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

Tess (1979)
Directed by Roman Polanski
Screenplay by Gérard Brach & Roman Polanski and John Brownjohn, based on the novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
Produced by Claude Berri
172 minutes

As a sum of its dialogue, casting, photography, editing and music, Roman Polanski’s screen version of the 1891 novel by Thomas Hardy tantalizes with how thrift of imperfection it seems. Once a passion of producer David O. Selznick — who wanted wife Jennifer Jones to play Tess — actress Sharon Tate handed the book to her husband two decades later. Dedicating the finished film to his slain wife, Polanski adapted the novel with Gérard Brach and tasked John Brownjohn to translate their script from French to English, tuning an ear to the Dorset dialect. In this expensive co-production between France’s Renn Productions and England’s Burrill Productions, Polanski cast in the title role 17-year-old Nastassia Kinski, the West German ingénue who Francis Coppola would call “the most beautiful woman in films today” when he cast her in One From the Heart a few years later.

Tess is worth viewing as a visual feast alone. Shot extensively during the “magic hour” of dusk by Geoffrey Unsworth (who died during production to be relieved by Ghislain Cloquet), the splendor of the landscape and the way sunlight reveals character is present in every frame. Much of the film’s success lies in the casting of Nastassia Kinski, who is on-screen much of the running time and exhibits an unusual power mostly foreign to actresses her age. What’s striking about Tess is the tender loving care Polanski takes to let scenes breathe, neither overwhelming the audience in period detail or racing through the events of the book. A whole world materializes in which an outsider struggles to find her place. Nominated for six Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director, the playful yet majestic musical score by Philippe Sarde is a standout.

In rural Dorset of the late 19^th century, local girls assemble for their May dance. John Durbeyfield (John Collin) crosses paths with a new parson, who notifies the peasant that his research into local genealogy indicates the Durbeyfields descend from an old family, the d’Urbervilles. Though his ancestors have died off without any wealth, Durbeyfield and his wife (Rosemary Martin) dispatch their teenage daughter Tess (Nastassia Kinski) to call on a wealthy widow in the town of Trantridge who goes by the name d’Urberville. The farm girl encounters the widow’s playboy son Alec (Leigh Lawson) who takes a shine to Tess. Accepting a job on the property, she discovers the “d’Ubervilles” are not blood relatives at all but merely bought the name. Ultimately giving in to Alec’s salacious advances, she returns home bearing his illegitimate child.

When her child succumbs to illness and dies, Tess leaves home to take a job as a milkmaid. Just as her co-workers Izz (Suzanna Hamilton), Marian (Carolyn Pickles) and Retty (Caroline Embling) have, Tess falls in love with a young apprentice farmer named Angel Clare (Peter Firth). The son of a reverend, Angel is attracted to Tess’ earthy wisdom and announces to his family that he plans to marry the penniless girl. On their honeymoon, Tess reveals that she surrendered her maidenhood to a cousin and bore his child. Ruining her husband’s image of her, Tess is sent back to her destitute family while Angel leaves for Brazil to seek his fortune. Tess reunites with Izz to work on a farm owned by Alec d’Urberville. He offers to provide for Tess if she returns to him, but clinging to her pride, she chooses poverty instead. For a while.

Jeremy Richey’s ardor for Nastassja Kinski inspired him to name his blog Moon In the Gutter and in June 2009, he turned his attention to Tess.

This terrific behind the scenes article by Harlan Kennedy on the making of Tess appeared in the October 1979 issue of American Film.

What do you say?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

What do you say?

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

Jules et Jim (1962)
Directed by François Truffaut
Screenplay by François Truffaut & Jean Gruault, based on the novel by Henri-Pierre Roché
Produced by François Truffaut
105 minutes

Constructed on the novelty that a woman might choose the ardor of two men — best friends at that — instead of limiting herself to one or the other, it seems appropriate that Jules et Jim still thrives as a triumph of romance over reason. This jewel of the French New Wave probably shouldn’t continue to resonate as deeply as it does, but its sensual pleasures still intoxicate. Mixing a cinematic cocktail of wisdom and exuberance, a first novel by 73-year-old Henri-Pierre Roché was adapted to film by 28-year-old critic turned filmmaker François Truffaut, who’d been an admirer of the book’s stylish blend of refinement and simplicity. Shot on stolen locations with a small crew on a budget of $280,000, the film was a box office smash in France and critically adored in the U.S., where Janus Films handled distribution.

By 1977, Truffaut admitted that Jules et Jim had become overrated, feeling his adaptation with writing partner Jean Gruault was too decorative and perhaps not brutally honest enough. Shot by Raoul Coutard in black & white “Franscope” — which was essentially Fox’s CinemaScope process, cribbed by filmmakers in Europe and renamed to avoid litigation — the film balances a sad, yearning quality in its rural scenes while moving at locomotive speed through ideas, whims and revelations in Paris. Jeanne Moreau is not my idea of Helen of Troy, but the mystique of Jules et Jim is that she represents any woman whose desires are dictated by the wind, which makes her desirable. The French dialogue moves so rapidly that more than one viewing may be mandated before the full breadth of the film’s pleasures take effect.

In Paris of 1912, a German named Jules (Oscar Werner) meets a fellow writer, a Frenchman named Jim (Henri Serre). Exchanging language and culture and bonding over a shared indifference toward money, the men becomes inseparable. Despite his vast acquaintances with ladies about town, Jim is unable to set his friend up with a woman; a nocturnal encounter with a girl (Marie Dubois) they rescue on the street is over for Jules by morning. His luck changes when Jules arranges dinner with Jim and three women his cousin studied with in Munich: one German, one Dutch, one French. The latter is named Catherine (Jeanne Moreau) and her elegant features remind the men of a statue they were just marveling over. After dating for a month, Jules introduces Catherine to Jim and the trio frolics across Paris.

During a holiday to the beach, Jules asks Catherine to marry him. She contends that she’s known more men than he’s known women, but that a union might be amicable. Jim covets Catherine from afar and World War I divides the trio by even greater distances. After Germany’s defeat, Jim travels to a chalet that Jules and Catherine share on the Rhine with their young daughter Sabine (Sabine Haudepin). Jules reveals that despite bringing order and harmony to their household, Catherine is bored easily and has strayed in their marriage with at least three men, while a fourth suitor — a guitar player named Albert (Boris Bassiak) who is an old acquaintance of the friends — convalesces nearby. Unique in some way to each man but unable to satisfy herself with any one of them, Catherine enters into an affair with Jim with dire consequences for all involved.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 5,805 users: 89% for Jules et Jim

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

What do you say?

Breezy (1973)
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Written by Jo Heims
Produced by Robert Daley
108 minutes

Folded into a 1973 seat cushion between High Plains Drifter (which he starred in and directed) and Magnum Force (which he reprised his role as Dirty Harry to stellar box office returns) is a slightly crumpled but remarkable sketch Clint Eastwood directed William Holden and up and comer Kay Lenz in titled Breezy. A ‘70s kind of love story written by one of Eastwood’s friends — screenwriter Jo Heims — and produced by a pal in Robert Daley, this vintage curio is further off the aisle than any film Eastwood involved himself in once he started directing. Striking a modest tone and devoting itself entirely to the male-female dynamic of its time, Breezy skillfully avoids feeling stuck in time by planting its characters downtown and relegating political diatribe to the outskirts.

Clint Eastwood himself can be spotted twice in Breezy, once in an Alfred Hitchcock styled cameo and again on a poster for High Plains Drifter. Those are the most obvious signs that he hadn’t found a comfort zone as a director yet. The atmosphere seems inert — Heims wrote Play Misty For Me to take place in L.A. and it’s a wonder Eastwood stuck with her floor plan instead of shooting this somewhere like Monterey — while Holden & Lenz, both give sensitive performances, but seem to be acting in the movie by themselves. But the screenplay is acute when it comes to the insecurities a man in his 50s might experience shacking up with a flower child. The dialogue, music and Frank Stanley’s camerawork all attain a timeless quality and the movie comments intelligently on its day without feeling like a relic of its day.

