What the *&#! Is This About?
In Los Angeles of the early 1950s, Officer Bud White (Russell Crowe) stops on his way to deliver his fellow cops booze for a Christmas party. He visits a recently paroled wife beater and settles the thug’s latest domestic assault out of court. Sgt. Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey) is introduced at a cast party for the TV program Badge of Honor, for which he serves as a technical advisor. He’s approached by Sid Hudgens (Danny DeVito), publisher of gossip rag L.A. Confidential, who offers the detective $100 to bust a starlet for marijuana possession so Hudgens will have fresh scandal to print. Sgt. Ed Exley (Guy Pearce) serves as watch commander at Hollywood station. Exley’s ambition is to make detective, but Lt. Dudley Smith (James Cromwell) counsels his protégé, “You’re a political animal. You have the eye for human weakness, but not the stomach.”

When four Mexicans assault two officers, several drunken cops – including White’s partner Dick Stensland (Graham Beckel) – drag the suspects out of their cells and beat them. The incident makes the front page under the headline “Bloody Christmas.” Exley volunteers to testify to a grand jury against White and Stensland, winning the promotion he eagerly covets. Lt. Smith gets White off the hook so the capable officer can serve on a special detail to strong-arm organized crime from moving in on L.A. The bodies of gangsters start piling up all over the city. Vincennes is demoted to vice for his role in the brawl and told the only way to get his job at narcotics back is to make a major case. He investigates a mysterious escort service known as “Fleur-De-Lis.”

Exley – despised as a rat by the cops he now works with – rushes to the scene of a massacre, six victims shotgunned at the Nite Owl Coffeeshop. One of the victims is Dick Stensland. Lt. Smith takes authority of the case, but allows Exley to serve as his second in command. Meanwhile, White has become infatuated with the mysterious Lynn Bracken (Kim Basinger), a call girl who’s been made up to look like Veronica Lake. Her manager (David Strathairn) is a millionaire investor with ties throughout the city. The Night Owl Massacre is pinned on three Black youths, but Exley begins to doubt they were responsible. The investigations of White, Vincennes and Exley soon intersect. In each case, the trail leads them back to the LAPD.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
Published in 1989, L.A. Confidential was the third volume of what novelist James Ellroy was referring to as “an epic pop history of my smog bound fatherland.” At 500 pages, over 100 characters, a timeline that spanned eight years and a labyrinth of a plot that unfolded in the minds of its three protagonists, when Ellroy’s publisher Otto Penzler notified him that Warner Bros. had purchased the film rights, the men broke into hysterical laughter. Ellroy wrote, “I figured some movie biz fuckhead would option the book. I figured he’d blow smoke up my ass about what a great film it would make. Movieland self-delusion was a major theme of the novel. It was only fitting that I should profit from its exercise. I knew my book was movie-adaptation-proof. The motherfucker was uncompressible, uncontainable and unequivocally bereft of sympathetic characters. It was unsavory, unapologetically dark, untamable and altogether untranslatable to the screen.”

One of Ellroy’s fans was a screenwriter named Brian Helgeland. “The weird thing was, I had gotten a hold of these pulpy novels he’d done in like ‘88 or something like that. I just tore through these things and I thought they were just great. Then when The Big Nowhere came out, I bought that right away and I read somewhere he was going to be signing it at some L.A. bookstore. I’d never gone to any book signings, but I was like, it’s Ellroy. I gotta go see him. It was really depressing because there were like, eight people there, this was probably in like ‘89 or so. So I talked to him for like half an hour, until he probably started to think I was a deranged fan or something like that, and he told me how he was going to write books that could never be made into movies. And I was like, ‘Cool, cool.’” When Helgeland heard that Warner Bros. had purchased the screen rights to L.A. Confidential, the screenwriter began a yearlong lobbying effort for the job of adapting the book. Helgeland was ultimately notified that the job had gone to someone else.

Curtis Hanson had toiled in Hollywood for close to twenty years as a screenwriter and director for hire. His latest film – The River Wild – starred Meryl Streep and was considered a step up in prestige. Hanson was thinking about his next project. “I’d always been interested in L.A. fiction from growing up here, authors like James M. Cain, Nathaniel West, Raymond Chandler. When I read L.A. Confidential, I just got hooked on the characters, got caught up emotionally in their individual struggles with their personal demons. I wanted to capture that in a movie. Also, I found that the way I felt about the characters was near to the way I felt about the city of Los Angeles. I’d always wanted to make a movie about L.A., to deal with this city at that magic moment in the ‘50s when the dream of L.A. was being bulldozed to make way for all the people that were coming here in pursuit of the very dream that was being destroyed. So I got really excited about it as a movie project and made a deal to write and direct it.”

Undeterred, Helgeland’s manager Missy Malkin got her client a lunch meeting with Curtis Hanson. Helgeland wrote, “We met in an old bungalow on the Universal lot that had been pink slipped – scheduled to be torn down to make way for the Jurassic Park portion of the studio tour. I thought this was a good sign, as much of the L.A. we would need to bring to life had suffered a similar fate.” Helgeland and Hanson discovered that they both shared a passion for Ellroy’s fiction, and thought they had the key to adapting L.A. Confidential. Hanson added, “If Bud, Ed or Jack wasn’t involved in a scene, it went by the board. Some were too good to let go of: the shootout at the abandoned auto court in San Berdoo that begins the novel, for example. We took it, moved it and let two of our trio take part.” It would take Helgeland & Hanson ten drafts and three years to complete their adaptation.

Meanwhile, the signals being sent from Warner Bros. were less than supportive. Hanson recalled, “The immediate strikes against it: Period, number one. Which of course every financier is afraid of, you know, on a commercial level, is that a contemporary audience won’t connect with the past. Multi-character, number two. Why are there three guys? Could you get rid of Ed Exley and Jack Vincennes, so that the movie is built around Bud White and then we could have a big star play Bud White? And I responded by saying how important Ed Exley was and why, and I was then cut off and they said, ‘Well what about getting rid of Bud White then and Jack Vincennes and build it all around Ed Exley, and then we could have a big star play Ed Exley.’ And number three, that it was in this period of film noir, which they’re extremely negative about because noir movies almost never do well, commercially. As you go through the history of the noirs made over the last few decades, very few of them did well enough to even earn their money back.”

Seeking a financier, Hanson turned to Regency Enterprises, whose head of production Michael Nathanson had long been an advocate of the filmmaker. Nathanson later recalled, “As years progressed, and I went on and became the president and chief operating officer of MGM, the irony was that if I had come into my office to say, ‘Will you make L.A. Confidential?’ I would have said, ‘No.’ This movie got willed to get made against incredible odds and against a business environment that said, ‘This is the kind of movie that should not be made.’” Nathanson set a meeting between Hanson and the principal of New Regency, Arnon Milchan. Instead of showing the producer a script, Hanson presented his elaborate vision of L.A. Confidential. Hanson recalled, “Arnon said, ‘Let’s go.’ Depending on the casting, depending on the budget, I’m in. So I had a sort of tentative blinking green light, let us say. And now we had to get the cast.”

New Regency suggested Hanson work with a casting director they knew well named Mali Finn. Hanson stated, “I wanted unknowns for Bud White and Ed Exley because with unknowns, the audience wouldn’t know who they liked, who they didn’t like, who would live, who would die. Anything could happen. I wanted these characters to be discovered, the way you discover characters in a novel. Your feelings evolve as you go along.” An Australian actor Hanson had seen in a movie called Romper Stomper flew to L.A. to read through some scenes, one of which Hanson decided to tape and show to Arnon Milchan and Michael Nathanson. After getting approval to cast Russell Crowe as Bud White, Hanson chose another virtual unknown – Guy Pearce – to play Ed Exley. The fact that Pearce also happened to be Australian was not immediately relayed by Hanson to his financiers.

For the role of Jack Vincennes, Hanson understood he needed someone audiences would be familiar with. Kevin Spacey met with the director to talk about the role and recalled, “I said to him, ‘All right, if it was really the 1950s and you were really directing this movie, who would you cast as Jack Vincennes?’ I kind of expected he would have said, like, William Holden. But he didn’t. He said, ‘Dean Martin.’ I thought, Dean Martin. And he said, ‘Well, watch Some Came Running. Watch Rio Bravo again, and you’ll see the quality that I’m talking about. It is a man who on the surface has all this ring-a-ding, you know, he’s slick and he’s cool and he’s on top of it but just underneath the surface is a man who’s going through changes and going through a moral eruption and that will ultimately lead him to the place where he realizes he can no longer behave the way he’s behaved.”

Hanson & Helgeland had held off paying a courtesy call to James Ellroy. The author recalled, “I had heard that Hanson was involved throughout the process and was impressed with the fact that he didn’t contact me. When he and Brian Helgeland had gone through seven drafts of the script they let me read what they had. I found it interesting and compelling and a good job of retaining the essential narrative integrity of my book, i.e. the dramatic lives of the three main characters. From that point on Hanson and I became friendly and I became an informal consultant. Chiefly, Curtis would call me up and ask me questions pertaining to L.A. in the ‘50s and the police corps then. ‘Do you turn left off the rotunda at City Hall to get to the detective bureau in 1953?’ Things like that.”

On a budget of roughly $35 million, L.A. Confidential commenced shooting May 1996 in Los Angeles. Producer Michael Nathanson remembered, “I think we had eighty something locations, in sixty-five days? Something like that. And we were all over greater Los Angeles. And we were shooting lots of nights. There was inclement weather, both written – where we created a few times – and there was inclement weather we ran into and tried to make it work for the movie. And we would go from Baldwin Hills to Pasadena to Santa Monica to downtown Los Angeles.” Pockets of 1950s architecture were found still standing in Elysian Park. Pierce Patchett’s home was located in Los Feliz, where architect Richard Neutra’s Lovell Health House permitted filming on their grounds for the first time ever. In Hollywood, the Formosa Café and the Frolic Room were both utilized as locations.

Editor Peter Honess may have been one of the first to realize just how great L.A. Confidential was going to be. “It’s such a well crafted piece of filmmaking, from A to Z, actually. And I thought it was terribly brave of Curtis Hanson to cast Guy Pearce and Russell Crowe – two virtually unknown actors in the States – to play very American roles. I thought actually that their accents are really good. It also gave the audience an opportunity to see a film that you cannot make about modern times. You had to set it in another period because of the racism, because of the language, because of the bigotry of some of the characters in the piece, and that’s fascinating too, because it actually seems like it is of the modern era, but it isn’t, and I don’t think you could make a film about the social situation now of the way of L.A. Confidential. And it was just a very well crafted piece.”

