Life Is Full Of Surprises

Bad movies. It’s one of the ongoing battles. More often than not I try to avoid writing about them because it just seems like a dead end. If they’re so bad they’re good I’m supposed to be snarky about it, if it’s the kind of bad that sucks the oxygen out of you writing about the film just becomes dispiriting. Of course, there’s always the hope that I’ll be able to dig into a film so I can break down why it doesn’t work. I still intend to get around to BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES sooner or later even though I’m not looking forward to it. But I’m forced to admit that my fascination remains. I’ll go to my grave expressing pride for seeing things like LOOSE CANNONS in the theater. The conundrum is when I feel incessantly drawn to some films that I know are terrible, as if dissecting them will get me to understand the badness even more and maybe somehow manage to find them even more fascinating. Maybe it helps me to love films all the more as a result. When it comes to writing about things like certain 70s disaster films I’m forced into confronting this.

You may have noticed a mention of actress Susan Blakely when I wrote about attending a special anniversary screening of THE LAST OF SHEILA recently. She’s not actually in that film although she’s a friend of James and Paula Coburn Foundation Executive Director Lynda Erkiletian who put together the event and it was thanks to the two of them that I got to be there. I’m still grateful and it was a thrill to meet Blakely that night so it seemed appropriate that I should write up on a film she was actually in. The first one that comes to mind is THE TOWERING INFERNO which I’ve covered before so I decided to move onto the other DVD I had close at hand featuring her--THE CONCORDE…AIRPORT ’79. Of course, for all I know she wouldn’t want me doing that because this is THE CONCORDE…AIRPORT ’79 we’re talking about after all, a film which came near the very end of the whole 70s disaster cycle. And like how Irwin Allen’s final theatrical film WHEN TIME RAN OUT… marked the end of his run, the Filmed-In-Universal-City 70s house style pretty much came to an halt with THE CONCORDE—hey, both of these films even share an ellipsis in their titles. If AIRPORT ’79 is a terrible film, and it pretty much is, at least it’s terrible for fascinatingly baffling reasons that make me wonder what sort of film was intentionally being made and if anyone ever spoke up on set about how blatantly absurd all this is even for the genre.

The first three films in the series (AIRPORT, AIRPORT 1975 and AIRPORT ’77, in case you forgot) all have their qualities and even now are strangely moody to the point that they’re actually ideal late night viewing. In various ways they each play as a part of the 70s zeitgeist or at least what I imagine a portrayal of the Nixon-Ford middle America conservative arm of the 70s zeitgeist to be, featuring affordable and willing big names in a no-nonsense, straightforward sort of spin of the GRAND HOTEL narrative structure punctuated by the mid-air jeopardy. For the most part they’re played as completely serious, jut-jawed, humorless, zero irony, featuring stars like Lancaster, Heston, Lemmon in the lead roles and an impressively diverse array of solid actors supporting them. In contrast THE CONCORDE is considerably more hysterical, surprisingly containing what are a number of presumably intentional laughs and one of the main stars is George Kennedy who was already familiar from this series, backed up by actors like John Davidson and Charo. It’s all over the place in tone and in spite of location shooting overseas it feels considerably smaller-scale than the others—it’s the only film in the series not shot in the widescreen 2.35 ratio and the flat look causes it to feel a little too much like a TV show made on a strict budget with touches like the generic “Concorde” painted on the side of the plane instead of an airline logo only adding to that feel. And in contrast to the by the book approach of the others there’s not a shred of plausible reality, even one that’s only set within the walls of Universal City. The film is so baffling that it makes me wonder if anyone knew while they were making it. I wonder if Susan Blakely knew. Incidentally, I should mention just from spending a little bit of time with her that she has to be the nicest, sweetest person on the planet and deserves better than this. She should have been in THE LAST OF SHEILA. Go follow her on Twitter and say that I sent you. And part of the whole conundrum I’m trying to get at that is I’d gladly watch the whole thing again right now. Clearly there’s something wrong with me.

As a brand new Concorde arrives in Washington D.C. to be handed over to Federation World Airlines, network news anchor Maggie Whelan (Susan Blakely) receives information that arms dealer Kevin Harrison (Robert Wagner) has been involved in illegal sales. The informant is killed right in front of her almost immediately but the wrinkle in this discovery is that Maggie is having an affair with the wealthy industrialist and although he denies the allegations she soon receives documents confirming his guilt. She informs him of her plan to go public with this information just as she is boarding a pre-Olympic goodwill flight of the new Concorde heading for Paris and then Moscow. Harrison immediately puts into effect his plan to use his new high-tech weaponry known as The Buzzard to bring down the mighty Concorde to make sure Maggie won’t get that chance. The many people onboard in addition to Maggie include Captain Paul Mertrand (Alain Delon), his sometime-girlfriend stewardess Isabelle (Sylvia Kristel), airline owner Eli Sands (Eddie Albert) and young wife Amy (Sybil Danning), a reporter (John Davidson), his Russian gymnast girlfriend Alicia (Andrea Marcovicci), a desperate mother transporting a heart for her sick child (Cicely Tyson), an old woman who needs to use the bathroom (Martha Raye) and, of course, Joe Patroni (George Kennedy) there to pilot the revolutionary plane that can achieve supersonic speed and ready to deal with anything that comes in its path.

