Roman Polanski was born August 18, 1933 in Paris. The sordid details of his flight from the United States in 1978 have often overshadowed discussion of the director’s work, which at the age of 77, includes one of the best films of 2010. Is he a world class filmmaker? In the month of August, I take a look at ten directed by Roman Polanski.

The Pianist (2002)
Directed by Roman Polanski
Screenplay by Ronald Harwood, based on the book The Pianist: The Extraordinary True Story of One Man’s Survival in Warsaw, 1939-1945 by Wladyslaw Szpilman
Produced by Roman Polanski, Robert Benmussa, Alain Sarde
150 minutes

A tale of an urban castaway that’s as powerful as it is restrained, The Pianist was Roman Polanski’s finest work in two decades. Originally published in 1946 under the title Death of a City, Wladyslaw Szpilman’s memoir of survival detailed the classical pianist’s six years under Nazi occupation in Warsaw. Seizing upon the book as his next film, Polanski selected South African born playwright and screenwriter Ronald Harwood — whose play Taking Sides also featured a composer caught in the maelstrom of World War II — to adapt a screenplay. France’s Le Studio Canal largely financed the €38 million (roughly $33 million) production in association with England’s Cadre Films and after Joseph Fiennes declined the role in order to remain on the British stage, Polanski arrived on Adrien Brody to portray Szpilman. The actor went from 160 to 130 pounds in six weeks to prepare for the part.

Filmed at Babelsburg Studios in Berlin, with additional shooting in the Braga district outside Warsaw, what sets The Pianist apart from WWII dramas like Saving Private Ryan or Enemy At the Gates is its simplicity and grace. Written immediately after the occupation, Szpilman’s story is resplendent in detail and confident enough in its truth not to employ artificiality or unearned sentiments. Turning genre conventions on their head, we meet Jews who are less than virtuous and at least one German who is more than pure evil, creating a landscape that provokes thought and feeling. A tale of genocide, the irony is that Polanski’s craftsmanship is so solid we wish the story kept going. Nominated for seven Academy Awards, Adrien Brody (Best Actor), Ronald Harwood (Best Adapted Screenplay) and Roman Polanski (Best Director) all won Oscars.

In Warsaw of September 1939, pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody) is performing Chopin’s Nocturne in C Sharp minor for Polish radio when German artillery shells hit the city. Szpilman’s violinist father (Frank Finlay), mother (Maureen Lipman), younger brother Henryk (Ed Stoppard) and two grown sisters (Julia Rayner, Jessica Kate Meyer) rejoice with the news that Britain and France have declared war on Germany, but Poland quickly falls under Nazi control. Szpilman has time to take an adoring cellist named Dorota (Emilia Fox) for coffee before the city’s 360,000 Jews are evicted from their homes and sealed inside a ghetto in October 1940. Szpilman finds employment as a piano player in an upper class Jewish café and along with Henryk, rejects an offer from a family friend named Heller (Roy Smiles) to join the Jewish Ghetto Police.

When Henryk is arrested, Szpilman appeals to Heller’s ego to secure his brother’s release. He keeps his family from being deported by obtaining employment certificates for them, but these prove worthless when in August 1942, the Szpilmans are herded onto trains bound for Treblinka. Heller pulls Szpilman off the line, sparing his life, but the pianist never sees his family again. He survives by joining a Jewish work detail and buys enough time to arrange for his escape. Harbored by friends, Szpilman is reunited with Dorota, now married and expecting a child. Once the Polish uprising begins in August 1944, he’s near the brink of famine. Scrounging for food in the deserted city, Szpilman comes to face to face with Captain Wilm Hosenfeld (Thomas Kretschmann). Instead of being shot, the pianist is rewarded by an act of kindness after the German officer hears his music.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 107,318 users: 94% for The Pianist

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: 85 for The Pianist

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Bird (1988)
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Written by Joel Oliansky
Produced by Clint Eastwood
161 minutes

A tone poem on the life and times of jazz innovator Charlie Parker makes such a valiant effort at authenticity, at not being a bad movie, that what’s left feels like virtually no movie at all. A script by actor, playwright and jazz fan Joel Oliansky (who co-wrote and directed the Richard Dreyfuss-Amy Irving melodrama The Competition) had been in development for so long that Richard Pryor was attached to the role of Parker before the superstar comedian’s freebasing accident in 1980. Bird is notable as the first movie about jazz music made by fans of jazz music, of which Oliansky offered that Clint Eastwood had even more ardor for the art form than he did. The end credits dedicate the picture to musicians, but it reads more like an admission of failure than a note of gratitude.

Instead of recreating the world in which Parker lived fast and died young (1920-1955, according to Wikipedia) and perhaps illustrating how he changed that world, Eastwood seems satisfied with simply broadcasting Parker’s music, which the filmmaker reprocessed from unreleased live recordings that were tracked down. Anyone who hasn’t pledged a donation to their public jazz radio station will likely be in the dark, literally. The lighting by Jack N. Green is so murky and the narrative so muddled that after a torturous 2 hours and 40 minutes, it’s still not clear where Parker came from, what he did or who the people who knew him were. Spike Lee criticized Bird for focusing on Chan Richardson’s and Red Rodney’s remembrances and pushing Parker into the shadows, but sadly, nothing in this passionate clutter is communicated with the least bit of clarity.

In Los Angeles, jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker (Forest Whitaker) returns from a gig to his partner Chan Richardson (Diane Verona). Despondent over the death of their daughter as well as his ongoing career problems, Parker swallows a bottle of iodine. Recuperating in a psychiatric hospital, his mind wanders back to his early days in Kansas City, where the young Parker (Damon Whitaker) fares so poorly in a “cutting contest” against Buster Franklin (Keith David) that a drummer tosses a cymbal at the young man’s feet to get him off stage. Unwilling to consent her husband be given shock treatment because it will risk his ability to improvise and compose music, Chan thinks back to when she first met “Bird”, in New York, when she was a footloose jazz fan and he had eclipsed Buster Franklin as a lightning bolt innovator of a new genre called bebop.

Franklin is so dispirited after hearing Parker perform that he dumps his saxophone in a river. But by the time Parker emerges from the hospital, he’s drowning his life. Moving back in time, Parker’s self-destructive binges are contrasted with his bandmate and friend Dizzy Gillespie (Samuel E. Wright), a trumpeter nowhere near as idolized as Bird, but happily married and never out of work. Parker finds a sidekick in Red Rodney (Michael Zelnicker), a white trumpeter who Parker takes out on the road. Parker’s erratic behavior puts him on the outs with club owners and record labels, until his arrest for heroin possession results in his cabaret license being revoked. He’s swimming in heroin and booze in L.A. when news reaches Parker of his daughter’s death. 34 years young going on 65, Bird never fully recovers.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 18 users: 72% for Bird

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: 78 for Bird

What do you say?

Every Which Way But Loose (1978)
Directed by James Fargo
Written by Jeremy Joe Kronsberg
Produced by Robert Daley
110 minutes

You’d think that at the very least, Every Which Way But Loose would rank as the best beer drinkin’, bareknuckle brawlin’ flick with an orangutan ever made, but actually, its 1980 sequel Any Which Way You Can holds that title. A huge hit that defied the expectations of Warner Bros. and most of Eastwood’s advisers retains a shaggy sort of charm in the grand scheme of things. Though a slapdash effort for sure, it’s one whose redneck hero is revealed to have a heart as big as his pet ape, or a country western ballad perhaps. It lopes forward with little organizing intelligence, but when it comes to pure heehaw entertainment, I’d rather see a movie full of stupid pet tricks and stupid human tricks than what Burt Reynolds devolved into after Smokey and the Bandit — giving his fans stupid car tricks.

James Fargo was an assistant director who worked for Eastwood on Joe Kidd before being promoted to direct the second Dirty Harry sequel The Enforcer, then Every Which Way But Loose. His work bears the signs of moving at light speed to keep the boss happy. Any business accompanied by punches or by the orangutan — who was named Manis and extraordinarily trained by Bobby Berosini — does have a merry quality to it. The movie also captures a tumbleweed vibe that was suburban Los Angeles in the ‘70s, with the country western tunes (Mel Tillis and Cliff Crofford perform in the film) that might entail. Appearances by Ruth Gordon and Beverly D’Angelo are highlights too, but regardless of how young your inner child, there’s no getting around how sloppy the material is and lazy the execution of it plays.

Pacoima truck driver Philo Beddoe (Clint Eastwood) ekes out a living in bareknuckle pickup fights arranged by his buddy Orville Boggs (Geoffrey Lewis). A man of simple tastes, Philo spends his time repairing cars, hanging out with his pet orangutan Clyde — who he bet his truck and two motorbikes to set free from a roadside zoo — and drinking beer at the Palomino. When an aspiring country western performer named Lynn Halsey Taylor (Sondra Locke) takes the stage, Philo experiences love at first sight; Lynn agrees to let Philo give her a ride home, but he declines an invitation to spend the night when the trailer park diva reveals she lives with a boyfriend. When Lynn takes off to Colorado unexpectedly, Philo, Clyde and Orville hit the road after her.