In the beatnik Los Angeles enclave of Laurel Canyon, a 19-year-old named “Breezy” (Kay Lenz) wakes up next to a guy she bedded down with in exchange for a place to sleep. Grabbing her guitar, Breezy thumbs a ride to the Valley, but has to hop out in the Hollywood Hills when the driver turns out to be a creep. She ends up in the driveway of Frank Harmon (William Holden), a real estate broker impatiently putting his date (Lynn Borden) from last night into a cab. Frank sizes Breezy up and refuses to be put on a hook for anything but a ride down the hill. Visiting his lover Betty (Marj Dusay) on his lunch break, Frank is surprised by the news that she’s getting married. That night, the divorcee is paid a visit by Breezy, who has returned for her guitar. Frank offers her a meal and a shower before urging her to leave.

Picked up by the police and delivered to Frank’s doorstep under the pretenses of being his niece, Edith Alice Breezerman is invited to stay this time. Revealing that she’s been in L.A. for three months without seeing the ocean, she pleads with Frank to take her to see the Pacific at 4:30 in the morning. The girl’s innocence and passion begins to bring some color back into the life of the withdrawn older man. They become lovers. Frank is convinced that a long term relationship with the much younger woman has little future, that his friends and society at large probably view their coupling as a “dirty little joke”. He sends Breezy back to the anonymity he found her, but changes in his life make Frank regret his decision.

‘

‘

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” among users says: Not available

Metacritic “Metascore” among leading critics says: Not available

What do you say?

Bronco Billy (1980)
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Written by Dennis Hackin
Produced by Dennis Hackin, Neal Dobrofsky
116 minutes

Like a skilled poker player, Clint Eastwood never overplayed his hand when poking fun at his image, but for one of the most revealing tells at what a wonderful comedian he could be, there’s Bronco Billy. Perhaps sensing this wasn’t the wild ‘n wooly western being advertised, audiences turned out in lower numbers than for almost any other Eastwood picture of the period, meaning it “only” grossed $15 million in the U.S. on a budget of roughly $5 million. What Eastwood apparently recognized in the material was that if Frank Capra were alive, he might have directed a movie like this, a screwball comedy that owes more to It Happened One Night than Animal House, a story that rolls along on sweetness and gentle tomfoolery instead of jokes. Of all the pictures Eastwood directed himself in, it cracks my personal Top Five.

Bronco Billy has a low key goofiness that somehow manages to affix a grin to my face whenever I watch it. There’s something deranged about grown-ups who’ve virtually dropped out of society to tour the land and entertain children as the cowboys or Indians they always wanted to be, but the sense of innocence that Dennis Hackin fashions in his wondrously offbeat script is irresistible. Of the six movies she co-starred in with Eastwood, this is by far Sondra Locke’s best work. She doesn’t have near the elegance of Carole Lombard or moxie of Jean Arthur say, but she’s funny nonetheless. Many of the plot details seem fuzzed over and the film introduces three or four villains before mysteriously abandoning them all, but like the audience of the Bronco Billy show, we’re too giddy to really care.

As Doc Lynch (Scatman Crothers) bellows to the tiny audience gathered under a bigtop somewhere in Montana, “the greatest, most authentic Wild West show in America” begins with a rattlesnake dance performed by Chief Big Eagle (Dan Vadis) and his wife Running Water (Sierra Pecheur). The Chief is bitten by one of the rattlers he’s refused to substitute with gopher snakes. Leonard James (Sam Bottoms), “the greatest lasso artist in the West” is up next. Backstage, the troupe’s leader Bronco Billy McCoy (Clint Eastwood) tries to ease the nerves of his latest floozy/assistant, Miss Mitzi (Tessa Richarde) who in her show business debut alongside “the greatest trick shooter in the West” is nicked by Billy’s buckknife in his signature stunt, the wheel of fortune shootout.

Bronco Billy’s Wild West Show is glued together by Billy’s honest-to-goodness ethics of loyalty and hard work and sharing the wonder of cowboys and Indians with “the little pardners”. The outfit pitches its tent across from a motel in Idaho where spoiled heiress Antoinette Lily (Sondra Locke) honeymoons after a quickie marriage to a stooge (Geoffrey Lewis) to retain her inheritance. The groom tires of his bride’s snootiness and takes off with her possessions, leaving Lily no choice but to accept a ride with Billy to the next town. Contemptuous of her rusticated surroundings at first, Lily takes over as Billy’s assistant and proves a fine addition to the cast. Through a run of bad luck, the show threatens to fold, but the redemptive power of their frontier theater proves difficult for the players to walk away from.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 15 users: 80% for Bronco Billy

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

What do you say?

Jackie Brown (1997)
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
Screenplay by Quentin Tarantino, based on the novel Rum Punch by Elmore Leonard
Produced by Lawrence Bender
154 minutes

Whether by freak accident or intelligent design, few movies manage to evoke the lives of their characters with the depth of Jackie Brown. Not only does the third film directed by Quentin Tarantino not pick up where Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction left off, it seems to have been dipped in the inkwell of another writer, perhaps one 20 years down the road, weather beaten and worn down, who ponders whether he’s got enough left for one more run. Part of that creative dissonance is due to the fact that Tarantino adapted a novel by Elmore Leonard, one of his literary heroes, using the Blaxploitation genre of the 1970s as a touchstone as well. But the filmmaker refuses to populate the movie with pimps, prostitutes or private dicks and instead, composes a modern love story as subtle, mature and self-assured as any director twice his age. Of the first five he directed — including Kill Bill and Inglorious Basterds — Jackie Brown is Tarantino’s best picture.

The picture is not without flaws. Samuel L. Jackson is allowed to do too much and draws a spotlight on how pleased some of Tarantino’s dialogue is with itself. And at a notch above 2 ½ hours, the film does feel long. While some of his other films mandated epic running times, here, the story barely seems to warrant the excess. But the film’s perfections are diverse. Plot and style are almost invisible; it’s character and performance that take center stage and on that count, the film is a master class on directing. Pam Grier’s moments with Robert Forster soar. Bridget Fonda gives the performance of a lifetime as one of the goofiest vixens ever seen in a caper. Tarantino also demonstrates remarkable taste by recognizing what makes an Elmore Leonard novel special: human beings articulating fears and desires, while plotting to get away with lots of money. Jackie Brown is the finest compliment the author has ever been paid on film.

In the city of Hermosa Beach, Ordell Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson) entertains dim-witted prison buddy Louis Gara (Robert DeNiro) with his knowledge of the firearms trade. Ordell’s girlfriend — an insolent, bong loving beach bunny named Melanie (Bridget Fonda) — is hardly impressed. Ordell receives a phone call from Beaumont, an associate who’s been arrested for drunk driving with a pistol. Ordell hires steady bail bondsman Max Cherry (Robert Forster) to bail Beaumont out, then uses the promise of Roscoe’s Chicken ‘n Waffles to lure Beaumont out of his apartment and silence him permanently. LAPD detective Mark Dargus (Michael Bowen) and a high charged ATF Special Agent named Ray Nicolette (Michael Keaton) intercept stewardess Jackie Brown (Pam Grier) returning from Mexico. Caught with $50,000 and a bag of cocaine, Jackie remains mum on who the contraband belongs to. Hired by Ordell to bail the stewardess out of jail, Max falls for Jackie at first sight.

Getting the jump on Ordell before he can put a bullet in her, Jackie offers her employer to buy her silence with $100,000 for each year of prison she’s sentenced to prison. In return, she offers to help Ordell retrieve half a million dollars he has stashed in an airport locker in Mexico. Confiding to Max that what she really intends to do is cooperate with the ATF and set Ordell up, Jackie reveals her biggest fear isn’t getting shot, but starting life over with nothing to show for it. Max realizes that he’s tired of the bail bond business and agrees to help Jackie scam not only Ordell, but steal his half million dollars under the nose of the ATF. Louis and Melanie are employed to help, a decision Ordell ends up regretting. To stay out of jail, Jackie has to convince Nicolette that she’s on his side. To stay alive, Max has to convince Ordell that Jackie was protecting him, and that she has just cause for not handing his money over to him.

