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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In the month of July, I take a look at films released in my very favorite film stock and aspect ratio: black & white in anamorphic. Unless they’re being financed with credit cards, movies are rarely shot like this anymore because they’re impossible to sell to television. Yet these dreams sneak onto Turner Classic Movies every now and again …

Manhattan (1979)
Directed by Woody Allen
Written by Woody Allen & Marshall Brickman
Produced by Charles H. Joffe
96 minutes

Of the 39 feature films he’s directed and written so far, neither the Oscar winning Best Picture Annie Hall nor the handful of other treasures in the Woody Allen vault have the timeless magnificence of Manhattan. Allen discussed the idea of shooting a movie in anamorphic widescreen with cinematographer Gordon Willis on the set of Interiors in 1977. Their ambition was to make a movie that captured an intimacy typically blown away by epic framing and since the story would take place in New York, use black & white film stock to express the vibe of the city. Allen — who grew up in Brooklyn and was introduced to Manhattan via Hollywood movies – began coming up with scenes as he listened to Michael Tilson Thomas recordings of George Gershwin. He then wrote a script with Marshall Brickman.

Manhattan is a valentine for the other 364 days on the calendar. Allen’s intent was to make a picture more serious than Annie Hall but funnier than Interiors, “a serious picture that had laughs in it”. Manhattan fits that bill better than just about any movie you could name. Allen’s one-liners aren’t the knee slappers they may have once been, but the film’s visual and symphonic splendor are as enthralling as they ever were. Expressing the resplendence of a city as it existed mostly in his own dreams, Manhattan volleys between Allen’s contention that we’re being too tough on ourselves, while in the moments that matter most, not being nearly tough enough. Diane Keaton and Mariel Hemingway — far sexier in other roles — have never seemed more beautiful than they are here, while Woody gives his most nuanced performance.

Four friends gather for supper at Elaine’s. Isaac Davis (Woody Allen) is a 42-year-old writer working on a book set in the city he adores. His 17-year-old girlfriend Tracy (Mariel Hemingway) has more intelligence and maturity than Isaac’s ego will give her credit for. His best friend Yale (Michael Murphy) is married to Emily (Anne Byrne) but leaving the restaurant, reveals to Isaac that he’s become involved with another woman. Isaac is unable to offer much relationship advice as his second ex-wife Jill (Meryl Streep) has taken up with a woman and is publishing a tell-all memoir about their marriage, or as she calls it, “an honest account of our breakup.” While Tracy asserts that she’s in love with Isaac, he advises the teenager to view their relationship as little more than “a detour on the highway of life.”

Visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Isaac and Tracy run into Yale and his mistress: journalist and neurotic dingbat Mary Wilkie (Diane Keaton). She offends Isaac by disparaging all of his cultural heroes — from Heinrich Boll to Ingmar Bergman — in under a minute. Nervous about his future once he quits a job writing for a hip sketch TV show, Isaac bumps into Mary at a benefit for the Museum of Modern Art and ends up wandering Manhattan with her until sunrise. Yale develops a guilty conscience after breaking off his affair and when Isaac maintains that he’s not serious about Tracy, compels his friend to give Mary a call. Isaac and Mary leap right into a relationship, which ends up being undermined when Mary confesses she still has feelings for Yale. Realizing he made a mistake by dumping Tracy, Isaac sets out to make things right.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average 16,781 users: 92% for Manhattan

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

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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

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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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Black Book (2006)
Written by Gerard Soeteman & Paul Verhoeven
Directed by Paul Verhoeven
Produced by San Fu Maltha, Jens Meurer, Teun Hilte, Jeroen Beker, Frans van Gestel, Jos van der Linden
Running time: 145 minutes

Should I Care?
At the age of 67, Paul Verhoeven got his filmmaking groove back by following the flight plan taken by so many Hollywood émigrés before him. He bought a plane ticket home — Holland, in this case — and made the Dutch/German language World War II action thriller Black Book, his first film outside the studio system in fifteen years. A similar approach worked wonders for the careers of Neil Jordan, Alfonso Cuarón and Mira Nair among others, but what Verhoeven comes back with needs almost too many qualifiers to work as a movie. “Yes, it’s got all the realism of a soap opera. No, it’s not meant to be taken as history. Yes, it’s ridiculous and laughable at times, but…” But this isn’t a very good film. A favorite among lovers of cinema and cable movie T&A alike, Black Book stubbornly refuses to take anything it pretends to be about seriously. The end product is watchable, but difficult to get hot and bothered about in any way.

To the credit of Verhoeven and his casting directors, Black Book boasts lead performances that make international stars out of Dutch actress Carice van Houten and Sebastian Koch, a German best known for his sympathetic performance in the Oscar winning The Lives of Others (2006). Van Houten & Koch spark a warm and sensual and adult dynamic that isn’t too far removed from the one shared by Jane Fonda & Donald Sutherland in Klute. They’re good enough to watch in just about anything, including a cheeseball action farce that makes The Dirty Dozen feel like a documentary. The problem with Black Book isn’t how much it resembles a comic book, but how it swerves between two completely different movies: a stylish historical drama exploring war, genocide and anti-Semitism, and a popcorn action flick with killings and boobies. Verhoeven aims for both dartboards and hits neither.

So, What’s This About?
In October 1956, a sightseeing bus reaches a kibbutz on the Dead Sea in Israel. Music draws a Dutch tourist named Ronnie (Halina Reijn) to a classroom, where she recognizes the songstress as a woman she knew during the war: Ellis de Vries (Carice van Houten). The discovery that Ellis is Jewish comes as a surprise to Ronnie and once she departs, “Ellis” — whose real name is Rachel Stein — returns in memory to occupied Holland of September 1944. Hidden from the Germans by a farmer who demands Bible study in exchange for room and board, Rachel loses her sanctuary when an American bomber dumps its ordinance on the farm. A Dutch police inspector with sympathies to the resistance tracks Rachel down and agrees to arrange passage for her across enemy lines. After visiting the family attorney (Dolf de Vries) to extract what she can in cash and jewels, Rachel is reunited with her brother, mother and father aboard a barge headed for Belgium.

Rachel’s party is intercepted by a patrol led by the Obersturmführer (Waldemar Kobus) whose stormtroopers gun down everyone on board. Rachel escapes and is spirited by the resistance into The Hague. She accepts work in a produce factory whose owner (Derek de Lint) leads a communist cell. He ultimately offers Rachel a different line of work: using her femininity to assist a valiant resistance fighter (Thom Hoffman) smuggling contraband across Holland. Evading capture aboard a train, Rachel meets Ludwig Muntze (Sebastian Koch), a handsome stamp collector who happens to command the S.S. in Holland. Making an impression on the benevolent German officer, Rachel is tasked with using any means at her disposal to gain his trust. Muntze awards her a clerical position at S.S. headquarters, where Rachel uncovers a plot between the Nazis and their collaborators to murder and rob Jewish refugees. Rachel finds herself entangled in loyalties to her country, her faith and her lover.

Who Made It?
Paul Verhoeven was born in Amsterdam one year before the outbreak of World War II. Spending a segment of his childhood in Nazi occupied Holland, he transitioned from studying mathematics and physics at the University of Leiden to the Royal Dutch Navy, where a hobby in filmmaking became his predominant interest. A career in Dutch television as creator of the swashbuckler Floris — starring Rutger Hauer — led to several acclaimed films in Holland: Soldier of Orange (1977), Spetters (1980), The Fourth Man (1983). Outgrowing his native land, Verhoeven immigrated to Los Angeles and found success juggling sex and violence with flashes of social commentary: RoboCop (1987), Basic Instinct (1992), Starship Troopers (1997). His experiences with the  special effects extravaganza Hollow Man (2000) proved a career catharsis for Verhoeven, who turned to Dutch collaborator Gerard Soeteman to draft potential projects set in historical Europe.