Philo leaves Southern California on the hit list of some bitter customers whose faces have had a close encounter with his fist, including two cops (Gregory Walcott, James McEachin) Philo accidentally beat up at the Palomino, and The Black Widows, the least intimidating motorcycle gang in the Southland, who made the mistake of harassing Clyde. Led by Cholla (John Quade), the Black Widows pay a visit to Orville’s cantankerous Ma (Ruth Gordon), who runs the sissies off with a shotgun. Picking up a produce stand girl (Beverly D’Angelo) who Orville shows a fancy for, Philo blunders into Lynn in Colorado, but learns she is less than thrilled to see him again. The brawler with a broken heart channels his energy into a pickup fight against the legendary Tank Murdock (Walter Barnes).

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 13 users: 31% for Every Which Way But Loose

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

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Honkytonk Man (1982)
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Screenplay by Clancy Carlile, based on his novel
Produced by Clint Eastwood
122 minutes

The star attractions in Honkytonk Man are the roadhouses that chew up and spit out an endless cycle of musicians. The film was a rare — but in retrospect not really surprising — commercial letdown from Clint Eastwood while he reigned as the biggest movie star in the world. Instead of good guys and bad guys, this is a story about a country bluesman who lives and dies according to the rules of the songs he releases into the night. Not exactly Escape From Alcatraz. The smokehouse lighting by Bruce Surtees and antique world designed by Edward Carfagno recreate the pit stops of the Dust Bowl with a savage beauty unparalleled among films set against the Great Depression, but the dramatic tissue needed to connect the set pieces together disappears like a cloud of cigarette smoke.

Directing his ninth film in 11 years, Eastwood assembled his finest cast yet. Verna Bloom and Matt Clark are the matriarch and patriarch of a farm family. Bette Ford, Barry Corbin, Tim Thomerson and Tracey Walter are characters encountered on the road, while country western legends Marty Robbins and Porter Wagoneer make appearances. The biggest gamble though was Eastwood casting his son Kyle — who’s grown into a successful career as a jazz bassist — as his character’s nephew. The junior Eastwood comes off more like a real kid than a coy child actor. Honkytonk Man has a subtle sort of grace and forces little, but at the same time, the material barely seems to warrant a feature film, with characters and incidents that come and go while the atmosphere is what stays in the air.

As a dust storm descends on a farm in Oklahoma, a Lincoln convertible swerves onto the property and knocks down a windmill. Emmy (Verna Bloom) recognizes the driver as her brother Red Stovall (Clint Eastwood), dead drunk. Her 14-year-old son Whit (Kyle Eastwood) has his sights set on life beyond that of a cotton picker and is beguiled by the automobile and the guitar case inside. Whit’s father (Matt Clark) discovers a letter that reveals Red has been invited to try out for the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. When his driving is revealed to be an improvement over his uncle’s, Whit is permitted to take Red to a local honkytonk, where his uncle picks up extra cash for the road picking his guitar and singing. Red then enlists his nephew’s aid settling a debt by sneaking into a chicken coop and making off with the poultry.

With the family pulling up stakes for California, Red asks his sister if she’ll allow Whit to drive him to Nashville. Not wanting her reckless brother — stricken with tuberculosis — to be alone, she agrees. Along for the journey is Grandpa (John McIntire), who feels he’s too old to start over and prefers to die in his birthplace of Tennessee. On the road, Red and Whit are chased by a bull, visit a whorehouse in Tulsa where $2 buys Whit his first sexual experience, unwittingly rob a roadhouse to collect money owed Red by a smalltime hood (Barry Corbin) and pick up a starry eyed 16-year-old named Marlene (Alexa Kenin) who wants to be anywhere but Oklahoma. Arriving in Nashville, Red’s sickness cuts a promising radio career short, but fate has one more twist in store for the honkytonk man.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 14 users: 93% for Honkytonk Man

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

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Play Misty For Me (1971)
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Screenplay by Jo Heims and Dean Reisner, story by Jo Heims
Produced by Robert Daley
102 minutes

Clint Eastwood once referred to Play Misty For Me warmly as an “odd little story about a disc jockey”; Eastwood’s understated regard seems perfectly matched to this material, his debut film as director. It’s a disquieting B-side that seems filled with one too many digressions to qualify as a classic thriller, but on the other hand, it’s those digressions that make the picture so memorable. Unlike Fatal Attracton — the blockbuster that would brazenly and brainlessly borrow Misty’s hook — this flick seems more inspired by the rhythms of a real one-night stand gone bad as opposed to the junk plot generator of Hollywood. The result has verve, atmosphere and a big scare along the way to actually addressing discontent between men and women.

Play Misty For Me doesn’t amp up the suspense so much as it ambles in the direction of an intriguing psychodrama. Shot in Eastwood’s backyard of Monterey, where the star assured Universal he knew where he could grab locations without spending money building sets, both the candlepower cinematography by Bruce Surtees and the sound design by Universal capture the allure of coastal Big Sur better than any movie ever made. Jessica Walter is superb as the scorned wackadoo and even though Eastwood dilly dallies away from her and from what makes the movie tick for a meadow love scene set to Roberta Flack’s “The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face” or a visit to the Monterey Jazz Festival, at least it can be said no other stalker movie would have thought of that.

Disc jockey Dave Garver (Clint Eastwood) opens his show at jazz station KRML in Carmel by promising his listeners “a little verse, a little talk, and five hours of music to be very, very nice to each other by.” During his shift, one of Garver’s regular female caller phones in and purrs, “Play ‘Misty’ for me.” Winding down at his favorite watering hole, Dave attracts the attention of a brunette at the end of the bar. Introducing herself as Evelyn Draper (Jessica Walter), she claims to have been stood up on a date. Dave gives Evelyn a ride home, but feels he knows this woman from somewhere. Evelyn reveals she’s his “Misty” caller. Dave claims that he doesn’t want to complicate his life, but neither one of them sees any reason why they shouldn’t sleep together.

Dave is actually more interested in patching things up with his artsy ex-girlfriend Tobie (Donna Mills) when he discovers she’s moved back from Sausalito. Evelyn won’t take a hint, tracking Dave down and asking why he hasn’t taken her calls. He’s not amused. She continues to smother him – banging on his door in the middle of the night and professing her love – until he makes it clear he doesn’t feel the same way. Evelyn responds by slashing her wrists in his bathroom and drawing out her recovery at his place. When Dave finally leaves his house for a business meeting, Evelyn follows him to the restaurant and costs him a prized hosting gig. Dave breaks it off with his schizophrenic wackjob for the last time, unaware that Evelyn considers the affair far from over.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 30 users: 83% for Play Misty For Me

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

What do you think?

Across the Universe (2007)
Screenplay by Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais, story by Julie Taymor & Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais
Directed by Julie Taymor
Produced by Gross Entertainment/ Team Todd/ Revolution Studios
Running time: 133 minutes

So, What’s This About?
Expressing themselves through the songs of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, two lovers are introduced on opposite shores of the Atlantic. Jude (Jim Sturgess) works in a Liverpool shipyard, while in the Midwest, Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood) lives an idyllic suburban life. Jude leaves his girlfriend in 1963 and travels to America, while Lucy says goodbye to her high school beau when he joins the army. Jude makes his way to Princeton University, where he locates his biological father working as a janitor. He then meets an irascible Ivy Leaguer named Max (Joe Anderson) who brings the British sketch artist home for Thanksgiving, introducing Jude to his sister Lucy.

Max drops out of school and heads to New York’s Lower East Side with Jude in tow. The young bohemians find room and board with a blues singer named Sadie (Dana Fuchs) and are soon joined by a guitar player from Detroit named Jo-Jo (Martin Luther McCoy) and an outcast from Ohio, Prudence (T.V. Carpio). Arriving in the Big Apple to deliver a draft notice to her brother, Lucy falls in love with Jude. When Max is shipped to Vietnam, she becomes active in the antiwar movement, which Jude — an illegal alien — remains largely ambivalent about. The gang encounters a West Coast beatnik named Dr. Robert (Bono) who expands their minds, but social forces begin to tear the group apart.

Who Made It?
Producer Matthew Gross and his associate Ben Haber were discussing the music of The Beatles and wondered why nobody had mined the riches of the greatest pop music library of all time for a movie. Working out a deal with Sony/ATV Music Publishing — rights holders of the Beatles catalog owned jointly by Sony and Michael Jackson — Gross planned to option the rights for 18 Beatles tunes to the tune of $5 million. To script an original musical utilizing those songs and a 1960s love story as a backdrop, the producer turned to the British writing duo of Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais, who drafted a short treatment.

After several rejections of what was then titled All You Need Is Love, Gross found a partner in Joe Roth of Revolution Studios. To direct, Roth suggested Julie Taymor, the multi-talented director of stage (The Lion King) and screen (Frida). Eager to explore a cultural landscape she had actually grown up in, Taymor turned to partner and frequent collaborator Elliot Goldenthal to compose the music. She arrived on the title Across the Universe and won the backing for a visionary rock opera utilizing music and lyrics from 33 Beatles tunes. Delivering a cut deemed too long and unwieldy by Sony Pictures, Roth would recut the film himself, leading to Taymor threatening to remove her name from the ambitious project.