Released in August 1979, less than a year before AIRPLANE! demolished the disaster movie formula once and for all, it’s the sort of bad movie that makes you go “Huh? Wha? Was this really a thing?” Directed by David Lowell Rich, THE CONCORDE…AIRPORT ’79 (titled AIRPORT ’80: THE CONCORDE in some countries where it presumably came out later) is never boring but it also doesn’t have much in the way of coherence or logic or any sort of believability. For all I know it’s actually set on another planet where such rules don’t apply. Let’s forget that the character of Joe Patroni doesn’t much resemble who George Kennedy was playing in the previous movies from his beginnings as chief airline mechanic back in 1970. Let’s also forget that having Maggie’s plane shot down would create an international incident of such enormous magnitude, what with all the Soviet athletes and other luminaries onboard, that it comes off as the dumbest and most unnecessarily complicated murder plot ever. Let’s also forget that even when the first attack fails it would create such an international investigation probably grounding every Concorde in the world, if not all planes flying to and from Paris. Maybe we should also forget about Joe Patroni sticking his hand out of the cockpit window to fire off a flare gun to distract one of the missiles while the Concorde is flying upside down over Mach 1. Actually, I don’t know how anyone could ever forget that.

Whether you want to consider the earlier films in the series legitimately good or bad (the first one especially may be cheese but even now it’s very entertaining cheese), the scripts for them have a consistency as if they were spotlighting the grand achievements of post-war America and what the people in charge can accomplish when things go wrong, often through no fault of their own, proving that American idealism and know-how will always win out in the end. The screenplay for THE CONCORDE is utterly imbecilic, so completely lacking in logic or rational motivation or plausibility but, in fairness, it’s pretty good considering the writer was ten years old. Actually, it was written by Eric Roth (producer Jennings Lang is credited with the story) who later went on to considerable acclaim as screenwriter on films like FORREST GUMP, MUNICH, THE GOOD SHEPHERD and THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON as well as co-writer on Michael Mann films like THE INSIDER and ALI. So never assume anything when it comes to screenwriters’ past credits. The story is as flimsy as the Concorde when it begins to break apart during the climax filled with character motivation that is completely muddled. And with dialogue like the now-infamous “They don’t call it the cockpit for nothing,” delivered by George Kennedy it verges close to intentional self-parody which would be fine if the damn thing would just decide on a tone, veering from apparent awareness of the absurdity to absolute deadly seriousness at times within moments of each other, along with a few random lines meant to sell us on how amazing the Concorde is. The trailer on the DVD in the AIRPORT Terminal Pack which features all four films seems to be mistakenly missing the voiceover narration. Maybe the film is too.

With a balloon launched in the opening moments specifically to protest the Concorde (by “a radical environmentalist group”) there’s an indication that the film is going to deal with current events that were around at the time—the balloon seems to go from the Lincoln Memorial to the runway at Dulles in the space of a few minutes which says something about the plausibility. The thread is pretty much dropped instantly anyway and the presence of a Soviet Olympics team on a goodwill tour probably doomed the movie’s topicality when the U.S. boycotted the 1980 games several months after the film opened. It all feels bogus right from the start and believability isn’t helped by the newscast near the beginning, a broadcast which in Basil Exposition style seems to consist entirely of upcoming plot points in the film (some of which are spoken by a pre-SIMPSONS Harry Shearer as the voice of a reporter which now only adds to the absurdity) including the introduction of Robert Wagner’s Kevin Harrison who has just been awarded ‘Man of the Year’ by ‘the United States Science Foundation’ an obvious sign that he’s up to no good.

