note characterizations and a tone that veers wildly between snarky and hysterical.”

In April 2008, Eugene Novikov – who ranked The Mist among the best films of 2007 – opened the floor on website Cinematical to a discussion of what viewers thought about that ending. John: “In regards to the ending: it’s one of the better twist endings I’ve seen in a while. Nowadays, I feel like twists or reveals have become cheapened by how frequent they have become in movies, and most of them just happen to trick the audience. But with The Mist, the twist ending was surprising AND thought-provoking.” Gary Triestman: “Balderdash and hogwash! I saw The Mist yesterday, and am utterly pissed at the ending. Pissed not such because it was bleak and useless, it was, but because it absolutely did NOT fit into the personalities, drives or character motivations of the people who allegedly assented to being sacrificed.” Okie: “I thought the ending was perfect. Its what made me recommend this movie to so many people. Most don’t like the ending because they don’t think they could ever do that to their child. But the alternative was definitely worse.”

The Mist would gross $25.5 million in the U.S. and $31.5 million overseas, then quickly dissipate from theaters. Even a two-disc DVD – which supplemented the theatrical version of the film with a black & white version closer to Frank Darabont’s retro vision of the material – did little to spark a reevaluation of the film. Less than enthralled with many of the flicks based on his work, Stephen King mused, “This movie has echoes of political and religious situations that we find ourselves in now, it raises a lot of interesting topics that have been debated in the press and current events over the last couple of years and all of those things obviously played a part when Frank got around to writing the screenplay and directing the movie, casting the movie – which is part of direction – but they’re not for me to say, other than to say he and I share some political convictions. As to what they are, the viewer who comes to the movie with an open mind and a clear eye will see that for themselves.”

Should I Care?
The Mist tries to be a provocative movie, one I was supposed to love or hate with a passion and occupy no middle ground on. While that’s true of he ending, as time passes, the film has actually inched into a twilight zone for me; not the failure I originally thought it was, but ultimately, not up to snuff with the nihilistic freakshows that inspired it, like Night of the Living Dead or John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing. But for all its flaws – and there are a gaggle here – it’s not easy to put The Mist out of your mind. For one thing, instead of the usual bag of bogeymen, Stephen King’s source material unleashes an ecosystem of hideous animals – equipped with tentacles, stingers, beaks, acid webs or giant pincers – that disturb on some primal level. Along with The Shining, this may be most terrifying story King has ever concocted.

Frank Darabont was inspired to adapt this material with the same thrift store economy Alfred Hitchcock brought to Psycho, but the results here are more amateurish than masterful. The abbreviated schedule not only handicaps the extensive makeup and digital effects, but turns what might have been an atmospheric and profoundly disturbing story about mass hysteria into a blunt, condescending and at times silly moral sermon. The Mist is short on B-movie nastiness and long on message. Ugh. Superbly cast in spite of the script’s high handedness – with local actors Robert Treveiler. Melissa Suzanne McBride and Kelly Collins Lintz doing outstanding work – the story might have been better realized with a more elegant, less in-your-face approach. The controversial ending is a failure simply because Darabont rushes headlong into a Big Message at the expense of credibility. The results are similar to trying on a bomb vest and plunging the detonator to see what happens.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
“An Exclusive Interview with Mr. Frank Darabont!” By Edward Douglas. Shock Till You Drop, 16 November 2007

“Stephen King and Frank Darabont Step Out of The Mist” By Brad Balfour. Pop Entertaiment.com, 23 November 2007

“When Darkness Came: The Making of The Mist” The Mist (Two-Disc Collector’s Edition). Genius Products (2008)

What the *&#! Is This About?
In the town of “Signal,” Wyoming in 1963, two ranch hands arrive and are put to work by a rancher (Randy Quaid) whose sheep need to pasture on “Brokeback Mountain.” The camp tender, Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) doesn’t say much to his new partner at first, only that he used to come from ranch people. The herder, Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) is the son of a rodeo rider. As time passes, the two men grow more comfortable with each other. Jack confides that his father was actually a well-known bull rider, but he kept his expertise to himself and never came to see Jack ride. Ennis reveals that his parents died and after a year of high school, he struck out on his own. When Jack complains about having to sleep up on the mountain with the sheep, Ennis offers to switch jobs with him.

Drunk and bunking down at the campsite, Ennis takes shelter with Jack in the tent to get out of the freezing cold. During the middle of the night, Jack initiates what escalates into an intense bout of sex between the men. “This is a one shot thing we got goin’ on here,” Ennis tells Jack the next day, adding “You know I ain’t queer.” Jack responds, “Me neither.” As the summer draws on, the experience turns out to be anything but a one shot deal, but when the job is over, Ennis forces himself to part ways with Jack. He marries his fiancée Alma (Michelle Williams) and starts a family. Jack drifts back into rodeo, where he catches the eye of Lureen (Anne Hathaway), a hotshot circuit rider whose father owns an equipment company.

Ennis receives a postcard from Jack, who drops by on his way through Riverton. Alma catches her husband greeting his old friend intimately, but keeps this to herself for the time being. Taking off on what become annual fishing trips to Brokeback Mountain, Jack fails to convince Ennis to go in with him on a ranch somewhere where they can live together. Ennis shares a childhood memory of “two old guys ranched up together” and what ended up happening to one of them. Even after Alma divorces him, Ennis keeps his feelings for Jack private. When Jack asks for how long they have to go on like this, Ennis replies, “As long as we can ride it. There ain’t no reins on this one.”