How’d They Do It?
Apple Corps — the multimedia company founded by The Beatles in 1968 — controls the band’s recordings, but the more lucrative publishing rights to most of that library was owned jointly by Michael Jackson, who bought the Beatles catalogue from ATV Music in 1985, and Sony Music, which the pop icon merged his publishing interests with ten years later. With a licensing fee of $250,000 per song, Beatles compositions had popped up in movies only sparingly over the years. Producer Matthew Gross learned that licensing 18 Beatles songs would cost $5 million, which he thought was a good investment to build a movie around. “The idea was reverse engineering. Instead of trying to string together a story from the songs, create a story and find the songs that suited the story.”

Formerly president of Kopelson Entertainment, Gross hooked the British screenwriting tandem of Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais — whose credits included The Commitments (1991), as well as the Michael Caine comedy Water (1985), which George Harrison’s HandMade Films had produced — to write a treatment. After five rejections, Gross found a buyer in Joe Roth, former chairman of Fox who founded Revolution Studios in 2000. Roth recalled, “The Beatles catalogue is owned by two parties equally, Sony and Michael Jackson. We distribute our films through Sony and I went to them with the idea, so they were okay and we worked long and hard at a time when Michael Jackson was somewhat vulnerable and we got the rights.”

To direct, Joe Roth wooed Julie Taymor, who he’d met while chairman of Walt Disney Pictures and Taymor was directing and designing costumes for the Broadway production of The Lion King. Taymor grew up in Boston in the 1960s. Her love of theater and travel led to creating a dance company while living in Indonesia in the mid 1970s on a Watson Fellowship. In 1991, Taymor received a MacArthur Fellowship and the following year, directed her first opera, in Japan. Following the massive stage success of The Lion King, Taymor made her feature film debut in 1999 with an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus starring Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange. Her sophomore film — Frida (2002) — notched Salma Hayek an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.

In February 2005, it was announced that Julie Taymor had agreed to direct what was then being called All You Need Is Love for Revolution Studios and a planned release of September 2006. Six months prior, Taymor had approached the head of Sony Classical about the possibility of launching a Broadway musical utilizing tunes by the Fab Four. The idea dissolved, but with The Beatles on her brain and the opportunity to recreate an era she had actually lived through, Taymor worked with Clement & La Frenais to expand their less than novel love story set during the social upheaval of the 1960s. She would suggest the title Across the Universe and add three supporting characters: Sadie, Jo-Jo and Prudence.

Taymor revealed, “The picking of the names was a bit of a debate — the Jude, Lucy, Max, Sadie, Jo-Jo and Prudence — but I felt that, you know, you can like it or dislike it but it allowed us to use some of those songs with the names, obviously, like ‘Dear Prudence’ and ‘Hey Jude’, and later you have ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ but it connected the people to the songs, otherwise, who were those people? If you used those names and those songs, who are they singing about? So no, we don’t have a song about Jo-Jo or Sadie, we are familiar with the words ‘sexy Sadie’ and what do we have, ‘Maxwell’s silver hammer comes down, crashing down’ in the later song, so people who know those songs understand where the references come from.”

Jennifer and Suzanne Todd — who rose from assistants of Joel Silver in the early ‘90s to producing the Austin Powers comedies, Boiler Room and Memento — were brought in to get the movie made. Jennifer Todd recalled, “We got the script from Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais and we just loved it. Once the permission came through to use the songs from The Beatles’ back catalog, it was incredibly exciting. We got to take these tracks that have become so much a part of everyone’s lives and reinterpret them — to have them lead a narrative and really breathe new life into them. To be able to work with a director of Julie Taymor’s talent, to really experiment and try to create a totally new experience, I mean, what could be more thrilling?”

To collaborate on Across the Universe, Taymor turned to her partner Elliot Goldenthal, who in addition to writing a film score, was tasked with rearranging the 33 Beatles compositions Taymor had selected. “Though Elliot is a composer and there are no songs to be composed, his arrangements and his understanding of drama and character are so great. I’ve worked with him for 20 years and have total trust and admiration for his work. I knew that he would find a new way to interpret the songs; by placing them with new arrangements, the music would be fresh again — not a better version, but different.” Music producers T-Bone Burnett and Teese Gohl would work with Goldenthal on the music.

Bruno Delbonnel was hired as director of photography. Taymor recalled, “Bruno, in our first interview said, ‘I hate musicals.’ I thought, ‘Now what do I think about that? That’s interesting.’ And I thought, he’s done Amélie and A Very Long Engagement, these incredibly theatrical movies. He has an incredible sense of light and photography. I knew that tough, European sense with him: he would want it to be a serious movie, not fluff; that the darkness would be there when I wanted it to be there, but it would also have that whimsy and theatricality that was very important.” Choreographer Daniel Ezralow came aboard to create routines that broke with the dance musical norm when possible and drew inspiration from more realistic movements.

Aside from Evan Rachel Wood — who was offered the role of Lucy — the cast was filled with relative unknowns. During an open casting call in England, Taymor and Goldenthal were sent a tape featuring Jim Sturgess. Taymor mused, “We did not want musical theater voices, and we didn’t want pop-y voices. Jim just fit in right away. Jim’s been in a rock band and he’s an actor. He just sings with such an incredible ease that you feel that the character is talking just to you. He has a beautiful voice – and there’s no disconnect between when his speaking voice and his singing voice. Jim can go right from talking to singing.”

English actor Joe Anderson had came to an open casting call for the role of Jude, but felt better suited for Max and employing an American accent, won the part. Taymor had created the part of Sadie specifically for Dana Fuchs, a singer/songwriter who’d recorded a demo for the director on a previous project. Martin Luther was a New York based vocalist and guitar player with little acting experience. The same went for T.V. Carpio, whose background included singing, dancing and ice skating, but not much acting. Revolution Studios announced a $45 million budget and Across the Universe commenced filming September 2005 in New York.

Once Across the Universe began the test screening process, its troubles began. In an article for L.A. Weekly in April 2007, gossip columnist Nikki Finke named various “insiders” who claimed that most everyone with an opinion agreed that the movie was too long, everyone except for Julie Taymor. The director unveiled a shorter cut of 135 minutes, but when it received similar complaints, Taymor blanched at any more trims, even after Sony co-chairman Amy Pascal was said to have taken Taymor to dinner and extolled the virtues of a shorter running time. One of Finke’s “sources” was quoted as saying, “That’s the refrain of everyone: There’s a great movie in there, somewhere. But as it stands now, it’s so complicated it’s just a bad movie.”

Joe Roth hired an editor and whittled Taymor’s cut to 105 minutes. Screening his abridged version to a test audience in Phoenix, the scores reportedly shot way up. Roth — who in addition to running studios, directed Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise (1987) and Christmas with the Cranks (2004) — left it up to Taymor to decide whether she would endorse the new audience friendly version. When Taymor floated maybe taking her name off the film, Sony backed down. Recounting the experience on The Charlie Rose Show, Taymor offered, “Look, I went through what many directors go through, which is: You get to the end, you think it’s done and some people think that it should be, slightly different.” She added, “And I did some cuts for pacing and everything stayed — you’re seeing my cut — and there’s support behind it. So, end of story.”

Running 133 minutes, Across the Universe premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in September 2007. Sony timidly released it on 24 U.S. screens in 12 cities, followed by a slow expansion to 400 screens in 24 cities. Critics scattered in every direction. Stephen Holden, The New York Times: “Somewhere around its midpoint, Across the Universe captured my heart, and I realized that falling in love with a movie is like falling in love with another person. Imperfections, however glaring, become endearing quirks once you’ve tumbled.” Marjorie Baumgarten, The Austin Chronicle: “Across the Universe will have ardent defenders, but in the long run, it will do nothing to infuse life into the current mini-revival of movie musicals and is as soft-headed as the wishful refrain ‘All You Need Is Love.’ Maybe that works in real life but not in the movies, sister.”

Despite striking a chord with many who discovered the film — and The Beatles — on their own, Across the Universe failed to take off at the box office, bringing in $24.3 million in the U.S. and only $5 million overseas. Appearing on The Charlie Rose Show in October 2007, Taymor was asked to comment on her film’s wildly diverse reception. “I think anything that’s really different, that really takes chances, that breaks the rules, also plays with sacred cows — like the Beatles music — is going to, it’s going to engender that debate. And I welcome that; better than bland, better than, ‘Wow, that’s nice.’”

Should I Care?
Across the Universe is that weird kid taking a seat at the back of the class. She’ll discover Brazil, The Hudsucker Proxy, Fight Club and other like-minded kids to smoke with behind the school during lunch, inspiring walkouts and love-ins among moviegoers over the years while giving film studios and their shareholders anxiety attacks. Shooting straight from the heart, this love letter to the songs of The Beatles — like the boldest love letters — is ill-advised, occasionally tedious and monumentally dazzling. Its closest point of comparison is Moulin Rouge!, but with much better taste and less cornball reverence for song and dance routine than Baz Luhrmann, Julie Taymor crafts a poetic and sumptuous rock opera destined to become a classic.