During the research phase of Soldier of Orange, Soeteman & Verhoeven had amassed enough material for another movie on the Dutch resistance during World War II, but it took two decades for Soeteman to realize that what the story needed to gel was a female protagonist. Titled Zwartboek (Black Book), the script was the consensus favorite among investors Verhoeven had reached out to in Europe for his next film. Securing a budget of roughly 16 million euros (21 million dollars) through a myriad of financiers in Holland, Germany, the United Kingdom and Belgium, Verhoeven collaborated with a German director of photography, Dutch art designer, British composer and actors completely unknown to most Americans. The Dutch/German language action thriller drew some of the most positive critical notices of Verhoeven’s career and was even named official entry of The Netherlands for Best Foreign Film at the 2007 Academy Awards.

How’d They Do It?
Hollow Man lifted off to the biggest box office of Paul Verhoeven’s career, but landed with a thud among critics and moviegoers alike. Waiting on Hollywood to send him material, the director lamented, “The scripts that have come to my office have all been, let’s say, pretty tame. The scripts that really interest me are a little bit edgy and have a little tension between the audience and the film itself. Those kinds of scripts have not been written much, or at least they didn’t get to me. There has been, mostly because of 9/11, an enormous amount of escapism. I mean, if you see the big successes of the last five or six years, they are all highly into fantasyland. Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Spider-Man — they’re all basically things that are not true and are not dealing with the reality of the world.” He added, “American movies in the last years have gone in the direction of non-confrontational, easy on the audience, pleasant to the audience, escapist, not confronting reality much, or not integrating reality to a strong and harsh degree, like life is.”

Screenwriter Gerard Soeteman had labored over three projects for Verhoeven to direct and each was set in the Old World. An adaptation of Boris Akunin’s bestselling 19^th century detective novel The Winter Queen was at the top of the list, while a return to the grounds Soeteman & Verhoeven had sowed in Soldier of Orange was stuck in neutral. The director recalled, “That material was already there in 1978 and we thought it was great, but it showed more the shadows than the light. We could not solve the script immediately. It took us twenty years to solve it! Soldier of Orange brought us this material, and we couldn’t use it.” He added, “We put the material aside and thought about it for twenty years. And then we changed protagonists. The original protagonist of the movie was the young boy in the sailboat. It’s a very small part now, but it was the main part. We could never figure out how he would be able to infiltrate the German headquarters. Whatever we came up with, it seemed contrived. When Gerard changed it around, well, she uses her sexuality to get inside.”

Verhoeven elaborated on the collaboration. “Gerard sets out the structure and the general drift. He monitors story development and character development. He writes the first draft and the next drafts. I then add things and change things, scenes as well as characters. If my memory serves, I came up with Ronnie, as I did with Maja in Spetters. The scenes at the end in the prison camp are mostly mine. I have made a significant contribution to the script. For most films I made with Gerard, the script was mostly his so I didn’t get a credit. But this time my contribution was such that Gerard and I both felt that we should share the writing credits.” He added, “Gerard and I have always clicked. We are from a similar background, even though our characters are very different. Gerard is only two years older than me. We were both children in the war, we went to grammar school, studied at Leiden University, and both did our national service. And then we met on the TV series Floris. With such similar backgrounds it’s easier to work together than when you are from different worlds.”

By Verhoeven’s estimation, between 700 and 800 documents were referenced to form the basis of the script, notably a report by a member of the Dutch Nazi Party named H.W. van der Vaart Smit, who was imprisoned after the war. “We have weaved some of those stories into Black Book. This is what makes the film so provocative, because nobody has yet shown how we treated our prisoners in 1945. But that wasn’t our only source of inspiration for the film. Picture archives were another. For instance pictures of the camp guards. Members of the provisional army and resistance people. After all, after the war everybody claimed to have been in the resistance. There were lots of dubious people there. If you look at those pictures, you wouldn’t have wanted to be at their mercy. They way they strut when they had arrested a Dutch Nazi, makes you fear the worst.” Rachel Stein was modeled after three Dutch women who lived under Nazi occupation: resistance fighters Esmée van Eeghen and Kitty van der Have and singer Dora Paulsen.

With a script for Black Book in hand by the end of 2003, Verhoeven reached out to Jos van der Linden, production manager on Spetters. Van der Linden introduced the director to San Fu Maltha, former head of acquisitions for Polygram International who’d launched Fu Works, an Amsterdam based production company. Verhoeven enthused, “San Fu felt right immediately; because of his collaboration with Jos, because he’s increasingly putting himself on the map as a producer, and because he’s got this international air about him. He’s got lots of contacts abroad, and that was important for this film. After all, Black Book is a big international production. And I my intuition didn’t lie, because San Fu has made some excellent financial deals.” By the closing of the 2005 Cannes Film Festival, Verhoeven’s next film was lined up with Maltha and producers Jens Meurer (for Berlin based Egoli Tossell), Teun Hilte (London based Clockwork Pictures) and Jeroen Beker & Frans van Gestel (Amsterdam based Motel Films). German private media fund VIP Mediafonds came on board as majority financier.

Verhoeven mused, “Financially, a disaster, getting money from all these different sources, about fifteen, and with the distribution deals, then you have thirty deals or something like that. But it’s a co-production with Germany, England, Holland, and Belgium, and all the post-production had to be done in England. In Babelsburg, we used all the interiors there, and there was a lot of extra German funding because there were three very important German parts. Then, of course, we had the Dutch funds, television funds, and then there is this European fund, situated in Strasbourg, I think, so to keep that money going parallel to how much money you’ve spent is — well, it’s not parallel at all. So from that point of view, the United States is ten times easier. Certainly if you work for a studio, that’s not a concern in any way. Artistically, of course, it was paradise, because nobody told me ‘This is too violent or too sexy, too many breasts, too much this, too much that, morally too ambiguous.’ Or ‘That’s not possible — a Jewish girl and a Nazi officer — it’s morally unacceptable,’ et cetera. None of that. We had the script, and the producers said, ‘Good, let’s shoot this.’”

When it came to casting, Verhoeven found himself out of sorts on native soil. “I had lived for twenty years in the United States so when I came back to Holland I had to catch up a little bit on the Dutch film industry. I used some of the actors I worked with before I came to America like Derek de Lint and Thom Hoffman. But the movie was mostly about younger people. I had seen a movie called Minoes where Carice played a cat. So I must say that I dismissed her immediately, but my casting director felt that that was probably not representative of her and brought her in on the first day of the auditions. Even though we did auditions for two months after that it was clear that on the day we met her that she was right for the part. She is phenomenal. She’s a real big talent. She does all her own singing. Often I was forced to back off as director and say to her, ‘Forget my instructions. Do what you want.’ She is probably the most talented actor that I’ve ever worked with.” For Black Book, Verhoeven reunited with his Dutch casting director Hans Kemna.

Filming was underway in The Hague, Netherlands by August 2005, with director of photography Karl Walter Lindenlaub lighting sets designed by Wilbert Van Dorp. Verhoeven explained, “I was never sure that I would shoot the next week because the money would not come in. You’re working with a crew that has not been paid for months and they do it because they like that I did this movie and that it was a big movie and a European movie so they stayed. Otherwise they would have left. Now that is not a pleasant feeling, to work with a crew that is partially not paid, and to go do it. So I felt that was a bit nightmarish and I feel it’s the case with every independent movie, and there are many of them that you start and they fall apart.” After wrapping interior scenes at Studio Babelsburg in December 2005, Verhoeven lobbied producers for a prologue in Israel.  “I tried to convince them that it was absolutely necessary that this way: Israel at the beginning and the end what happened to her. How did she evaluate the situation with the Dutch? And of course, she evaluated it by turning her back on Holland and going to Israel.”