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
Following the publication of her third novel Accordion Crimes in 1991, Annie Proulx found herself drawn to writing about life in small town America, specifically Wyoming, where the author had moved in 1994 after living in Vermont for thirty years. Proulx recalled, “I am interested in landscape, folkways and rural problems. There is an endless conflict of values, lifestyles, the way people make their livings and social networks. I find the lives of country people far more interesting than the lives of city folk who are less connected to landscape and the natural world.” In 1997, Proulx started writing a short story she doubted would ever be printed; it concerned two young ranch hands in 1960s Wyoming whose sexual and emotional relationship spans twenty years. Published in the October issue of The New Yorker, Brokeback Mountain would ultimately be named an O. Henry Prize Story and win a National Magazine Award.

A couple of years prior, Larry McMurtry – the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Lonesome Dove – was recuperating from heart surgery in the home of a friend named Diana Ossana. McMurtry wrote his 1993 novel Streets of Laredo on Ossana’s kitchen counter, which she keyed into her computer and edited. McMurtry had received offers from Steven Spielberg, John McTiernan and others to write various screenplays and had rejected them all, but when Warner Bros. contacted the author about scripting a movie about gangster Pretty Boy Floyd, Ossana jumped into action. She recalled, “I went out and did a bunch of research on it. I had ten legal-sized pages of interesting facts about Pretty Boy, and sat down with him and said, ‘These are all the reasons that you ought to write this script.’ He was kind of amused by that, and by the time I was done reading him that list, he said, ‘Ok, I’d like to write the screenplay, but will you write it with me?’”

By October 1997, McMurtry & Ossana had written a script for Pretty Boy Floyd as well as two teleplays based on McMurtry’s work: Streets of Laredo and Dead Man’s Walk. The duo was back in Texas, where a friend gave Ossana a copy of that month’s issue of the New Yorker, which featured Brokeback Mountain. Ossana recalled, “Two-thirds of the way through reading the story, I began to sob, and I sobbed all the way to the end. I was floored.” Ossana took the magazine to McMurtry, who recalled, “I don’t read fiction much anymore, so I was reluctant. But in her tenacious way, she asked that I humor her and read it. After I was finished reading it, the first thing I thought was that I wished I had written it. It was a story that had been sitting there for years, waiting to be told, and Annie finally wrote it. It is one of the finest short stories I’ve read. The place, the landscape, the men and the way they speak are drawn precisely and convincingly.”

Diana Ossana recalled, “He read it and said it was the best short story ever published in the New Yorker. ‘Well, do you think it would make a screenplay,’ I asked. And he replied, ‘I think it might.’ And I said, ‘Why don’t we write Annie a letter?’ And he said, ‘Okay.’” Within a week, Proulx had optioned her short story to the writing tandem. Paying her out of their own pockets, McMurtry & Ossana started writing and three months later, finished a screenplay. Producer Scott Rudin would option the script and ultimately brought Gus Van Sant on board to direct. Despite interest from Joaquin Phoenix to play Jack Twist, McMurtry believed that actors were getting cold feet. “They’d say it was the best thing they’d ever read, and then they’d waver and anguish. Their agents were afraid and steered them away from it.” Unable to lock a cast, Gus Van Sant had to pass on directing Brokeback Mountain.

In 2001, producer James Schamus took out an option on Brokeback Mountain. Schamus presented it to his longtime collaborator, director Ang Lee, who read the short story, felt the screenplay was a great adaptation, but opted to direct The Hulk instead. Schamus had no luck getting a studio to take a chance on the material. He took a job developing films for Universal’s specialty unit Focus Features, where it dawned on him that now, he had the cache to greenlight Brokeback Mountain himself. By this time, Ang had finished The Hulk. The director recalled, “Two years later, I asked James, ‘What happened with Brokeback Mountain? Did it get made yet?’ He said, ‘We haven’t been able to make that movie.’ Lucky for me. I said, ‘You know, it’s stuck with me over the years. I can’t get it out of my mind.’” Ang continued, “James got the rights, and I started thinking about making the movie right away. Before I knew I could physically do it, I jumped on. I just knew, in the bottom of my heart, if I let it go, I would regret it for the rest of my life.”

With Ang Lee behind the camera, a cast for Brokeback Mountain quickly fell into place. Jake Gyllenhaal had met Gus Van Sant about taking on the role of Jack when he was only 16. The actor recalled, “I was immediately drawn to Brokeback Mountain because love stories haven’t been told this way in a long time. Movies I’ve seen in recent years have avoided the struggles and the trials that it takes to actually be in love and keep that going. When I heard that Ang Lee was going to make it, I thought, ‘I have to do this movie.’” Heath Ledger committed to the project without meeting or even speaking to the director. “I trusted that story in Ang’s hands. I loved the script because it was mature and strong, and such a pure and beautiful love story. I hadn’t done a proper love story, and I find there’s not a lot of mystery left in stories between guys and girls. It’s all been done or seen before.”

Diana Ossana elaborated on the writing process. “Adapting Annie’s story was extremely easy and yet extremely difficult. It was easy in the sense that we had the blueprint right there with her writing – of the story itself, of the characters, of the specific way they speak, of the specific place they were from, and the landscape that formed them. The difficult part was to stay true to all that while turning this into a feature-length film. First we scripted the entire short story, and then we imagined and proceeded to flesh out the female characters so they would have depth and a presence on-screen. We also continued to build upon the stories of Ennis and Jack, many times creating an entire scene based upon a single sentence in the story.” On the strength of the screenplay, Michelle Williams, Anne Hathaway, Linda Cardellini and Anna Faris all joined the cast in supporting roles.