Whatever you think about Across the Universe, chances are, you’ll end up thinking about it. Rather than a recyclable consumer entertainment product, almost every frame of the movie is designed with TLC. The framing, lighting and camera movement are beautiful, the musical arrangements eclectic, vocal work by the cast excellent, animation mesmerizing and its staging innovative. The film flies off the rails during its psychedelic, “I Am the Walrus” and “Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite” numbers, while its star crossed lovers start resembling chess pieces being moved across history rather than people we really care about. But if Luhrmann was heralded for raising the bar on movie musicals, Taymor elevates it even higher with the singular drive to try something different.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Movie Mogul Joe Roth Speaks” By Wilson Morales. BlackFilm.com, February 2006

“Film Has Two Versions; Only One Is Julie Taymor’s” By Sharon Waxman. The New York Times, 20 March 2007

“Across an Alternate Universe” By Nikki Finke. L.A. Weekly, 12 April 2007

“Sony exploits its Beatles catalog” By Martin Lewis. Variety, 6 September 2007

“Julie Taymor Soars Across the Universe” By Edward Douglas. ComingSoon.net, 18 September 2007

“Beatles mania strikes again” By Chris Lee. The Los Angeles Times, 12 October 2007

“Jennifer and Suzanne Todd’s Sister Act” By Jessica Hundley. MovieMaker Magazine, 18 November 2007

“The Art of Musicals: Across the Universe” The Writing Studio

Across the Universe. DVD commentary by Julie Taymor and Elliot Goldenthal. Sony Home Entertainment (2008)

Talk to Me (2007)
Screenplay by Michael Genet and Rick Famuyiwa and Kasi Lemmons (uncredited), story by Michael Genet
Directed by Kasi Lemmons
Produced by Pelagius Films/ Mark Gordon Company/ Sidney Kimmel Entertainment
Running time: 118 minutes

So, What’s This About?
At Lorton Reformatory in 1966, Dewey Hughes (Chiwetel Ejiofor) grudgingly puts in a visit to his convict brother (Mike Epps), fulfilling a promise he made to their mother. Dewey — the enterprising station manager of WOL-AM in Washington D.C. — is intercepted in the waiting room by the loquacious Petey Greene (Don Cheadle). Immensely popular as the prison disc jockey, Petey is serving a 10 year sentence for armed robbery, but doesn’t let this stop him from asking Dewey for a job, while he waits for a conjugal visit from his sassy girlfriend Vernell (Taraji Henson). Dewey dismisses Petey as a “miscreant” and brushes the con off by telling Petey to look him up when he gets out.

Petey wins an early release by talking a prisoner off a water tower, and with Vernell at his side, storms WOL, where his rap doesn’t go over well with Dewey or his boss (Martin Sheen). After being kicked out, Petey organizes a community protest against WOL. Recognizing the potential to tap into the prevailing anti-establishment mood, Dewey gives Petey a shot as a morning deejay. Off-the-cuff remarks about Berry Gordy get him yanked off the air, but Dewey refuses to give up on Petey. Through a successful radio program, a TV talk show and comedy albums, Petey becomes the voice of D.C.’s black community. Dewey gets him booked on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, where stardom appears inevitable for Petey Greene.

Who Made It?
Lurma Rackley met Petey Greene in 1981 when she was hired to write an article on the broadcast legend for the Washington North Star. Greene looking for someone to pen his autobiography and was pleased enough with Rackley’s piece to offer her the job. Greene would pass away a year later, long before any book could be finished. Rackley was friends with Dewey Hughes, who by 1991 was a successful TV producer in Los Angeles. Hughes offered to take the material she’d finished and see if he could interest anyone in Hollywood on a Petey Greene biopic. He ultimately hooked producer Joe Fries with the idea. Producer Mark Gordon came on board as well and in June 2000, it was announced that Martin Lawrence had agreed to play Petey Greene.

Unable to reach a deal with Rackley, Joe Fries ignored her research and chose to center the film on Petey Greene’s relationship with Dewey Hughes. Titled Petey Greene’s Washington, a spec script by Hughes’ son Michael Genet was written and set up at Fox. Rick Famuyiwa was brought in for revisions, then Kasi Lemmons, who became more enamored with the project over time and aspired to direct it herself. After several directors in front of her passed, Lemmons — who’d made a big splash in 1997 writing and directing Eve’s Bayou — won the job, suggesting Don Cheadle for the lead. Talk to Me was put into turnaround by Fox and after several starts and stops, was financed by Sidney Kimmel Entertainment.

How’d They Do It?
Ralph Waldo “Petey” Greene Jr. was an ex-con, a disc jockey, a two-time Emmy Award winning host of Petey Greene’s Washington on WDCA, a Washington D.C. community organizer, guest of the White House and in 1981, the subject of an article that freelance writer Lurma Rackley was assigned. When the interview was over, Greene asked Rackley if she’d ever written a book. Greene was looking to pen his autobiography, but collaborations with two or three other writers hadn’t worked out. Rackley had never attempted a book, but Greene was sufficiently impressed with her article and gave Rackley the job. A year into their interviews, Greene would be stricken with liver cancer and pass away at the age of 52.

Rackley recalled, “When he was in the hospital on his final days, he really couldn’t talk anymore — he could just listen; a relative put the phone to his ear so he could hear. I told him I promised I would get the story out.” According to Rackley, Greene’s attorney lost interest in a book, leaving the writer with 60 hours of taped interviews. By 1991, Rackley was press secretary for Mayor Marion Barry and working on the book part-time when she received a call from her friend Dewey Hughes. The conversation got around to Rackley’s work-in-progress. Hughes offered to take what she had so far — an outline, prologue, five chapters — and shop it around Hollywood.

Seven years later, Hughes hooked producer Joe Fries, who’d grown up in Bethesda watching Petey Greene’s Washington. Fries — who helped launch The Learning Channel — recalled, “I was completely the cultural opposite of Petey. Yet I was drawn to this character on television.” Fries offered to buy Rackley’s unfinished manuscript and her taped interviews, but concerned about how her candid interviews with Greene would be used, Rackley held out for the opportunity to join the movie as a consultant. “Joe and his people didn’t want to negotiate. They wanted me to sign that contract or they didn’t want to work with me at all … It was one of those all-or-nothing things.”

With Lurma Rackley no longer involved — she would self-publish her book, Laugh If You Like, Ain’t A Damn Thing Funny, in 2004 — and without Petey Greene’s life story, Joe Fries backed into the idea of a movie about the friendship between Greene and Dewey Hughes. He compelled Hughes’ son — screenwriter Michael Genet — to write a spec script. Genet recalled, “Joe Fries and executive producer Joey Rappa called and told me they wanted to do a movie about Petey and Dewey. As Joe started talking through the story with me, it all came rushing back like a raging river because I had lived it; my father and his best friend were two powerful brothers and the talk of our town, D.C.”

In writing a script about Petey Greene, Michael Genet turned not only to his father’s memories, but his own personal remembrances of Greene. “Whenever he opened his mouth and spoke, I would jump. As funny as he was, even as a boy I could hear the pain in his voice. Listening to him on the radio, I didn’t always understand what he was speaking about. But I couldn’t change that dial; he had me and an entire city mesmerized and hypnotized.” Genet added, “What I found in telling their story was that there is a love shared between black men that we almost never hear tell of. You wont find it defined in any textbooks or dictionaries, yet it exists.”

The script found a fan in Josh McLaughlin at The Mark Gordon Company, who’d also grown up in D.C. McLaughlin recalled, “Hearing Petey’s name, I remembered that there was a community center office dedicated to him. I found it was very difficult, though, to remember a non-blaxploitation movie about an urban city in the late ‘60s/early ‘70s. The three Sidney Poitier/Bill Cosby movies, beginning with Uptown Saturday Night, did depict that period, and of course there was that great documentary concert film Wattstax. There were also several civil rights pictures, but those were Southern-oriented. Those are all good films, but the Black Is Beautiful era in a world of change has largely gone unexplored. Petey’s story, about speaking your mind, was a window into there.”

Writer-director phenom Rick Famuyiwa (The Wood, Brown Sugar) took a crack at the script next. He stated, “What drew me in first was Petey. He was an iconoclast, and a torchbearer of the oral tradition that is an integral part of African-American culture. To me, he represented a bridge between the orators of the civil rights movement and the orators of today, hip-hop musicians. Like a rapper, he was the voice of people who didn’t have a say. What he had to say wasn’t always what people wanted to hear both inside the community and out but it represented a truth he felt had to be expressed. I felt he could be contemporary and relatable to today’s hip-hop-reared generation.”

Kasi Lemmons began her career as an actress — appearing in Candyman and Fear of a Black Hat most memorably — but seeking a challenge beyond just paying the bills, went back to school, enrolling in the film program at the New School for Social Research. She also started writing. Lemmons followed her critically acclaimed gem Eve’s Bayou in 1997 with a disquieting adaptation of George Dawes Green’s novel The Caveman’s Valentine starring Samuel L. Jackson in 2001. She then labored for four years trying to get an adaptation of Jeanette Winterson’s Napoleonic romance The Passion made, but even with Miramax poster girl Gwyneth Paltrow committed, tumultuous times at the studio ultimately squashed the project.