There’s not that much to say about director Rich’s shooting style although he does occasionally brings some creative blocking into play like when Wagner watches Blakely leave in one of those shuttles at Dulles Airport but the portentousness of moments like this makes it feel like a parody of direction trying to amp up suspense and there’s never any tension as the Concorde turns upside down with actors and extras screaming. The air disasters in the previous sequels are outlandish but there’s something primal in the fears they touch off—a bomb going off in mid-flight, no one onboard able to land a plane since the pilot has been killed due to a mid-air collision, even the suspense that comes from the underwater crash in ’77 has an effectiveness since we can of course relate to a fear of drowning, but the plot this time goes beyond ludicrous. There’s never any sense of actual jeopardy, particularly since no one seems the least bit concerned about getting back on the plane only a day after it was attacked. Airline owner Eddie Albert storms off the plane after the first flight insisting that it will take off the next day on schedule—so much for an investigation or adequate time for repairs, I suppose, and the pilots are apparently never even debriefed by authorities as everyone settles in for a night in Paris like they’re stopping over on a bus trip. Odd touches every now and then at least provide an unusual mood setter like Robert Wagner’s insecurity at wearing glasses or the woman in a wheelchair who appears from nowhere to shove some crucial documents in someone’s hands at least plays as appropriately disarming but more often than not these things are cancelled out by a moment or action that bears no resemblance to actual human behavior so they wind up just playing as random bits that don’t add up to anything. And then there’s the intentional comedy of George Kennedy’s Parisian dinner set up with Bibi Andersson, of course famous from multiple Ingmar Bergman films, and the ultimate revelation he learns about her the morning after. All I’ll say is that if you’ve ever wanted to see George Kennedy make love to Bibi Andersson by a roaring then this is your chance.

At least some location work makes it feel like a real movie--the early dialogue scene between Blakely and Wagner set out on the National Mall in D.C. is so deserted I wonder if it was one of those Sunday at 6AM deals. And a chase scene at Charles DeGualle Airport midway through actually winds up being fairly suspenseful—it’s nothing great but for a few minutes it does feel like we’re watching a cool 70s European spy movie. But too much is just ridiculous. Why does Maggie Whelan believe a single word that Harrison says? Why doesn’t she go public with her findings as soon as she gets off the plane in Paris instead of waiting until she reaches Moscow? Does she feel any pangs of guilt from having an affair with a man who has a wife and three kids? Why is Harrison still trying to make things right with her after he’s tried to have her killed and will try again? Wouldn’t he be worried about the resulting investigation if his plan to shoot down the Concorde succeeds? Maybe a longer cut would have helped explain things—this isn’t the only AIRPORT sequel where it feels like scenes clarifying points like simple motivation were sliced down to bare essentials to stay below a two-hour running time—several scenes added to the network version were apparently shot just for that purpose including an appearance by Jessica Walter as Patroni’s wife in flashback (go here for more than you’ll ever want to know about the network cut). The scenes that can be found on Youtube are pretty lousy but at least they offer an excuse why Patroni is thinking about his late wife twenty minutes before the movie’s end for no reason. However long it is, I still barely know what to make of this film. You don’t get titles that contain years very much anymore, at least not referencing the year the movie actually opened. You also don’t get movies like THE CONCORDE…AIRPORT ’79 anymore which comes off as so tone-deaf and cluelessly bad—at least, I think that’s what it is—that it really does become endearing. Maybe it’s one of the worst films ever released by a major studio, but I don’t like to assign labels to these things. It makes my head hurt and yet I’m still kind of glad it’s there.

The actors to their credit do seem like they’re actually trying, just flailing from lack of actual direction and half the time I wonder if they’re playing scenes thinking about something cut from earlier in the film that we never got to see. Susan Blakely tries her best but it’s an impossible part to play and many of her actions don’t say much for someone who’s supposed to be a high-powered journalist. Robert Wagner appears to be trying to add substance to his part as if to indicate a hidden distaste for his actions but there’s only so much he can do considering what’s on the page. George Kennedy may be kind of a punchline now considering the inevitability of his appearance and his later association with THE NAKED GUN but he still plays things with technical expertise, somehow actually selling a ridiculous moment talking about a girl he once knew in Saigon. It’s just so odd to find that kind of joke in the context of an AIRPORT movie, up until this entry just about the most strait-laced, humorless franchise ever and it makes moments like this even stranger but he does provide a certain weight and stoicism in the eye of all this nonsense. As for Alain Delon I’m not sure what he’s doing in this movie at all, money aside, but I guess if you ever wanted to see him pal around with George Kennedy this is your chance. In his love scenes with Sylvia Kristel the material doesn’t provide them with much beyond the thinnest of soap opera scraps.

Jimmie Walker, playing his saxophone and smoking weed, is comic relief. Monica Lewis, Mrs. Jennings Lang and also in EARTHQUAKE and AIRPORT ’77, is a jazz singer on tour. John Davidson plays a reporter named Robert Palmer and somebody before me has probably come up with all the obvious jokes already. Andrea Marcovicci is his Russian gymnast love interest. Mercedes McCambridge is her stern instructor. David Warner is the Concorde’s navigator, kind of a comedown after playing Jack the Ripper in TIME AFTER TIME, but he’s always good to have around. Eddie Albert is the owner of the airline, using all the bluster you would expect (“I had the best seat in the house!” he cracks when his seat almost falls through the hole in the plane). Sybil Danning, looking awfully cute, is his much younger wife. Cicely Tyson is the crying mother of an unseen kid who needs a heart transplant. Avery Schreiber is a Russian coach, spending most of his screentime explaining things via sign language to his deaf daughter. Really, let’s not talk about Martha Raye needing to use the bathroom. Charo gets pretty high billing for a brief cameo in which she tries to smuggle a dog onto the plane, another one of the ‘comedy’ bits sprinkled in there. Ed Begley Jr. has about twelve seconds as a rescuer in the Swiss Alps near the end, playing his one scene in a blatantly obvious set. If the AV Club ever does a Random Roles with Begley they’d better bring up this one.