Shooting commenced May 2004 in Alberta, Canada on a budget of $12 million, Ang’s least expensive since making Eat Drink Man Woman in Taiwan. Impressed with his work for Alejandro González Iñárritu, Ang hired cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto. Production designer Judy Becker was also hired. She recalled, “Ang and I, and Rodrigo, talked about how the towns would be a strong contrast to the mountains – colorless and cluttered. We didn’t have the resources to build a huge amount of the sets. The biggest challenge was finding the right locations.” She added, “I looked at imagery of small towns. One thing that struck me, which Ang and I discussed early on, was that although the movie takes place mostly in the 1960s and 1970s, the towns still looked like they could be in earlier decades. We went to Wyoming and Texas to do some research and, even now, so much detail and architecture is left over from pre-World War II. Change happened very, very slowly in small towns in the West.”

Following screenings at the Venice, Telluride and Toronto film festivals, talk in Hollywood was whether paying audiences would have any desire to see a movie about the love between two men. Diana Ossana recalled, “As human beings we tend to put labels on everything as a way to sort of categorize and feel safe about something. ‘That script is about gay cowboys, well, I’m not going to give that thing the time of day. I’m not going to waste my time on it.’ It’s a way to reduce it to something very simple, when it’s something that isn’t simple at all. At one point I remember somebody saying to me, ‘You know, Diana, this movie would get made a heck of a lot faster if it were about a man and a woman.’ That wouldn’t make any sense. You wouldn’t make that movie.”

Opening December 2005 in the U.S., critics greeted Brokeback Mountain with near universal acclaim. Anthony Lane, the New Yorker: “This slow and stoic movie, hailed as a gay Western, feels neither gay nor especially Western: it is a study of love under siege.” David Ansen, Newsweek: “There’s neither coyness nor self-importance in Brokeback Mountain – just close, compassionate observation, deeply committed performances, a bone-deep feeling for hardscrabble Western lives. Few films have captured so acutely the desolation of frustrated, repressed passion.” Marjorie Baumgarten, the Austin Chronicle: “It’s possible to point to some weak spots in Brokeback – its seeming multiple endings, the lack of clarity about certain images, some digressions – but there is no movie this year that has moved my heart more than Brokeback Mountain.”

Not every community in the world was ready to embrace Brokeback Mountain. The Chinese government refused to add it to a list of foreign films deemed suitable to be shown in mainland theaters. Despite the fact that the city’s two major newspapers carried ads, the late owner of the NBA’s Utah Jazz franchise – Larry Miller – withdrew Brokeback Mountain from exhibition in the Salt Lake City suburb where he owned an entertainment complex. Many conservative Christian groups in the U.S. – anticipating noisy protests would only help promote the film, as they had in 1988 with The Last Temptation of Christ – stayed quiet, predicting that rural audiences would likely reject the subject matter anyway. Strongly favorable word of mouth and eight Academy Award nominations instead had the opposite effect. Brokeback Mountain was propelled to box office receipts of $83 million in the U.S. and $95 million overseas.

The month of its release, Annie Proulx was asked whether straight men would watch Brokeback Mountain. The author replied, “They are watching this movie. Of course, why wouldn’t they watch it? Straight men fall in love. Not necessarily with each other or with a gay man. My son-in-law, who prides himself on being a Bud-drinking, NRA-member redneck, liked the movie so much, he went to it twice. Straight men are seeing it, and they’re not having any problem with it. The only people who would have problems with it are people who are very insecure about themselves and their own sexuality and who would be putting up a defense, and that’s usually young men who haven’t figured things out yet. Jack and Ennis would probably have trouble with this movie.” She added, “It is a love story. It has been called both universal and specific, and I think that’s true. It’s an old, old story. We’ve heard this story a million times; we just haven’t heard it quite with this cast.”

Should I Care?
Ang Lee, Larry McMurtry & Diana Ossana and composer Gustavo Santaolalla all won Oscars, while – in yet another awards show “moment” – the racial melodrama Crash was voted Best Picture, but one of the more lasting impressions made by Brokeback Mountain is that instead of angling for awards or trying to send a message, the film reveals genuine empathy for its characters and their experiences, portraying both realistically without Hollywood glamour or spin. It’s not a film that casts judgments its characters, in spite how the politics of the time may or may not have judged the movie, developing a timeless quality by depicting its setting with honesty, and its emotional range with complexity. In the process, it cuts deep through just about every demographic to leave its mark as a great love story.

With Annie Proulx’s short story running 11 pages, Brokeback Mountain doesn’t cover a whole lot of ground, but the power of what’s on film is hard to ignore. The opening scenes convey the beauty and solitude of the country as memorably as any of Larry McMurtry’s movie adaptations, particularly Hud. Material is rarely matched so perfectly to the sensibility and skills of a particular director as this story is for Ang Lee. The combination of writing and directing obviously attracted one of the finest casts assembled in recent memory. Each time I watch the movie, I come away thinking another actor gave the best performance: Michelle Williams, Jake Gyllenhaal, Linda Cardellini, Anne Hathaway. There’s nothing more to say about Heath Ledger except that his work as Ennis Del Mar passes into legend.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
“Ang Lee’s Brokeback Explores ‘Last Frontier’” By Anne Thompson. The Hollywood Reporter, 11 November 2005

“Annie Proulx discusses the origins of Brokeback Mountain” By Sandy Cohen. Associated Press, 18 December 2005

“New Cultural Approach for Conservative Christians; Reviews, Not Protests” By John Leland. The New York Times, 26 December 2005

“Annie Proulx Interview” By Deepanjana Pal. Time Out Dubai, 23 March 2009

Brokeback Mountain – Production Notes. Focus Features

Brokeback Mountain – 2-Disc Collector’s Edition. Universal Studios Home Video (2006)

Synopsis
“So where are you? You’re in some motel room. You just, you just wake up and you’re in a motel room,” narrates Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) as he tries to figure out what he’s doing in the motel. Lenny meets Teddy (Joe Pantoliano) and is able to remember that this is a friend of his by referencing one of several Polaroids he carries, with notes scribbled on the back. The notes on Teddy’s photo read, “Don’t believe his lies. He is the one. Kill him.” Lenny asks Teddy to beg his wife’s forgiveness before he shoots him.