Elmore Leonard was born in New Orleans, but his father’s work as a site locator for General Motors eventually settled his family in Detroit. Joining the Navy as soon as he graduated high school in 1943, Leonard would enroll at the University of Detroit after the war and ply a degree in English and philosophy into work as a copywriter at an advertising agency. Writing on the side, Leonard would have five novels and thirty short stories published between 1951 and 1961 — mostly westerns — with two being adapted into movies in 1957, The Tall T and 3:10 To Yuma. Transitioning away from westerns once the genre fell out of fashion, Leonard turned his focus to crime fiction. With Glitz in 1985, Leonard vaulted from genre author to bestselling author. Without exception, the movies either scripted by Leonard or adapted from his novels — Hombre, Mr. Majestyk, Stick – were critical and commercial duds.

Leonard’s twenty-ninth novel — Rum Punch — was published in 1992. Among those who read a copy while it was in galleys were producer Lawrence Bender and writer-director Quentin Tarantino, who’d been an Elmore Leonard fan almost since he could read. Following the mega success of Pulp Fiction in 1994. Miramax Films optioned four of the author’s books for Tarantino to possibly adapt to film, including Rum Punch. Leonard’s dialogue soaked tale of an airline stewardess, a gunrunner and a bail bondsman in Miami floated to the top of the projects Tarantino was considering as his follow-up to Pulp Fiction. Relocating the story to Los Angeles, Jackie Brown would also shift away from the sensational violence and comedy Tarantino had become celebrated for. Despite revitalizing the careers of Pam Grier and Robert Forster, it drew a blank among critics and was overlooked by audiences in December 1997.

In an interview with The Book Reporter in January 1998, Elmore Leonard revealed the genesis of the novel that inspired Jackie Brown. “Rum Punch, I thought of a character of Max Cherry, the bail bondsman. I decided I wanted to do a book about a bail bondsman because of the kind of people he’s involved with every day. A story has to come out of that situation. My researcher found a bail bondsman for me who understood what we wanted to do. He was very willing to cooperate. So I learned about his business and started to write the book about a bondsman doing his job. I realized not too far into the book that he wasn’t my main character. The woman, Jackie, was the main character. The plot was happening to her. And then the other characters fall right into place on opposite sides of her. She’s caught in the middle and how does she get out? And I never know how they get out. I never know how my books are going to end.”

According to legend, when Quentin Tarantino was fifteen years old he became so engrossed reading a copy of Elmore Leonard’s The Switch that he strolled out of K-Mart without paying for it. Arrested and almost taken to jail, he was let go, only to return to the store to pull off the heist successfully. Appearing on The Charlie Rose Show in October 1994, Tarantino enthused, “I love Elmore Leonard. In fact, to me True Romance is basically like an Elmore Leonard movie that he didn’t write, you know. And like, actually, I actually owe a big debt to like, kind of figuring out my style from Elmore Leonard because, you know, he was the first writer I’d ever read — and, but also like Charles Willeford did it as well — but he was one of the first writers I had ever read that just let mundane conversations actually inform the characters, you know, and then all of a sudden, ‘Boof!,’ you know, you’re into whatever story you’re telling.”

Tarantino met his producing partner Lawrence Bender in 1989 at a barbecue in L.A. A ballet dancer turned actor turned aspiring producer, Bender would get the struggling video store clerk’s script for Reservoir Dogs into the hands of people who ended up financing it. While in pre-production on Pulp Fiction, the duo then came across Rum Punch in manuscript form. Reading the novel and immediately seeing it as a movie, Tarantino and Bender made overtures to option the film rights. In the liner notes for the 2-Disc DVD release of Jackie Brown, Leonard wrote, “Originally, my faith in Quentin was based on Reservoir Dogs. Right after it came out Quentin approached my agent, Michael Siegel, with the idea of acquiring the rights to Rum Punch. The fact that he wasn’t in a position to buy the book wasn’t a concern. We wanted Quentin to have it. So we promised to save it for him — hold off any offers that might be made — until he had a studio behind him and could buy the book. This came about shortly after Pulp Fiction was released and Quentin became the hot kid in town. We offered him five novels with film rights available. Miramax stepped up and optioned four of them for him.”

Bandits, Freaky Deaky, Killshot and Rum Punch were the Elmore Leonard titles Miramax optioned for its favorite son. At one point, Tarantino envisioned adapting, producing and co-starring in Killshot opposite Robert DeNiro for director Tony Scott. He was preparing to pass Rum Punch to another director when he reread it and once again, became enamored with its big screen potential. His adaptation would make key alterations. The action shifted from South Florida to the South Bay of Los Angeles — Hermosa Beach, Carson, Torrance — where Tarantino grew up. In the film’s production notes, Tarantino explained, “I don’t know Miami at all, but I know South Bay like the back of my hand. This was a way for me to make this movie personal to myself and to be confident that I could keep it real. In a South Bay context I knew exactly where each of these people would live, how they would dress, what their apartments would look like. Shooting in Miami I would not have come to those things as naturally.”

Tarantino spent a year working on and off on an adaptation. In a January 1998 interview with The Guardian, he revealed, “I remember something Stephen King said once a long time ago when he was going to direct the movie Maximum Overdrive when they asked him, ‘Do you hope to bring an adaptation to your stuff that may be other filmmakers have not?’ He used Elmore Leonard as an example. He saw the Burt Reynolds movie, Stick. He said, ‘I saw Stick, and it is a story. Everything that happens in the novel happens in the movie, but I don’t have that feeling that I have when I read an Elmore Leonard novel.’ That was sticking in my head because I like Elmore Leonard novels. I wanted the movie to have that feeling, and I felt the way to have that feeling was to truly invest in the characters so they are not just movie characters doing movie plots. The first hour of the movie is pretty well hanging out and getting to know these people. That was my track into getting it.”

Tarantino changed Leonard’s white airline stewardess Jackie Burke into a black stewardess named Jackie Brown. He had Pam Grier in mind for the part. “It was one of those things that I knew a good idea when I saw it. I thought Pam is perfect for the role. She is the exact right age. She looks younger, and she looks like she can handle anything. By doing that, it turned it into a Pam Grier movie. Nothing wrong with that. That sounds good; another Pam Grier movie I would like to see. Then it became very easy. The fact that she is black ended up giving the piece even more depth; not in a cheesy way or a cheap way.” He added, “At 44 she is probably going to have to go to jail for a year and start all over again. The cops are fucking with her. It made the dilemma more crystal clear, having to be a black woman in that situation. It just gave it more depth.”

After Samuel L. Jackson and Bridget Fonda joined the cast, Tarantino was still trying to settle on who would play Max Cherry, the bail bondsman. “I had about four guys in there. I will name the guys. I had Paul Newman in mind; I had Gene Hackman in mind; I had John Saxon in mind; and I had Robert Forster in mind. I was always leaning more towards Robert Forster than the other guys. I didn’t have to cast him right away. I had my options open. You know what I mean, why pin yourself in a corner? I was always leaning more towards Robert Forster, and I walked into a restaurant and he was there, and I knew he was the guy. I walked into a restaurant with the book, with my notebook to do some writing, and he was in the restaurant, and I thought, ‘That’s Max Cherry, he’s right there.’ C’est la vie to the three! All terrific actors. All would have done a wonderful job but they are not Max Cherry; Robert is.”

In a November 1997 interview with The New York Times, Tarantino revealed, “The hardest part to give up in Jackie Brown was Ordell, who is played by Samuel L. Jackson. I was Ordell. It was so easy to write Ordell. I was Ordell for the year I was writing the script. I had to really work hard in letting go of Ordell and letting Sam play him and not being a jerk about stuff. Sam was him for 10 weeks; I was Ordell for 52 weeks. Ordell was all my mentors as a young man growing up. Ordell was who I could have been. It was interesting writing the film because that all kind of came back to me, and that persona of who I could have been at 17 if I didn’t have artistic ambitions. That was it. If I hadn’t wanted to make movies, I would have ended up as Ordell. I wouldn’t have been a postman or worked at the phone company or been a salesman or a guy selling gold by the inch. I would have been involved with one scam after another.”