Following enthusiastic reception at the Cannes and Toronto Film Festivals, L.A. Confidential opened September 1997 in the U.S. With the possible exception of The Sweet Hereafter, it received the best reviews of any film released that year. Janet Maslin, the New York Times: “Curtis Hanson’s resplendently wicked L.A. Confidential is a tough, gorgeous, vastly entertaining throwback to the Hollywood that did things right. As such, it enthusiastically breaks most rules of studio filmmaking today.” David Ansen, Newsweek: “You have to pay close attention to follow the double-crossing intricacies of the plot, but the reward for your work is dark and dirty fun.” Todd McCarthy, Variety: “L.A. Confidential serves as an almost overwhelming reminder of the pleasures of deeply involving narratives in the old Hollywood sense … This picture restores the primacy of the dramatic line, which tends to make the violence even more startling when it comes.”

The Academy Awards returned nine nominations, but in a year that featured the highest grossing motion picture of all time, Hollywood saw fit to honor Titanic instead. Kim Basinger (Best Supporting Actress) and Helgeland & Hanson (Best Adapted Screenplay) were the only L.A. Confidential nominees to receive Oscars. The awards consideration did nudge the film to box office of $64.6 million in the U.S. and $61 million overseas. Naming the 25 best Los Angeles based movies of the last quarter century, the staff of the L.A. Times ranked L.A. Confidential #1 on their list in August 2008. Curtis Hanson mused, “The movie truly started with L.A. I wanted to capture the city of my childhood memories. And I wanted to take a hard look at the dark side – the booming economy, the exploding population, the corruption and racism – as well as certain problems that are still with us. I wanted to capture the spirit of this place. The optimism and energy was real. It still is.”

Why Should I Care?
The fact that a brooding, politically incorrect, character driven murder mystery set in 1953 was made without any real movie stars and proved a terrific success would be worthy of praise in itself, but the best news for movie lovers is that more than a decade after it reaped all those rave reviews, L.A. Confidential has actually appreciated in value as a screen classic. You don’t realize what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone, and after a couple of so-called Best Pictures have proven to be little more than hocus pocus Hollywood bullshit – Titanic had a better grip on reality than Crash did – James Ellroy’s complex, gratuitously violent and ceaselessly entertaining detective yarn stands out as prime rib among the fast food, what Hollywood filmmaking can aspire to be.

Top to bottom, the craftsmen behind L.A. Confidential are operating at the top of their game. In collaboration with cinematographer Dante Spinotti, production designer Jeannine Oppewall and costume designer Ruth Myers, Curtis Hanson went to great lengths to avoid the stereotypical look and feel of mysteries set in the ‘30s or ‘40s, opting instead to recreate a postwar Los Angeles that was looking ahead to its future. Scenes burst with vitality, as well as complexity. Helgeland & Hanson’s colorful adaptation sidesteps nearly every known cliché of the detective genre, moving at breakneck pace from a sleazy journalist to freeway construction to an uptight detective questioning Johnny Stompanato & Lana Turner to an LAPD hit squad. Somewhere in there, the portrait of a metropolis takes shape in all its glamour and deceit. Jerry Goldsmith composed the robust, brooding musical score.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!
L.A. Confidential: The Screenplay. By Brian Helgeland & Curtis Hanson. Warner Books (1997)

“Curtis Hanson” By Alex Simon. Venice Magazine, 1997 September

“Helgeland the Happy Heretic” By Rob Blackwelder. Splicedwire, 2001 April 17

Endangered Species: Writers Talk About Their Craft. By Lawrence Grobel. Da Capo Press (2001)

“Hollywood’s James Ellroy Enigma” By Scott Timberg. Los Angeles Times, 6 April 2008

“The Top 25 of the Last 25: L.A. Is A Complicated City, But They Got It” Los Angeles Times, 31 August 2008

L.A. Confidential (Two Disc Special Edition). Warner Home Video (2008)

What the *&#! Is This About?
In the San Fernando Valley of 1977, busboy Eddie Adams (Mark Wahlberg) catches the eye of Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds), maker of “adult films, exotic pictures” at the nightclub where Eddie works. Jack lives in Reseda with Amber Waves (Julianne Moore), a coke sniffing adult film star whose line of work has cost her custody of her son. After Jack sends another one of his performers – the legendary Rollergirl (Heather Graham) – to inspect Eddie’s stuff up close, the troupe takes him for a cup of coffee. Jack expresses his vision to make an adult film where the story is so compelling the audience can’t get up and leave until they find out how it ends. Once Eddie’s spiteful mother (Joanna Gleason) kicks him out, Eddie finds a home with Jack.

Eddie’s new family includes the exuberant Reed Rothchild (John C. Reilly), actor/stereo salesman/cowboy Buck Swope (Don Cheadle), a grip (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who develops a crush on Eddie and The Colonel James (Robert Ridgely) who puts up the money for all of Jack’s films and urges Eddie to think about changing his name, “some name that makes you happy, or something with a little pizzazz.” Coming up with the handle “Dirk Diggler” while lounging in Jack’s hot tub, Dirk makes his film debut having sex with Amber. His physical endowments and charisma propel Dirk Diggler to the top of the adult film world, a position he solidifies with the character of Brock Landers, super agent and super lover whose debut Angels Live In My Town prompts Jack to declare, “This is the best work we’ve ever done.”

Dirk’s fortune takes a detour in 1980, after Amber introduces her “baby boy” to cocaine and the adult film industry transitions from film to the much cheaper format of video tape, ushering in an era of amateurism in the industry. Dirk’s drug use effects his acting and his ego gets him tossed off Jack’s set. Dirk and Reed take a shot at becoming rock stars, but shoot so much cash up their noses that they can’t pay the recording studio to retrieve their pathetic master tapes. On his way to rock bottom, Dirk falls in with desperado Todd Parker (Thomas Jane) who hatches a scheme to rob Rahad Jackson (Alfred Molina), a drug smuggler with a fondness for mix tapes and firecrackers. Reaching a new low in life, Dirk Diggler realizes he has nowhere left to go but up.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
The Dirk Diggler Story was a 30-minute short Paul Thomas Anderson made when he was seventeen years old. Shooting on video and using two VCRs to edit, he was inspired not only by the porn movies he was obsessed with, but by fake documentaries like This Is Spinal Tap. Anderson chronicled the rise and fall of a porn star he based loosely on John Holmes, as well as a performer he’d seen profiled on A Current Affair named Shauna Grant. Anderson recalls, “There was some humor that I saw in it, I guess in a sick twisted way, maybe because it was the first time I was recognizing that a lot of these people in this story on A Current Affair were people I’d seen peripherally around the Valley, just in an area where I grew up, which is not a real shady area or anything, but there’s a lot of kind of goofy characters. So maybe it was just kind of being tickled by that.” Anderson ultimately wrote a feature length script based on The Dirk Diggler Story that ran 300 pages.

A 26-minute short Anderson made starring Philip Baker Hall opened doors for the filmmaker at the Sundance Film Festival in 1994. When Samuel L. Jackson agreed to join the cast of a feature Anderson had written – ultimately titled Hard Eight – financing was secured from Rysher Entertainment. Anderson enthused, “I remember on day two of shooting, calling my agent and saying, ‘After I’ve finished this movie, I wanna go right away and make Boogie Nights, ’cause I’m here with four actors and I LOVE IT! But I need more! I need fucking more! I need 80 of them!’ I knew it would be cool to consciously make a small movie – and a big fucking epic sloppy huge movie.” In the summer of 1995, Anderson went back to The Dirk Diggler Story, jettisoning the documentary approach and honing his script to a straightforward narrative of 185 pages.

One of the first people to get a look at Anderson’s script for Boogie Nights was the 31-year-old president and chief operating officer of New Line Cinema, Michael De Luca. Anderson’s pitch to DeLuca was that this was a four hour movie with a disco intermission. He talked about the opening shot of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and how he wanted to open with something similar: a black screen with disco music thumping underneath, which would then explode into a club marquee with the film’s title. Anderson described a long tracking shot that would descend into the club and introduce nearly every character, without cutting. DeLuca – thinking this sounded like Lawrence of Arabia, with disco – was hooked. He signed on immediately, regardless of the running time. “I would do Berlin Alexanderplatz with Paul. He’s Orson Welles. I’m the blank check guy.”

New Line chairman Robert Shaye had reservations about the thick script, which DeLuca assured his boss that Anderson could cut. Other executives remained dubious. VP of Marketing Karen Hermelin recalled, “I remember Mike DeLuca asking me to read it and I thought, ‘Who would watch this? You can’t make this.’ But DeLuca was totally passionate, he believed in Paul. And Paul believed in himself.” Hermelin came around. “And he was totally uncompromising. He had this five-thousand page script which was completely misogynistic. I loved it.” Shaye struck a deal with Anderson: He could make Boogie Nights with the freedom to cast whoever he wanted, provided he kept the budget below $15 million, secured an R-rating from the MPAA and delivered a running time of no more than three hours, which New Line would ultimately retain final cut over. Anderson agreed.

The first actor Anderson seriously considered for Jack Horner was Warren Beatty, who had phoned to flirt with the role. Appearing on The Charlie Rose Show in October 1997, Anderson revealed, “I think what I eventually, I started to figure out was that Warren wanted to play Dirk Diggler, you know? ‘You don’t really want to play Jack Horner. You want to be the kid on this movie. He said, ‘Yeah.’” Anderson felt Beatty’s reticence had something to do with morality. “I think what he might have been looking for, which maybe some other people were looking for, was a clear kind of moment or a clear moment when someone stands up and says, ‘What we are doing is wrong,’ you know?” After considering Jack Nicholson, Anderson made an offer to Sydney Pollack, but the director/actor blanched over the subject matter. Once they saw the film, Beatty and Pollack both regretted saying no. Burt Reynolds had said yes and received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

Leonardo DiCaprio attached himself to the role of Dirk Diggler, but weeks before shooting was to begin, the rising star was talked into taking the lead in Titanic. On his way out the door, DiCaprio recommended one of his co-stars from The Basketball Diaries – Mark Wahlberg – for the job. Joining him were most of the cast from Hard Eight - John C. Reilly, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Robert Ridgely, Philip Baker Hall – as well as actors that Anderson was eager to collaborate with. Don Cheadle had previously worked with Julianne Moore in a production of Jean Genet’s The Screens at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. “I called her and said, ‘What’s up with this script? Are you down with this?’ And she told me she got a real good feeling from Paul. I did too, but I was still nervous about how the film would come off. I didn’t want to be naked and exploited. I wanted the film to take a deep look at these people. And it does.”