As the story moves backwards one scene at a time, Lenny reveals that he knows who he is, but after an accident, is unable to form new memories. In addition to the Polaroids and notes he uses to cue his recall, Lenny has covered his body in tattoos, such as, “Find him and kill him.” Using these clues and a DMV record that’s been given to him by someone named Natalie, Lenny concludes that Teddy is the man he’s been searching for, the man who raped and murdered his wife.

Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss) – whose Polaroid reads, “She has also lost someone. She will help you out of pity” – meets Lenny at a diner to give him information he apparently asked her for. Natalie seems to have feelings for Lenny and wants to help him get his revenge, but as far as Lenny’s concerned, he just met her. Teddy tries to warn his friend against killing a man based on his little notes and pictures because they may be unreliable. Lenny disagrees. “Facts, not memories. That’s how you investigate.”

Lenny used to be an insurance investigator. He recalls the case of Sammy Jankis (Stephen Tobolowsky), a retired accountant who after an accident, appears to lose the ability to form new memories. When junkies kill Lenny’s wife (Jorja Fox), he succumbs to the same condition. Lenny is convinced that the police got it wrong and that the true killer is the mysterious “John G.” Natalie wants to help him find this man, but Lenny fears someone may be trying to take advantage of his condition to make him kill the wrong person.

Production history
Jonathan Nolan was attending Georgetown University in 1996 when a General Psych course introduced him to a condition known as “anterograde memory loss.” His professor explained that this prevented patients from forming new memories. An aspiring writer, “Jonah” dropped out of school and spent a year traveling and reading Melville. Returning to Chicago a year later, he wanted to write a story about memory. ”I was drawn to it as a metaphor. A demonstration of how fleeting identity really is.”

Jonah was helping his older brother Christopher Nolan move from Chicago to Los Angeles. During the road trip, Jonah told him about his idea. Christopher Nolan had just finished Following, a no-budget, 69-minute mystery he’d made in England that marked his feature film debut as a writer/director. He became excited about his brother’s story idea and asked if he could write a screenplay.

In the short story Memento Mori – ultimately published in Esquire Magazine in March 2001 – a man named Earl whose short term memory is wiped clean every fifteen minutes escapes from an institution, following clues to the man he believes murdered his wife. In the screenplay Memento, the protagonist is named Leonard Shelby. He suffers from the same condition, using scraps of paper, Polaroids and tattoos to find his wife’s killer. The major departure Christopher Nolan took from his brother’s short story was to tell it in reverse.

Aaron Ryder read an early draft of the script while working with Christopher Nolan’s wife, producer Emma Thomas. Ryder optioned the script through a film financing company he worked for called Newmarket and helped Nolan develop it. After a rewrite, Newmarket brought in producers Suzanne and Jennifer Todd to produce Memento and committed to a budget of $5 million. The script then went out to actors.

Guy Pearce claims he literally begged to play Lenny. “My agent sent me the script and wrote on the bottom, ‘You’re going to love it.’ And I called him after I read it and said, ‘Well, that was an understatement, wasn’t it?’” Carrie-Anne Moss joined the cast next, and recommended Joe Pantoliano for the third lead. Memento went before the cameras in August 1999 for 26 days of shooting around Los Angeles. But when Newmarket screened the finished film to studios and distributors, not one of them made a respectable offer. According to Ryder, “People thought it was too difficult, too obscure and had no commercial potential.”

Newmarket wanted to transition from a finance company to one that produced and marketed its own films, and chose Memento to be their first release, submitting it to the Venice, Toronto and Sundance Film Festivals. Riding a wave of favorable reviews – “If nothing else, Memento is a savvy comment on the queasy uncertainties of the postmodern condition, in which history goes no further back than yesterday’s news, and knowledge is supplanted by ‘information’ from a tumult of spin-controlled, unreliable narrators,” wrote Ella Taylor in L.A. Weekly – and enthusiastic word of mouth, the film took in $25 million at the box office in the U.S.

Opinion
Memento occupies select real estate in the seedy neighborhood of the film noir mystery because the story unravels with the precision of a narrative engineered by Mensa. That said, you don’t have to be a genius or even watch the film more than once to be enthralled by it. The Nolans employ all sorts of ruses, dodges and slights of hand here, but the biggest surprise may be how well the film holds up under scrutiny. It’s just as exciting now as it was when it was released, and remains one of the most compelling movie mysteries of all time.

While there’s a vague familiarity to this tale of an insurance man and a dangerous dame, the Nolans are less interested in repeating genre conventions than they are in shattering them. Assembling a movie in reverse might have been disastrous, but the con works beautifully. Part of the fun is how Guy Pearce, Carrie-Anne Moss and Joe Pantoliano play variations on their characters, changing who they are depending where we are in Lenny’s recollection. Editor Dody Dorn cut this together seamlessly, while Christopher Nolan deserves props for stretching a small budget to look twice what it was.