Screened at the Venice Film Festival and Toronto Film Festival in September 2006, Black Book opened later that month in The Netherlands. Arriving April 2007 in the United States, critics seemed shocked how much they enjoyed it. Manohla Dargis, The New York Times: “Mr. Verhoeven’s cartoon realism, accentuated by the sitcom lighting, the primitively staged gun battles, the gnashing teeth, whizzing bullets and thundering score, has its hard-surface appeal. Designed for distraction (the frequently timed gunfights suggest as much), Black Book works only if you take it for the pulpiest of fiction, not a historical gloss, its stated claims to ‘true events’ notwithstanding.” Marrit Ingman, The Austin Chronicle: “The action set-pieces, double crosses, and narrow escapes are handsomely mounted and suspenseful as a Saturday matinee. In the production notes, Verhoeven cites David Lean as an influence, and the film has Lean’s epic scope and crackerjack timing, if not his mannerly refinement.” Andrew O’Hehir, Salon.com: “It’s a messy, colorful big-screen entertainment that veers from sober period piece to outrageous melodrama, which is to say it’s a Verhoeven movie.”

Rounding up $4.3 million in the United States, Black Book sold $22.3 million in tickets overseas. Hailed as a comeback for Verhoeven, Black Book was submitted by The Netherlands to vie for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. The director reported, “The reviews in Europe have been very positive in general. Well, except in Holland. Many reviews in Holland were negative. It’s been the biggest R-rated hit there in twenty-five years, the audience has embraced it. The last one that was that successful was my own movie, Spetters. But the critics have been very tough. Some of them feel I have been Americanized, and I think it’s true that I have used my American experience to create a more driving narrative. Which is often absent in European films, even the greatest ones. In La Dolce Vita, a classic of European filmmaking, the story is nearly zero. There is no compelling narrative. Working in the American film industry has made me want to make movies with compelling, driving narratives. But Holland has always been, well, like it says in the New Testament, no prophet is honored in his own country.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
“A Conversation With Director Paul Verhoeven” By Bill Hunt. The Digital Bits, 29 December 2000

“Verhoeven’s Black Book Cranks Up In The Hague” By Robbert Blokland. ScreenDaily.com, 29 August 2005

Black Book — Production Notes

“Director Paul Verhoeven Discusses Black Book” By Rebecca Murray. About.com, 31 March 2007

“Paul Verhoeven” By Scott Tobias. The A.V. Club, 3 April 2007

“Paul Verhoeven Gets Real”By Andrew O’Hehir. Salon.com, 6 April 2007

“Verhoeven’s Dutch Comeback” By Karl Rozemeyer. Premiere Magazine, April 2007

“Back To Basics: Talking to Paul Verhoeven” By Damon Smith. Bright Lights Film Journal, August 2007

“Paul Verhoeven Interview” By Daniel Robert Epstein. UGO.com

Laurel Canyon (2003)
Written by Lisa Cholodenko
Directed by Lisa Cholodenko
Produced by Antidote Films/ Kuleshov Productions
MPAA rating: “R for sexuality, language and drug use”
Running time: 103 minutes

Should I Care?
Watching Lisa Cholodenko’s sophomore film the year it was released, I didn’t care much for it. Laurel Canyon never picks up the gauntlet thrown down by Pulp Fiction, L.A. Confidential or Boogie Nights, the modern day standard bearers of pop culture soaked decadence in the City of Angels. In a bummer, the characters actually seem intelligent and reasonably well-intentioned enough to keep from selling their souls to the devil. But what the movie lacks in visceral thrills it makes up for in a kind of finely honed reserve, recalling Five Easy Pieces or Shampoo, two ‘70s classics Cholodenko and her collaborators seem to be channeling here. Laurel Canyon is much better than generally given credit for at the time, a well crafted and strongly performed drama. This is one movie where the devil is definitely in the details.

The chief reason to see Laurel Canyon is Frances McDormand playing a record producer willing to own up to her failings while everyone around her traffics in bullshit. This includes her son, played by Christian Bale, before his earnestness as a master thespian got a bit ridiculous. Here, Bale’s scenes opposite McDormand are tense and poignant and ring true. Natascha McElhone and Alessandro Nivola — lonesome presences in the movies these days — are both insatiably watchable in supporting roles. Tip toeing away from exploitation, Cholodenko still delivers one of the most intensely erotic scenes between two clothed actors I’ve seen. Cinematographer Wally Pfister and production designer Catherine Hardwicke lend Laurel Canyon an exquisitely detailed look, one that needs a second viewing to appreciate.

So, What’s This About?
Leaving their lives in the Ivy League to begin promising careers in Los Angeles, Sam (Christian Bale) is to start a residency in psychiatry at a mental hospital, while his fiancée Alex (Kate Beckinsale) is finishing her Ph.D in genomics. They land at the Laurel Canyon enclave of Sam’s mother Jane Bentley (Frances McDormand), a record producer with a history of soured relationships, including the one with her son. Sam was under the impression that she’d vacated to her beach house in Malibu, but arrives to discover his uninhibited mom smoking a bong with four British pop rockers. Not only is Jane still at work on their album, she’s shacked up with the band’s charismatic frontman (Alessandro Nivola), a singer/songwriter her son’s age.

While Sam rejects the free wheeling environment he was raised and doesn’t approve of his mother’s choices, Alex loses interest in her dissertation and sits in on the band’s recording sessions, smoking some weed with Jane and being solicited for her musical opinion. Instead of looking for a house to rent, Alex begins spending more time with Jane and is drawn into that world. Meanwhile, an Israeli colleague named Sara (Natascha McElhone) starts giving Sam rides to work. His controlled, decisive nature attracts her, but Sam refuses to indulge his physical urges for his fellow psychiatrist. Realizing how distanced he’s become from his girlfriend, Sam heads to the band’s record release party at the Chateau Marmont. There, he finds out how deep his girlfriend has fallen into his mother’s orbit.

Who Made It?
Lisa Cholodenko grew up in the San Fernando Valley. Exposed to the experimental film program at San Francisco State as an undergrad, she lucked into a job as a post-production assistant on Boyz N the Hood and worked as an assistant editor on Used People. Cholodenko was accepted into the graduate film program at Columbia University, where director Milos Forman became one of her mentors. She wrote, produced and directed two acclaimed short films — Souvenir (1994) and dinner party (1997) — that dealt with the fractured love lives of female couples. Her feature film writing and directing debut High Art earned Cholodenko the Waldo Salt Screenwriting award at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival and revitalized the career of Patricia Clarkson, who co-starred with Ally Sheedy and Radha Mitchell.

Editor Amy Duddleston was cutting High Art with Cholodenko when she brought in Joni Mitchell’s 1970 LP “Ladies of the Canyon”. Inspired by what the songwriter’s life might have been like in that place and time, Cholodenko wrote a script, hoping to jump into her next film quickly. Reteaming with High Art producers Jeffrey Levy-Hinte and Susan Stover, the project took four years to get cast and financed. The director ultimately met Frances McDormand — game for a role that called for nudity — and once the Oscar winner was cast, Christian Bale and Kate Beckinsale became interested. Levy-Hinte raised roughly $5 million in financing and was able to accommodate McDormand’s family schedule as well as the Cannes Film Festival, with Laurel Canyon finished in time to screen at the Director’s Fortnight in May 2002.

How’d They Do It?
Lisa Cholodenko elaborated on the origin of her sophomore feature film. “I think the first germ of the story came when I was finishing up High Art. I was in the editing room in New York with my editor Amy Duddleston. We’d been cutting for a long time and to keep our energy up we took a lot of breaks and listened to a lot of music. One morning, Amy brought in the Joni Mitchell record ‘Ladies of the Canyon’. I hadn’t heard that record in a long time. We listened to it beginning to end. I was looking at the cover — a painting that Joni Mitchell did of a hillside up in Laurel Canyon where she lived at the time. We started spinning a yarn about people who lived up there: what their lives were like, what Joni Mitchell’s life must have been like.”