A twelve week shooting schedule commenced in July 1996. The perfect house for Jack Horner had been found, but the location ended up being in West Covina, a 45 minute commute. Little about the production was a breeze. Producer John Lyons recalls, “Boogie Nights was a truly grueling shoot. It was made for basically no money, $12 million. It was a period piece and we shot a lot of it in the San Fernando Valley and West Covina. It was very hot and we shot so many days where it was 104 or 105 degrees. We shot a lot at night, which was really exhausting. When we made that movie, there was a lot of talk about workers in the sex industry and how it was a liberating thing. The reality was that I think we all got sort of depressed during the making of the film. It was intense and the reality of the lives of those people were leading are far from glamorous.”

Screened for the executives at New Line, Boogie Nights met with enthusiasm, for the most part. At 165 minutes, Robert Shaye felt the picture was just too long. While Anderson hemmed and hawed at trimming anything, Shaye brought in his own editor to cut the movie. When test screened, New Line’s 140 minute version somehow scored even lower than Anderson’s version, which was generating a miserable 30% among recruited audiences. New Line marketing chief Mitch Goldman explained, “The truth was – people didn’t want to say they liked it, even if they did. That’s the fallacy of testing a picture like this. They’d applaud, laugh, cry at the right places. Then the cards would come in shitty. When they put pencil to paper they’d say, ‘I don’t know anyone I’d recommend this to’ because it was a distasteful subject. But you could tell they loved it.”

The MPAA’s reaction to Boogie Nights was predictable. Anderson recalled, “When we submitted the movie, it was NC-17. I said, ‘I can’t argue with you.’ What they said next surprised me: ‘We just want you to know we love this movie, and we want it to be NC-17.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ They said, ‘We created that rating for movies like this, movies that deal with explicit material but that are also legitimate films. Then Showgirls came along and made us look like girls, sort of wiped the rating back to an X. So we need a movie like this.’ That changed my mind. I understood, but I said, ‘I can’t be the guinea pig.’” After recutting and resubmitting the film at least six times to no avail, Anderson reshot the sequence in which William H. Macy discovers his wife nonchalantly enjoying sexual relations at a New Year’s Eve party. “The MPAA broke it down like this: you can either hump or talk. You cannot hump and talk.”

Boogie Nights premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 1997. By late October, it had opened in the U.S. to nearly universal critical acclaim. Janet Maslin, the New York Times: “Some of the most distinctive American films of recent years – Pulp Fiction, The People vs. Larry Flynt, L.A. Confidential and now this one – have invoked a sleaze-soaked Southern California as an evilly alluring nexus of decadence and pop culture. Boogie Nights further ratchets up the raunchiness by taking porn movies and drug problems entirely for granted, and by fondly embracing a collection of characters who do the same.” Marjorie Baumgarten, the Austin Chronicle: “From the second it begins, Boogie Nights seizes your senses and pulls you right in: no turning back, no time for debate, no regrets.” Emmanuel Levy, Variety: “Darkly comic, vastly entertaining and utterly original.”

Far from a blockbuster – grossing $26.4 million in the U.S. and another $16.7 million overseas – Boogie Nights did receive three Academy Award nominations (Burt Reynolds, Julianne Moore and Anderson’s script were up for Oscars). Anderson trumpeted his magnum opus in one of many interviews by stating, “It’s about finding a family, to tell you the truth. I know that sounds kinda preposterous, ’cause it’s about porno! You know, and that’s a really kinda weird thing, is that you want to say ‘Well, it’s about the pornography industry’ and then you want to quickly say well, not really. And then maybe people might look at you sideways and go, ‘Come on, which is it?’ But I think ultimately, the thing that I really liked most and really focused on is that it’s about a lot of people searching for their dignity, and trying to find any kind of love and affection they can get. And they find it in really fucked up and twisted ways – but they get it, you know?”

Why Should I Care?
Just about every minute of Boogie Nights – which clocks in at 155 minutes – looks, sounds and feels almost exactly like I’ve imagined that movies should look, sound and feel. Photographed by Robert Elswit, we’re dazzled on a technical level. Karyn Rachtman – music supervisor for Pulp Fiction – deserves some kind of special award for mixing up The Chico Hamilton Quintet and Charles Wright & The Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band with the usual suspects like The Commodores and K.C. and the Sunshine Band. In his script, Anderson tackles challenging subject matter and takes on big, sloppy ideas, while swinging back and forth between darkness and light. If the picture has a flaw, it’s in the two dimensional portrait of just about every single character, who speak, act but very seldom it seems, think. Rollergirl flies out of the movie almost as thinly sketched as when she flew in.

Great insight is not a service Anderson offers. Where Boogie Nights succeeds masterfully is as a document of a moment in show business history and how the camaraderie of the players binds them together after the show is over. As a pure entertainment, it features plenty of ‘70s kitsch, a consistently twisted black wit, a ceaselessly mesmerizing visual palette, and that ass kicking retro soundtrack. Musician Jon Brion pitches in with a sparse but wonderfully kooky musical score. The cast – which includes Luis Guzman, Melora Walters, Nicole Ari Parker and Ricky Jay – has to be one of the finest groups of character actors ever assembled under one tent. What’s most admirable is how Anderson resists making a crowd pleasing, derivative comedy and instead, has the maturity to explore the darkness in each his characters, redeeming the ones still left standing.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
“The Don” By Justine Elias. Interview, 1997 August

“The Innocent Approach to an Adult Opus” By Margy Rochlin. The New York Times, 12 October 1997

Boogie Nights (New Line Platinum Series). New Line Home Video, 1997

“Q & A with PTA” By Matt Grainger. Cinemattractions. 1998 February

“20 Questions” By David Rensin. Playboy, 1998 February

Movie Moguls Speak: Interviews with Top Film Producers. By Steven Priggé. McFarland (2004)

Rebels on the Backlot. By Sharon Waxman. Harper Entertainment (2005)

Synopsis
In Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Harvard College graduating class of the year 1870 – which includes James Averill (Kris Kristofferson) – assembles in a massive auditorium to hear a speech by their class orator, Billy Irvine (John Hurt). Irvine rejects the high-minded ideals mapped out by the reverend doctor of the university (Joseph Cotten), and advises his classmates to merely rise no further than each of them is capable. Twenty years later, Averill arrives by train in Casper, Wyoming after transporting an immigrant woman to St. Louis to be hanged. Averill is now sheriff of Johnson County, mountainous and pristine territory in which more settlers – mostly Polish, German or Ukrainian immigrants – are pouring into every day.

Averill can’t help but notice Casper is teeming with mercenaries. By the time he drops by a saloon operated by his friend John Bridges (Jeff Bridges) in the town of Sweetwater, Averill has learned that the local cattle association, led by the unscrupulous Frank Canton (Sam Waterston) has drawn up the names of 125 settlers suspected of cattle rustling or troublemaking and put them on a death list. The most efficient of the assassins is Nathan Champion (Christopher Walken), who roams Johnson County hunting down and executing immigrants who’ve stolen livestock. Averill returns to his pastoral home and to his girlfriend Ella Watson (Isabelle Hupert), who manages a bordello and accepts stolen cattle as payment.

After adjourning to the town reception hall – Heaven’s Gate, which hosts music and roller skating – Averill asks Ella to leave the county, not wanting to tell her that her name is on the death list. Champion – who in addition to being one of Ella’s customers is in love with her – offers to take her away under the protection of his men (Geoffrey Lewis and Mickey Rourke). She rejects both offers and chooses to stay. Three of the killers make their way to Ella’s bordello and rape her. Averill arrives in time to dispatch the men with his pistols, while Champion rides to Canton’s camp and kills the mercenary who planned the raid. After debating the matter, the town chooses to stand their ground and repel the invasion.

Production history
In 1971, a filmmaker no one in Hollywood had heard of – putting his pictorial eye and camera skills to use in New York directing commercials for Kodak, Pepsi and United Airlines – wrote a screenplay titled The Johnson County War. The screenwriter was Michael Cimino and his script was loosely based on a range war that took place in 1892 between cattle ranchers and settlers, many of them immigrants, who flowed into Johnson County, Wyoming after passage of the Homestead Act. Producer David Foster set the project up at Fox, only to have production head Jere Henshaw put it into turnaround in 1972. Henshaw later told American Film, “It looked to us like a pretty downbeat story at a pretty heavy cost.”

An idiosyncratic caper Cimino wrote titled Thunderbolt and Lightfoot fared much better, with Clint Eastwood enjoying the script enough to gamble on the first time director. Co-starring Jeff Bridges, the picture was very favorably reviewed and a modest box office hit in the summer of 1974. Four years later, Cimino was riding a tidal wave of industry buzz for his second film, an ode to brotherhood and sacrifice set against the Vietnam War titled The Deer Hunter. Among those in Hollywood who were high on the movie was David Field, a production executive for United Artists. “We saw an advanced print of Deer Hunter – I don’t know how many weeks before it was released – and we were blown away.”

Cimino’s agent submitted a package for his client’s next film – The Johnson County War – to United Artists. UA’s head of production Danton Rissner read the script in August 1978 and was cool to it. His story department concluded: “If it were not for Cimino, I would pass.” What distinguished the script from the typical western was its assertion that the U.S. government had sanctioned the range war in what amounted to ethnic genocide. Rissner remained dubious that theater exhibitors would welcome such liberal revisionism of a fading genre. But by September, UA agreed to a pay-or-play package of $1.7 million for The Johnson County War: $250,000 for Cimino’s script, $500,000 for Cimino’s directing services, $100,000 for Cimino’s producing partner Joann Carelli and $850,000 for Kris Kristofferson to star, all to be paid whether the movie was made or not.

Cimino continued to tune his script. He inserted a prologue introducing the characters of Averill and Billy Irvine at Harvard twenty years before the events in Wyoming, and added a brief epilogue, taking place 10 years after the range war. Averill is moored in a yacht off the coast of Rhode Island, still haunted by the events of the film. The script concluded with the quote, “What one loves about life are the things that fade.” Cimino had also arrived on a new title, and in April 1979, one week after The Deer Hunter won five Academy Awards including Best Picture, principal photography began on Heaven’s Gate. Glacier National Park at Kalispell, Montana had been selected as a filming location and a release date of December 1979 set. The accelerated schedule dictated a budget of $11.5 million, $15 million at most.