With Miramax Films financing a budget of $12 million and Guillermo Navarro serving as director of photography, Tarantino’s third film commenced shooting May 1997 in Los Angeles. Tarantino cited several movies as inspirations in style. “During Jackie Brown, I would watch one side of the laserdisc for Carlito’s Way. My cinematographer and I watched two movies: Hickey and Boggs, which was directed by Robert Culp and was shot in the 70’s — it’s a really good movie. And then we watched They All Laughed, by Peter Bogdanovich. Both were perfect for Jackie Brown. They All Laughed is a masterpiece, I think. It captures a fairy-tale New York. It makes New York look like Paris in the 20’s. It makes you want to live there. And we kind of used it. And then we watched Straight Time, one of the best L.A. crime movies ever. But I wanted Jackie Brown to look more like a movie than that. Straight Time is too gritty.”

To get Jackie Brown into theaters for year’s end awards consideration, Tarantino and editor Sally Menke were cutting all the way up to December 4. The film snuck into theaters Christmas Day 1997. Critics responded coolly. David Denby, New York Magazine: “The movie doesn’t so much dramatize the characters as tail them. They come; they go; they meet and talk; they talk again; and finally someone gets shot.” Todd McCarthy, Variety: “Unquestionably too long, and lacking the snap and audaciousness of the pictures that made him the talk of the town, this … nonetheless offers an abundance of pleasures, especially in the realm of characterization and atmosphere.” Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly: “Each scene is staged methodically, overdeliberately, as if it concealed some payoff zinger. But the zingers don’t arrive. All we see is a reasonably clever Elmore Leonard caper that needed to be treated as fast, trashy fun. It doesn’t help that Leonard isn’t nearly the artist Tarantino is. He’s strictly a genre man, with paper-thin characters and an amiable low-life spark to his busy, lurching plots.”

Taking in $39.6 million at the U.S. box office, Jackie Brown was regarded by many as a failure coming off the $213 million Pulp Fiction had grossed worldwide. But in an interview with IGN in October 2003, Tarantino maintained, “You have to remember, movies are not about the weekend that they’re released, and in the grand scheme of things, that’s probably the most unimportant time of a film’s life, but the thing is, I wasn’t trying to top Pulp Fiction with Jackie Brown. I wanted to go underneath it and make a more modest character study movie. So, if you were waiting for Pulp Fiction part two, you were going to be disappointed.” He added, “I made Jackie Brown like the way that I always felt about Rio Bravo, which is a movie that I can watch every couple of years. It’s just like, ‘I know those people now.’ Once I saw it once, I got the story line out of the way and I just hang out with them. Then, it’s like, hopefully, if you liked Jackie Brown, every three years or so, you can put it in and you’re having screwdrivers with Ordell and you’re taking bong hits with Melanie and you’re drinking white wine with Jackie and it’s all good.”

Sources:

“The Two Hollywoods; The Man Who Changed Everything” By Lynn Hirschberg. The New York Times, 16 November 1997

“Quentin Tarantino interview with Pam Grier, Robert Forster and Lawrence Bender” By Adrian Wootton. The Guardian. 5 January 1998

“Interview with Elmore Leonard” By Jennifer Levitsky. The Book Report, 13 January 1998

“An Interview with Quentin Tarantino” By Jeff Otto. IGN, 10 October 2003

“Lawrence Bender Looks Back On 20 Years with QT” By Scott Feinberg. And The Winner Is … 27 February 2010

Lolita (1997)
Directed by Adrian Lyne
Screenplay by Stephen Schiff, based on the novel by Vladimir Nabokov
Produced by Mario Kassar, Joel B. Michaels
137 minutes

There’s a litany of reasons why the second film adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is not something to enjoy. It’s based on a brilliant novel far too internal to put on film. It’s a remake of a film by Stanley Kubrick. It’s about a distasteful subject, so the film itself must be distasteful, if not banned outright. It’s too stylish, lacking in depth. It’s too cerebral, lacking in action. The case against Lolita is as fullproof as it’s ever been for director Adrian Lyne, who in spite of all of that, adds another entertaining, sometimes silly but always absorbing film to an impressive short list of credits. Far from great, it is great work, a haunting, skillfully made picture with terrific and unlikely performances from one of the few directors who can be relied upon for intelligent dirty movies. Sort of like John Woo, Lyne isn’t trying to win an Oscar here. He seems to know exactly the type of genre flick he wants to make, rarely gets delusions of grandeur and always delivers intense audience appreciation.

In terms of casting, this version of Lolita is on at least equal footing with Kubrick’s classic. In her first acting gig, Dominique Swain conveys the geeky exuberance of a clueless teenager without acting precocious; she seems closer in spirit to what Humbert lusted after, as opposed to Sue Lyon, who had the appeal of a 24-year-old stripper. Miscast in so many other films, Melanie Griffith really finds a niche here in the brusque Shelley Winters role of Lolita’s mother. Lyne shows a tin ear for wit, resisting savage satire with every fiber of his being to instead make a picturesque, European love story from Nabokov’s novel. Jeremy Irons is the ideal leading man for that movie, which I’m not sure I prefer to the one with an absurd sense of humor about its characters and underlying situations. Still, this Lolita is without question stunning to look at and listen to, with director of photography Howard Atherton handling the lighting and legendary composer Ennio Morricone providing the mournful musical score.

In New England of 1947, a professor of French literature named Humbert Humbert (Jeremy Irons) decides to spend his summer in the town of “Ramsdale”, writing a textbook. Looking for a room to rent, Humbert arrives at the abode of the obnoxious Charlotte Haze (Melanie Griffith), whose manner doesn’t quite appeal to the fussy professor. Humbert changes his mind as soon as he lays eyes on Charlotte’s 14-year-old nymphet of a daughter Lolita (Dominique Swain), who unwittingly stirs feelings Humbert hasn’t felt since being with his very first girlfriend, who died of typhus when they were age 14. Obsessed with movie magazines, food and antagonizing her mother, Lolita becomes curious about what kind of rise she can get out of Humbert. Charlotte soon sends her wayward daughter away to summer camp before she’s to be enrolled in boarding school. Crushed at the prospect of losing Lolita, Humbert agrees to the lonely Charlotte’s marriage proposal.

Miserable in marriage, Humbert’s prayers are answered when Charlotte discovers his journal, which contains less than flattering descriptions of his new wife. Charlotte throws herself into the street, where she is struck by a car and killed. Humbert picks Lolita up from camp, but rather than tell her about her mother’s death right away, takes cues from the girl’s incessant flirtations and checks them in to the Enchanted Hunters Inn. A Christian convention fails to deter them from consummating their love affair. Humbert breaks the news of Charlotte’s demise to Lolita the next day and takes her on a cross-country trek to spend more carefree time together. Reporting to his job at Beardsley Prep School, Humbert begins to suspect Lolita is socking away money to run away from him. His suspicions are validated by the appearance of the mysterious Clare Quilty (Frank Langella), a debauched playwright who seems to share his attraction to nymphets.

Stephen Schiff was a correspondent for the CBS news program West 57^th and a critic of theater, books and film for Vanity Fair magazine. Producer Lili Fini Zanuck had made an effort to steer Schiff toward screenwriting and in 1990, advised him that the estate of Vladimir Nabokov was optioning the film rights to various literary properties of the Russian born entomologist and author best known for his 1955 novel Lolita, which had been rejected by publishers in America due to the nature of it sexual content. Over the next 40 years – during which a controversial film adaptation starring James Mason was directed by Stanley Kubrick — many critics would rate Lolita as one of the greatest novels of the 20^th century. An admirer of the book, Schiff began an adaptation of his own. He would finish 40 pages before Zanuck told the budding screenwriter to forget it; in the current political climate, Lolita would never be made into a movie anyway.