She continued, “Laurel Canyon is a strange island in the middle of Los Angeles: it’s a kind of time warp wedged between Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley. It has its own history and morality and culture that’s distinctive from anywhere else in L.A. It has a kind of hippie quality and it also has a timeless quality. It has a lawless quality to it as well, which seems to change each decade. Rumor has it was an outpost for Hollywood players to conduct their clandestine affairs and in the ‘60s and ‘70s it had the rock ‘n roll drug culture which gave way to a more seedy hard drug/ porno culture — the Boogie Nights era. Then recently there was a resurgence of the younger movie industry and nouveau music culture. I think it’s always been attractive to people who are less conventional or are interested in being identified with a culture that is less conventional.”

Cholodenko hoped to get her second feature off the ground as soon as possible. That process took four years. She recalled, “And I’d say those four years were about half of the writing stage. I’m a slow writer and I’m a detailed writer and I had to work in between drafts, I guess. I went and directed some television and did other rewrite jobs and whatever. So it was about two and a half years later and we were ready to try to get this film made and October Films — who originally had the movie, was developing it before it had become USA Films — and by the time that we were sort of ready to get it rolling, USA not only in trouble and soon to become Focus Features, but decided to put it in turnaround. They wanted to do much, you know, sort of broader and bigger films.”

After USA Films officially lost interest in the summer of 2001, the prospect of Laurel Canyon being produced was looking unlikely. “Jeffrey Levy-Hinte and Susan Stover and I, we were moving on from High Art to sort of create an environment we had created on High Art, which was done independently and anyway, we realized that was how we were going to have to go and around that time, there was supposed to be a strike in the industry, a writers strike and an actors strike. So not only were we kind of at a stalemate with sort of getting studio money to make this movie, but we were figuring we’d kind of missed the window of opportunity because everyone was shutting down and there was no cast that was going to work because they were going to strike and the rest of it, so it was a pretty dark season with Laurel Canyon for a while.”

Fortunately, the threatened 2001 actors strike never materialized. Then, the Academy Award winning Best Actress of Fargo read Cholodenko’s script and wanted to meet her. Frances McDormand recalled at the time, “I had this general idea that I wanted to do nudity. I’m 45 years old. A couple of years ago I decided, ‘All right, it’s time.’ I wasn’t really interested in that when I was 25. But now that I’m 45, I’m kind of pleased with myself.” She added, “There’s nothing wrong with middle-aged people expressing their sexuality on film. Lisa wrote a great part for a 45-year-old woman. It’s not because I get to be nude in a swimming pool, but because she’s an interesting person. Lisa was really conscientious in making her three-dimensional.” Once McDormand came aboard, other actors suddenly got interested.

Christian Bale appraised his collaboration with Lisa Cholodenko by stating, “The story seemed to be so highly personal to her. From working with Lisa, I know she has a great deal going on internally — always — even if she doesn’t think she’s communicating it. I found her face to be very easily readable, and I found myself kind of looking at her rather than listening to her. I would imagine that her real enjoyment comes through the writing of a film. I think she’s really more interested in the whole emotional side of it. You get some directors who fall in love with the whole technical side of it and the physical staging of things, but she is definitely someone whose first love is the whole emotional side of what’s happening.” With a cast finally coming together, producer Jeffrey Levy-Hinte’s Antidote Films was able to raise around $5 million in financing.

Director of photography Wally Pfister — heavily in demand after shooting Memento and Insomnia for Christopher Nolan — signed up to work with Lisa Cholodenko on Laurel Canyon. He recalled, “From the outset, Lisa and I had a common language that we wanted to use in the storytelling of this film. It was based in par on films of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, by great filmmakers like Mike Nichols, Hal Ashby and Robert Altman. Not so much in the look of the films, but more in the tone and spirit of the storytelling.” Cholodenko confessed, “The big inspiration for this film was The Graduate. And another film I adore is Five Easy Pieces. Those are two classic films of young-person-on-existential-journey to deal with family, and the trappings of expectation, and sort out their identity on their own terms, and those kinds of things.”

Jeffrey Levy-Hinte owned a property in Santa Monica Canyon designed by architect Richard Neutra that he was planning to tear down and restore to its original architecture; production designer Catherine Hardwicke helped transform the location into Jane’s house. In the search for the music Jane would been working on, music supervisor Karyn Rachtman and Cholodenko settled on two songs written by Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse: “Someday I Will Treat You Good” and “Shade & Honey”. Alessandro Nivola lent his vocals to the tunes, while Lou Barlow, Imaad Wasif and Russ Pollard of Folk Implosion were cast as his bandmates. Production was scheduled to accommodate Frances McDormand, who lives in New York with husband Joel Coen and their (at that time) 8-year-old son. Laurel Canyon was finished in time for it to screen in the Director’s Fortnight of the 2002 Cannes Film Festival.

While the filmmakers beat the clock getting Laurel Canyon finished, critics praised the film’s star and little else. J. Hoberman, The Village Voice: “The spectacle of pretty people floating languidly across the screen notwithstanding, Laurel Canyon is short on conviction and long on contrivance. McDormand, however, has a ball.” Manohla Dargis, The Los Angeles Times: “There wasn’t a moment in the film that I didn’t enjoy, but neither was there anything that got my mind or heart racing. Cholodenko is clearly talented but it’s less clear whether she’s afraid to push harder or whether this is as far as she can go.” Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun Times: “Not a successful movie — it’s too stilted and pre-programmed to come alive — but in the center of it McDormand occupies a place for her character and makes that place into a brilliant movie of its own.”

Following a screening at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival, Sony Pictures Classics acquired domestic distribution rights to Laurel Canyon. A month later, Good Machine picked up international rights, but when the film opened March 2003 in the United States, it would tally only $3.6 million at the box office, adding $748,847 overseas. Cholodenko found the reaction very familiar. “What I find with High Art is people tell me they enjoy it a lot on the second and third viewing and I think with this film it’s sort of the same. There’s a lot of detail and I think it’s fun to go back and discover it after you’ve already seen the film, you’d be able to focus on different characters doing the different plotlines and stuff like that. The detailey stuff. That’s what I like in films. I’m kind of a detailey person.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
Laurel Canyon – Press Kit

“Lisa Cholodenko” By Jennifer M. Wood. MovieMaker, 21 March 2003

“Interview with Lisa Cholodenko” By Marty Mapes. Movie Habit, 3 April 2003

“Lady of the Canyon” By Steve Bloom. High Times, 4 April 2003

Laurel Canyon. DVD audio commentary with Lisa Cholodenko. Sony Pictures Home Entertainment (2003)

“Cinematography Serves the Story” By Jennifer M. Wood. MovieMaker, 3 February 2007

Adventureland (2009)
Written by Greg Mottola
Directed by Greg Mottola
Produced by This Is That Productions/ Sidney Kimmel Entertainment
Running time: 107 minutes

So, What’s This About?
In the summer of 1987, Oberlin College grad James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg) is notified by his parents (Wendie Malick, Jack Gilpin) that money he was depending on to help pay for a European backpacking trip will no longer be available. Unable to help their son pay rent when he enrolls at Columbia in the fall, James returns to Pittsburgh for the summer looking for work. A comparative literature and Renaissance studies major, the only job he finds he’s really qualified for is at the scruffy amusement park Adventureland, where his childish neighbor Tommy Frigo (Matt Bush) works.

James is passed over for a position in Rides when the couple that runs the park (Bill Hader, Kristen Wiig) concludes that he’s more of a Games man. His co-workers include the mopey Joel (Martin Starr) and a streetwise girl named Em (Kristen Stewart) who saves James from getting knifed by a customer. Em reveals a similar taste in music (The Replacements, Big Star) and that she’s headed for NYU in the fall. But James’ affection for Em is tempered when he discovers she’s been sleeping with Adventureland’s 30-year-old married maintenance man (Ryan Reynolds).