Petey Greene’s Washington came to Lemmons from The Mark Gordon Company as a rewrite. “I read the script years ago, and I respected it, but it didn’t speak my language.” Over time, the material begin speaking to Lemmons. ”I started to hear Petey’s voice in my ear. He was saying: ‘You better direct this thing. Don’t let this out of the house.’ I suddenly fell passionately in love, head over heels. One of the things that happened was the Iraq War. We were invading. People had strong opinions, and they were afraid to say anything. There was fear, you could feel it. People were afraid. I was. So I was attracted to a character who spoke loudly, without censoring, who let the chips fall where they would. There was something about a loud, uncensored, brave voice that attracted me.”

To get the directing job, Lemmons had to wait in line until Fox exhausted the names of the directors in front of her, prestige-wise. She recalled, “Finally I got a meeting. I went in über-prepared. I was very clear in how I wanted it to feel — very alive, very dynamic, immediate. Which is, I believe, how it feels. Instead of looking at the past, have it feel that you could enter it. It would have a movement, a beat. And to put Don Cheadle in it. I knew what people were afraid of — that it might be pretty. I said, ‘I want it to be gorgeous, without being pretty.’ I had to say without saying that I wouldn’t make it feminine. Once I had the movie I never thought about it again.”

Flush from the success of Hustle & Flow, Terrence Howard was briefly attached to play Petey Greene before agreeing to switch parts with Don Cheadle and take on Dewey Hughes instead. Fox ultimately put Talk to Me into turnaround, but Focus Features picked it up and tentatively agreed to provide financing. Lemmons flew to Toronto in September 2005 and with producer J. Miles Dale, started scouting locations. Lemmons recalled, “When I got to Toronto to shoot the movie we worked for 12 to 14 days, but we started getting a bad feeling around Day 10. We kept it together a few more days, but then things unraveled. There were legal issues in transferring the film from Fox to Focus. It was not a pretty feeling.”

With filming pushed back at least until April 2006, Don Cheadle remained on board, but Terrence Howard had to drop out. Chiwetel Ejiofor read for the role of Dewey Hughes and clicked with Cheadle so well that Lemmons used a rehearsal tape between the actors to secure a new financier. Lemmons recalled, “It’s extremely difficult to get money for films with a predominantly black cast. We were independently financed by Sidney Kimmel Entertainment because a producer there, Bill Horberg, felt passionately about the story but we were extremely lucky.” On a budget of $12.5 million, Talk to Me commenced shooting July 2006 in Hamilton, Canada, which was not only less expensive and less restrictive than D.C., but featured architecture locked in the 1960s.

After being screened at Cannes in May and the Los Angeles Film Festival in June, Talk to Me opened in limited release July 2007 in the United States. Critics were mostly supportive. Carina Chocano, The Los Angeles Times: “With its R&B soundtrack and footage of civil unrest, Talk to Me might seem to cover familiar ground. But as an intimate portrait of the complex, fruitful and extremely volatile friendship between trailblazing African American men whose daring came to redefine an industry, it’s fresh and revelatory.” Michael Phillips, The Chicago Tribune: “Talk to Me has a great subject and a great actor working in tandem, reminding audiences that once upon a time media personalities used to fight The Man, not be The Man.”

Distributed by Focus Features, Talk to Me never expanded beyond 193 U.S. theaters, where it was held to $4.5 million at home and $245,115 overseas. Disappointed with the box office, Lemmons was energized by her Petey Greene experience. “At the beginning of the Iraq War, people felt scared to say anything because you were going to be labeled ‘unpatriotic.’ People were very, very cautious and I felt like saying, ‘Wake up, goddamitt!’ I felt like screaming at people all the time. Talk to Me is this perfect anti-censorship film in a way. You’ve got this character that is going to tell it. Whether or not that’s a mistake, he’s going to have to judge later — but at the moment that he is speaking it, nothing is censoring him. I thought that was kind of exciting.”

Should I Care?
Talk to Me is at least five different movies and four of them range in quality from “really good” to “great”. There’s a 15-year friendship between two men from different worlds who become hugely successful by trusting each other. There’s a fantastic social document of an urban community in the late ‘60s. There’s a hugely entertaining story about a community radio station — with Cedric the Entertainer (as “Nighthawk” Bob Terry), Vondie Curtis-Hall (as Sunny Jim Kelsey) and Martin Sheen as progressive owner E.G. Sonderling — that rivals anything on WKRP in Cincinnati. There’s also a good story in here about events that overtake an R&B station on the day of Martin Luther King’s assassination.

By living so many lives in 52 years, the story of Petey Greene was probably never going to gel as a movie, taking creative license with history and losing focus in the last half hour, when Petey’s rise to celebrity isn’t very compelling. That said, Don Cheadle & Chiwetel Ejiofor — two of our best actors — have remarkable chemistry together. The sensational Taraji Henson figures somewhat less into their story, but Cheadle and Taraji can star in every movie as far as I’m concerned. Amid the clashing tones here, one Kasi Lemmons rings truest is how endangered we’ve allowed our speech to become in an effort not to offend anyone. Talk to Me is a testament to a time when even the people who had a lot to lose didn’t back down from challenging the status quo.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Remembering Petey” By Kathryn Sinzinger. The Common Denominator, 8 March 2004

“City core subs for Washington D.C.” By Doug Foley. The Hamilton Spectator, 6 July 2006

“The Ready Return of a True Believer” By Sharon Waxman. The New York Times, 8 July 2007

“Talk to Her” By Amanda S. Miller. The Washington City Paper, 1 August 2007

“Talk to Me Kasi Lemmons” By Emanuel Levy

“Kasi Lemmons Finds the Voice to Speak Out in Talk to Me” By Lily Percy. MovieMaker Magazine, 15 October 2007

What the *&#! Is This About?
In New York City of the 1870s, Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis) is among the well heeled who attend a performance of the opera Faust at the Academy of Music. Newland is taken aback by the entrance of the Countess Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer), who’s left her husband in Europe and become an object of great scandal by returning to her family. Newland is engaged to Ellen’s innocent, pampered cousin May (Winona Ryder). To discourage gossip against the family, he announces his engagement to May at an opera ball that night. When Ellen fails to appear, Newland seems disappointed. He goes out of his way to ingratiate her back into the favor of New York society, with the help of May’s reclusive grandmother Manson Mingott (Miriam Margolyes).

Sensing she might feel lonely, Newland wants to help the free spirited and exotic Ellen. “Is New York such a labyrinth? I thought it was all straight up and down, like 5th Avenue, all the cross streets numbered and big honest labels on everything.” “Everything is labeled,” he tells her, “but everybody is not.” Behind closed doors, Newland questions conformity. In public, he upholds family and tradition. “This was a world balanced so precariously that its harmony could be shattered by a whisper,” says our narrator (Joanne Woodward). The Mingotts enlist Newland to dissuade Ellen from seeking a divorce, but he finds himself falling in love with her. He tries to speed up his engagement to May, who correctly guesses he’s in love with someone else. Newland denies this.

For Newland, responsibility to his mother and sister, who rely on him for every security, comes before his own desires. A year and a half later, Ellen returns to New York when Mrs. Mingott suffers a stroke. Newland goes to meet her at the train station. They share a carriage ride, where a simple touch of Ellen’s wrist qualifies as a consummation of their affair. Ellen refuses to take it any further for fear it will hurt May. Meeting each other at the Metropolitan Museum, Ellen changes her mind about the prospect of an affair. Newland finally decides to confess his feelings to his wife, but she interrupts to tell him that Ellen is returning to her husband. Newland realizes that his family and all of New York society have conspired to send her back to Europe to preserve decorum.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
Edith Wharton wrote most of The Age of Innocence from September 1919 to March 1920 while living in the Rue de Varenne of Paris. Her sister-in-law Minnie Jones helped research 1870s New York society by combing through back issues of the New York Tribune at Yale University Library. Published in 1920 in serial format, then as a novel, The Age of Innocence became a phenomenal bestseller. Columbia University awarded it the Pulitzer Prize for Literature – making Wharton the first woman to receive the honor – and within two years, the author had reaped $50,000 in royalties, including $15,000 from Warner Bros. for the film rights. The studio produced a seven-reel feature in 1924, while RKO mounted a talkie version in 1931 starring Irene Dunne as Countess Ellen Olenska. Neither was a box office success.

60 years after its publication, Jay Cocks – former film critic for Time Magazine – handed a copy of The Age of Innocence to his friend, director Martin Scorsese. Appearing on The Charlie Rose Show in October 1993, Scorsese recalled, “We had known each other since ‘68 and over the years we saw so many different films and over the years we really tried to write scripts together and do all kinds of projects and really got involved with wanting to do many different genres: westerns, costume pieces – you could call them costume pieces – romantic films, musicals, etcetera. And so around 1980 he gave me the book and said, ‘When you decide to do that romance piece,’ he said, ‘this one is you.’ Meaning this has the qualities that you would like.’”