The crash into the Swiss Alps and the subsequent rescue of the final moments is rushed through, with most of the characters not even given a ‘final’ scene, followed by a fast fade out on the triumphant image of the mighty Concorde once again in midflight, presumably heading off into future glory. I guess. Even if the movie had been any good, even if AIRPLANE! had never been made, it’s easy to imagine that this would have been near the end of the line for the AIRPORT series anyway since the concept of air travel simply wasn’t as exotic as it once had been. Alain Delon even has a line of dialogue observing, “Only three hours and a half ago we were in Paris. The world seems so small.” The final Concorde flight took place in November 2003 so it’s now a part of a future that no longer exists—incidentally, the jet used in this film was later purchased by Air France and remained in service until it crashed in July 2000, killing all onboard. The last Concorde flight took place in October 2003 ending the era of supersonic flight and in the year 2013 there’s not much in the way of glamour to air travel at all anymore. Don’t get me started on US Airways. Maybe since there wasn’t much left to say about the excitement of air travel, and considering how the movie seems pretty desperate to say something about it and have a reason to exist, this was where the series needed to end. And now in writing this all this I’m probably taking the movie much more seriously than I should. But that’s what I do. I can’t help myself. So in case I ever get to run into Susan Blakely again one of these days, I hope she’ll be ok with all this. And I will watch every absurd moment of THE CONCORDE…AIRPORT ’79 again eventually, maybe sooner than I care to admit.

Unenlightened Shadows Cast

If you know me, and maybe you should be glad if you don’t, you know that I get obsessed over things that don’t warrant such intense focus. Things I’ve done or haven’t done, films I’ve seen way too many times, people I know, people I know only slightly, women I’ve known for years, girls I intensely ponder when suddenly I’m passing them on the street. These obsessions, whatever they are, continue as time spirals forward. After my first viewing of David Fincher’s ZODIAC when it was released back in March 2007 I went on the internet to learn more about the case since I had never read up on it before. After a few lines I remembered the rabbit hole that I had fallen into on a few subjects—the Kennedy assassination, the death of Marilyn Monroe, Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter, things like that. I flashed on the ZODIAC poster’s tagline—“THERE’S MORE THAN ONE WAY TO LOSE YOUR LIFE TO A KILLER”—and then clicked away to other things so I don’t know much more about the actual case than what’s in the movie.

Even now just a very brief glance at the Wikipedia page on the subject of Zodiac makes it clear that all the pieces of the puzzle add up to far more than what can be contained in a single film, even one that’s over two-and-a-half hours and features a narrative that spans over twenty years. I’m still not going to start reading up on all that because that’s not what I want my life to be. After all, there are still Sam Fuller movies to get around to. And there’s a pretty good chance that I’m going to see the film ZODIAC many more times in the years to come, something I’ve kind of done already, something I keep on doing and for me it’s easily one of the most addictive films of the past decade, one where I just need to dip into it every now and then if only to absorb a small piece of the tapestry. ZODIAC is about many things. It’s about the real-life case it documents, obviously—“based on actual case files” as the opening card tells us—it’s an illustration of how investigative work has changed, how the world has changed in how information is put out through the media and eventually discarded, whether the narrative being sold was ever completed or not. And it’s also about how merciless the world can be as time marches forward. How life changes, how the parts of your life all around simply move on past you sometimes, how you’re still drawn to a certain place that once meant everything but everyone around you just keeps walking by. How can people be so heartless goes the cover version of “Easy to Be Hard” by Three Dog Night heard in the opening frames. Of course, in some ways people can’t help it. So we need to take what that feeling does to us and make the world into what we need it to be. Sometimes it convinces us to turn away from our obsessions. Sometimes it forces us to dig into them even deeper. Easy to be hard. But harder to look elsewhere from where we already are.