Almost at the same time, Adrian Lyne reread Lolita. He mentioned his interest in a film adaptation that would hew closer to Nabokov’s work to the chairman of Carolco Pictures, Mario Kassar, who put up $1 million to purchase the film rights for the director of such highly stylized and hugely commercial forays into erotica as Flashdance, 9 ½ Weeks and Fatal Attraction. Several notable screenwriters attempted an adaptation before Lili Fini Zanuck and her husband Richard Zanuck — who was producing the project — turned to Schiff to fashion a script. On the film’s way to completion, Carolco Pictures would go bankrupt, the budget would climb and the U.S. Congress passed a law that threatened to land the filmmakers in prison if they moved forward. Protected from legal prosecution, Lolita was nonetheless shunned by distributors in the U.S. due to its high cost and difficult subject matter. Lolita opened in Europe and became the highest budgeted film to hold its U.S. premiere on cable television.

Journalist Stephen Schiff was living in New York in 1990 when producer Lili Fini Zanuck — who’d been compelling Schiff to try screenwriting — notified him that the Vladimir Nabokov estate was optioning the film rights to its catalog. She thought that Schiff would be ideal to adapt one of those works in particular. In Lolita: The Book of the Film, Schiff wrote, “Lolita is one of the most beautiful, poignant, funny, splendidly designed, gorgeously written, and psychologically acute works in the English language. To my mind, it is the greatest American novel of the postwar era. So the opportunity — if opportunity this was — to create a coherent artistic response to it was irresistible. I got to work, but, I hasten to add, I did so idiotically: I wrote some forty pages of screenplay, but it was all dialogue, no ‘stage direction.’” Instead of writing off-screen directions, Schiff merely scribbled “TK”, journo jargon for “to come”. He added, “Still, I was somewhat saddened when, a few weeks later, Lili called me back and said, rather presciently, ‘Forget about it. In this political environment, any version of Lolita would be too controversial. It’ll never get made.’”

Adrian Lyne had picked up a copy of Lolita as a teenager. Flipping to the lascivious parts and putting the novel down when he saw there weren’t any, Lyne was shooing Jacob’s Ladder for Carolco Pictures in the fall of 1989 when he read Lolita properly. On a making-of featurette on the film’s DVD release, Lyne stated, “I like movies that create discussion. I love it when they haven’t forgotten about your movie by dinnertime afterwards, you know, and they’re still arguing about it the next day. That’s what a movie should do. It should make you argue and disagree.” He added, “I wanted to make a movie of Nabokov’s novel because it’s — I think — one of the great novels of this century. The movie is about a middle aged man’s obsession for a 14-year-old girl and it’s about all that that entails. In the end, it’s a love story. It’s a strange and awful love story.” When proposing Lolita to Mario Kassar, the co-founder and chairman of Carolco was eager enough to work with Lyne again that he ultimately snapped up the film rights for $1 million.

The first screenwriter Lyne approached was James Dearden, who’d written the screenplay for Fatal Attraction. Up next was the esteemed playwright Harold Pinter, whose draft was considered far too cold for Lyne’s tastes. In the fall of 1994, Stephen Schiff’s phone rang and Lolita producer Richard Zanuck — Lili Fini’s husband — inquired about the pages Schiff had written. He was summoned to Los Angeles for a chat. Schiff recalled, “The first thing he and Adrian wanted to know was whether I could see my way clear to setting the film in the present. (Unbeknownst to me, that was what Dearden’s script had done). The answer was ‘No’. A Lolita growing up in America in this day and age would have been warned about the Humberts of the world from the age of three; her teachers would have talked about pedophiles; her mother would have been on the lookout. Besides, to set Nabokov’s story in the present is to lose much of what it is about, for this was not just a novel about a grown man’s love affair with his twelve-year old stepdaughter, it was about the dawning impingement on the European mind of postwar America.”

David Mamet was commissioned, but unconvinced that the playwright’s knack for American machismo would produce a usable draft of Lolita, Schiff started writing on spec. He elaborated, “Humbert is thoroughly equipped for greatness, and yet he winds up in an ignominy of his own making. Part of his tragedy — and a large part of his comedy — is that his enormous intelligence is always defeated by his obsession. He can’t get outside that obsession to see who Lolita is, to see that she is actually a fairly ordinary little girl, more charming than some and probably more sexually precocious than most, but still a child.” With very little dialogue available in the novel, Schiff invented most of it. “Another thing. Because Nabokov’s Humbert lives in a kind of exalted subjectivity, Lolita herself is so much a figment of his imagination that she barely exists on the page. In effect, I had to reinvent her, piecing her together from my own adolescence and from adolescents I knew.” One of Schiff’s ideas was to have Lolita constantly eating bananas or candy or ice cream.

Schiff’s intuitions and efforts won him the job. Concerned that audiences would be unwilling to sympathize with Humbert Humbert, Lyne was adamant about restoring the character’s childhood love affair — which Stanley Kubrick excised in his film version — that attempted to explain the man’s obsession with Lolita. Of the actors considered for the part, Anthony Hopkins was deemed too old. Hugh Grant cited Lolita as his favorite book and didn’t want to see any film version made. Lyne claimed that Warren Beatty flirted with the role “for about five minutes” before Jeremy Irons was approached. Lyne had met Irons while visiting the set of Reversal of Fortune in 1989 and soothed the actor’s fears that Lolita was too politically incorrect to get involved with. Dominique Swain hadn’t gone on an audition in two years, but learning of the part from her manager, read Lolita and sent Lyne a videotape of herself performing scenes from the book. She responded, “It’s all through Humbert’s eyes. Lolita doesn’t have a point of view. I think I can give her one.” The 14-year-old won the role of Lolita.

With Carolco Pictures heading into the sunset of bankruptcy and selling off its assets in 1995, the production of Lolita was picked up by the French corporation Chargeurs, which agreed to finance the film through a media group it owned called Pathé. With plans for shooting to begin in June, the film’s budget had climbed from $41 million to roughly $50 million. This was in part due to Adrian Lyne’s preference to shoot on location. The flashback to Humbert’s youth would be filmed in Les Cedres in the south of France. “Ramsdale” would be filmed in Wilmington, North Carolina. The location for the Enchanted Hunters Inn was found in New Orleans, as was Humbert’s apartment. The production would also travel to Amarillo, Texas and Sonoma County, California to grab footage of Humbert and Lolita’s road trip. Perhaps balking at the price of what Richard Zanuck considered a $25 million or so production, the producer dropped out. Mario Kassar tapped Joel B. Michaels — producer of Universal Soldier and Stargate — to replace the Academy Award winning producer of Driving Miss Daisy.

Once shooting was underway in North Carolina in September 1995, weather delays, an illness to Melanie Griffith and the firing of director of photography Jeffrey Kimball (who was replaced by Howard Atherton) ballooned Lolita up to a budget of $58 million. In the background was the nature of the material. Invited to the set, Stephen Schiff noted, “At times I seemed to be the only one connected with the film who didn’t harbor visions of some small town sheriff descending on the set and carting us off to jail on obscenity charges, child pornography charges, or just general principle. During the shoot, we played by the strictest rules the film’s lawyers could devise. Any nudity required an adult body double for Dominique. If Dominique sat on Jeremy’s lap, a board was inserted between them. Dominique’s mother and tutor were on the set whenever she was. I often found myself in the position of reassuring everyone: We’re not going to be arrested, for Chrissake. This isn’t the ‘50s. We’re not making a pornographic film. We’re adapting one of the acknowledged great works of 20^th century literature. So I said. And so I thought.”

Coincidentally, while Lolita was in post-production, Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) attached a rider known as the Child Pornography Act of 1996 onto a federal budget bill being passed through the U.S. Congress. The rider extended the definition of “child pornography” to cover anything that simulated a minor engaging in sexual activity. Critics charged that the law was so ambiguous that it was nearly impossible for filmmakers to know whether or not they were in compliance; at the risk of 15 years in prison, they would resort to self-censorship instead. A strict interpretation of the law would now classify such films as The Exorcist, Night Moves, Taxi Driver, Pretty Baby, Little Darlings and others as child pornography. Schiff recalled, “It was so vaguely worded that it seemed to me certifiably unconstitutional, although a judge later upheld it. Broadly interpreted, it could have resulted in the banning of any number of mainstream films, paintings, book covers, photographs, MTV videos, and so forth. We didn’t even know about it until Adrian read about it somewhere and went into a panic. And the panic was contagious.”