Recalling Cimino’s exacting work methods, cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond stated, “It was very unusual the way he worked. He would actually paint by selecting extras and put them in the right place in a set. It was like a painter would paint them. He painted by picking up people and put them into the right place. Then, once we started to shoot, you know, sometimes we would go for three takes, sometimes you would go for ten takes. And many, many times you had to go for forty takes.” In the first six days of shooting, Cimino had fallen five days behind schedule, with roughly 90 seconds of usable footage in the can. After twelve days, Heaven’s Gate was ten days behind schedule.

In his book Final Cut, former United Artists head of worldwide production Steven Bach recounted the expenses that accumulated: “It was true, as later press reports informed, that Michael Cimino was building sets and rebuilding them, hiring 100 extras, then 200, then 500, adding horses and wagons and hats, shoes, gloves, dresses, top hats, bridles, boots, roller skates, babushkas, aprons, dusters, buckboards, gun belts, rifles, bullets, cows, calves, bulls, trees, thousands of tons of dirt, hundreds of miles of exposed film, and all this mattered economically. But what mattered most was that what he was adding was takes and retakes and retakes of the retakes. And retakes of those. Michael Cimino was taking – and retaking – time. Getting it right.”

To get it right, Cimino was shooting many, many, many takes of shots and printing nearly every one, burning through $200,000 a day and $1 million per week. Actor Brad Dourif recalled, “I’m not used to seeing 57 takes. I’m really not. I’m not used to doing a minimum of 32 takes. He wanted to try a bunch of different ways. It was like workshopping on film, you know, we did the happy version, we did the crying version, we did the furious version. I mean, each scene was taken to these degrees, beyond which you weren’t going for the ultimate take, you were going for a lot of choices.” At its current rate, Heaven’s Gate was on track to exceed its budget by 500% and end up costing United Artists a then stellar sum of $35 million.

United Artists got its first peek at Heaven’s Gate on June 6, 1979 when Bach and David Field made the trip to Kalispell to view about thirty minutes of the film. Bach recalled, “The footage was ravishing. There was nothing that anybody on Earth could say to criticize the footage, so we knew it wasn’t the case of a production that was falling apart. We never thought it was a case of Michael sitting in his trailer eating chocolates and watching television when he should have been out on the set. That was never the issue. The issue was we didn’t agree that you could take this much time to achieve perfection. And if you continue to take this much time to achieve perfection, you’re going to break our bank and there’s not going to be any company to release the picture.”

Jeff Bridges recalls, “From somebody on the outside it would look like it was almost too much, but it never appeared that way to me. It was like, this guy really cares.” But with John Hurt due to start work on The Elephant Man in October and the mountain roads in Montana closing for winter, Cimino heeded United Artists’ pleas to pick up the pace. UA pushed the release of the film back a year, settling on Christmas 1980. The studio planned exclusive reserved seating 70mm print engagements in New York, Los Angeles and Toronto for November 1980. Heaven’s Gate would then expand to additional cities in December before a general release in February 1981 to benefit from the many Academy Award nominations the film industry would bestow on the picture.

On June 26, 1980, after eight months of editing, Cimino was ready to show United Artists the film. Studio executives assembled in Los Angeles for a private screening. Bach recalls, “I thought Michael looked exhausted, truly, truly depleted. I remember asking, ‘How close are we to a final cut?’ And he said, ‘It’s a little long. I can lose maybe fifteen minutes.’ And we sat down and we watched the movie. And the movie that we saw was 5 hours and 25 minutes long. The battle sequence alone was as long as most feature motion pictures. I was angry, I was angry, I was angry. The company had been put through turmoil … And the internal hope that had kept us all going for those two or three years at this process now – which was that it was going to be a masterpiece, and that would justify everything that we had gone through – was suddenly gone.”

By mid-October, Cimino had Heaven’s Gate down to 3 hours and 39 minutes. No one at United Artists bothered to see his cut until its public unveiling in New York one month later. Jeff Bridges recalls “I can remember going to the first screening, the premiere in New York, and we were all very excited and Mike was quite anxious because I don’t know if he even saw the film before it was shown, you know, it was wet right out of the soup. He had just put it together and just barely made the deadline to get it all together. And the movie comes on. I remember my first impression of seeing it was, you know, kind of the splendor of it was wonderful, but the rhythm of it was so unusual and so kind of slow and not what you expected to see that the audience certainly was frustrated. And you hear that [smattering of applause] terrible applause at the end. Ugh, it was terrible.”

The next morning, Cimino, Joann Carelli and Bridges were on their way to Toronto for the next screening when they picked up a copy of the New York Times. The opening paragraph of Vincent Canby’s review read: “Heaven’s Gate … fails so completely you might suspect Mr. Cimino sold his soul to the Devil to obtain the success of The Deer Hunter, and the Devil has just come around to collect.” Brad Dourif recalls, “Well I read Vincent Canby’s – I don’t read reviews, that’s the first thing – I read Vincent Canby’s because it actually had the line in it, ‘like being given a four-hour tour of your own living room’ and I just wanted to see how bad a review could be and it was really scathing. Angry review. I mean, basically, everything that people hated about the direction of film was piled onto Michael.”

Interviewed by Jean-Luc Godard in 1982, film critic Pauline Kael defended the stoning Heaven’s Gate took in the mainstream media. “I did think Canby’s review was rather brutal. On the other hand, the fact is the picture does not have one good scene, or one good character, and it goes on for several hours. I think it’s very interesting visually, but there is nothing that can carry it with an audience. If the company had thought that the critics were wrong, they would have put in millions in advertising and they might have recouped on the picture. A lot of terrible movies get by if the companies believe in them … But they were dismayed because they could see the justice of what the reviewers were saying, that there was nothing there.”

Steven Bach disagreed. “I think the critics were reviewing the production history. They were rewriting their reviews for The Deer Hunter, which they thought they had over praised. They were getting back at what they perceived as hostile treatment from the director. I think they were slapping United Artists for having allowed this to happen. But I never felt that there was a real serious attempt to see what is this picture trying to do and does it succeed on its own terms. It didn’t succeed on the terms they wanted to lay on the picture and that was what they were writing about, was their terms for the picture, not the picture’s terms.” After playing for a week in New York, Cimino took out ads in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter asking UA to withdraw the film from release so he could rework his 219-minute cut.

A 149-minute version of Heaven’s Gate opened in 810 theaters nationwide in April 1981. But audiences ignored it completely, buying $3.4 million in tickets in the U.S. Tom Brokaw introduced a segment on Heaven’s Gate for the NBC Nightly News by proclaiming “a $40 million film from an Oscar winning director may be the biggest bomb in Hollywood history.” The loss to United Artists was tabulated at $44 million. Within a month, Transamerica decided it was done with the movie business and sold UA to rival studio MGM. Michael Cimino and Kris Kristofferson were at the Cannes Film Festival in May when the news broke. UA’s new president Norbert Auerbach maintained that while Heaven’s Gate had not been directly responsible for the collapse of the prestigious 62-year-old studio, it hadn’t saved it either.

Naturally, the first audiences to appreciate Heaven’s Gate were French. In December 1982, celebrated film magazine Cahiers du Cinema sponsored a screening of Cimino’s 219-minute cut in Paris. Word reached Los Angeles, where Jerry Harvey and Fred Grossbud of pay cable’s Z Channel persuaded MGM/UA to let them air the long version of Heaven’s Gate starting on Christmas Eve. It marked the first time a wide audience had been permitted to see the film at its original length. In the Los Angeles Times – whose film critic Kevin Thomas had been one of the few to submit a rave review of Heaven’s Gate while it was in theaters – Charles Champlin wrote, “Not a damn thing was gained economically by forcing Cimino to eviscerate his work, but audiences were denied the chance to see fully whatever it was that Cimino had in mind.”

In August 1983, England’s National Film Theatre booked the long version of Heaven’s Gate for six performances, with Cimino on hand to introduce the film. Derek Malcolm wrote in The Guardian: “The full version, I can assure you, is quite an experience – an extraordinary attempt to make a major American movie at a time when only the minors held sway.” The long version was released theatrically at the Plaza 2 theater in London, but its box office was so negligible that MGM/UA nixed plans to re-release the uncut Heaven’s Gate elsewhere. Michael Cimino – who has not directed since 1996 and refuses requests to discuss his infamous magnum opus – had this to say in 1990: “I would respond to Heaven’s Gate the same way Jack Kennedy responded to the Bay of Pigs. I’d take full responsibility and all other questions are answered by the film itself.”

Opinion
Some academics still accuse Heaven’s Gate of vaporizing the Golden Age of the director and putting the controls of Hollywood back in the hands of the studio, a process that was under way long before Michael Cimino ever got to Montana. What ultimately matters here is what’s on screen and what isn’t. On that basis, it’s time to call Heaven’s Gate what it is: the last great American film of the 1970s. It has nothing to live up anymore – making a fresh eyed and open minded reappraisal a win-win situation – but the movie is really that good. For all its excesses, what Cimino does is capture a lyrical beauty virtually missing in filmmaking since the days of David Lean. Heaven’s Gate is all at once one of pictorial brilliance, almost unparalleled scope, terrific performances and haunting grandeur.

Micahel Cimino’s screenplay not only visualizes the Old West in a way I imagine it really was – crowded and sparse, violent and peaceful, ugly and beautiful – but features dialogue of surprising depth and pathos. The cast featured no stars, but Kristofferson, Walken, Huppert, Jeff Bridges, John Hurt, Brad Dourif, Sam Waterston, Mickey Rourke, Richard Masur all do outstanding work. Few films recreate a bygone era with the detail of this one, assisted by majestic cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond and a heartbreakingly beautiful musical score by David Mansfield. Unlike so many cinematic turkeys of the last 30 years that truly qualify for “worst ever” status, for all the money spent on Heaven’s Gate, there’s never any question of where those bucks ended up.

@ Joe Valdez

Sources
Final Cut: Dreams and Disaster in the Making of Heaven’s Gate by Steven Bach (1985)
Final Cut: The Making and Unmaking of Heaven’s Gate (2004), directed by Michael Epstein

Synopsis
On the 6th of January 1917, five condemned French soldiers are brought to a trench in Somme: a once cheerful carpenter, who accidentally shot himself scattering away rats; a welder so disillusioned by the war that he burns his hand in an attempt to win a discharge; a brave farmer (Clovis Cornillac) who wounds himself in shame after murdering a superior officer; a Corsican pimp whose self-inflicted wound fails to win him a reprieve from combat, and a young lighthouse keeper named Manech (Gaspard Ulliel) who cracks under the horror of trench warfare. Each are sentenced to be thrown over the front lines, to starve or be shot by the Germans.