Curt Holman at Creating Loafing writes, “Though it’s not the easiest of films to follow, Nolan crafts his narrative with such care that the audience soon falls into its rhythm. At the end Nolan seems to bend his own well-established rules, and the finale may make your head spin — counterclockwise, of course. But it’s in the service of a deeper meaning, allowing Memento to conclude on an unnerving note about obsession, vengeance and grief that gives it thematic staying power beyond its gimmick.”

“Memento is a clever thriller, which is rare in these times. It consistently entertains with a sense of humor and an artful spirit. So what if the final conceit doesn’t fit within the logic of the initial conceit? Unfortunately, those praising the film for more than twists and thrills need to try harder to recall their college philosophy readings … Affixing great intellectual import to this film turns a great body of philosophical work into a giant souvenir sombrero,” writes Jon Kern at Jiminy Critic.

Christopher Null at Filmcritic.com writes, “It’s deeper than you can make a gimmick like this sound – and to be honest, it is just a gimmick – but it’s a gimmick that works. The movie, written and directed by Christopher Nolan (and based on his brother’s short story) is vibrant and harrowing, unpredictable despite an ending long since given away. Unfathomably, the film gets progressively better as it goes along, and I found myself inching closer and closer to the edge of my seat throughout the movie.”

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
“I got out of the institution the day of my sister’s wedding,” narrates Lee Holloway (Maggie Gyllenhaal). The socially repressed Lee has an alcoholic for a dad (Stephen McHattie) and a mom (Lesley Ann Warren) who puts a happy face on everything. Lee returns to old habits, inflicting cuts on herself with the instruments she keeps locked in a child’s jewelry box. Never having worked a day in her life, Lee completes a typing class and interviews for a secretarial position with tax attorney E. Edward Grey (James Spader).

Lee’s messy wardrobe, sniffling, and constant playing with her hair unnerves the fussy Mr. Grey, but her submissiveness excites him, as when she happily climbs into a dumpster to look for a file. Lee gives a normal relationship a try with a quirky high school classmate (Jeremy Davies), but she’s more turned on by her withdrawn boss, his red pens and admonishments when she commits a typo on the IBM typewriter. Mr. Grey later confronts Lee about her jewelry box and tells her that she’ll never cut herself again. She obeys, and discovers a world of spankings and obedience opening her life up.

Production history
Steven Shainberg had graduated from Yale University and moved to Los Angeles, where he toiled on commercials and music videos before being accepted into the American Film Institute. A friend told Shainberg about a book he thought the aspiring filmmaker would love. It was a short story collection by Mary Gaitskill called Bad Behavior. One of the stories – Secretary – dealt with a homely young woman taken advantage of by her boss, a lawyer who punishes typos by spanking her. Shainberg loved it and over five days, shot a 22-minute short based on the story on videotape.

Several studio executives in Hollywood who saw the short expressed interest in Shainberg adapting it to feature length, but the director wasn’t interested in “curing” the title character of her sadomasochism. Shainberg recalls, “I would say, ‘No, you don’t understand. It’s not a problem. In fact, it’s something joyful and beautiful that happens to her.’ That point of view made it impossible to get anyone to develop the feature.” Shainberg instead made his feature film debut in 1998 with Hit Me, a poorly received adaptation of Jim Thompson’s novel A Swell Looking Babe featuring Elias Koteas and William H. Macy.

Shainberg moved back to New York and was looking to collaborate with his friend, playwright, novelist and professor of dramatic writing at Duke University Erin Cressida Wilson. Nothing clicked, until Shainberg decided to take another look at Secretary. Using Jane Campion’s film Sweetie as an inspiration, Shainberg & Wilson spent a year adapting a screenplay. Instead of adhering to Gaitskill’s text – which portrayed sadomasochism as dark and damaging – the script proposed that the experience could be liberating.

Raising $2 million from Slough Pond – which had financed Hit Me – Shainberg found producers who liked the material as much as he did; Andrew Fierberg and Amy Hobby at double A Films came on board in return for profit participation. Casting Secretary was another story. All the A-list actresses Shainberg approached turned the project down. Exploring other ideas, Shainberg considered the virtually unknown Maggie Gyllenhaal. Exhibiting “tenderness, honesty, a sense of humor, and an odd physicality that could lead to something beautiful,” that the director liked, Gyllenhaal loved the script and agreed to play Lee.

Screened at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2002, Secretary won over festival audiences and went on to receive a Special Jury Prize for Originality. The film’s sexual content and doubts about its marketability kept distributors away, but three weeks later, Lions Gate offered $1 million to distribute the film in North America. Released in September, Secretary notched rave reviews in the New York Times, the L.A. Times, Entertainment Weekly and Rolling Stone, but the film was never expanded beyond 150 screens. Those who found it quickly elevated the quirky romance to cult status.

Opinion
The Sundance jury who awarded it a prize for “originality” sums up the appeal of Secretary, a wonderfully offbeat romance that succeeds as a situation comedy, a family drama and even somewhat of a camp classic, retaining the best facets of each genre while jettisoning the clichés. Shainberg has stated that the film that made him aspire to be a filmmaker was Blue Velvet, and in some respects, this movie could be viewed as if David Lynch decided to try a romantic comedy, or his version of Pretty Woman.

In addition to the superb casting of Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader – who bring uniqueness, excitement and a geeky hilarity to the film every moment they’re on screen – the script is wickedly funny without turning its characters into jokes. The joy Lee experiences when Mr. Grey calls to instruct her what portions of dinner she’s allowed (”A slice of butter, four peas, and as much ice cream as you’d like to eat”) – as well as what Lee means to him – feels real. Lynch’s frequent composer – Angelo Badalamenti- provides the sensual jazz infused musical score.