The firm that Pathé had contracted as production legal counsel before filming began — Troop Meisinger Steuber & Pasich of Los Angeles — suggested that the producers hire attorney John Weston to advise them on First Amendment issues. Weston was invited into the editing room to guarantee that Lolita was in compliance with the new law. Schiff admitted, “Sometimes, I thought, the cuts actually helped the film. Crotch shots had to go, and, indeed, there was a legal precedent for them to go, and their removal was fine with me. There was no legal precedent for the removal of breast shots, but we didn’t really need breast shots — in any case, they went.” But Weston also suggested that two pivotal scenes had to go; an encounter between Humbert and Lolita in a motel room in which we realize the pair are engaged in sex as she reads the comics, and a later scene in which an enraged Humbert pushes Lolita down on a bed and has sex with her. Neither scene was graphic enough to threaten the film’s R rating with the MPAA and when Lyne and Schiff challenged Weston on the exact wording of the new law, the attorney withdrew his objections.

In a February 1999 interview with The Bulletin, Lyne recalled, “I sat in a cutting room with a lawyer for six weeks. The law that came out said that essentially I couldn’t use any of the shots that I had shot with the body double; that I couldn’t have an adult imitating a juvenile. This law was aimed at the Internet and it was aimed at people putting children’s heads on mature bodies, if you see what I’m saying, and it carried over into films. So it was traumatic for me because, obviously, this lawyer was saying I had to take this out, I had to take that out … and I was hooting and hollowing and yelling and disagreeing with the guy but in the end, happily, I didn’t have to do much, actually. He was a fairly understanding man; but I did have to take out a few shots that I’d done with the body double, you know, her breasts or whatever. But I don’t think it affected the movie. It was a very unnerving period because we didn’t know, for example, where we stood in terms of legality with the film and at times we were worried about literally moving the film from California to New York. There was a lot of paranoia.”

Lolita was test screened three times in Los Angeles and according to Schiff, was well received. A screening was also arranged for Nabokov’s only child and executor of his late father’s estate, Dmitri, who enthusiastically supported the new film adaptation. In March 1997, the filmmakers began shopping for a U.S. distributor. Schiff recalled, “What happened next was very strange. One by one, the studios saw the film. Many of the executives went out of their way to congratulate Adrian, to tell him that it was his best film ever, to recount in detail their ravishment over it, to beg him to work with them on his next film. And then, one by one, they refused to distribute it.” Schiff believed the political climate had a lot to do with that. “Never in history had there been such a horrified awareness of the pedophilia lurking around the fringes of American life. The Megan Kanka case, the JonBenet Ramsay case, the Polly Klass murder, the Belgian sex murders — all these were in the air. The Christian right had been fulminating for years of the subject of family values, and no film courted controversy without running into efficiently organized watchdog groups run by zealots like Donald Wildmon and others of his ilk.”

Pressure never materialized from either Christian groups or from legislators, but no U.S. distributor wanted near Lolita. Pathé had hoped to sell U.S. distribution rights for $25 million, plus the cost of prints and advertising for an additional $20 million. That quote came down, but not even the so-called indies opened up a checkbook. Schiff revealed, “Miramax was part of Disney, and Disney, with its reputation and its stockholders, was never going to spring for Lolita. We heard that October Films, the distributors of Secrets and Lies and The Apostle, wanted it, but then they were bought by Universal, which was owned by Seagrams, which didn’t want a Lolita on its hands.” Pathé chose to release Lolita in Europe first, hoping positive response there might make an impression in Hollywood. Schiff added, “To me, this plan seemed naïve at best. Since when did American distributors look to Europe for guidance? Lolita would have to be a jawdropping blockbuster overseas to catch America’s attention, and I knew that, no matter how kindly it was received, it was never going to be Independence Day.”

Months after it premiered at the San Sebastian Film Festival in Spain in September 1997, Showtime agreed to buy U.S. distribution rights and broadcast Lyne’s 137-minute cut of Lolita on both Showtime and the Sundance Channel in August 1998. Critics had mixed feelings about what they saw. Caryn James, The New York Times: “Mr. Lyne (whose commercial hits include Fatal Attraction and Indecent Proposal) was expected to have made a titillating Lolita. Instead, he has risen to the level of his material. His direction, and Stephen Schiff’s discerning, faithful screenplay, are sensitive to Nabokov’s wit as well as his lyricism.” Manohla Dargis, L.A. Weekly: “A glum, dull, witless affair buoyed only by the minor scandal of its failure, until recently, to secure U.S. distribution, this newest translation of Vladimir Nabokov’s still-shocking novel has the singular attraction of not only confirming Lyne’s aesthetic irrelevance, but of making Stanley Kubrick’s flawed if brilliant 1962 film seem like a paragon of literary adaptation.” Newsweek (Jack Kroll) and Time Magazine (Richard Schnickel) posted positive reviews. The Village Voice (Michael Atkinson) and Variety (David Rooney) did not.

Samuel Goldwyn Films agreed to give Lolita a limited theatrical release. In September 1998, it played one theater in Los Angeles for a weeklong Oscar qualifying run. Lolita received no nominations and managed $1 million in domestic box office receipts. Stephen Schiff remained convinced that the political climate had kept Americans from being able to see the film in theaters. “Had we released Lolita in the ‘70s or ‘80s, I believe that it would have easily made its way into distribution. But the culture has contracted since then. And even if it hasn’t, its gatekeepers believe it has. (Thus the gap between the alarm the gatekeepers expected us to feel over President Clinton’s sexual shenanigans and the meager alarm we actually did feel). Still, whether or not there would have been some vast surge of outrage upon the release of Lolita, the potential distributors certainly thought there would be. Every advance article about the film included threats from advocates of child welfare and family togetherness: newspaper columns railed against the project, sight unseen, from a vantage of laborious ignorance.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Lolita Loses Her Chaperon” By Judy Brennan. The Los Angeles Times, 24 September 1995

“Girl Trouble” By Benjamin Svetkey. Entertainment Weekly, 9 August 1996

“Lolita Comes Again” By Elizabeth Kaye. Esquire, February 1997

“Lolita Reaches A U.S. Audience” By Bill Carter. The New York Times, 6 May 1998

“In Hollywood, Almost Anything Goes — Except For Lolita, That Is” By Claudia Eller. The Los Angeles Times, 31 July 1998

“Lawyers were forced to cut scenes from Lolita because of Vagueness in Obscenity laws” By Bob Van Voris. National Law Journal 17 August 1998

“Adrian Lyne: Lolita” By Andrew Urban. The Bulletin, 25 February 1999

Lolita: The Book of the Film. By Stephen Schiff. Applause Books (2000)

Lolita. DVD audio commentary by Adrian Lyne. Trimark (2001)

Heaven’s Gate (1980)
Directed by Michael Cimino
Written by Michael Cimino
Produced by Joann Carelli
Running time: 219 minutes (original cut)

Should I Care?
As the 1970s came to a close, five runaway film productions loomed on the horizon, piling up doom and gloom courtesy of the mainstream news media. Suffering from fiscal recklessness at best, studio mismanagement at worst, if the poor buzz was to be believed, these five big budget movies were determined to bankrupt Hollywood: Apocalypse Now, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, 1941, The Blues Brothers and Heaven’s Gate. Four of these would-be disasters quickly recouped their heavy costs at the box office. The one that didn’t make it into the black seems to have been conveniently lost in time along with its infamous director. That would be Michael Cimino and the movie would be Heaven’s Gate, a 3 ½ hour western of pictorial brilliance, almost unparalleled scope, outstanding performances and haunting grandeur. For all his excesses and notoriety, Cimino captures a certain lyrical beauty missing in epic filmmaking since the passing of David Lean.