Though three years have passed without word from Manech, Mathilde Donnay (Audrey Tautou) refuses to believe that her lover died at the trench. Mathilde is a limp orphan who lives with her uncle (Dominique Pinon) and aunt (Chantal Neuwirth) on the Brittany coast. A veteran who escorted the condemned soldiers to their deaths meets with Mathilde, but can’t say whether he saw Manech killed. Presented with a box containing personal effects belonging to each soldier, Mathilde uses the clues to begin her own investigation. Her first lead involves a Corsican prostitute named Tina Lombardi (Marion Cotillard) who may have news about the prisoners’ fates.

Hiring a diligent private detective (Ticky Holgado) to pick up the trail of the mysterious Tina Lombardi, Mathilde resorts to her own guile to steal government documents and fan out across France in search of those who may hold a piece of the puzzle in her mystery. These include the carpenter’s girlfriend (Julie Depardieu), the Mess Hall Marauder (Albert Dupontel) who served Manech his last meal, and a war widow named Elodie Gordes (Jodie Foster) who was engaged in an extramarital affair with one of the condemned. Unknown to Mathilde, the vengeful Tina Lombardi is conducting her own investigation, tracking down military officers implicit in her pimp’s execution and killing them.

Production history
Un Long Dimanche de Fiancailles was a 1991 novel by Sébastien Japrisot. The hybrid storybook romance, detective mystery and social commentary on the Great War had been awarded the Prix Interallia by French authors and journalists on its way to becoming an international bestseller. Among its fans was Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who had just co-directed his first feature, Delicatessen. Jeunet was fascinated by the era of World War I and intrigued with the possibilities of recreating 1920s Paris on a massive scale. Jeunet recalls, “When I was a teenager I read everything about the First World War, every book. I wasted a lot of holidays because they gave me nightmares, even today it’s very difficult to read some of that stuff.”

Warner Brothers was eager to work with Jeunet following his 2001 magical romantic comedy Amelie, which had become the highest grossing French language film in history. The studio purchased the screen rights to A Very Long Engagement, wooing the director away from French studio UGC, which had hoped to produce Jeunet’s next project. He again collaborated with his Amelie co-writer Guillaume Laurant on a screenplay. Laurant recalls, “First we worked together to agree on what had to be kept and what discarded and decide upon a structure. Then Jean-Pierre wrote a 30-page synopsis. On the basis of that, I wrote a first version of the script. After that, it was a constant to-and-fro between myself and Jean-Pierre until we came up with a final version. I really enjoyed working with Jean-Pierre because of his constant concern for simplicity and efficiency.”

Jeunet had a few requests from Warner Bros. He wanted to make A Very Long Engagement a French language picture, in France, with a French cast and crew. He also wanted final cut. Jeunet recalls, “At every point they said, ‘Yes, OK.’ I said, ‘When are the troubles going to start?’ And they never did. I had as much freedom as I had doing Amelie. One hundred percent.” Warner Brothers set up a company it called 2003 Productions, financing a third of the film’s $56.5 million USD budget, the second highest ever for a French language film at that time. A five and a half month shooting schedule commenced in August 2003 in Corsica, before moving to the Paris area, then to Brittany for the coastal scenes and the Poitiers area for the trench warfare sequences. Interiors were shot at Bry-sur-Marne Studios.

The troubles started when Jeunet finished A Very Long Engagement and submitted it to the French government for subsidies awarded to films made in France. This raised a furor by two unions of French film producers, who argued that the film wasn’t French because it had been financed by Warner Bros. Jeunet felt that the three major producers in France – Gaumont, UGC and Pathe – were wary of Hollywood intruding on their turf. “It’s quite simple. There are three supermarkets and a fourth opens; the other three are not too happy about it and do everything they can to block it. Warner Bros. wants to be a fourth supermarket but making French films. I defend those who make movies. We gave work to 600 technicians, 80 actors and 2,000 extras; we saved Duboi, which was in trouble; and we spent €35 million in France. We didn’t delocalize.”

Opening October 2004 in France, A Very Long Engagement was a hit, ultimately selling $63.5 million in tickets outside the U.S. Arriving in the States in November, the response was not as stellar. Critics who liked the film had a peculiar way of communicating it. Carina Chocano, the Los Angeles Times: “A resolutely odd, occasionally absurd movie, but it’s as charming and stylish as one could expect from this pair – if you like that sort of thing.” Ken Tucker, New York Magazine: “When this long movie is over, all you want to do is clap and weep and watch it all over again immediately.” Variety: “Told with a blend of visual mastery and emotional intimacy, ambitious venture sustains a special melding of romance and pragmatism that should engage discerning audiences.” Expanding to 219 screens, it managed only $6.5 million in the U.S.

Opinion
For anybody suffering withdrawal over director Terry Gilliam’s seeming inability to finance a movie that lives up to the droll vision displayed in Time Bandits or Brazil, A Very Long Engagement is the magic show you’ve been waiting for. A plot summary really can’t do any more justice to Sébastien Japrisot’s richly intricate novel than it can to Jeunet’s immensely whimsical vision of it. This is a cinematic dessert tray, with French digital animation studio Duboi recreating 1920s Paris on an eye popping scale and rendering some 300 trick shots to make the treats even richer. But underneath the visual sheen are reminders of wartime loss, regret and futility that only a European filmmaker would hint at in an enterprise this lavish.

Because this story is so dependent on exposition – with lots of subtitles for non-French speakers to keep pace with – A Very Long Engagement is challenging. And unlike Amelie, it doesn’t rate as a gigglefest. As a visceral experience, it’s beyond peer. Jeunet and cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel borrowed a warm color palette from the Little Italy sequences of The Godfather Part II and much of the film resembles less a movie than it does a painting. The digital effects add depth to this world, instead of overwhelming it. In terms of the cast, watching Audrey Tautou, Marion Cotillard and Jodie Foster (speaking impeccable French she studied at the Lycée Français prep school in L.A. as a teen) is a treat. Jeunet lets enough light into the cellar to keep the film from being overwhelming, creating one of the finest anti-war movies in recent memory.

Noel Megahey at DVD Times writes, “All of this fabulous spectacle however is at the cost of any real feeling or emotion, it being smothered under the next spectacular, beautifully lit scene. Even when Mathilde visits what she believes is the grave of her fiancé it should be a solemn private moment, but Jeunet can’t resist filling every inch of the full scope ratio of the screen with as many crosses as will fit. Visually impressive, yes – emotionally resonant, no.”

Chris Luedtke at Passport Cinema writes, “Basically, this is what we call in the business ‘some good stuff.’ A lot of directors nowadays could take some cues from Jeunet’s originality in his displays of characters and plot drive … Jeunet has no problem making you believe that her long lost love may be alive one minute and then dead the next. For those willing to pop this in, you’ll be pleasantly delighted with it. Don’t expect some overly sappy romance story but do be prepared for a character driven mystery that’ll keep you guessing.”

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
When his exhaustive knowledge of Elvis Presley fails to convince a woman he meets a bar to watch a triple feature of Sonny Chiba movies with him, Clarence Worley (Christian Slater) goes to the theater alone. There he meets Alabama Whitman (Patricia Arquette) when she spills popcorn on him. Taking a seat next to Clarence, Alabama not only makes it through all three kung-fu movies, but actually seems impressed when Clarence takes her to his workplace, a comic book store. They go to bed, after which Alabama confides that Clarence’s boss hired her to keep him company for his birthday. Conflicted because she’s fallen in love with Clarence, Alabama quits her new job as a call girl and elopes with him.

Clarence goes to see Alabama’s vile pimp Drexl (Gary Oldman) to settle his wife’s accounts. During the melee that ensues, Clarence grabs a suitcase filled with cocaine instead of Alabama’s clothes. He visits his estranged father Cliff (Dennis Hopper) to find out if Detroit PD is on to him. Cliff notifies his son that Drexl was an associate of gangsters and the cops assume his death was gang related. Clarence and Alabama depart for their honeymoon, but Cliff receives a visit from Vincent Coccotti (Christopher Walken), the rightful owner of the narcotics. Rather than be forced to give up his son, Cliff uses his knowledge of Sicilian history to infuriate the gangster into shooting him.

Clarence and Alabama arrive in L.A., where Clarence’s friend Dick Ritchie (Michael Rapaport) – an aspiring actor up for a role on T.J. Hooker – lives with his stoner roommate Floyd (Brad Pitt). Clarence hopes his buddy can find a buyer for the cocaine. The only possibility Dick can think of Elliot (Bronson Pinchot), a guy he knows from his acting class who’s an assistant to a big movie producer named Lee Donowitz (Saul Rubinek). They set up a meet, but Coccotti’s enforcer Virgil (James Gandolfini) intercepts Alabama at her motel room. Only one of them makes it out alive.

Meanwhile, Elliott is pulled over for speeding and is caught wearing a bag of Clarence’s cocaine all over him. Two narcs (Tom Sizemore and Chris Penn) pressure Elliott into wearing a wire for the business meet. Arriving at the Beverly Ambassador Hotel, Clarence – who’s been receiving guidance from the spirit of Elvis Presley (Val Kilmer) – makes a good impression on the movie producer. But before he can complete the drug deal, the LAPD and the Sicilians and the producer’s own gunmen find themselves in a Mexican standoff.

Production history
In 1985, an employee at Video Archives in Manhattan Beach named Roger Avary started a screenplay called The Open Road. The script was about an uptight businessman who encounters a wild hitchhiker and travels with her to a bizarre town in the Midwest. Avary ran out of gas after eighty pages. Moving on to other projects, he gave his buddy and fellow video store clerk Quentin Tarantino the okay to rewrite The Open Road using his own sensibility. Tarantino came back with close to five hundred handwritten pages.

Avary helped Tarantino hone the epic manuscript to a presentable length. The result was True Romance, the first screenplay Tarantino ever finished. Over the next five years, his manager Cathryn James beat down doors trying to sell it. Meanwhile, Tarantino used his magnum opus as the genesis for his second script, Natural Born Killers. Buyers weren’t interested in that title either. Many were put off by its profanity, while others felt that Tarantino’s writing style – which featured fractured timelines and lengthy monologues – was the sign of an amateur.

Craig Hamann, a friend of Tarantino’s and co-writer of a home movie the pair were trying to finish called My Best Friend’s Birthday recalled, “Cathryn James took calls all around from people in the industry who were just livid at that script. They absolutely didn’t like it at all. One person who’s very prominent in the film industry sent the script back to Cathryn and said, ‘I will seriously consider reading anything else that you send me again if this is the quality.’ I mean that kind of hostile thing was going on and I’m not sure even Quentin understands that completely, but then after Reservoir Dogs everybody was, ‘Oh we really like this film.’”