Simply put, ZODIAC focuses on the case as the Bay Area transforms around it from 1969 through the 70s and beyond as experienced by San Francisco police detective Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), San Francisco Chronicle reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey,Jr.) and Chronicle cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), whose own obsession through the years only grows as the world around him shrinks away or off into other things. With a screenplay by James Vanderbilt from Graysmith’s book documenting the case, ZODIAC is about the hunt for this killer and the conclusions that come from that investigation. It’s about how the search affects the lives of these three men and the people around them in different ways but it’s also about the details that you can tell Fincher is focusing on even if it’s for only a second because those touches matter, whether they directly involve the Zodiac case or not—the multiple layers of clothing worn by Mike Mageau in the opening, the way Candy Clark’s Carol Fisher flips around that letter to see "Please Rush To Editor" staring right at her, that ‘do not touch volume’ button on the TV in the Chronicle press room, the mention of Melvin Belli’s STAR TREK guest shot, the way Anthony Edwards as Bill Armstrong slowly turns his eyelids up at something John Carroll Lynch’s Arthur Leigh Allen has just said during that lengthy interrogation, even the correct vintage Paramount logo the begins the film (the lack of a Warner-Seven Arts recreation is lamentable, howver). Those details are important, they’re what make up the movie to give it its power, its portrayal of obsession. It feeds into me as I watch it over and over, getting obsessed myself as I get involved in not so much the literal facts of the case but the desperation, the need to keep digging, even into the blind alleys of how the Rick Marshalls of the world simply wind up sucking you dry, as Dave Toschi says. “Learn a lot,” Robert Graysmith tells his son going to school as the title of the movie flashes onscreen, but he’s the one who winds up learning a lot, more than he ever intended. It’s not about the need to find a serial killer, but to find something, to find a piece of meaning, to feel like you’re doing something even if it’s just to get Avery to try one of those Aqua Velvas. You wouldn’t make fun of it if you tried it, after all. And yet Robert Graysmith lists off a number of such things to Toschi in order to implicate someone near the end to which the response is, “All circumstantial.” So then what matters? What can ZODIAC really be about?

More than any other character, ZODIAC is about Robert Graysmith, or about anyone who spends time among co-workers who ignore him, feeling like he doesn’t matter in a place where he wants to matter and imagines what it would be like to go with everyone to the bar on the corner for a drink. What’s in this for you, asks Avery. He can’t answer. He’s not even sure how to answer that. In some ways, he’s already gotten it by just being asked out for a drink but he has to keep looking to go further, to find more. This is good business for everyone but you, Avery says but Graysmith isn’t thinking about it as business. For Dave Toschi, it’s about what he’s already doing and getting stuck into some kind of cycle able to dig his way out of it because he has to but that quicksand pulls him back on occasion because he stands nearby. We never know what Paul Avery wants, aside from the thrill of the story, a thrill that completely leaves him eventually. Graysmith has to keep digging because he doesn’t know what else to do, because he doesn’t know what else he could do.

Maybe most surprising about his approach considering the swoop through the coffee pot handle in PANIC ROOM Fincher dials back on the visual flourishes, time lapse of the Transamerica Tower being built aside, as if he’s taking inspiration not just from how Alan J. Pakula directed ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN (a pretty addictive film itself for many of the same reasons) but in how that film’s most audacious shot, the famous eight-minute take of Bob Woodward getting Kenneth Dahlberg on the phone, never even announced itself as such—as a crucial component in this approach mention should also be made of the great cinematographer Harris Savides who died last year at the age of 55. Even the David Shire score works as both homage and totally serving the film, the haunting nature heard in that far-off trumpet sound of what is almost impossible to ever fully resolve in those dark streets at night. The film is paced like a metronome, impeccable down to how it keeps going only sometimes stopping cold for a scene like the Arthur Leigh Allen interrogation, laying out every piece of information that we can barely keep up with beat by beat. The cold facts we need to know are laid in alongside the distractions as if a reminder that we need to keep focused on what really should be paid attention to--for all we know the Kathleen Johns section is a distraction itself, which is kind of the point.

Fincher resists ever making it a serial killer film along the usual lines—of course, SEVEN wasn’t that either, it just inspired plenty of them and interestingly this is the second David Fincher serial killer movie where library books turn out to be a plot point. ZODIAC does have its murder scenes and they’re absolutely terrifying, never playing as cinematically cool at all just unrelentingly brutal and nasty, as if it’s saying that every other moment of violence you’ve ever witnessed in a movie before is total bullshit. To be perfectly honest, as many times as I’ve seen this film by now I sometimes find myself skipping past these scenes when I see the film again but if I do watch them I’m riveted by every moment—the awkward humor that comes from the reactions of the two victims in the Lake Berryessa sequence is disarming and unexpected but it also makes what occurs just moments later all the more horrifying. Fincher’s playful side is evident in many of his films, even ALIEN 3, even SEVEN as if this humor makes these people all the more human. And that works here too, humanity being important in this context, something that needs to be remembered.

But these scenes aren’t what the film is about anyway—it’s about what they lead to, the details, the minutiae, the dead ends and ultimately the depths of that neverending fixation on getting answers to what can never entirely be solved. It goes on. People fall away and out of life. Fuck-ups happen. Pieces are forgotten. The cycle of life goes from someone who stands over you remembering the person that used to have your desk to you one day doing the same with a new employee. You put things off, like the Japanese food Bill Armstrong hasn’t gotten around to trying or those animal crackers in the car that Toschi is saving for later. What’s added to the director’s cut doesn’t substantially change things but I have no problem with the film being a few minutes longer—hell, I’d be happy with even more asides like Melvin Belli’s comments on his safari to Africa (the sort of thing one puts off in life—Melvin Belli is able to float outside of these concerns in his world). As for his famed sound montage traveling through the seventies even if it is the way Fincher wanted it I still like the extra-long hold on black before we fade up on ‘Four Years Later’ in the theatrical cut.