It’s time to call Heaven’s Gate what it is: the last great American film of the 1970s. Cimino’s screenplay not only paints the Old West with the contours I imagine actually existed there — crowdedness and expanse, serenity and violence, beauty and ugliness – but fills that landscape with intriguing characters and dialogue of surprising depth. Kris Kristofferson leads a fairly overlooked cast of talented character actors, all of whom are elevated above the din and clamor of the massive production and are enabled to deliver excellent performances. Few movies recreate a bygone era with the detail of this one, with Vilmos Zsigmond overseeing the majestic cinematography and David Mansfield composing a staggering musical score. Unlike so many turkeys that truly qualify for “worst ever” status, the craftsmanship here is never in question. For all the money spent on Heaven’s Gate, we can see exactly where the bucks ended up and why.

So, What’s This About?
In Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Harvard College graduating class of 1870 — which includes James Averill (Kris Kristofferson) — assembles to hear their class orator Billy Irvine (John Hurt) speak. Irvine rejects the high-minded ideals sewn by the reverend doctor of the university (Joseph Cotten), and advises his fellow classmates to merely rise no further than each of them is capable. 20 years later, Averill arrives by train in Casper, Wyoming after transporting an immigrant woman to St. Louis to be hanged. Averill is sheriff of Johnson County, pristine territory which more Polish, German and Ukrainian immigrants seem to be pouring into every day.

By the time Averill visits a saloon operated by his friend John Bridges (Jeff Bridges) in the town of Sweetwater, the sheriff learns 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 assassin on the cattleman’s payroll is Nathan Champion (Christopher Walken), who roams Johnson County executing immigrants who’ve stolen livestock. Meanwhile, Averill returns to his pastoral home and to his girlfriend Ella Watson (Isabelle Hupert), who operates 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 also 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 in Sweetwater. Three mercenaries intercept Ella at her place of business and attempt to scratch her name off the death list. Standing behind Averill and Champion, the rest of the town elects to stay their ground and attempt to repel the invaders.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
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, who later recalled, “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. The studio’s head of production Danton Rissner read the script in August 1978 and responded coolly 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 United States 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 20 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 in 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, director of photography 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 12 days, Heaven’s Gate was 10 days behind schedule.

In his book Final Cut, Steven Bach recounted the expenses that began accumulating: “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 as many as 30 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 fifty seven takes. I’m really not. I’m not used to doing a minimum of thirty-two 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 pace, 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.

The studio 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 30 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 later offered his recollection of the production by stating, “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 1979 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 naturally 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 recalled, “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 five 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 viewing his cut until its public unveiling in New York one month later. Jeff Bridges recalled, “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, Michael 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 recalled, “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 was given 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 United States. 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, the movie hadn’t steered UA away from disaster 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.”

Where Are You Getting This?
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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Black Book — Production Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Humpday (2009)
Written by Lynn Shelton
Directed by Lynn Shelton
Produced by Lynn Shelton
MPAA rating: “R for some strong sexual content, pervasive language and a scene of drug use”
Running time: 94 minutes

Should I Care?
Lynn Shelton provoked more than one journalist to crown her “the female Judd Apatow” in the summer of ‘09. Her micro budget coming out as a filmmaker has little in common with The 40-Year-Old Virgin or Knocked Up. Humpday is more like the female version of The Blair Witch Project. Instead of two dudes and a girl getting terrorized in the woods, Shelton explores the relationship between two college buddies and how wide open the window is on the possibility they would actually take that relationship to the next level. That’s scary. In spite of its abrasive premise, this is a surprisingly tasteful movie, smart, spot-on emotionally, superbly performed and funny. Whether Shelton will be any more successful than The Blair Witch bros at applying her DIY touch to another film remains to be seen, but she catches lightning in a bottle here.

Working from a budget she scraped together from grants and donations, Shelton wasn’t left with much else to put on screen except frank dialogue about sex and the evolving nature of adult relationships. It’s a target that she hits dead on. With a script workshopped in collaboration with her actors (Mark Duplass, Joshua Leonard & Alycia Delmore), the results are like a much less jokey or pop culture obsessed Clerks (1994), with Humpday coming close to being as amusing as Kevin Smith’s debut. Shelton smartly avoids fanning a debate between straight versus gay and focuses on her honestly drawn characters. Instead of jumping from one location to the next, scenes are permitted to play out with the natural pace of a dinner conversation, growing more revealing the longer they’re allowed to continue. The result is a small but perfect comedy.

So, What’s This About?
The plans of Ben (Mark Duplass) and his wife Anna (Alycia Delmore) to conceive a child go awry when Ben’s buddy Andrew (Joshua Leonard) drops in for a visit at two thirty in the morning. While Ben has added a few pounds employed as a transportation planner, Andrew has been in Mexico, working with locals on an art project of some sort. In an effort to get to know her husband’s bohemian friend, Anna cooks them dinner the next evening, but Andrew lures Ben to dine at the home of a polyamorous couple (Lynn Shelton and Trina Willard) that he just met. There, conversation turns to an amateur porn festival called Humpfest. Scoffing at Andrew’s ambition to make his own “erotic art film”, Ben gets challenged to expand his suburban horizons. Stuffed on fettuccini, wine and weed, the guys agree to have sex with each other and film it.

Not buying that her husband needed to chaperone Andrew all night, Anna urges Ben to explain why he left her at home with pork chops. He apologizes, but maintains that even though they’re starting a family, they shouldn’t close themselves off from having new experiences either. Sobered up, Andrew lets his buddy off the hook for their art project by claiming he doesn’t want to wreck any havoc in Ben’s newly domesticated life. Being stereotyped only makes Ben more determined to go through with it. He feels confident his wife will let him participate in the porn movie, but chickens out giving her full details of his planned participation. Having a drink with Anna later that night, Andrew unknowingly fills that information in. Explaining to his wife that this is something he feels he has to get out of his system, Ben books a hotel room for him and Andrew to go through with their business.

Who Made It?
Lynn Shelton was born and raised in Seattle. An interest in stage acting led her to the University of Washington, where Shelton graduated in 1987 with a B.A. in theater. She spent the next nine years in New York City, discovering that instead of acting, her true passion was photography. Shelton earned an MFA in Photography and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, where she started making short films. Opting to raise her son in Seattle, she returned to The Evergreen State with her husband. Without really knowing anyone in the Seattle filmmaking community, Shelton was awarded a grant from 911 Media Arts to complete a short film, about a miscarriage. She learned to craft narrative films by working as an editor-for-hire on a couple of shorts, as well as a feature titled Outpatient (2002).

Shelton’s feature film writing and directing debut We Go Way Back (2006) — financed by The Film Company, a Seattle non-profit film studio — concerned a 23-year-old nagged by her former 13-year-old self.  It won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2006 Slamdance Film Festival, but Shelton’s experiences working with a large crew spurred her to create a looser, faster, more actor friendly environment on her sophomore film, My Effortless Brilliance (2008). Employed as a still photographer, Shelton met an actor named Mark Duplass. Inspired to create a movie with him, Shelton pitched an idea about two straight buddies who attempt to have sex for an adult film fest. Self-financed with grants and favors and shot over 10 breezy days in Seattle — with actors using a structured premise to base their improvisations — Humpday became a sensation at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, winning a Special Jury Prize.

How’d They Do It?
Humpday had its genesis in Lynn Shelton’s desire to collaborate with actor/filmmaker Mark Duplass on a movie of some sort. The two had known of each other through mutual contacts in the Do It Yourself filmmaking community and finally met in the summer of 2007, when Shelton volunteered her services as a still photographer on a low budget movie titled True Adolescents that was shooting in Seattle with Duplass in the cast. Shelton recalled, “We just had a lot to talk about and knew we wanted to work with each other in some capacity. And then watching him act on that set was just completely inspiring — I just loved the way he worked as an actor. Not only was he tremendously talented but the specific style that he worked in and [how] generous he was with the other actors and how he seemed to bring the best out of everybody and make everybody go deeper than they might have gone otherwise.”