Who Made It?
Greg Mottola grew up in Dix Hills, a town on Long Island, New York. After receiving a BFA in art from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Mottola earned an MFA in film at Columbia. His debut feature film The Daytrippers (starring Hope Davis, Parker Posey and Liev Schreiber) won the Audience Award at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival. Mottola envisioned an auteur’s career for himself like that of Stanley Kubrick or Woody Allen, writing and directing his own material. But when Columbia Pictures put Mottola’s planned sophomore film – The Life of the Party, a road trip ensemble to feature John Cusack — into turnaround in 1999, Mottola fell into a funk that resulted in little if any writing.

Desperate to get back behind the camera in 2001, Mottola accepted an offer from producer Judd Apatow to direct episodes of Fox’s coed dorm comedy Undeclared. Surrounded by a cast and crew much younger than himself, Mottola started thinking about writing a film about first love. Working with producers Ted Hope and Anne Carey of This Is That Productions, Mottola was ready to send his script Adventureland out to investors when Apatow offered Mottola the job of directing a feature: Superbad. The teen comedy’s runaway critical and commercial success in 2007 led to Sidney Kimmel Entertainment and Miramax Films agreeing to split financing for Adventureland.

How’d They Do It?
Greg Mottola had moved from New York to Los Angeles to work on Undeclared when the idea for what became Adventureland began to percolate. Mottola recalled, “I was working on the TV show Undeclared and there were so many young people in the cast and on the writing staff, it made me very nostalgic for being young, because I was one of the older people there. I thought, you know, I’d like to write a movie about first love. Thinking back to the first relationship where it wasn’t just infatuation or horniness, it was an actual relationship and you saw the person and loved them in spite or because of their flaws.”

He added, “I was a very naïve young man at one point, and had lots of romantic illusions. I remember back to like the first girlfriend. I saw that person for who they were and it was a real change in how relationships were for me. I think I was just getting a little sentimental and nostalgic, hanging around with young people. But I thought it would be kind of fun to do that in a way that was naturalistic and kind of bittersweet.” During a conversation with a member of the Undeclared writing staff — Jenny Connor — about the worst jobs anyone had ever had, Mottola mentioned his stint working at a Long Island amusement park called Adventureland in the summer of ’84.

“So I had a friend working at this amusement park I applied and soon found myself wearing a ‘Games’ shirt and being a carnival barker for the summer. And it was just demeaning, you know, I was pretentious, I was an art student at the time, I thought it was beneath me … You know, and I wanted to find people who could sit and talk about the abstract expressionists and Rothko you know, and it was these animals vomiting around me and eating cotton candy. But, you know, it quickly turned into one of those kind of super fun summers.” While directing episodes of Fox’s Arrested Development and HBO’s The Comeback, Mottola continued to work on his script.

Once Mottola had a draft of Adventureland he was happy with, he sent it to producer Ted Hope. A partner in the indie film production company Good Machine, Hope had produced Ride With the Devil for Ang Lee, Storytelling for Todd Solondz and Human Nature for Michel Gondry before agreeing to sell Good Machine to Universal and founding This Is That Productions with Anne Carey. Hope recalled, “Years back when I was struggling to get Nicole Holofcener’s Walking & Talking financed, Nicole said in a fit of despair that I should be working with someone who will actually make a lot of movies, like the guy who had just won best film at Columbia Film School, Greg Mottola.”

Hope added, “He already had a producer relationship so we just got to know each other, but life wasn’t as Nicole had predicted for him. By the time five or so years had passed since Daytrippers, his agents, who were also our agents, submitted the script to us as a ready-to-go project. We loved it but had some thoughts on how to enhance it and make it more resonant in the marketplace. Greg agreed but it took us over two years to get it right, and then he got what initially looked like a direct-to-DVD feature, but that turned out to be Superbad and the rest is history.” Confident of his take on Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg’s teen comedy, Mottola put his moody take on first love on the backburner.

With the massive success of Superbad, Mottola found plenty of investors willing to bankroll Adventureland, if he could only change it a bit. “You know, it was hard to get the film set up, even after Superbad. People who wanted to make it made a condition that I had to rewrite it as a contemporary film, and I refused. That may have been very stubborn of me. But I didn’t know what the equivalent to this film would be for a 21-year-old just coming into college. I could research it, but it wouldn’t be as fun to me as a film that came from personal experiences. There was just something about a movie that’s looking back — it has a slightly more melancholy strain. And a part of it was because life did seem simpler before the Internet and before cell phones.”

Sidney Kimmel — a garment magnate who built Jones Apparel Group into a publicly traded company worth $5 billion — had quietly assembled a film production and finance company in Beverly Hills in 2005. With indie film vets Jim Tauber and William Horberg on his team, Kimmel rolled the dice on a number of offbeat comedies (Death at a Funeral, Lars and the Real Girl) and socially conscious dramas (United 93, Talk To Me) that were anything but safe commercial bets. SKE financed Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut Synecdoche, New York and decided to go into business with Greg Mottola, splitting $10 million or so in financing with Miramax Films. In August 2007 it was announced that Adventureland would be Mottola’s next picture.

Ted Hope recalled, “We were ready to go out with the script for financing and casting a few weeks before Superbad came out. Interest in Greg was high, but time to put together a summer movie was short. Luckily Greg had thought hard about whom he wanted in the film prior and they were all accessible. Jesse & Kristen were pretty much whom he always wanted. Kristen had yet to get Twilight so she was still considered a virtual unknown. Greg knew Bill Hader from Superbad and wanted him and Kristen Wiig from the get-go too. Ryan Reynolds may have been the first person Greg had met for the role; he just happened to be in NYC right when we started.”

Hope continued, “And Martin Starr just slayed it in an early audition and changed our conception of the character. Similarly Margarita Levieva came to the audition in full character and makeup. Both of them became the archetype so there was no one else we could cast. Perhaps most fortunate, was that our financing partners agreed with our vision for the roles and that allowed Greg to lock his cast quickly by his taste and not some Chinese Menu of what may work in different markets or with specific demographics.” To get the summer romance rolling before winter set in, Mottola ended up with two weeks of prep time. The director admitted some mistakes were made as a result.

“Well, like, a prop guy thought they didn’t have those pop tags on soda cans in 1987. And I’m like, ‘I’m pretty sure they did.’ And it’s hard to find ‘80s cars. People will preserve and treasure their ‘70s muscle cars, but not treasure their K-cars. It was weird; we couldn’t find cars that ran. But I grew up in a really modest suburban community in Long Island and a lot of my neighbors didn’t have a lot of money, and their houses were still filled with furniture from the ‘70s and the ‘60s, even. It’s not as though everyone switched to an ‘80s aesthetic because that’s what was on TV. This is a modest world where the film takes place, and it’s okay if there’s a mish-mash of ‘70s and ‘80s.”

The search for an amusement park that hadn’t changed much in 20 years came down to Playland in Rye, NY and Kennywood Park in Pittsburgh. Mottola recalled, “The tax rebates in Pennsylvania were better than New York state, plus it seemed like we could get a better deal with Kennywood, so the choice was arrived at pretty quickly. Plus, I have a fondness for poor maligned Pittsburgh. We didn‘t have the budget to build or create very much, although my production designer Stephen Beatrice did a very nice job of creating the specific booths that I needed and scuzzying up the park a bit so it wasn‘t quite as quaint as Kennywood is in reality.” Shooting in the 111-year old park during the week — before Kennywood went into Phantom Fright Nights mode on the weekends — Adventureland commenced filming September 2007.