And much as I may love DIRTY HARRY, in this context the Scorpio letter read by John Vernon as viewed at the SFPD special screening comes off as pretty crass and exploitative after all we’ve seen—interesting to note that Clint Eastwood’s likeness is never glimpsed, even in the posters out in the lobby. The thread from real to fiction is Fincher delving into his own past and memories of growing up in the Bay Area, of which he has much to say about on the commentary and it makes his own obsession of exploring his past what the film is about as much as anything (I suspect there are some issues with the chronology of actual events and other factual elements—I may not know much about the Zodiac case but I know when DIRTY HARRY was released). Understandably, the film makes use of some L.A. architecture as well since some of it is period appropriate like the Wilshire Colonnade that might be recognizable to some from EARTHQUAKE. Even the DIRTY HARRY screening sequence makes use of the National Theater in Westwood to represent the Bay Area location—ZODIAC actually played at the National, making me now wish that I’d seen it there especially since not long after the beautiful theater with its distinctive mid-century architecture was closed and ultimately razed. The site is still a hole in the ground. So I guess, for me, ZODIAC is about that as well.

Ultimately ZODIAC is about the unknowability of the past, how you can never fully grasp what’s already occurred, to get answers to questions that you’ve long wondered about and will never receive. It’s about waking up one day and realizing years have gone by while you’ve been distracted by all the shiny pieces of distracting nonsense in front of you which was something I took from NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, another film from 2007, as well. We never really find out about Paul Avery’s implosion into drinking and drugs either. We never find out about a lot of things. Until everything ends. And you’re not even sure what the end really was.

One thing I may admit to if pressed is that ZODIAC is a great film that has an impeccable ensemble as opposed to a great lead performance—I wonder if there was a more novelistic concept in the script of the two ‘movie star’ roles being superseded by the lesser player in the final third but things didn’t necessarily play out that way. Robert Downey Jr. is totally dynamic as Avery, making me wonder if it’s a side of the real Downey and his own demons than we’ve seen before otherwise. Ruffalo, who maybe gives the best performance in the film, gets me to imagine a BULLITT remake that he stars in and it’s great to watch him thinking even if he doesn’t quite have the charisma. His "Thank You. Thank you for breakfast" at the end just drives the moment home. Gyllenhaal does solid work but is still lacking something, maybe the true feel of a misfit, to get his unrelenting determination to fully connect (“The heart of the movie unfortunately turned out not to be Jake but it’s Ruffalo…” Fincher can be heard saying to David Shire in a hidden track on the score CD). Some of the best work in the supporting cast is a reminder of how few directors out there today enjoy making use of That Guys as Fincher does—separate essays could be written on how each of these actors add to the film in their own ways with particularly good work from Anthony Edwards, John Getz, John Terry (recognizable now from LOST but having been in FULL METAL JACKET makes him an automatic Kubrick reference), Chloe Sevigny (doing something with very little), Elias Koteas, Brian Cox (immensely charismatic as Melvin Belli, the most movie-star like performance here), John Carroll Lynch, Charles Fleischer, Dermot Mulroney (for the look on his face as DIRTY HARRY plays alone) Jimmi Simpson as the older Mike Mageau for the film’s final image and Ione Skye, unbilled as Kathleen Johns.

ZODIAC didn’t do well at the box office. It received zero Oscar nominations. A shame. I don’t care. It remains stunning, absorbing, impossible to shake. ZODIAC is a serial killer movie where the final confrontation is not a dramatic showdown on a rooftop or even out in the desert with Gwyneth Paltrow’s head in a box. It’s just two men staring at each other in a hardware store. It’s not a true catharsis. It’s just one simple moment of understanding in the labyrinth of trying to make it through the years when you don’t know what you’re supposed to do anymore. What are Graysmith, Toschi and Avery really looking for? What am I looking for? Is this sort of search even something that a person wants to ever be over? And if you do find an answer does it really mean anything when you come right down to it? At the end, the full-on close up of the individual brought back to the moment that forever altered his existence gives ‘at least an eight’ as to how sure he is about what he says. He’s very certain. Not completely certain. Maybe in life that’s as close as we’ll ever get.