Finally, a B-movie company called CineTel optioned True Romance. Their plan was to have William Lustig of Maniac Cop 2 fame direct. The company gave Tarantino his first professional writing job, doing dialogue polishes on scripts they had in development. CineTel executive Catalaine Knell took Tarantino under her wing. Knell had been an assistant to director Tony Scott, and introduced her protégé to her former boss. Tarantino gave Scott a copy of True Romance and a script he’d just finished titled Reservoir Dogs.

Scott wrapped The Last Boy Scout in June 1991 and was on a flight to Italy when he read the scripts. When he landed, Scott called Tarantino and said that he wanted both of them. Tarantino wanted to direct Reservoir Dogs, but told Scott he was welcome to True Romance. Scott recalled, “I’m not a good reader but I read it in one sitting and I thought it was brilliant. I thought it was very fresh and very different and totally character based. My love of the piece was based on how much I fell in love with the characters, so therefore it’s an actor-based movie and it’s the first time I’ve had one of those. After Top Gun, the movies that I was offered were, for better or worse, what you’d call hardware action movies.”

Scott commenced shooting in June 1992 in Los Angeles on a $12.5 million budget. Other than structuring the action in chronological order, the only change Scott made to the script was the ending. Tarantino had Clarence perishing in the climactic gun battle, but Scott had become so enamored by the couple that he brought in Roger Avary to write a happier ending. Tarantino recalled, “At first, I was really distraught about it. In fact, I was talking about taking my name off the film. I had a lot of faith in Tony Scott – I’m a big fan of his work, especially Revenge – but where I was coming from, you just couldn’t change my ending, you know?”

Released September 1993 in the U.S., even critics who liked the movie seemed embarrassed to admit it. On Siskel & Ebert, Roger Ebert stated, “True Romance is like a case study of the inflamed fantasies of violent, stupid, amoral, gun loving, sexually obsessed teenagers, and on that level – which is an admittedly low level – it is well made and very entertaining. It tells the kind of story that a lot of teenage boys think they would like to live through, before they grow up and begin to develop average intelligence, of course.” Gene Siskel simply retorted, “It’s kind of sloppy and dumb and not fun.”

True Romance was ignored at the box office, where it grossed only $12.2 million in the U.S. Interviewed in 2003, Scott commented, “Unfortunately, the film wasn’t successful. It bombed, really. I think maybe it’s too violent. But if you ask me to make a choice and state which of my films is my favorite, I think I would say True Romance, because it invaded my life so easily, because it was so well written. The characters were so well drawn. Every day, I went to the set and had an amazing smorgasbord of the best actors around.”

Opinion
When viewed as the sum of its parts, True Romance is a classic because it has scenes that rank among the most spectacular in film history when it comes to the written word. By far the most memorable is the showdown between Christopher Walken and Dennis Hopper; the 11-minute scene features two of the greatest actors of their generation chewing up two of the most enthralling monologues a writer has ever crafted. The muscular confrontation between Patricia Arquette and James Gandolfini is a blue ribbon award winner as well. Gary Oldman in bananas as the dreadlocked white pimp who believes he’s black. The same goes for Brad Pitt, who is the epitome of the completely useless roommate.

The conceit of a pop culture geek taking down pimps and cold blooded killers may be the stuff of science fiction, and it’s hard to believe that if Tarantino had chosen to direct this, Christian Slater would have appeared on his list to play Clarence (Val Kilmer desperately wanted the role.) Some of the casting and almost all of the music is completely generic Hollywood, while Tony Scott – director of Beverly Hills Cop II and Days of Thunder – gets mixed results filming a down and dirty exploitation flick like it was a cologne commercial. But for the most part, the cast is one of the finest ever assembled, while Scott remains true to the spirit of Tarantino’s text, which is both uncompromising in its brutality and invigorating in its repartee.

Colin Jacobson at DVD Movie Guide writes, “In the end, Romance feels like an odd piece. The script seems unusually thin and sketchy for something from Quentin Tarantino, but since it was his first finished work, that makes sense; he clearly hadn’t quite found his voice just yet. Had Tarantino taken on the project himself and made it as a low-budget indie production, it could have worked, but unfortunately, it went the other way and became a glossy piece of Hollywood fluff. Romance enjoys a few decent moments, but overall it falls short of its goals.”

David Medsker at Bullz-Eye.com writes, “True Romance was a pioneer action movie in many respects, in that it placed an equal influence on the dialogue and characters as it did on the action. It may not have reinvented the genre entirely, but the action movies that soon followed (The Professional, Con Air, Grosse Pointe Blank) were far more enjoyable than their predecessors (again, The Last Boy Scout). Sonny Chiba and Elvis would certainly approve.”

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
Resorting to a fantasy in which a stranger accosts her in the shower, Kate Miller (Angie Dickinson) gets through a thoroughly unsatisfying round of sex with her husband. Revealing this to her psychiatrist, Dr. Elliott (Michael Caine), she’s advised to think about where her anger is going and to confront her husband with her sexual frustrations. Kate visits the Metropolitan Museum of Art and after a prolonged game of gallery tag with an amorous stranger, climbs into a cab and indulges in a quickie in the backseat with him. Leaving his apartment, Kate is cornered in the elevator and slashed to death by a blonde with a straight razor.

Call girl Liz Blake (Nancy Allen) witnesses the slaying and is hauled before the crass cop (Dennis Franz) leading the investigation. Kate’s geeky teenaged son Peter (Keith Gordon) eavesdrops on the interrogation electronically, hoping to nab the killer himself. Meanwhile, “Bobbi” – a disturbed patient who feels he’s a woman trapped in a man’s body – leaves a message for Dr. Elliott in which he reveals he’s taken the shrink’s razor. Peter follows Liz on the subway and saves her from Bobbi’s razor. Liz and Peter then hatch a plan to snoop through Dr. Elliott’s appointment book to learn who “Bobbi” is and stop her before she kills one of them.

Production history
Brian DePalma spent a year working on an adaptation of Robert Daley’s book Prince of the City when Orion Pictures balked at where the script was headed and dismissed the director. DePalma returned to an unproduced screenplay he’d adapted from the novel Cruising. Taking the idea of a character engaging in random sex, DePalma married it to a woman who gets picked up in an art gallery, something he’d tried in his college days. Seeing a transsexual interviewed on The Phil Donahue Show gave him the idea of a psychiatrist whose female side murders the women arousing his male side. This formed the basis for Dressed To Kill.

DePalma sent the script to his former agent George Litto, whose response was, “If you and I can’t agree that I can produce the movie, I’ll kill ya.” Litto knew that Samuel Z. Arkoff was an admirer of DePalma’s and set the project up at Filmways, which provided $6.5 million in financing and gave DePalma full creative control. His first choice to play Kate Miller was Liv Ullmann. The esteemed Norwegian actress turned the part down. Sean Connery was asked to play the psychiatrist and also passed. DePalma talked Angie Dickinson and Michael Caine into filling the roles, joining DePalma’s wife Nancy Allen, who the role of Liz Blake had been written for.

The first crisis arrived when DePalma submitted Dressed To Kill to the MPAA. The film was stamped with an X rating. To ensure that the theater chains would exhibit the film and that newspapers would run ads, the director reluctantly toned down the nudity in the shower scene and the bloodshed of Kate’s death to win an R rating. DePalma recalls, “I had an impression that because it so effective I was being penalized by being effective, not because I showed so much, but because it was so scary and so violent.” Audiences in Europe were able to see DePalma’s uncut version, while in the United States, they had to wait for home video.

Arriving in theaters July 1980, Dressed To Kill received some of the most enthusiastic critical notices of the year. The New York Times (Vincent Canby), the New Yorker (Pauline Kael) and New York magazine (David Denby) went out of their way to praise the film. Andrew Sarris dissented, calling it “soft-core porn and hard-edged horror” and citing DePalma for ripping off Alfred Hitchcock. An even more hostile reaction came from Women Against Pornography, which organized protests outside theaters in New York, Boston, L.A. and San Francisco. One of the group’s leaflets read, “If this film succeeds, killing women may become the greatest turn-on of the Eighties!”

The picket lines amounted to free publicity and vaulted Dressed To Kill past Airplane! and The Empire Strikes Back to the number one grossing movie in the country its second week of release. It went on to earn $31.8 million in the United States. Looking back on the furor in 2001, DePalma commented, “All those movies that they were trashing in the ‘60s and the ‘70s or ‘80s are the ones that people are writing about now and the ones that seem to have some kind of life. The revisionism will start basically and you basically as an artist, you just have to just do what you feel is what you’re doing and not get crushed by the particular establishment in place at the time.”

Opinion
Whether you’re an academic taking notes in the aisle with a pen light, a jackass up in the balcony with a box of Goobers, or a regular moviegoer somewhere in between, Dressed To Kill is a classic because it has something to marvel over regardless of which demographic you fall into. It’s my favorite Brian DePalma film, one that absolutely has to be considered on any list of top five achievements in the director’s infamous yet prodigious career. It is gruesome (the DVD features the film in both its theatrical and “unrated” versions,) but in a way that’s more electric than upsetting, soused on a pure intoxication for cinema and eliciting a visceral response from the audience. And does it ever.

From the opening chord of Pino Donaggio’s billowing musical score, the movie is too far over the top to be taken seriously as a drama. As an orchestration of camera movement, film and sound editing and art design, even the ghost of Alfred Hitchcock would have to admit that DePalma knows how to utilize the medium. Michael Caine sort of looks like he came in on his time off between Beyond the Poseidon Adventure and Blame It On Rio, but Nancy Allen and Keith Gordon have never been more engaging in a movie. Terrifying in parts, the film is also hilarious in others, courtesy Dennis Franz, who takes off running with the full range of New York cop talk, without ever looking back.

Gary Militzer at DVD Verdict writes, “Stylish psycho-shock films don’t come any better than this. Talented acting, superb direction, shocking twists, taut suspense – it’s all here. Sure, there is style to burn here – Brian De Palma is a filmmaker in love with his camera, after all – but De Palma sprinkles in just enough lingering substance to gel it all together into a memorable suspense classic that only gains in stature with repeat viewings. And it’s not just a one-trick, gimmick-twist of a film that insults your intelligence in the end… This is the real deal; Dressed to Kill is an essential De Palma masterwork that is not to be missed.”

“It has some genuinely creepy sequences and some really well-shot scenes, but De Palma strays too often into gratuitous violence and sensationalism. De Palma was one of the major voices in the 1970s-1980s school of filmmaking that wanted to see how far they could push the envelope. What they learned (or, at least, what the audiences learned) is that being able to show everything that classic Hollywood had to cover up is not necessarily a good thing, especially if the films exist only to see how far they could go,” writes Michael W. Phillips Jr. at goatdog’s movies.