An Adventureland employee in 1984, Mottola bumped the film’s timeline up to 1987 to take advantage of songs he wanted to use to tell his life story. Collaborating with music supervisor Tracy McKnight — who had worked at an amusement park in Seaside Heights, NJ in her youth — Mottola exchanged iPod playlists and mix tapes. Accustomed to licensing 15 to 20 songs for a movie, McKnight arrived on 40 tunes, including “Bastards of Young” by The Replacements, “Don’t Want To Know If You Are Lonely” by Husker Du and “I’m In Love With a Girl” by Big Star. Mottola joked that the fee paid to Van Halen to use “Panama” in Superbad “cost nearly as much as all of the songs in Adventureland.” To compose a score, Mottola turned to another favorite band, the Hoboken trio Yo La Tengo.

Screened at the Sundance Film Festival in January and the South By Southwest Film Festival in March, Adventureland opened nationwide April 2009. Critics fell in love with the movie. Tony Scott, The New York Times: “Somehow the story of a young man’s coming of age never gets old, at least when it is told with the kind of sweetness and intelligence Adventureland displays.” Marjorie Baumgarten, The Austin Chronicle: “A confident return to the kind of teen comedy that’s funny without being raunchy, youthful without being juvenile, and reflective without hitting you over the head.” Michael Phillips, The Chicago Tribune: “A sweet, sharp coming-of-age romance, Adventureland is a little warmer, a little funnier and a lot more truthful than the last 20 or 30 of its ilk. Especially its Hollywood ilk.”

Never expanding beyond 1,876 U.S. screens, Adventureland sold $16 million in tickets domestically and added $1 million overseas. Acknowledging the challenges of marketing a period movie to kids who might feel it wasn’t about them and to adults who might feel it was just about kids, Greg Mottola sounded pleased with the results. “There was a moment when I thought, well, maybe I shouldn’t make this film. I’ll turn into this, like, young-adult filmmaker and everyone will be disappointed that it’s not Superbad 2 and I’m not as funny as Seth Rogen. But I didn’t write the movie to try to be as funny as Seth Rogen. It’s apples and oranges to me. I wanted, for better or worse, to make this little movie looking back 20 years ago. And I’m just grateful to have this shot.”

Should I Care?
Quickly hailed as one of the year’s best films by critics and too easily dismissed by casual viewers as lacking in laughs (Kristen Wiig fans expecting more than a token cameo will probably be disappointed), Adventureland is a little of both, a small but perfect gem that gets better the more I think about it. Without painting a rose colored portrait of the late ‘80s, Greg Mottola’s writing genuinely pines for the days when people somehow met without the Internet and expressed themselves without cell phones. It’s a gentler coming-of-age drama than something from Noah Baumbach and recalls Wes Anderson’s early work in its understated wit.

One sign we’re in the hands of a talented filmmaker is the casting. Jesse Eisenberg does what Michael Cera couldn’t have done, playing a boy growing into a man. Kristen Stewart has an alluring scruffiness that I can’t recall seeing another young actress emulate as convincingly. It takes time before we know how to feel about either character. The soundtrack — a sublime blend of kitsch played at the park and the ‘70s or ‘80s music its couple shares via mix tapes — refrains from explaining the scenes, supplying mood instead. What’s most rewarding about Adventureland is how Mottola smarts the movie up — instead of dumbing it down — by rejecting raunch and taking a slow turn toward brutal honesty.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“A Film Producer Guided More by His Heart Than by His Calculator” By David Halbfinger. The New York Times, 12 December 2007

“When Hollywood Comes Calling” By Daniel McGuire. IAAPA, February 2008

“Greg Mottola Interview, Adventureland, Sundance 2009” By Kevin Kelly. SpoutBlog, 22 January 2009

“Sundance 2009 — Adventureland — Greg Mottola” The Hollywood Podcast starring Tim Coyne. 19 February 2009

“Directing to an ’80s Playlist” By Larry Rother. The New York Times, 20 March 2009

“Five Questions for Ted Hope (Adventureland)” By Matt Dentler. indieWIRE, 31 March 2009

“After The Daytrippers …” By Peter Keough. The Boston Phoenix, 31 March 2009

“Director Greg Mottola on Keeping Adventureland Eighties Appropriate” By Lane Brown. New York Magazine, 3 April 2009

“Some Kind of Love” By Nick Dawson. Filmmaker Magazine, Winter 2009

What the *&#! Is This About?
On May 28, 1976 – the last day of the school year at “Lee High School” somewhere in Texas – quarterback Randall “Pink” Floyd (Jason London) faces an existential crisis over whether to sign a pledge promising not to take drugs or engage in summer activities which might jeopardize the “goal of a championship season in ‘76.” His teammates (Sasha Jenson, Cole Hauser, Jason O. Smith, Ben Affleck) spend the last day of school sanding down paddles and chasing 8th grade boys home for their freshman initiations. This includes Mitch Kramer (Wiley Wiggins), whose older sis Jodi (Michelle Burke) seals his doom by asking her classmates to “take it easy” on her brother. The senior girls (Parker Posey, Joey Lauren Adams) organize the 8th grade girls and spill condiments on them in the parking lot for their initiation.

One of the 8th grade pledges (Christin Hinojosa) catches the eye of a journalism geek (Anthony Rapp). His friends (Adam Goldberg, Marissa Ribisi) plan to attend a big keg party, but when it’s busted, end up cruising around looking for something else to do with all the other kids. This includes Slater (Rory Cochrane), a stoner whose access to party favors makes him a VIP presence at whatever party is in the offing, and the beatnik Michelle (Milla Jovovich) who steals two bronze statues to paint them in the likeness of Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons of KISS. Mitch eludes his tormentors long enough to befriend Randall, who welcomes the self-respecting freshman into his social circle. Hanging around this scene is Wooderson (Matthew McConaughey), a grown adolescent who spreads word that the kegger will convene under the Moon Tower.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
Born in Houston and raised in the town of Huntsville, Richard Linklater would drop out of local Sam Houston State University and take work on an oilrig in the Gulf of Mexico instead of finishing college. He saved enough money to buy a Super 8 camera and by 1985 had settled in Austin, where he began making short films and founded the Austin Film Society with cinematographer Lee Daniel. A feature film that Linklater shot in the summer of 1989 for $23,000 – a free form examination of Austin’s subculture titled Slacker – became a sensation in arthouses and film festivals two years later. This got the attention of producer Jim Jacks, who – with partner Sean Daniel – had a development deal with Universal Pictures. Linklater recalled, “I told him I had this teenage rock and roll film that I felt was my next movie.”

Richard Linklater added, “I’d always had this idea for a strange high school film. I remember being a high school freshman in Huntsville and driving around all night with three or four guys in a Le Mans, listening to an eight-track tape of ZZ Top’s ‘Fandango’. Eight-tracks never ended; a song would get quiet, you would hear a click, and then it would pick back up. So I wanted the film to start with a close-up shot of ‘Fandango’ sliding into the eight-track player and then have a whole movie in this car, meeting people who drove up next to you, going through the drive-through, getting out and getting beer – basically always in and around the car. But at that time, teen movies were John Hughes movies. There was so much drama. Maybe I’m an undramatic guy, but I remember a complete lack of anything big going on in high school. The essence of being a teen to me was a whole lot of energy and music but nothing much technically happening. On any given night there wasn’t a car wreck. There was no one impregnated, no huge love story from the wrong side of the tracks.”