The Dangers of Improvisation

You wake up one day in this town and suddenly decades have gone by while the path that originally brought you to Los Angeles stretches further back into the past. The road you’ve been on, mixed in with all those people you’ve met up to this point, is now so crooked that you can’t tell where it came from and what lies in front of you seems even hazier. Released in 1973. THE LAST OF SHEILA is a film where barely a few minutes are actually set in L.A. and yet it seems like one of the most perfect films about this city where I live, or at least what I still imagine it to be. It’s a film about friendship and yet it’s the most cynical film imaginable. Perfect for the decade when it was made. Perfect for now. A number of weeks ago—4/9/13 to be exact—I surprised some people on my Facebook and Twitter feeds by saying I was at the 40th Anniversary screening of THE LAST OF SHEILA. They weren’t aware of the event and, truthfully, I was a little taken aback that I was there myself. This particular path began when I started following actress Susan Blakely on Twitter since, after all, she was in THE TOWERING INFERNO so doing this made perfect sense. She actually followed me back and responded to a few things I said on there, which led to a few friends of hers on Twitter starting to follow me. This included Lynda Erkiletian who may be known to some out there as one of the Real Housewives of DC and among other things is also the executive director of the James and Paula Coburn Foundation which supports charitable organizations devoted to the arts and sciences. It had put together this special night designed to celebrate the legendary James Coburn as part of the KCET Cinema Series. I suppose they enjoyed the unabashed film geekness of my tweets and that led to being invited to the event but I’m not entirely sure I follow along with this myself. After my platonic date cancelled due to not feeling well I decided that maybe it was best to traverse this particular evening alone since I wasn’t sure what I was in for. I arrived early, maybe earlier than I needed to, and it was about this time while I seated in the reserved section that I left the status updates and got people wondering what the hell was going on. Soon enough the theater started to fill up and before I knew it Susan Blakely sits behind me. I introduce myself, she excitedly gives me a hug, introduces me to her husband and friends which included Sally Kellerman. Lynda Erkiletian then appeared, very happy to meet me as well. What was I doing here? Even after all these years, what am I doing in this town, anyway? But as much as I may have worried that there had been some terrible mixup, it was very real. All this led to that night’s screening of THE LAST OF SHEILA shown in 35mm something which I imagine isn’t going to happen again very often. Part drawing room mystery, part dry character comedy, part look behind the curtain at the movers and shakers of Hollywood, on the surface the film might resemble any number of international productions from the 70s, the kind which feature the actor’s faces in boxes at the bottom of the poster. But THE LAST OF SHEILA is more than that, not only one of the best films directed by Herbert Ross in his long career but notable as being the one film written by the screenwriting pair of Stephen Sondheim and Anthony Perkins in their only collaboration which certainly adds to the interest as well as the intrigue of what this movie really is. It's a lot more than that as well and there are all sorts of things to compare it to but, really, there aren’t many films like THE LAST OF SHEILA. Exactly one year after the mysterious hit-and-run death of his wife Sheila in Bel Air, film producer Clinton Greene (James Coburn) gathers six of his friends for a cruise aboard his luxury yacht in the South of France. The group includes film director Philip Dexter (James Mason), screenwriter Tom Parkman (Richard Benjamin) and wife Lee (Joan Hackett), movie star Alice Wood (Raquel Welch) and husband-manager Anthony (Ian McShane) as well as powerful agent Christine (Dyan Cannon). Once the group has assembled Clinton announces that the week’s cavorting will consist of an elaborate game he calls “The Sheila Greene Memorial Gossip Game” to commemorate the anniversary of her passing, handing out cards to each person listing a secret that the others are meant to uncover. The secrets make a few of them uncomfortable, getting everyone to wonder what Clinton really has up his sleeve, in addition to his proclamation to make a movie about Sheila’s death, but the game has barely gotten underway when somebody actually turns up dead. It’s not only up to those who remain to determine who the killer is, but what the cards that were handed out might have to do with the answer and what happened to Sheila a year ago. I'm trying to be as cagey with certain plot details as possible. Inspired by games that the two screenwriters actually played with their famous friends, THE LAST OF SHEILA is a puzzle movie about people aware they’re assembling a puzzle. As is typical in the Agatha Christie tradition the victim is hated enough that they aren’t missed at all beyond those that are still there feeling compelled to assemble the mystery of what happened, with cocktail hour coming right on schedule. And at least part of what the film seems to be about is how they’re not missed, how it’s populated by people who are well aware they’re moving on to their own insignificant troubles after just a few moments. But in this case their absence is also keenly felt, just one more hole in the lives of these people who have their own disappointments already, as indicated by the cards handed out by Clinton that display their darkest secrets. They’re all members of the Hollywood jet set but maybe one bad decision away from being tossed out and as one character puts it, they’re friends who all know stuff about each other, they just don’t know the same stuff. It’s well-known by now that legendary agent Sue Mengers was the model for Dyan Cannon’s character and it’s not a stretch to imagine how part of the back story of the film’s stars are