Scorsese continued, “When I finally did read the book – because when he gave me the book I was finishing Raging Bull and I was going into King of Comedy – and in a sense, Raging Bull is a picture that is spinning. It’s like a vortex of emotion. I was very much into that state of mind. So it took me a while to sit down and read the book. But when I did, I reacted immediately to the passion of the love story between Archer and Ellen and especially the fact that it’s unconsummated … maybe because I read it and it was 1987, January and I had gotten older, but I reacted immediately to that. I must tell you that I’ve read other books – I’ve loved the books of Thomas Hardy and other types of classical literature and 19th century English literature – but this one, I said I can make into a film.”

Adapting a screenplay in 1987, Cocks & Scorsese had a first draft in three weeks. The Age of Innocence was set up at Fox, with Scorsese planning to direct as soon as he completed GoodFellas. But when studio chairman Joe Roth weighed the commercial risk of an Edith Wharton novel against Scorsese’s $32 million budget – as well as the director’s unwillingness to reduce his fee – the project was put into turnaround. Scorsese accepted an offer to direct Cape Fear for Steven Spielberg, but even after that movie became a blockbuster, Universal Pictures considered The Age of Innocence too rich for its taste as well. Mark Canton, chairman of Columbia/TriStar, was eager to forge a relationship with Scorsese, who by that time had been crowned “the greatest living American director” by critics. Columbia agreed to finance the film.

Speaking with the New York Times in 2007, Daniel Day-Lewis recalled The Age of Innocence and Martin Scorsese. “He is a mighty man, and when he asks you to do something, you want to do it. I was struggling to escape from English drawing rooms, but because of Martin, I accepted the role in The Age of Innocence.” Michelle Pfeiffer had already worked in drawing rooms as well, but Scorsese was more impressed by the versatility she’d shown in Married to the Mob, as well as Scarface, offering her the role of Ellen Olenska. The actress recalled, “What’s most universal and timeless about the novel and the film is what they have to say about the charades people play, the masks people wear for the sake of what’s socially acceptable. That’s still going strong. And when you see someone’s whole life guided by those standards, it touches a chord. You ask yourself: Will I wind up like Newland Archer? Could I make those sacrifices without becoming bitter?”

Many of those involved with the production of The Age of Innocence seemed enamored with the timelessness of Edith Wharton’s story. Jay Cocks remarked at the time, “The themes – which are love, passion, conscience, commitment – they’re pertinent and immediate and compelling at any time, whether it’s 1993 or 2010. We have the same problems of wanting things we can’t have and having things we don’t want, and that’s what this story is about.” As filming was just getting underway, Martin Scorsese addressed his suitability to portray those themes successfully. “I guess you try to make films about what you know. Merchant and Ivory are maybe more attuned to this kind of society. It is second nature to them, whereas Mean Streets, GoodFellas, Raging Bull are more second nature to me. But a love between two people, whether successful or unsuccessful, is common to everybody.”

By the time The Age of Innocence went before the cameras in March 1992, Scorsese’s visual research consultant – Robin Standefer – had spent two and a half years studying New York society of the 1870s. Her work with the New York Historical Society, the Library of Congress and Edith Wharton scholars was so meticulous that Standefer discovered Wharton had misnamed a Bougeureau painting in her novel. A dozen other consultants were devoted to food, to decorative arts, to etiquette. With its three-story brownstones, the Victorian city of Troy, New York – located on the east bank of the Hudson River across from Albany – stood in for 19th century Manhattan. The opera sequence was filmed over a five-day period inside the Philadelphia Academy of Music, while outside, the streets were covered with soil, as New York had no paved streets in the 1870s.

Accustomed to having a year to cut his films, when The Age of Innocence wrapped in June 1992, Scorsese and editor Thelma Schoonmaker were initially given only five months to have the film ready for Christmas. Then Scorsese’s 79-year-old father Charles – who had played bit roles in many of his son’s films – fell seriously ill. The studio decided against hurrying the greatest living American director. Producer Barbara De Fina recalled, “All the fine cutting and shaping would have suffered, the down-to-the-frame timing that makes it a Scorsese movie. Marty also likes to cut his scenes to the music, not lay in the score afterward.” Adding $2 million to its production costs, Columbia was confident that they were positioning the film for Academy Awards consideration in ‘93, with industry observers predicting a Best Actress win for Michelle Pfeiffer.

Premiering at the Venice Film Festival August 1993, The Age of Innocence opened in the United States and Canada in limited release the following month. The critical praise was faint. Rita Kempley, the Washington Post: “Though lovely to behold, this film isn’t meant to send you home with a song in your heart.” Todd McCarthy, Variety: “An extraordinarily sumptuous piece of filmmaking, The Age of Innocence represents an impeccably faithful adaptation of Edith Wharton’s classic novel, which is both a blessing and a bit of a curse.” Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader: “As beautifully mounted as this production is, Scorsese has a way of letting the decor take over, so that Wharton’s tale of societal constraints comes through only in fits and starts. But it’s a noble failure.”

After test screenings had not gone well, Mark Canton successfully lobbied Scorsese to cut the film from 165 minutes down to 139 minutes. Audiences ignored the film anyway, which grossed $32.2 million in the U.S. The New York Times cited an unnamed prominent theater exhibitor as saying, “It’s a coast picture, a specialized picture that does best on the East Coast and the West Coast but doesn’t hit in the heartland. The women seemed to like it, but it didn’t grab the men at all. A good picture, but not mainstream.” Nominated for five Academy Awards – including Winona Ryder for Best Supporting Actress – only Gabriella Pescucci (Best Costume Design) ended up being honored. Michelle Pfeiffer wasn’t even nominated.

Should I Care?
Stanley Kubrick bent the heads of critics and moviegoers into a question mark in the mid 1970s when the director of 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange announced he was adapting an 1844 novel by William Makepeace Thackeray titled Barry Lyndon. If the choice of material wasn’t visionary in itself, the costume piece starring Ryan O’Neal was rendered to film with nothing less than the artistry of an 18th century impressionist painting. Martin Scorsese routinely cites Barry Lyndon as his favorite Kubrick film and The Age of Innocence is not only the director’s valentine to it, but surpasses it in style, exquisitely interpreting the language and descriptive flow of a Victorian Era novel, while boasting actors and production techniques that make Kubrick’s 1975 film look on many levels like hobby moviemaking.

Dante Ferretti lavishes the period in pictorial detail, with director of photography Michael Ballhaus bathing those scenes in vibrant color (the floral shop scenes alone are worth the price of a rental). Editor Thelma Schoonmaker, title designers Elaine & Saul Bass and composer Elmer Bernstein make The Age on Innocence a Thanksgiving banquet where each guest unwraps a spectacular dish. Like Thanksgiving, all this food – not to mention the many characters, their social positions and veiled agendas – are prone to give the first time viewer indigestion. On repeated viewings, the passion between Wharton’s exiled lovers and the tenacity of those seeking to keep them apart is much easier to distill and be moved by. Daniel Day-Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer are as emotionally compelling here as any other roles I can remember.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
“Scorsese, From the Mean Streets to Charm School” By Alessandra Stanley. The New York Times, 28 June 1992

“The Fine Aging of Innocence” By Steve Daly. Entertainment Weekly, 21 May 1993

“In Age of Innocence, Eternal Questions” By Francine Prose. The New York Times, 12 September 1993

“Recreating The Age of Innocence In Brick and Paint” By Christopher Gray. The New York Times, 24 October 1993

“Innocence & Experience: The Making of The Age of Innocence” (1993)

Hit and Run: How Jon Peters and Peter Guber Took Sony for a Ride in Hollywood. By Nancy Griffin, Kim Masters. Simon and Schuster (1997)

Synopsis
Sunday, August 20, 1972. Memphis-based Stax Records descended on the L.A. Coliseum with most of their recording roster – Isaac Hayes, The Staple Singers, The Bar-Kays, Rufus Thomas and many more – for an eight hour concert to benefit the annual Watts Summer Festival, the observation of the “rebellion” that burned through the community only seven years previous, claiming 34 lives. Passing through the turnstiles were 112,000 people, the largest assembly of African Americans at a non-civil rights event up to that point in history. To record the day, Stax contracted award winning documentary producer David Wolper, and under the direction of Mel Stuart, supplemented the groundbreaking concert with “man on the street” interviews with the people of South Central L.A. and staged performances in the community. Narrating the film and providing his own commentary was a rising comedian named Richard Pryor.

Production history
In the early 1970s, a record company in Tennessee was looking to expand. Cinematographer Larry Clark recalled, “Stax Records – you know – they came out of Memphis and they were kind of like this underground company. They didn’t have the same kind of promotional machine that other record companies had like Motown. But people did identify with the type of music that Stax was putting out there. They could identify with it culturally. Motown was more crossover, whereas Stax was really that down home kind of sound. The mindset of the African American community across the country had changed and we were at that place where Stax Records was. People were lookin’ more towards the African roots, more towards our musical roots. That’s just where we were politically, culturally.”