To assemble a cast, Jim Jacks and Sean Daniel brought in Don Phillips. As he’d done for Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Phillips met virtually every up and coming actor and actress during the auditions in Los Angeles. Phillips recalled, “Vince Vaughn was there, but he was competing with Cole and Ben, and he didn’t get it. Neither did Claire Danes, whom Rick Linklater and I loved but was more of an Eastern-school type. And poor Ashley Judd – she never even got to meet Rick. Then I get to Austin, and that’s when I met Renée Zellweger. I went, ‘Isn’t this girl interesting?’ When Rick and I saw her together, we read her and thought, ‘Ahh, man! Too bad that everybody’s set, because she would have been perfect.’ So we gave her that teeny part in the parking lot.” Wiley Wiggins was walking out of Quackenbush’s when producer Anne Walker-McBay convinced him to audition for a part; the 15-year-old ended up cast as Mitch.

Due to graduation ceremonies at the University of Texas, Don Phillips was making due with a room at the Hyatt and hanging out in the bar. A part-time waiter named Matthew McConaughey strolled in with his girlfriend. When the bartender mentioned that Phillips was in town to produce a movie, McConaughey went over to introduce himself. He’d appeared in a music video and a beer commercial, but had never acted in a movie. After drinking and talking golf with Phillips for hours, the casting director proposed McConaughey come in and read for the role of Wooderson. Linklater recalled, “I thought he was too good-looking. Matthew looked like he’d do fine with college girls; but I needed Wooderson to be a little creepier. But Matthew just sunk into character. His eyes shut to little quarter slots, and he said, ‘Hey, man, you got a joint?’ He just became that guy. I thought, ‘Okay, don’t cut your hair. Can you grow a beard and a mustache?’

After Jim Jacks and Sean Daniel had convinced Universal that Richard Linklater might be another George Lucas and Dazed and Confused could be the next American Graffiti, shooting commenced July 1992 in Austin on a budget of $6.9 million. In terms of style, Linklater wanted to make a movie that felt like it had actually been shot in 1976. He recalled, “I didn’t use a Steadicam, for instance. Had I been able to get film stocks from that era, I would’ve. I just wanted it to look like a ‘70s movie, in a way. Blown out windows, just a certain style. I was very much playing off that. The way music was used in movies pre-MTV, for instance. Sort of a storytelling narrative element to music, more along the lines of Easy Rider, Mean Streets, Graffiti, even, you go back to Scorpio Rising, films like that, but pre-MTV influence, so, I was very consciously looking at that era stylistically.”

With a 38 day shooting schedule, cast and crew worked on the fly. Linklater recalled, “I wanted a montage sequence at the beer bust to give the essence of the party. But it’s hard to script the essence of a party, and if you don’t have it in the script, you don’t have it on the shooting schedule. So we had about thirty minutes and a couple of cameras to get it. We cranked up the music, asked people to move, and followed them around. I’d run up to Rory Cochrane and whisper, ‘Okay, you’re trying to score some weed off somebody,’ and he’d go with it and we’d film.” When a scripted crush between Tony and Cynthia failed to spark much chemistry between Anthony Rapp and Marissa Ribisi, the director suggested maybe her character should go for Wooderson instead. Ribisi recalled, “I thought, ‘Oh, this is genius.’ He’s everything she’s against. She’s this girl with a future, kind of preachy, and suddenly she’s into this guy who only likes high school chicks. She’s so smitten she can’t speak.”

One of Richard Linklater’s first disputes with Universal concerned the film’s language. “They were in some delusion about this could be a PG-13 movie if we had less cussing. ‘I’m like, ‘Are you kidding? Teenagers drinking, driving, smoking pot, this is an R rated movie.’ But they: ‘Well, less. Maybe there could be less.’ They were afraid they were gonna offend people.” The real battle came over the soundtrack. In need of a $300,000 advance to begin obtaining the clearances for the songs he’d selected, the studio suggested that Linklater instead consider using contemporary bands singing cover versions. This was seen as a way to get the movie exposure on MTV. Linklater recalled, “At that moment we didn’t have any money, and I still needed it to finish the film. There was a threat that I’d have to start cutting songs. Dylan’s ‘Hurricane’ alone cost $80,000. Finally the studio said, ‘Okay, we’ll come up with the money, but only if you give up all your royalties from the soundtrack.’ I said, ‘Fine. Just don’t screw with my movie. You can rob me, take everything I have. Just don’t kill my family.’”

When released September 1993 in the U.S., critics were unequivocal in their praise. Marjorie Baumgarten, the Austin Chronicle: “Dazed and Confused is one of the most exciting movies of this, or any other, year. It’s smart, funny, and wonderfully crafted and performed. The movie is structured as a period ensemble piece about a specific group of teenagers on the last day of high school in 1976. But it also functions as a timeless social study of high school character types and a disclosure of commonplace abuses of power in this social system.” Peter Ranier, the Los Angeles Times: “It’s a highly enjoyable spree that doesn’t add up to a whole lot by the end. But you don’t necessarily want it to add up to anything – that’s part of its charm.” Janet Maslin, the New York Times: “No film whose plot involves the quest for Aerosmith tickets can take itself too seriously. So Dazed and Confused has an enjoyably playful spirit, one that amply compensates for its lack of structure.”

Unfortunately, Dazed and Confused had its box office fate sealed months earlier, when it went before test audiences in Los Angeles. Linklater recalled, “You’d watch the movie with a test audience – this is the down side of making a studio film – you’d watch the film with an audience, and they’d laugh and applaud and have a great time and then the cards would come back ‘Poor.’ You know, we tested poorly. So those audiences at those testings more or less killed this film for being a wide release and we just got marginalized. It was kind of a studio production with an independent release, sort of the worst of both worlds.” Never expanding beyond 214 theaters in the U.S., Dazed and Confused scored only $7.9 million at the box office. Over time though – as the film’s reputation among college students blossomed – sales of VHS tapes and DVDs would ultimately top $30 million. Two volumes of the soundtrack – Dazed and Confused and Even More Dazed and Confused – have sold more than two million copies.

Looking back on Dazed and Confused ten years later, Richard Linklater contrasted the experience to the one he had working independently on Slacker. “It was probably the biggest leap I’ve ever made. Like doing a film where someone else paid for it. It was technically my third film, I had done one film completely alone, then I did one film with a crew of about six or seven and that’s a big leap there, to communicate with a crew and throw your ideas out there. This was a bigger leap even still, like how you make it within the system with a really tight schedule with all the previews and all that stuff. A lot of people fall apart at that level. I think the studio was sick of me and didn’t like me by the end, but I was pretty happy to get out alive with the film that I wanted to make. If I had listened to them and done everything that they wanted, we wouldn’t be talking today, I’ll put it that way.”

Should I Care?
Gramercy Pictures – the short lived distributor launched in 1993 as a venture between Universal Pictures and PolyGram – had apparently exhausted their marketing ideas by the time they arrived on the High Times approach, issuing posters with taglines like “See It with a Bud”. The MPAA objected to the drug references and ordered Gramercy make alterations. Richard Linklater – who had no input into the campaign – lamented, ”They were marketing it for dumb teenagers, but what are you gonna do?” Ultimately, this is a movie that stoners just don’t deserve. Half Baked, they deserve. Dazed and Confused on the other hand is a film whose token toker ends up with maybe three lines of dialogue, tops. Instead of jokes, what Linklater seems to be going for is a brutally honest reevaluation of 18 hours of his childhood. Banned substances play a role, but so do music, clothes, healthy doses cynicism and the relationships recalled by someone who remembers being there.

While the script digs no more than skin deep into its characters, when it comes to casting, Dazed and Confused is a master class. Matthew McConaughey was the discovery of the picture, but Linklater gets terrific performances from both the pros (Adam Goldberg, Marissa Ribisi, Parker Posey, Cole Hauser) and the Austin area novices in his ensemble. The lengths Linklater went to accurately depicting his youth – in all its petty cruelties and substance use – gives the film a real edge, softened at the right moments by the presence of Wiley Wiggins as the empathetic freshman navigating his way through this madness. Linklater’s take on his teenage years refuses to lay any moralizing or tired plot devices on the audience. Instead of feeling phony, the experience is alive and fun, enabling us to become active observers in the rituals and celebrations of another decade’s youth. Dazed and Confused feels like one of the most truthful expositions on high school ever made. This is Linklater’s best film.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
“Smoke Got In Their Eyes” By Jessica Shaw. Entertainment Weekly, 8 October 1993

“The Spirit of ‘76” By John Spong. Texas Monthly, October 2003

“Making Dazed – Catch You Later Dude, Ten Years Later” By Emily Christianson. Film Radar, 14 September 2005

Dazed and Confused. Criterion Collection (2006).