Daniel Stephens at DVD Times writes, “The brilliance of the movie begins at its core: the script. De Palma has managed to create a taut thriller filled to the gills with false avenues, red herrings and ambiguity. It is much more original than it may look at first glance, combining visual scenes driven by the camera rather than dialogue, and for all intents and purposes throws out any remnants of genre conventions. For all its worth as a thrilling psychological drama, it has true connotations of gothic horror, romance, comedy and porn.”

© Joe Valdez

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
In Seattle, Jack Baker (Jeff Bridges) leaves his latest one-night stand in her bed. “You’ve got great hands,” she tells him on his way out. Jack dusts off his tux and shuffles to a gig at the Starfire Lounge. Performing a dual piano act with his partner of 31 years – his older brother Frank (Beau Bridges) – Jack can barely mask his contempt for his job, his surroundings and his employer. His only happiness seems to come from his dog, the 10-year-old neighbor (Ellie Raab) who’s adopted him as a surrogate dad and performing his own brand of sophisticated jazz piano at an after hours joint.

With audiences drying up, Frank holds auditions for a singer. Thirty-seven “singers” later, Susie Diamond (Michelle Pfeiffer) enters. While her entertainment experience is limited to being on call for the Triple A Escort Service, Susie’s voice is elegant and powerful. After a rocky start, the Fabulous Baker Boys and the Sensational Susie Diamond start drawing crowds. But the more intimately Jack and Susie get to know each other, the more nervous Frank becomes. “This isn’t some hat check girl you can leave behind at the Sheraton. You’ve got two shows a night with her!” Jack ignores the advice. Both he and Susie come to regret it.

Production history
A love for movies brought Steve Kloves from Sunnyvale, California to UCLA, where he worked at a campus deli and found little time for class. He dropped out his sophomore year and took an unpaid internship with an agent. Barely old enough to drink, he wrote a script called Swings, an “’80s version of Diary of a Mad Housewife” about women in the suburbs. The script brought Kloves to the attention of Paramount, which put his third screenplay – a coming of age tale set against World War II titled Racing With The Moon – into production in 1983 with Richard Benjamin directing and Sean Penn and Nicolas Cage starring.

Kloves started work on his next script. “I had spent a lot of time in bad hotels and I would occasionally go down to the bar and hear some guy play the piano, and some of them were pretty good. The way my mind tripped off on it was that this guy’s parents gave him piano lessons to improve his life and give him an opening into culture and there he was, twenty years later, at a Holiday Inn playing ‘Feelings.’ ” Kloves finished writing The Fabulous Baker Boys in 1985 and sold it to producer Paula Weinstein. She took the project to Mark Rosenberg, president of production at Warner Brothers.

Chevy Chase and Bill Murray were proposed to star. Kloves wanted Jeff and Beau Bridges and spent the next three years holding out for the opportunity to direct the film himself. Mark Rosenberg left Warner Brothers, partnering with producer/director Sydney Pollack to form Mirage Productions. Pollack read The Fabulous Baker Boys and recalled, “The first thing that struck me was its sense of atmosphere, mood and leanness. Steve is a minimalist, and there is something extremely evocative in the understated way he writes.” But even with the Bridges, Mirage was unable to interest a studio. Finally, in 1988, Fox agreed to finance the film at $11.5 million.

For the role of Susie Diamond, Kloves hadn’t considered anyone except Michelle Pfeiffer. It was hoped she would be able to do her own singing, but it had been seven years – for Grease 2 – since Pfeiffer had sang or had a voice lesson. Composer Dave Grusin suggested a singer/songwriter named Sally Stevens coach Pfeiffer’s vocal performance. After taking the actress to the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel to hear a nightclub singer and get the ambiance down, they spent six weeks rehearsing for two hours a day at Pfeiffer’s Santa Monica home. Stevens recalls, “I can swear that every single note in that movie was hers.”

Shooting commenced in December 1988. Though set in Seattle, much of the film was shot in L.A., with the production utilizing the Biltmore Hotel, the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel and the Ambassador Hotel for key musical sequences. Nominated for four Academy Awards – including a Best Actress nomination for Pfeiffer – and a darling of nearly every critic that reviewed it, audiences stayed away. Kloves recalls, “Baker Boys was considered a difficult, quirky movie. Dark. Anything in the present state of Hollywood where people have real arguments is considered dark.” It wasn’t until the film was released on home video that moviegoers warmed up to it.

Opinion
Jazz music, a conflict that stays mostly internalized in the main character, and a dry sense of humor are only a few of the challenges Kloves imposes on the audience here, the number one being that his screenplay doesn’t tell us much more about these characters or their music than we’d soak up tending bar at one of their gigs. The reason that The Fabulous Baker Boys endures as a classic is precisely because it refuses to impose any artificial plot devices, jokes or dialogue on the audience, transporting us right into those dingy lounges with their blue collar musical acts.

Using the success metric coined by Howard Hawks, this movie has three great scenes and no bad ones. Pfeiffer’s audition to “More Than You Know” is magic, as is her show stopping performance of “Makin’ Whoopee” atop a piano. And any screenwriter should envy the way Kloves bookends his story. While Susie Diamond is still the best role of Michelle Pfeiffer’s career, Jeff Bridges walks away with the movie, playing a worn out rake who’s heard the same lines and played the same tunes one time too many. Cinematographer Michael Ballhaus brings an Edward Hopper/“Nighthawks” vibe to the film, aided immeasurably by Dave Grusin’s mellow musical score.

Nathan Rabin at The Onion A.V. Club writes, “American studios turned out plot-light, atmosphere-heavy observational gems like this throughout the ’70s, but when Baker Boys hit screens in the late ’80s, its understated, world-weary sophistication stood out like a Cole Porter ballad sandwiched between generic Top 40 R&B hits … Though it lacks momentum as it ambles to a close, Baker Boys is nevertheless a touching, sly, resonant look at the joy and pain of collaboration, and the way jaded souls cut themselves off from their emotions to keep heartache at bay, but ultimately end up hurting each other all the same.”

“Even by the standards of leisurely paced films, The Fabulous Baker Boys takes its sweet time to kick its dramatic arc into gear. The movie, especially its final act, could’ve used tighter editing. But those are minor complaints. Both Bridges are excellent; it might be the pinnacle of Beau Bridges’ filmic career. Pfeiffer initially overplays the brassy broad routine (perhaps still channeling her performance from 1988’s Married to the Mob) … but her performance transcends vocal prowess. Heterosexual males might have trouble watching Pfeiffer’s rendition of “Makin’ Whoopee” without drooling on themselves,” writes Phil Bacharach at DVD Talk.

Vince Leo at QWipster’s Movie Reviews writes, “This is the film that contains the classic scene of Michelle Pfeiffer in a red dress laying on top of the piano, belting out the standard, ‘Makin’ Whoopee’, and there are several other moments that make this a worthwhile watch for those who enjoy thoughtful fare with lots of good music. It’s an efficiently made film made by consummate professionals, and for a night of quality sights, sounds, and good performances, the price of the rental should be well worth it.”

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
“Nothin’ but a bunch of jive and junk,” is how a “gateway hustler” named DJay (Terrence Howard) sizes up FM radio in Memphis as he drives through the city with Nola (Taryn Manning), a wide-eyed white girl employed as his top moneymaker. Selling an ounce of weed to bar owner Arnel (Isaac Hayes), DJay learns some big company is expected over the Fourth of July weekend: “Skinny Black,” a rapper DJay remembers “when he was hustling his underground tapes down at the drive-in out the back of his Cutlass.” Skinny is now a platinum selling recording artist.

Struggling with the other women in his house – the pregnant Shug (Taraji Henson) and the bitter Lexus (Paula Jai Parker) – DJay finds solace with a used synthesizer. He runs into a schoolmate named Key (Anthony Anderson) who works as a recording engineer. Now the age his father was when he died, DJay feels like his end may be coming soon. He articulates his “mode” through lyric, interrupting dinner between Key and his middle class wife (Elise Neal) to demonstrate his rhyme. Impressed, Key brings in a piano player from his church, a geeky looking white boy named Shelby (D.J. Qualls) and sets up a recording studio in DJay’s house.

Working to find a hook in the pages of lyric DJay scribbled, Shelby brings Shug into the studio and has her lay down a chorus to “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp”. Nola gets upset that her role in the enterprise seems limited to exchanging her body to a pawnshop owner for an expensive mic. DJay reminds her that without her work as their “primary investor,” none of them would be anywhere. Equipped with a demo tape, DJay makes his way to Arnel’s Fourth of July party, determined to get his big break by getting the tape to Skinny Black (Ludacris) by the end of the night.

Production history
Craig Brewer grew up in Memphis and spent his school days writing and directing plays. After studying at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, he moved home to Tennessee. The sudden death of his father at the age of 49 had Brewer thinking of his own mortality by the age of 27. Using a $20,000 inheritance from his father’s passing, Brewer shot his first feature – a tale of a Memphis car thief who falls in love with one of his victims, titled The Poor & Hungry – on digital video. The film made the festival circuit and was later sold to the Independent Film Channel.

Out scouting locations in Memphis, Brewer was approached by a hustler trying to sell him a woman. The pimp would not take no for an answer. “So I just put the two together. I thought, ‘Man, if that guy had the same mid-life crisis that I had, and suddenly he started thinking about making something creative, what kind of story would that be?’ It seemed to me that his creative outlet would be music. In Memphis, that means hip-hop, crunk.” In 2000, Brewer finished a screenplay for Hustle & Flow and found a champion in producer Stephanie Allain, who had brought John Singleton and Boyz N The Hood to Columbia Pictures in 1990.

Allain spent three years trying to set up Hustle & Flow. No one was buying, but she refused to take no for an answer either. “Stephanie said, ‘When you made your first feature, The Poor & Hungry, you made a really good movie for 20 grand. Let’s see what $400,000 can do.’” Hoping he’d help finance the film, Allain sent the script to Singleton. He loved it. “I called [Brewer] up and I said that he’d done what they’d always told me at USC Film School: the cheapest way to make a film is to write a film. And reading the script to Hustle & Flow, the story leapt off the page, and it deserved to be a picture.”

Singleton – coming off the biggest box office hit of his career with 2 Fast 2 Furious – felt they’d have no problem raising far more than $400,000. He shopped the project around, but got the same answer Allain had been given. “They said they really loved the script, they loved the material, that they had hesitations on casting Terrence Howard because he wasn’t a known actor, he wasn’t someone who could bring in an audience, they thought. One studio had issues with Craig being white.”