Concert promoter Forest Hamilton was in Los Angeles to establish a film division – Stax West – when he met writer Richard Dedeaux. Hamilton’s collaboration with Dedeaux on a movie script produced the idea of a benefit concert. Stax president Al Bell seized on donating the proceeds to the Watts Summer Festival, observing the anniversary of the “rebellion” – as it was known in the community – that ignited in the summer of 1965. Most of Stax’s recording roster signed on to perform for free and Bell booked the Los Angeles Coliseum. Stax underwrote most of the expenses and Schlitz Brewing Company stepped up as sponsor. With tickets going for $1, the 90,000-seat arena – home field of the Los Angeles Rams – completely sold out. Wattstax was on its way to becoming the biggest assembly of African Americans ever in one place for a non-civil rights event.

Al Bell recalled, “As it evolved though, the idea emerged, well, you know, when we pull this off, we’ll have pulled something off that hasn’t been done before, but we really ought to consider doing a documentary. Well, then if we do a documentary, what kind of documentary should it be? Well, it should be about something that demonstrates to the world that the music that we sing is a reflection of what goes on in our lives and in our lifestyle. We gotta pull that off. I told Forest, ‘I want to go and find out who the finest documentary producer is in Hollywood.’ We want the very best. And he came back and said: ‘David Wolper.’” The contract between Stax and Wolper gave the producer creative control, with one major exception: Stax retained the right of approval on content relating to Black relationships or feeling, as well as the narration and music contained in the picture.

A budget of $480,000 was set. To direct, New Yorker Mel Stuart was brought into the project. “I got involved with Wattstax because I had done many films for Dave Wolper. I had just finished directing Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and was at liberty. I had some mixed feelings, because I felt I wasn’t that familiar with the Black experience, so this was the condition. I met the staff of Stax: Larry Shaw (who became co-producer of the picture with me), Forest Hamilton and others and said, this is the way I want to do it. I am the only White person on the creative staff. Everything will be siphoned through your feelings, ‘cause I don’t know enough about the Black experience. I can interpret it, but I don’t know it.”

Isaac Hayes recalled, “I thought about the commemoration of what happened, with the Watts riots. We were not celebrating the devastation that went on there. We were commemorating lives that were lost and the coming together of a people that had been suppressed. That’s why all the violence broke out. We were suppressed. You know, police brutality, all those things added up. All that pent up frustration from a people, it just came out. So, somebody struck a match. I don’t know how it started. But I think the society we were livin’ in bred that, gave rise to it. You know, you can suppress a person for so long and they will rise up.” To keep tensions cool, Al Bell lobbied the city to keep the LAPD out of the stadium. Security was all Black and was not permitted to carry firearms. With an estimated 112,000 turning out for the eight-hour concert, no violent incidents were reported.

Reviewing the concert footage, Stuart was disappointed with what he found. “It was like a newsreel, a performance. And I knew we needed more. I knew for the film to be important, it just couldn’t be a record of a concert. And I came to the realization that it’s not the music, it’s how the people feel about the music that’s important, how the people feel about their lives that’s important, if this film is going to have any substance.” Stuart, Larry Shaw and Forest Hamilton turned to the Stax acts unable to make the concert and staged them performing throughout Watts. The Emotions did a gospel song at a small church. Johnnie Taylor tore the roof off The Summit Club singing “Jody’s Got Your Girl and Gone”. Little Milton was filmed in the shadow of the Watts Towers lip synching “Walking the Back Streets and Crying”.

The filmmakers still didn’t feel they had a movie. Larry Clark recalled, “So then we had this assignment: go out into the community and ask people about the blues. So we went out and we found people on the stoop, we found people sitting in front of grocery stores, wherever we could, and we started asking about the blues. Part of it was we would start talkin’ to people, all right, and, just talkin’. Camera’s not even rollin’. Eventually, you kind of get a sense – when people are gettin’ relaxed – and then very quietly you turn on the camera, so that the person talking is not actually aware that you’re shooting.” In search of a narrator – someone to serve as the voice of the community – Forest Hamilton took Mel Stuart to a club to a see a comedian named Richard Pryor. The next night, Stuart returned with a camera crew and sat down at the bar for two hours with Pryor, who gave an improvisational tour-de-force on racial relations, the police or whatever else flew through his mind.

Columbia Pictures agreed to distribute Wattstax and held a world premiere February 1973 in Los Angeles. The film climaxed with Isaac Hayes performing his monumental hit “Theme From Shaft”, and “Soulsville”, songs from the movie Shaft. MGM immediately filed a lawsuit. In order for Hayes to appear in the movie at all, he was called back to pen a new song – “Rolling Down the Mountainside” – and lip synch it on a soundstage, as if it had been performed at Wattstax. The original ending was buried for 30 years. Hayes recalled, “I was angry. I was angry at MGM. Why would they do that? Makin’ money’s one thing, monetarily speaking, but it would have been a contribution to allow that to go just like it was, ‘cause it meant so much to so many people. It was insensitive of them to do that. But – you know – they had control of it. So I don’t know who made that decision, I don’t know if attorneys or what. Again, they were representing that same kind of suppression that caused them riots in the first place. It’s always a struggle.”

Wattstax was generally dismissed in the mainstream press. Vincent Canby, the New York Times: “I don’t mean that the film is in any way fake; it just has the air of something too carefully laid out in advance. It’s so busy being glossy and optimistic that it doesn’t even allow its performers time to create on screen a measure of the excitement they might have created in person.” Though Wattstax was invited to open the Cannes Film Festival in May 1973 and according to Stuart “did very well in Black neighborhoods”, within a year, the film was a memory. An arcane financing deal dividing the film’s rights between Columbia and Fantasy Inc. – the record label that purchased much of the Stax library in 1977 – prevented Wattstax from being broadcast on TV or released on VHS. For decades, Wattstax practically disappeared.

In 2001, film restoration expert Tom Christopher was on the Warner Bros. lot working on a director’s cut of Amadeus. He stumbled into a palette of boxes that hadn’t even been checked into the film storage facility and discovered the original 16mm negative of Wattstax. After some investigating, Christopher also tracked down the missing ending. Fantasy Inc. joined with Columbia and Warner Bros. to restore Wattstax to its original theatrical condition, cleaning the negative and remastering the soundtrack. A 35mm print of Wattstax: The Special Edition screened at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival and was re-released in 12 theaters that June. A long overdue DVD emerged later that year. Fantasy facility manager Scott Roberts commented, “We realized that the performances were really brilliant and quite a cultural find. So we coordinated with Warner Brothers and Columbia to get the film seen by the public as it was originally intended. The feedback we get is that it’s an important cultural document for African-Americans. It was a major event.”

Opinion
To get an idea of how epic the lineup of performers assembled at the L.A. Coliseum in August 1972 was, Isaac Hayes is nearly blown off the stage twice; first by cosmic bad assedness of The Bar-Kays laying down “Son of Shaft” and later in the afternoon, Rufus Thomas – the world’s oldest teenager – busting out “The Breakdown” and “Funky Chicken” and having enough energy left to coax hundreds of festival goers off the football field and back into the stands. It’s one hell of a show, but what makes Wattstax one of the top five concert films of all time is how poetically it weaves the music into the real world of the community surrounding the venue. Interspersed between the delicious drum beats and funky rhythm guitars, the filmmakers give the people a voice. Opening up about their experiences – hopes, fears, relationships – is more even more powerful than what takes place on the stage.

© Joe Valdez

Sources
Official Site Wattstax – The Special Edition Restoration

DGA Interview with Wattstax Director Mel Stuart

“Loud and proud” By James Maycock. The Guardian, July 20, 2002

“Wattstax back: Forgotten film revived with slot in Sundance” By Tommy Perkins. Memphis Business Journal, January 17, 2003

“Sound For Wattstax Concert Film” By Blair Jackson. Mix, June 2003

Wattstax (30th Anniversary Special Edition). Warner Home Video (2003)

Synopsis
Jimmy Rabbitte (Robert Arkins) – a peddler of bootleg tapes who lives with his family in the housing projects on the north side of Dublin – is approached by his friends Outspan (Glen Hansard, guitar) and Derek (Kenneth McCluskey, bass) to take over management of their band. “You had the Frankie Goes to Hollywood album before anyone had ever heard of ‘em. And you were the first to realise they were shite,” Outspan tells him. Jimmy accepts and announces they’re going to be playing “Dublin soul.” His musical aspirations are ribbed by Jimmy Rabbitte Sr. (Colm Meaney), but Jimmy’s newspaper ad brings every musical wanna-be in the neighborhood to the Rabbitte home for auditions. Dean (Félim Gormley, sax), Billy (Dick Massey, drums), Steven (Michael Aherne, piano) and a bus conductor Jimmy heard belting out drunken tunes at a wedding named Declan Cuffe (Andrew Strong) join the band.

Imelda Quirke (Angeline Ball), the most beautiful girl in town, and her friends (Bronagh Gallagher, Maria Doyle Kennedy) are enlisted as backup singers. The final piece becomes a trumpet player named Joey “The Lips” Fagan (Johnny Murphy). Old enough to be their dad, Joey wins over the kids by claiming to have jammed with everyone from Screamin’ Jay Hawkins to Otis Redding to The Beatles. Joey christens their band The Commitments. Tensions arise when Declan develops a star sized ego, the girls seduce Joey the Lips one at a time, and Billy quits before he kills their lead singer. Jimmy replaces the drummer with a skinhead named Mickah Wallace (Dave Finnegan), a psycho who earns a promotion from the band’s doorman. As The Commitments build a local following, Joey promises he can deliver Wilson Pickett – in town performing – to jam with them at their next gig. Stardom appears inevitable.