High Fidelity (2000)
Screenplay by John Cusack & D.V. DeVincentis & Steve Pink. Based on the novel by Nick Hornby
Directed by Stephen Frears
Produced by Dogstar Films/ New Crime Productions/ Working Title Films/ Touchstone Pictures
Running time: 113 minutes

What the *&#! Is This About?
“What came first, the music or the misery?” Rob Gordon (John Cusack) asks the audience as his girlfriend Laura (Iben Hjejle) moves out. When his record collection fails to soothe his heartache, Rob recounts his “Desert Island, All Time, Top Five Most Memorable Breakups, in chronological order.” He tells himself that Laura doesn’t crack the list. Rob owns the Chicago record store Championship Vinyl. “I get by because people make a special effort to shop here,” he continues, “Mostly young men who spend all their time looking for deleted Smiths singles and original – not re-released, underlined – Frank Zappa albums.”

Bookended at the store by the shy and awkward Dick (Todd Louiso) and the manic Barry (Jack Black), Rob broods over Laura and makes a half-hearted attempt to win her back. A shared friend (Joan Cusack) reveals that his ex has moved in with “this Ian guy.” Rob deduces that Ian (Tim Robbins) is their flaky former upstairs neighbor and torments himself imagining Laura having sex with him. He finally admits that Laura is indeed in his top five breakups of all time. His wounded, sensitive side appeals to singer Marie DeSalle (Lisa Bonet) who poured her breakup woes into her music and has a compassionate one-night stand with Rob.

With the encouragement of Bruce Springsteen, Rob tracks down the rest of his Top Five breakup list, including the introspective Sarah (Lili Taylor) and the obnoxious Charlie (Catherine Zeta-Jones). None of the women boost Rob’s ego to the extent he needs to get over Laura, but when her father dies, she invites him to the funeral. In her grief, Laura decides to give Rob another chance, helping him promote a record release party for two skateboarding punks whose album Rob produces. This brings him to the attention of Caroline Fortis (Natasha Gregson Wagner), a music columnist who has Rob second guessing his relationship status all over again.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
Published in 1995, High Fidelity was the first novel by English essayist Nick Hornby. It told the story of Rob Fleming, a self-absorbed record shop owner in London who soothes a breakup with his girlfriend Laura by generating trivial “top five lists” with Dick and Barry, the audiophiles who work in his store. According to Hornby, “People would come up and say, ‘This book is about me – literally, this book is about me.’ I’ve been told, I don’t know how many times, ‘I know the record shop you wrote about,’ and the shop’s in some part of the country I’ve never been to. It’s a fairly depressing indictment of the state of things, I think.”

Mike Newell optioned the novel and set it up at Disney, where Scott Rosenberg wrote a draft. Looking for a better take, the studio ultimately sent the book to John Cusack, who’d rewritten Grosse Pointe Blank with two high school buddies from Chicago named D.V. DeVincentis & Steve Pink. The locations and characters Hornby described reminded Cusack of his hometown, and the actor also felt “that many young men can identify with Rob’s inner monologue, which is spoken through great, incisive writing. It’s a very funny book, but he also captured this particular type of character with brutal honesty. And it’s actually kind of strangely romantic in a way, so I felt the combination of all those things was really remarkable.”

After receiving Hornby’s blessing to relocate his narrative from London to Chicago, the scribes went to work. Cusack recalls, “We’d go through the book and structure it out and then Steve and D.V. would go off and write and then I’d read what they do, and then sometimes I’d go off and I’d write for a while and they’d read it. Finally when we were getting it all together, we’d sit with two or three different computers and say ‘All right, well here’s a checklist of things we need to get done … So, each person would then check something off the list and take a pass at it and then three of us would edit it together.”

Cusack had signed with William Morris Agency to represent him as a screenwriter. Stephen Frears – who directed Cusack in The Grifters – was also a William Morris client, and when he heard the news, asked what the actor was working on. Though skeptical of High Fidelity being taken out of England, when Frears read the script, he changed his mind. “I liked the idea of it being in America. It had a sort of, this sort of more optimistic way in which Americans live, seemed to me to add something to it, rather than taking it away. So it lost some of its stoicism and became slightly more romantic.”

Once Frears came on board, one of his first questions to Cusack and his co-writers was who they thought should play Barry. Without hesitating, they answered “Jack Black.” Black had worked steadily in TV and film, but was unknown to the general public. Todd Louiso walked in to audition and quickly fell into the role of Dick. Settling on the woman Rob spends the film trying to win back did not go as smoothly. Frears was at the Berlin Film Festival in 1999, where a Danish actress named Iben Hjejle was starring in Mifune. Her mother was an English teacher and Hjejle spoke fluent “American.” Frears phoned Cusack to tell him that he’d found Laura in Germany.

High Fidelity commenced filming in Chicago in April 1999. To assemble a soundtrack, Frears gave Cusack and his co-writers free reign. Cusack recalls, “The film has 70 song cues, and we probably listened to 2,000 songs to get those 70 cues. We used our Rob and Dick and Barry dispositions a lot.” One scene in the script called for Rob to converse with Bruce Springsteen in his head. Cusack was sure The Boss would turn them down. To the actor’s surprise, “he kind of just laughed at the idea and said, ‘Send me a script.’ So when we finished shooting, we wrapped around 2 a.m., flew to New York, and taped him in his studio for an hour the next morning.”

Opening in the U.S. in March 2000, High Fidelity became one of the best reviewed films of the year. Stephen Holden, the New York Times: “Even more sharply than the book, the movie evokes the turmoil of urban single life with a quirky mixture of confessional poignancy and dry, self-deflating humor.” Marjorie Baumgarten, the Austin Chronicle: “A smart, funny, and youth-savvy relationship film.” Nick Hornby himself commented, “I never expected it to be so faithful. At times it appears to be a film in which John Cusack reads my book.” It grossed a modest $27 million in the States, quietly recouping its costs.

Why Should I Care?
One of the more sublime things about the film version of Nick Hornby’s hysterical novel is how Rob is altered from an Englishman obsessed with American R&B to an American obsessed with British New Wave and punk: Belle and Sebastian, Stiff Little Fingers, Elvis Costello and Sheila Nicholls all make appearances on the superlative soundtrack. The best news is that High Fidelity lives up to and then surpasses the emotional honesty, edginess and freewheeling creativity of the platters Cusack and company spin over the course of the film. If there’s such thing as a perfect movie, this is it.

Rob’s immaturity might remind women of their least favorite ex, and those too young to have experienced a painful breakup will likely be bored as well, but single urban dwellers with misplaced fetishes will find repeated enjoyment in the film. Stephen Frears deserves much credit for enabling Jack Black, Todd Louiso, Joan Cusack and Tim Robbins to go to another comic level here, while every concept in the script – addressing the audience, employing flashbacks, dramatizing Rob’s insecure psyche – shouldn’t work, but does. The movie contains not one tired plot element, but somehow manages an upbeat, hopeful ending all the same.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
“The Cusacks” By Scott Tobias. A.V. Club. 2000 March 29

“Keeping Faith with High Fidelity” By Jamie Malanowski. New York Times, 2000 April 2

““Conversations with Cusack and Frears” High Fidelity DVD. Buena Vista Home Entertainment (2000)

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)