TC Candler at Independent Critics writes, “A sexy romantic comedy that avoids all the clichéd pitfalls that are so prevalent in the genre and delivers a touching and honest love story that is, to this point, unique in the history of cinema … If you cross American Beauty with Office Space and mix in a dash of sado-masochistic romance… you have Secretary.”

“What’s best about this film is that it never panders to its audience, yet it nevertheless makes an effective case for a lifestyle which many viewers will be encountering for the first time … The focus is not really sexual, nor even sadomasochistic, but is more about the blossoming of personalities through the exploration of dominant and submissive feelings. Passionate and intelligent, this is a delightful small film deserving of a wider audience,” writes Jennie Kermode at Eye For Film.

Brian Webster at Apollo Movie Guide writes, “Provocative, funny and one of the more offbeat love stories you’re ever going to see, Secretary is an unusual little gem of a film that does what art is supposed to do – provoke us to look a bit more closely at what we might initially judge without thought. It’s a solid effort that will certainly have me looking closely at Shainberg’s next film.”

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
Leaving Los Angeles and driving through the desert for a business appointment, David Mann (Dennis Weaver) gets stuck behind a 1955 Peterbilt dripping with grease and billowing diesel fumes. Mann’s road etiquette appears to offend the unseen trucker, who gains speed and cuts back in front of Mann before slowing to a crawl. Mann passes him again, but when he stops at a filling station, the truck pulls next to him. All Mann sees of its driver is a pair of boots.

The trucker goes from road hog to road rage, signaling Mann to pass and almost getting him hit by oncoming traffic. The trucker then runs Mann into a fence outside a diner before disappearing. Mann pulls his thoughts together in the men’s room, but when he comes out, discovers the truck parked outside, waiting for him. Attempting to identify his assailant among the diner’s customers proves unsuccessful. Climbing back into his Plymouth Valiant, Mann realizes the trucker wants to take him off the road permanently.

Production history
Novelist and screenwriter Richard Matheson was golfing when he first heard that President Kennedy had been shot. Distraught by the news, Matheson and a friend headed home. Driving through a narrow pass near Simi Valley, a huge truck began tailgating them. They sped up, but so did the truck, and the day’s events only made them more anxious as they pulled off the road and the truck blew past. Matheson felt he had a story and scribbled the idea on the back of an envelope his friend had in the car.

Matheson presented the idea of a man being chased by a truck to the producers of several TV series, including The Fugitive. None of them felt there was enough of a story there. Seven years later, Matheson wrote Duel as a novelette, which was published in the April 1971 issue of Playboy Magazine. Universal Pictures obtained the film rights. This came to the attention of assistant Nona Tyson, whose boss was Steven Spielberg, a 25-year-old director looking to move from episodic television to feature films.

Spielberg read the novelette and felt it was a Hitchcock movie, “It’s like Psycho or Birds on wheels!” Tyson found out that producer George Eckstein controlled the property. Spielberg met with him and shared Eckstein’s enthusiasm for the story, as well as his idea to keep the point of view with the driver as much as possible. Spielberg showed Eckstein an episode of Columbo he’d just directed. Three days later, the producer made Spielberg an offer to direct Duel.

Eckstein had set up the project with ABC as a Movie of the Week. Spielberg was given 10 days to shoot a 73-minute film. His production manager Wally Worsley told the young director there was no way he could make a movie of this scale in that time frame on location. He advised Spielberg to shoot it on a soundstage. When Spielberg persisted in going on location, he was allowed to shoot the process plates of the road and continue making the film on location if he could stay on schedule.

Working on a fifteen mile stretch of Highway 14 north of Los Angeles in Palmdale – with Dennis Weaver in the lead and stuntmen Dale Van Sickle and Cary Loftin driving the car and truck – Spielberg wrapped only three days over schedule. Quickly edited in order to make its airdate in three and a half weeks, Duel drew a huge market share in November 1971. Spielberg shot some additional scenes (such as the truck pushing Weaver toward a train) and expanded to 90 minutes, his debut feature was released theatrically in Europe.

Opinion
Given what Steven Spielberg went on to accomplish as the most successful film director of all time, it’s easy to overlook his first feature as a TV Movie of the Week or a work in progress and little more. But Duel holds up supremely well as both a taut and riveting entertainment, and as the ideal blend of terrific material being adapted by a hungry filmmaker. Though it aired almost 40 years ago, there wasn’t a moment in the movie where I lost interest in what was happening on screen.

Technology is making great thrillers more and more rare. All a character has to do when placed in jeopardy now is pull out a cell phone. Duel is old school all the way, stripped down in narrative, with only a businessman, two vehicles and some dimes for the phone booth to develop its conflict. Spielberg’s decision not to reveal the trucker demonstrates what an ardent student of Hitchcock he was, while Billy Goldenberg’s musical score – shunning melody in favor of disorienting sounds – also punctuates dread on the road.

Dennis Prince at DVD Verdict writes, “Duel is a film that is fully captivating as it drops us into perhaps one of modern life’s most frightening situations … The viewer experiences the events from Mann’s perspective, and shares in his mounting feelings of unease and dread; the situation is all the more disconcerting because, in addition to the fact that there seems to be no reason for the trucker’s extreme actions, Mann (and, therefore, the viewer) is left slack-jawed asking the most disconcerting of questions, ‘Why me?’”

“It’s a worthwhile thriller, ingeniously conceived and masterfully executed in almost every way. Perhaps the only thing that would make me love Duel more is if Spielberg could have made it without voicing the thoughts of Weaver’s character throughout, as it seems unnecessary (at least to me). Highly recommended for all Spielberg fans, or just thrillers in general. Duel has been often imitated, but far from duplicated in sheer tension,” writes Vince Leo at QWipster’s Movie Reviews.