At the 2006 Maryland Film Festival, Shelton became friends with Joe Swanberg, director of the micro budget LOL (2006) and Hannah Takes the Stairs (2007). Visiting Shelton and Duplass in Seattle, Swanberg related his experiences at their city’s amateur erotica festival, HUMP! Shelton recalled, “He said that long ago he’d become completely desensitized to straight porn — growing up in the age of the internet, a young guy just watching it all the time — and had never sought out gay porn before, so here he was sitting in this theater being forced to watch gay porn and he just found it absolutely compelling. He could never describe exactly why.” She added, “It wasn’t as if Joe was like, ‘I need to have sex with a man!’ but it was fascinating that this very straight guy was just like, ‘Boy, that was really an interesting sight to see!’ Some little switch was flipped for him, and at that point I thought, ‘Well, this just seems very amusing to me that this straight guy is so interested in gay porn,’ and that was what got me going in that direction of straight guys and gay porn and gay sex.’”

Duplass sent Shelton a script he was hoping she’d direct starring his wife, Katie Aselton. That never came to pass, but about a month later, Shelton called Duplass with an idea. “It took me a little while to get the nerve up because I was a little worried about how he would react, I wanted to pitch it just right, but basically I said: ‘The idea is two best friends from college, ten years later their lives have sort of diverged, but the basic premise is they decide they have to try and have sex together, two straight friends.’ He sort of paused for half a second and then said, ‘Okay! Sounds great!’ The interesting thing was that I originally had seen him in the other role, this idea of the wild, adventuring nomadic artist, very charismatic. He immediately said, ‘I’ve got to play the domesticated dude. That’s just where I am in my life right now and that would be more interesting for me.’ So I said, ‘Okay, I’m going to need help finding the other guy because I don’t know anybody as charismatic as you and he needs to be at least as charismatic as you.’”

Mark Duplass had met Joshua Leonard at the 2005 Woodstock Film Festival, where he and his brother Jay Duplass were screening their film The Puffy Chair (2005) and Leonard — best known for his role in The Blair Witch Project (1999) — was presenting a short he’d directed. Duplass revealed, “I knew enough that [there] are two essential ingredients that I wanted out of someone playing opposite me. The first being that we just have great natural chemistry and it looks like we’re buddies, and that we have an affection for each other, and you really would believe that they’re long-time friends. I knew we had that. We had instant chemistry when we met. What I also wanted in there was someone who could match me, because I’m a very dominant Type A aggressive person, and when I knew we were going to be improvising, I knew I needed someone who was my match, essentially. I knew that about Josh. He’s just very intelligent, very Type A. We both have big tempers and we would have explosiveness together, so it was like a totally natural fit.”

Shelton enthused, “The thing that was so beautiful is that when I first gave Mark the idea — it took me a few days to build up the courage to actually pitch it to him, the whole idea, because I totally didn’t see how he would say yes — and not only did he say yes, he said, ‘I don’t see how we can succeed doing this.’ We didn’t want to make a movie that was going to be just sort of a broad farce or slapstick comedy, we really wanted to make it only if we could do it in a believable way.” Duplass claimed, “I honestly didn’t have any hesitations. I mean, when we made this project, the bromance and that sort of zeitgeist wasn’t really around as much. It’s happened. I guess we lucked out making a movie about a subject that was interesting and that people were talking about at the time. That really wasn’t at the forefront of our brains, and in terms of me being maybe hesitant or reserved, the only concern I really had was that we would make a movie that was flippant with the sexual politics, and I didn’t want to trivialize any of that stuff.”

In addition to taking a chance on content that fell outside the norms of mainstream film, Shelton committed to trying a radically new approach to production. “After experiencing the traditional model of filmmaking with my first feature, I wanted to try creating a totally actor-centered atmosphere on set with my second feature film. It was really an experiment to see if I could capture a level of naturalism that would be so high, it would almost feel like a documentary. So instead of writing predetermined dialogue for characters that I thought up in my head, I decided to start with the people I wanted to work with and then handcraft characters custom designed just for them. I invite the actors in very early on in the process, when the film is still a loose story, because the actors will be heavily involved in the development of their own characters and I need to know who those characters are before I can cement how they will behave in each scene of the film.”

She continued, “The film organically evolves from that point on. By the time we get to the set, everyone has a detailed backstory and they are all intimately acquainted with their own characters. Instead of a proper script, we have a detailed outline of all the scenes. We know the point of every scene, and the emotional map of every scene, but the actors come up with the actual words on their own. With the right casting (as well as a very high skill level in the editing room), I have found that this kind of highly structured, highly directed improvisation can give me both the naturalism that I crave as well as the structure that I love.” With a day job was teaching part-time at the Art Institute of Seattle’s digital filmmaking program, Shelton applied for grants and collected donations from friends and family to self-finance Humpday. She claimed her budget ended up “less than a million dollars but more than 10 dollars.”

Collaborating with director of photography Ben Kasulke — who’d shot each of Shelton’s previous films — Humpday rolled June 2008 in Seattle. Utilizing two Panasonic HVX-200 digital camcorders, a schedule of no more than 12 days was allotted. To accomplish this, Shelton realized she needed help. An assistant director was hired and two co-producers — Steven Schardt and Jennifer Maas — were brought aboard to run the set. Shelton explained, “You’ve basically got two camera operators, you’ve got your DP and you’ve got a second camera operator, and eighty percent of the time I was the second camera operator, and you’ve got one sound person and then you’ve got maybe a couple of other people in the next room, basically that’s it on set along with your actors.” Editor Nat Sanders — who Shelton had met on the festival circuit — came up from Los Angeles to cut Humpday with the director over two and a half months. Sound department head Vince Smith would be tasked with composing the film’s sparse but quirky musical score.

Humpday would be invited to the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, where it notched a nomination for Grand Jury Prize. Critics marveled over the movie as well. Robert Abele, The Los Angeles Times: “That Humpday is able to avoid standard-issue homosexual panic jokes almost entirely for something more thematically pointed — the bumpy humor of men who crave intimacy and change but can only articulate it as a ridiculous challenge — is a testament to Shelton’s filmmaking intelligence.” Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun Times: “Funny, yes, but also observant and thought-provoking.” Stephen Holden, The New York Times: “It is all the more remarkable for having been conceived by an empathetic woman with no apparent ax to grind and a sensibility tuned to the minutiae of straight-male bonding rituals. Men may be from Mars and women from Venus, but some observant Venusians understand the brute fundamentals of Martian psychology.”

Magnolia Pictures acquired worldwide distribution rights and planned a national on-demand release via their Ultra VOD platform. In a limited theatrical release in the United States July 2009, Humpday got enough ink to run up $407,377 at the domestic box office. Lynn Shelton remained grounded about her future plans. “Aside from doing right by this film and hoping it gets out into the world, I just want to keep making movies. It’s really as simple as that. I don’t have any specific goals — I don’t want to leap into the studio system, I just want to be able to stay in Seattle and keep making movies and not bankrupt my family. If it provides me with a broader range of options for budgets and a broader range of people, that would be a lovely side effect. Frankly, I’m a very actor-centric director, so my biggest fantasy would be for actors that I respect to see this film and want to work with me.”

Where’d You Get All of This?

“Humpday. Sundance 2009 Preview w/Director Lynn Shelton” By Karina Longworth. Spoutblog, 15 January 2009

“Lynn Shelton: Humpday” FilmMaker Magazine, 30 January 2009

“Lynn Shelton and the cast of Humpday” Comingsoon.net, 6 July 2009

“Interview with Lynn Shelton, Director of Humpday” By Melissa Silverstein. The Huffington Post, 8 July 2009

“Interview: Lynn Shelton on Humpday” By Sean Axmaker. Parallax View, 9 July 2009

“Mark Duplass Talks Humpday and Future Projects” By Hayley Hosman. The Daily Californian, 22 July 2009

Humpday. DVD audio commentary by Mark Duplass & Joshua Leonard and Lynn Shelton. Magnolia Home Entertainment (2009)