Production history
In the mid-1980s Roddy Doyle was teaching secondary school (high school) in the Kilbarrack neighborhood of north Dublin, where he’d grown up. He’d written a satiric novel called Your Granny’s A Hunger Striker that publishers he’d submitted it to didn’t even bother opening. Kicking around ideas for a better book, Doyle recalled, “I decided I wanted to write about the type of kids I taught and had become charmed by, really, and whose company I enjoyed, who are typical of the type of place I came from. I didn’t want it to be a school story. I wanted to see them a few years after they would leave school, still young, but adult. Forming a band just struck me as being a good excuse to bring them together. It could have been a football team because I’m also very fond of football, but I can’t see football being funny – or amusing on paper. Also, it would have been restricted to one sex.”

Launching what he dubbed King Farouk Press in 1987, Doyle printed 3,000 copies of The Commitments, dispersed them to local bookstores and built a cult following in Dublin. London publishing firm Heinemann picked up the rights and published the novel to critical and commercial success. It was so well received that interest in a movie began to filter in. Doyle recalls, “They said they loved the book and the first thing they do before your arse is warm on the seat is to tell you how to pull it apart and give it a happy ending. I was kind of frightened by this. I’d two questions I put to would-be producers and Lynda Myles was the only one to answer them correctly. Would the film have stars, because it didn’t seem to make sense to have stars in a film about unknown people? She agreed. I asked then would the language remain intact; not necessarily the expletives but the rhythm of the language, would it be Dublin? And she said yeah, of course.”

London based producer Lynda Myles recalls, “One of the things that was very important to him was he would be allowed to write the script. He wasn’t interested in signing away the rights. And what we agreed was we would start working with him and take it as far as we could go – given that he had never written a screenplay before.” While Doyle kept his day job teaching in Kilbarrack, Myles and her partner Roger Randall Cutler coached the novelist through the finer art of screenplay adaptation, instructing Doyle how to condense scenes. Their patience produced a completed draft, but Cutler admitted, “It somehow was just a wee bit short of the experience of reading the novel. One wanted to have a screenplay that did that and more, if you like.” The producers passed the book to British screenwriters Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais for help.

Dick Clement recalls, “Roger had shown it to us in London. We came back to Los Angeles. We thought we had money to develop movies, had lunch with Alan Parker just to sort of talk about what we were all doing, which we did fairly often. He said, ‘I’d like to do it.’ We called Roger Randall Cutler and said, ‘Now, this will make it more expensive, and it will probably become Alan’s movie, not yours, but at the end of it you’ll have an Alan Parker movie, which is pretty tempting. It took some convincing that this was actually for real. I mean, you can’t blame him, because these things don’t normally happen that way.” In terms of their rewrite, Ian La Frenias added, “It wasn’t a punch-up job. It needed to be rethought to just as a film. And I think Roddy – there was all that wonderful dialogue and characters – but it just had to be retold in a form that made a more dramatic and that more actually happened and there were bigger beats and the growth and the development of the band and their characters.”

Alan Parker – director of Fame, Pink Floyd: The Wall and Mississippi Burning – remembers, “The first time I heard about Roddy Doyle’s book was Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais – who are old friends of mine and are quite wonderful writers – they gave me the book. And I loved the book, for a number of reasons. First of all, it was a very slim volume. And I found myself laughing out loud. It’s a wonderful book because it’s mostly dialogue and all of the descriptions really are in the beauty of language, and if you’re laughing out loud at a book then you think to yourself, ‘Well, maybe the movie’d be all right.’” With the principals of Beacon Communications – Armyan Bernstein and Tom Rosenberg – locking down financing, Parker worked with Clement & La Frenais on the screenplay adaptation. Once a script was ready, casting convened in Dublin.

Andrew Strong (Deco) was discovered after his father – vocalist Rob Strong – was hired to give Parker an idea of what Otis Redding or Wilson Pickett were going to sound like interpreted by an Irish soul band. Strong was 16 when he was offered the part. Robert Arkins was an accomplished trumpet player and frontman of his own band, but was ultimately was offered the part of Jimmy Rabbitte. Of the ten leads, only Bronagh Gallagher (Bernie) and Johnny Murphy (Joey the Lips) had acted before. After five weeks of rehearsals, a 53-day shooting schedule commenced in Dublin. Parker recalls, “Barrytown – which is the mythical place where Roddy has set his book – obviously was based on Kilbarrack, where Roddy was a schoolteacher. And I just found it cinematically a little dull, Kilbarrack, I have to admit.” Parker ended up shooting the film in 44 different locations spread throughout Dublin.

Opening August 1991, critics in the U.S. did anything but applaud The Commitments. Janet Maslin, the New York Times: “As in his earlier Fame, Mr. Parker immerses his audience in a world in which popular art amounts to a communal high, a means of achieving identity and a great escape from the abundant problems of everyday life. As in Fame, he does this with a mixture of annoying glibness and undeniable high-voltage style.” Roger Ebert, the Chicago Sun Times: “Parker never promises us a profound human drama here, and the band is so good that maybe music was the best way to go. But I was left with sort of an empty feeling, as if after the characters were developed into believable people, Parker couldn’t find anywhere to go with them.” Peter Travers, Rolling Stone: “Parker gives Dublin’s poverty the same misplaced gloss he brought to the Japanese refugee camps in Come See the Paradise. And the predictable way in which the band’s nine men and three women argue about music, sex and fame robs the story of urgency.”

The Commitments only managed $14.9 million at the box office in the U.S., and while the film swept the British Academy Awards in 1992, it notched only one Oscar nomination, for Best Editing (Gerry Hambling). A decade after its release, Parker mused, “This film really was quite inexpensive to make for its time. I think it cost $12 million and bear in mind that all the music was done within that budget, and recorded and everything. And it’s the kind of film, I suppose it’s the music which gives it its chance of success as a movie, particularly in the United States, which is, you know, audiences in the States are not really very tolerant of films that are not filmed in the American language. The Irish accent could have been difficult; I don’t think it’s that difficult to follow.” In addition to winning many fans on home video, The Commitments did become a sensation as a two-volume soundtrack album. By 2008, the CDs had sold 12 million copies worldwide.

The popularity of the soundtrack has enabled Kenneth McCluskey and Dick Massey to tour the world with a band calling themselves The Stars of The Commitments. Glen Hansard – who performs and records with his band The Frames – returned to acting in Once (2007) and won an Academy Award for Best Original Song with Markéta Irglová. Soundtrack sales remained brisk enough to get the attention of Miramax Films. In 2000, the studio flew playwright Warren Leight to Dublin to sound out a sequel. But according to McCluskey, “Miramax bought the rights to make a sequel, they commissioned a script writer and he came to Dublin. We got him very drunk and sent him back to New York with a hangover, but nothing ever happened.” Roddy Doyle has maintained that he has no interest whatsoever in a Commitments reunion. “It’s a better story if they break up. I don’t think it would be as enjoyable if they went on became the biggest band in the world.”

Opinion
The Commitments is one of those special movies that just hit at the right place and right time. Within a few short years, construction cranes and venture capital would have made a film about a working class band on the skids in Dublin laughable. But in either a stroke of genius, case of first timer’s luck, or both, the movie caught everyone involved at the peak of their creativity. The audience gets to experience lighting in a bottle in what is probably the most entertaining movie I’ve ever seen featuring actors I’d never heard of. Roddy Doyle’s source material has a sharp ear for the vernacular of the north side of Dublin, but more importantly, contains a self-depreciating wit that slashes through the cheesy melodrama of the musical genre. Jimmy Rabbitte Sr. – an absentee character in the novel – acts as a partial observer in the movie, bringing even greater doses of humor and vitality to the story.

Alan Parker belongs to a class of British directors whose commercials won lots of citations in the 1970s, but unlike most of his films, The Commitments is focused on its characters, its dialogue and its ideals as opposed to lighting effects or trick editing. And unlike a lot of shitty musicals (or worse, American Idol) the emphasis here isn’t on how music can transform you into a superstar, but on what music can do for your dignity. Music supervisor G. Marq Roswell is one of many who deserve credit along with Parker for the four-star soundtrack. The Commitments’ versions of “Mustang Sally”, “Slip Away” and “Try A Little Tenderness” have stood up against the original recordings by Wilson Pickett, Clarence Carter and Otis Redding. The amateur cast is equal parts energetic and natural, particularly Robert Arkins, whose self-conducted interviews in the tub should resonate with anyone who ever dreamed of rising above their surroundings.

© Joe Valdez

Sources
“Something of a Hero: An Interview with Roddy Doyle” By Karen Sbrockey. Interview Literary Review, Summer 1999

“When Roddy Met Trudy” By Ciaran Carty. Sunday Tribune, February 25, 2001

The Commitments. 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment (2004)