Matt Day at DVD Times writes, “Duel is a film that transcended the boundaries of both the genre and the medium it was designed for and became a huge influence on a generation … It still works today as a tense thriller, even if the originality of the film has long been diluted, not to mention it being such an important film in the career of a man that has become synonymous with movie-making.”

“Okay. You wanna play games.” This is awesome stuff. View the original theatrical trailer for Duel.

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
In the town of “Hamlin,” Tom Wetherly (William Devane) presses his 12-year-old son Brad (Ross Harris) to keep up with him on their morning bicycle ride. Tom’s teenage daughter Mary Liz (Roxanne Zal) adores him, while his 5-year-old son Scottie (Lukas Haas) has been cast as a rat in a school recital of The Pied Piper of Hamelin. Carol Wetherly (Jane Alexander) is a nervous suburban housewife who stays in perpetual motion in an effort to keep up with her husband.

Carol listens to a message from Tom explaining that he’s stuck at the office. While her boys watch afternoon cartoons, the signal momentarily turns to static. It’s then replaced by breaking news: “This is San Francisco. We have lost our New York signal. Radar sources confirm the explosion of nuclear devices, there in New York, and up and down the East Coast. Ladies and gentlemen, this is real.” Carol receives a phone call from her mother in Chicago a second before the line goes dead and a flash appears outside.

The nuclear holocaust cuts Hamlin off from the outside world. Panicked neighbors (including a couple played by Kevin Costner and Rebecca De Mornay) gather at the home of an elderly couple, who offer assistance to anyone who needs it. The old man is a short wave radio operator and has been able to contact some outlying communities, including Santa Rosa, which he reports has sustained blast damage. Hamlin appears to have been spared. The reason behind the attack or who started it remains unknown.

Other than the fact that Tom has yet to appear, life goes on for a while. Carol begins keeping a journal. Without electricity, batteries become a commodity. The Wetherlys receive fuel from a gas station owner (Mako) whose autistic son Tom had gone out of his way to be friendly to. The school recital goes on as planned, though many of Hamlin’s residents are becoming ill. Before long, the cemetery fills up. Brad asks his mother if they should leave. When she asks him what he thinks, he tells her they should stay.
Production history
The Last Testament was a short story by Carol Amen that originally appeared in the St. Anthony Messenger – a national Catholic weekly – in 1980. Ms. Magazine reprinted it and filmmaker Lynne Littman came across the story. Littman – who had won an Academy Award for her 1976 documentary short Number Our Days – contacted Amen and though reluctant, the author sold the film rights to her story, for $1,000. John Sacret Young was hired to adapt a script.

Littman had spent a year as an executive at ABC producing made-for-TV movies, but didn’t bother taking Testament to a commercial network. She approached the anti-nuclear community for funding. “They wept and passed. They were spending their money directly, not on metaphors.” Producers of the American Playhouse series on PBS pledged $500,000, while British company Entertainment Events invested $250,000, on the condition that American Playhouse agree to give them a theatrical release.

While ABC mounted The Day After, a $7 million TV movie event about nuclear holocaust, Testament was quietly shot in 28 days in the city of Sierra Madre, California. Word of mouth was so non-existent that Littman screened her finished film in the Sierra Madre High School auditorium. When it played the Telluride Film Festival in September 1983, Roger Ebert reported that it was “so painful, frightening and yet plausible that it left people shaken.” Paramount Pictures bid $500,000 to distribute Testament theatrically that fall.

Opinion
The Day After utilized what was at that time cutting edge special effects and makeup to dramatize the effects of nuclear war, but only ended up vaporizing its plausibility in the process. Testament features not a single scene of destruction, but builds psychological and emotional horror few films sustain at this level. Schindler’s List did. So does Testament, a gut wrenching tale that imagines a domestic holocaust with similar power and meditation.

Testament generates plenty of unsettling suspense – a moment of paralyzing realization as the bomb hits, and mounting dread as people grow ill afterwards – but the film is effective because it never loses sight of its human toll. The family’s dynamic and the way they relate to one another resonate with a great deal of depth, as does the different ways they cope with loss and try to survive. Jane Alexander led a tremendous young cast and received a deserved Academy Award nomination for Best Actress for her work.

Lacey Worrell at DVD Verdict writes, “Due to the moving performances from all involved, the spare but meaningful storyline, and the sensitive direction, Testament should go high on your list of must-see films. But be prepared: It will take you right back to a time that none of us are too eager to relive, but that we should never forget.”

“Littman must also be congratulated for not resorting to grandstanding gimmicks or overblown idealism to make her case. An obvious advocate for nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament, she lets the truth, not some misapplied special effect, prove her point. Her greatest achievement comes in the first 15 minutes of the movie, where she manages to capture the world of the Wetherbys in all its casual, collective elements,” writes Bill Gibron at DVD Talk.

Jeff Rosado at digitally Obsessed writes, “Though no one wants to believe that another 9/11 or potentially more disastrous occurrence of terrorist-inflicted madness will occur in our lifetime, Testament is a gripping, emotional reminder (despite being 20 years old) that such a moment is possible when you least expect it. Despite its subject matter, it’s not only a ‘must-see’ film, it’s a must-own DVD with terrific supplements that are so richly deserved. Highest recommendation.”

© Joe Valdez

31 days of October. 31 articles devoted to the screen’s maestro of suspense and the macabre, Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980). I’ll be jumping back and forth through five decades in this series. More than half of the films I’ve never seen before, but even the ones I have seen were viewed, researched and written about this month.