Brewer recalled, “A lot of studios did not want Terrence because they thought this was a perfect role for a rapper to play. But I was like, ‘You know, that’s really not what the movie is about. The movie is really about the people in shadows, the people who feel like they’re on the other side of the globe.’” Brewer wanted the movie to be more like The Commitments, “There’s something about nobodies trying to be somebodies that America has always embraced.” After a year of rejection, Singleton decided to greenlight the movie himself, using his house as collateral to put up a $2.8 million budget.

To make sure Howard would be convincing as a rapper, Singleton took him to Memphis to work with DJ Paul and Juicy J of Three 6 Mafia, the group composing the film’s songs. Howard laid down vocals for “Pop It For Some Paper” and put any doubts he could rap to rest. Shooting commenced in July 2004 in Memphis. Brewer had rejected suggestions he make the movie someplace cheaper, wanting to tie in the musical legacy established at Sun Records and Stax in the 1960s with what local rappers were creating out of makeshift studios in the present.

Shot in 23 days, Hustle & Flow became the story of the Sundance Film Festival when screened in January, winning the Audience Award for Dramatic Feature and selling distribution rights to Paramount Classics for $9 million. Released in July 2005, the film drew generally favorable reviews, though critics in The New York Times and The Village Voice were among those who disapproved of the film’s depiction of women. Audiences only bought $20 million of tickets in the U.S., but Howard received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, while Three 6 Mafia became the first rap group to win Best Original Song with “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp”.

Opinion
Hustle & Flow works on all sorts of different levels: as a down and dirty B-movie in the Blaxploitation mode, as a rich character study firmly grounded in reality, as a musical drama about nobodies striving to become somebody. But where it succeeds most eloquently is as a love poem to the power of creativity. In twenty years of movies about rap music starting with Krush Groove, this is the first one that actually takes the time to depict how rap’s sound is created. Instead of stretch limos or champagne or fame, this is a movie fascinated with artists.

Brewer’s script not only mines Memphis and its street culture for production value, but features characters we haven’t seen before. The casting is A+, with Terrence Howard, Anthony Anderson, Taraji Henson and Taryn Manning coming out of nowhere and giving career making performances. The story itself may not be the newest thing under the sun, but the style Brewer tells this with is. Director of photography Amy Vincent provided the gritty lighting, while the crunk soundtrack is filled with great old school blues and soul, including Buddy Guy, Al Green, Luther Ingram and Willie Hutch.

Michael W. Phillips Jr. at goatdog’s movies writes, “Hustle & Flow is a perfect example of the manipulative power of a tale well told. I found myself cheering DJay (Terrence Howard) on in his quest to make it big, despite his misogyny and his dubious self-control and his overpowering self-pity … The film works as a showcase for a powerful, sly performance by Howard, a performance that will probably bring him an Oscar nomination, but too often it’s overpowered by the heady scent of its own hokum.”

“Hustle & Flow has some dark undertones, but they are always overshadowed by the sheer joy of the film’s execution. The musical segments in which they create a demo tape are joyous and enlightening, capable of converting the most straight-laced moviegoers into lyrical rappers … Unless your popcorn is laced with sedatives, you will find yourself dancing to the beat and singing ‘Whoop that trick’ with the rest of them. If only all summer movies could ignite this same level of enthusiasm,” writes Lexi Feinberg at Cinema Blend.

Sara Fetters at Movie Freak writes, “I know almost nothing about rap and I’m not going to try and be more knowledgeable than I really am … So what? What I do know is a good movie when I see one, and Hustle & Flow is a very good movie … Like Scorsese scouring the streets of New York, Brewer is so confident, so at ease amidst the crazily calm and lackadaisical whimsy of Memphis’ seedier pathways I almost felt like I was there. What he does is remarkable, showing all the showmanship and bravado behind the camera of a director with far more under his belt.”

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
Shooting baskets in the yard of Attica State Prison, Jake Shuttlesworth (Denzel Washington) is called for a visit with the warden (Ned Beatty). Jake is notified that the governor is a huge basketball fan and a booster of his alma mater, “Big State University.” The warden verifies that Jake’s son Jesus (Ray Allen) is now the number one high school basketball prospect in the country. The governor has given his word that if Jake can convince his son to sign a letter of intent with Big State, Jake’s sentence will be reduced.

With a week to go until the signing deadline, Jake returns to Coney Island with an ankle bracelet, a menacing chaperone (Jim Brown) from the board of corrections and a letter of intent for his son to sign. While Jake’s 11-year-old daughter (Zelda Harris) is happy to see her father again, Jesus isn’t interested in reconciliation. He refuses to forgive Jake for the death of his mother. Jesus hasn’t decided which college he wants to sign with yet, but nearly everyone in his life appears to have a vested interest in the boy’s plans.

His girlfriend Lala (Rosario Dawson) is scared of being left behind and urges him to speak with a sports agent who’s paid her off. His uncle (Bill Nunn) is suspicious of where Jesus gets his money and demands his piece of the pie. His coach has kept Jesus in money from an anonymous party, hoping for a hint of which school he’s leaning toward. Coaches John Thompson, Dean Smith, John Chaney, Roy Williams, Nolan Richardson and Lute Olson appear on video to remind Jesus, “This will be the most important decision in your life.”

Only a diminutive teammate (Hill Harper) and a neighborhood ganglord (Roger Guenveur Smith) who guarantees Jesus protection seem not to want something from him. Beyond the accident that took his mother’s life, Jesus resents his father for how hard he pushed him as a child on the practice court. Jake does his best to make up for lost time – revealing he named Jesus after Earl Monroe, not Jesus Christ – but with his time up, issues his son a challenge; a game of one-on-one for his signature on the letter of intent.

Production history
Writer-director Spike Lee had always thought his first sports film would be a biography of Jackie Robinson, but after struggling for two years to find the financing necessary to tell Robinson’s story, Lee had to put the project on hold. In 1996, his wife told him that he should write an original screenplay, something in his own voice. Jungle Fever had been his last attempt at this and that had been six years previous. Once Lee started writing again, the first thing that came to his mind was basketball.

Lee wanted to avoid sports cliché, “that hokum Hoosiers, Rocky kind of sports movie. No underdogs, no team from the sticks.” Knowing that every NBA player who spotted him courtside at Madison Square Garden would be on his case if he made a bad movie about basketball, Lee also wanted to avoid the inaccuracies of many recent hoops flicks. “Those films, everybody’s dunking. And you can tell they got trampolines off to the side and guys are flying through the air like it’s a karate movie or something.”

Once he finished the script, Lee Fed Exed it to Denzel Washington, who sent word two days later that he would star in the picture. This got Disney to commit $23 million in financing. Washington made the package even more appealing by cutting his fee in order to get the movie made. Lee had been worrying about who he was going to cast as Jesus. “I don’t think there’s an actor today that could’ve exhibited the skills to look like he could be the best high school athlete.” Lee drew up a list of every NBA player who looked like he could still be a high school senior.

Kobe Bryant had off-season commitments. Tracy McGrady auditioned but was found too reserved. Allen Iverson auditioned as well, but his acting chops didn’t impress anyone. Management for Kevin Garnett and Stephon Marbury wanted a guarantee that one or the other would be offered the part. Travis Best, Walter McCarty and Rick Fox auditioned and all won supporting parts. Lee approached Ray Allen during halftime of a Bucks-Knicks game and ultimately offered him the role of Jesus. Allen had never acted before, but went to work with an acting coach eight weeks prior to filming.

He Got Game opened in May 1998 on more screens (1,300) than any Spike Lee film to date, and though it debuted number one at the box office, the movie faded fast from public view, grossing $21.5 million in the U.S. As with most of Lee’s work, critics either loved it or hated it. Roger Ebert wrote that it was Lee’s best since Malcolm X, adding “Spike Lee brings the spirit of a poet to his films about everyday reality.” Bruce Diones at The New Yorker wrote, “Spike Lee offers up more cliché-ridden street angst.”

Appearing on The Charlie Rose Show, Lee’s take on He Got Game was this: “I think this film is about parents and children. It’s not just sports dads. It could be stage mothers, I mean, it could be parents pushing their children to be lawyers or doctors or ballerinas or ice skaters. I think all children need to be pushed by their parents, but, at some point, pushing has to stop or it becomes very harmful to the child.”

Opinion
Some complained that like several of Lee’s films, its portrayal of women seemed unflattering, while the script featured too many subplots, one focusing on Jake’s relationship with a hooker (Milla Jovovich). While neither of those charges is unfounded, they overlook how masterfully He Got Game flows between satire and father-son story, between a scathing indictment of the recruitment of student athletes and the redemptive power Lee finds in the game of basketball. The result is a real labor of love and one of the finest films of Lee’s career.

As a document on the pressures top high school prospects face from colleges, agents, hangers-on and haters, the movie exhausts every angle and takes absolutely no prisoners. Denzel Washington is in Training Day mode playing a man whose anger has undermined his relationship with his son. His climactic hardcourt duel with Ray Allen is a purely awesome piece of filmmaking. Public Enemy provided two terrific songs, and in an inspired choice, Lee utilizes the music of composer Aaron Copland to stirring effect.

Keith Phipps at The Onion A.V. Club writes, “There’s not a relationship in He Got Game that feels right, especially the one between Washington and Allen, and if that doesn’t work, neither does the film. It doesn’t work, in large part because neither is allowed to develop into a character … He Got Game makes a few feints in the direction of religious allegory, but it’s ultimately just a heavy-handed morality tale, complete with cartoonish stereotypes and streetwise, been-there, done-that types who pop up to deliver lectures.”

“Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing was excellent. Ever since then, his films have captured some of that excellence in part, but never the quality of the whole. He Got Game is great for looking at a sense of time and place and at the web of relationships that describes the community in the film, reasons enough for setting this film above many others. But gaps in other departments keep this Spike Lee Joint from being another masterpiece,” writes Marty Mapes at Movie Habit.

Rob MacDonald at Apollo Movie Guide writes, “He Got Game is a film of highs and lows, from beautiful on-court scenes to pointlessly gratuitous scenes like the one in which a pair of balloon-chested babes offer sex to Jesus. There are moments of great passion that are followed by scenes that are terribly juvenile or over-sentimental. And the use of Aaron Copland’s ‘inspirational’ music sends some scenes over the edge. Spike would have fared better to stick with Public Enemy.”

The music of Aaron Copland set to the images of one of the best documentarians making feature films, Spike Lee. View the opening credits sequence for He Got Game.

© Joe Valdez