Synopsis
As gulls swarm over San Francisco, Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) enters a pet shop. Inquiring about the mass of birds, she’s told, “There must be a storm at sea. That drives them inland, you know.” Daughter of a newspaper magnate, Melanie meets Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) when he enters the shop and teases her. Mitch is an attorney familiar with Melanie’s gossip column exploits, but she’s attracted to him anyway.

Melanie buys two lovebirds, but when she tries to deliver them to Mitch, she’s notified that he’s left town for the weekend. She makes the drive to Bodega Bay, sixty miles north of San Francisco, to find him. Schoolteacher Annie Hayworth (Suzanne Pleshette) gives Melanie directions. She crosses the bay by motorboat and sneaks into Mitch’s house to leave the lovebirds as a present for his sister’s birthday. On her way back across the bay, a gull attacks her.

While Mitch’s distant mother Lydia (Jessica Tandy) is suspicious of Melanie, his kid sister Cathy (Veronica Cartwright) invites her to stay for her birthday. Melanie rents a room from Annie, who she discovers was once romantically involved with Mitch. In the night, a gull kills itself trying to crash through their door. At the party the next day, a whole flock of gulls descends on the children, clawing and pecking them.

Lydia heads to a neighbor’s farm, looking for answers on why her chickens won’t eat, and finds the farmer with his eyes pecked out. Hysterical, she asks Melanie to pick Cathy up from school. An army of crows gathers outside the schoolhouse and when the children appear, attacks them. Melanie takes her story to town and makes believers out of the locals when the birds attack the town. Melanie, Mitch, Lydia and Cathy barricade themselves, hoping to survive the onslaught.

Production history
More than two years after the biggest commercial success of his career, director Alfred Hitchcock had settled on a follow-up to Psycho. He had come across a news item in August 1961 about thousands of seabirds swarming on the town of Capatolla, California. It reminded him of a 1952 short story by Daphne du Maurier which Hitchcock had included in his anthology book My Favorites In Suspense.

Du Maurier’s story chronicled an apocalyptic attack by birds, as told from the point of view of a farm family in Cornwall. To adapt a script, Joseph Stefano was unavailable, and while Ray Bradbury loved the idea, he was too busy writing for Alfred Hitchcock Presents to start right away. Novelist Evan Hunter – who was also working for the series – was hired to write the script, relocating the action from rural England to Bodega Bay.

Operating under the belief that the stars of the movie would be the birds and himself, Hitchcock set out to make a star out of his female lead. Pamela Tiffin, Yvette Mimieux and Sandra Dee were all considered, until Hitchcock chose a model turned actress whose deportment in a diet supplement TV ad had appealed to him. Her name was Tippi Hedren. Rod Taylor, Suzanne Pleshette, Jessica Tandy and a 12-year-old Veronica Cartwright rounded out the cast.

While thousands of trained crows, sparrows and gulls were employed, for the most complex sequences, Hitchcock opted to superimpose birds against the actors in post-production by using a sodium lighting technique pioneered by Walt Disney Studios. Legendary Disney animator Ub Iwerks oversaw the optical effects, while matte artist Albert Whitlock provided paintings for the establishing shots. The budget rose to $2.5 million, making it the most expensive film Hitchcock had mounted to date.

Released March 1963 on a surge of print, radio and TV publicity, The Birds was harshly received by critics in the U.S., where it was called everything from not scary, to silly, to a failure. Critics overseas were more liberal with praise, but in spite of respectable grosses – $5 million in the U.S. – the high budget and expectations tainted the film as a disappointment. Today, this may be the movie the casual filmgoer associates Hitchcock with most.

Opinion
With Strangers On a Train, Rear Window, Vertigo, North By Northwest and Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock had enjoyed a run not just of great movies, but masterpieces. The Birds is not a masterpiece, but it is a milestone, a brilliant technical achievement that succeeds both as a crowd pleasing thriller and an experimental mood piece.

While the script cleverly leaves the question of why the birds are attacking up to the imagination of the audience – I saw the birds as an ominous warning of World War III – it also drags for 50 minutes. The attack sequences are thrilling, and a scene at the town diner with various locals offering their version of the disaster has Hitchcock’s trademark black wit all over it. Otherwise, this isn’t much of a narrative.

Tippi Hedren and Rod Taylor are better actors than critics might give them credit for, but Hitchcock is indeed the star of the movie. Instead of a traditional score, he opted for synthesized sound effects and in some cases, silence, to beautifully underline the terror. The reveal of the crows massed outside the schoolyard, the sonic assault on the house, and Hedren’s attack are masterfully executed. Poltergeist and Signs are just two modern blockbusters practically based on this horror classic.

Jacob Hall at Independent Critics writes, “The appeal of Hitchcock is that he can take something simple and turn it into a terrifying thing. Showers, heights, broken legs, they all terrify me now. But the one that terrifies the most is the sight of a flock of birds.”

“This film is Jurassic Park, with birds instead of dinos. Both films work because they are well-crafted and downright scary, but neither has characters you really give a damn about,” writes Lisa Skrzyniarz at Crazy For Cinema.

Vince Leo at QWipster’s Movie Reviews writes, “The Birds is one of the best ‘creature features’ ever made, possibly only rivaled by Jaws for best ever, though the latter does owe a debt of style to this film.”

“Naturally, the egg plays a very prominent part in my lecture. Not a word about which came first, however. I don’t believe in dealing in controversial matters.” View the 1963 theatrical trailer, with Alfred Hitchcock telling us all about The Birds.

© Joe Valdez