part of this giant shell game as well--Cannon herself had already been nominated for an Oscar at this point but had also been married to one of the most legendary movie stars in history, Raquel Welch’s actress doesn’t seem all that jazzed in taking part in the fun and games Clinton the movie producer is engineering which seems appropriate for someone trying to move away from the bikini stereotype (she appears in one anyway since she’s Raquel Welch after all), while James Coburn himself makes a disparaging joke about one of the other characters doing a rewrite on what he dubs “A Fistful of Lasagna” just a few years after starring in DUCK YOU SUCKER aka A FISTFUL OF DYNAMITE. For all I know one of the key secrets eventually revealed comes from Anthony Perkins and his own secret life as well. But even on its own THE LAST OF SHEILA is a mystery that takes continuous pleasure in twisting around the expectations—appropriate for such a puzzle there are any number of pieces that someone might catch on first viewing without knowing right away how they’re going to fall into place. The dialogue includes various asides that sometimes have nothing to do with anything (or maybe they do, like the weirdness of those puppets) as well as lines which will certainly have greater meaning when seeing the movie multiple times, like one particularly nasty piece of foreshadowing that jumps out if you’ve seen the movie before. As much as the moderator during the Q&A afterwards made the observation that movies like this only come out near the end of the year for possible Oscar consideration these days it’s not at all an insult to say that THE LAST OF SHEILA isn’t an awards-type movie—that said, it could easily have deserved a screenplay nod—but instead is the sort of adult entertainment which was once more the norm, featuring movie stars in a sly film that displays their talents set in a far-off locations slinking its way through a plot that forces us to stay on our toes. There’s a bite to the approach in how it reveals the characters through their wisecracks even down to expressing how some of them are more amused by that sharpness than others. THE LAST OF SHEILA is entertaining all the way through and manages to become more so, more resonant, when seeing it again. Ross’s staging of this script is continually expert, knowing just when to emphasize certain touches over others and zero in on what we should pay attention to. Plus a surprising amount of subversive elements within the quiet moments such as one of the uglier secrets held by the characters which doesn’t seem to inspire much more than a shrug and even how things are resolved in the end provides a sting of how people are willing to turn their back on certain actions by people since, after all, there’s a movie to get made. Maybe, according to the film, the worst possible punishment in life is to do exactly what you were doing already. As the host of this week in the Riviera, Coburn’s famous toothy smile has a particularly demonic shine in this context (he’s even in drag at one point which deserves a mention) and his presence is such that when he’s not onscreen it almost feels as if that image is subliminally burning its way through the frame regardless. Along with the layers of the story the very title has multiple meanings—not just Sheila’s death but how it becomes clear that the characters will never be rid of everything surrounding all the problems that entered their lives through her and how it will always be with them. Almost seeming slight as a mystery at first, the intrigue of THE LAST OF SHEILA as we stare at those “YOU ARE A…” cards over and over holds all the way even through its laughs but its bite leaves a mark as well, one that stays with you as the layers reveal themselves on multiple viewings. There’s fantastic work by all involved and it’s a treat to watch a few of the actors involved in the drawn-out explanations of the second half (to avoid spoilers in this twisty plot I’m even trying to not mention who those are) play mental chess with each other. Everyone is a joy here—James Coburn’s relish as he chews his way through his speeches, Dyan Cannon’s energy, Richard Benjamin’s canniness, James Mason’s gradual awareness of what’s going on around him. Their differing energy works for the film like how the different energy of Joan Hackett (particularly good) makes her seem like the one genuine human being of the entire group and the intentionally less flashy personalities of Raquel Welch and Ian McShane (I guess he didn’t just pop into existence when DEADWOOD began production) provides just as much of an effect. The end credits song “Friends” is sung by Bette Midler and feels like just the right bitter bill to take after all this—incidentally, Midler is now playing Sue Mengers in a one-woman show on Broadway. The film that night was followed by an enjoyable Q&A with stars Richard Benjamin and Dyan Cannon in which they recounted various tales about its making such as when the unpredictable nature of shooting on the water forced the production to rebuild the yacht interiors at a studio in Nice—Truffaut’s DAY FOR NIGHT was filming there at the same time—so the actors had to wait around for a few weeks in the south of France, which doesn’t sound too bad. Going along with the theme of the evening emphasis was placed on memories of James Coburn—maybe my favorite anecdote told involved Benjamin remembering driving along in a fast sports car Coburn had just bought when on a whim he suggested they drive to Italy. Benjamin said he didn’t have his passport on him but Coburn told him not to worry. Sure enough the Italians weren’t going to let them across the border but when Coburn flashed that famous smile they exclaimed, “Ah, Signor Flint…” and waved them right through. At the reception afterwards Susan Blakely brought me around introducing me to various people so I can now say I've met Richard Benjamin and Dyan Cannon. It was a thrill to be there celebrating such a bitterly funny, cynical film about the nature of friends in Hollywood (or, what the hell, friends everywhere) so my thanks to Susan Blakely and Lynda Erkiletian for making me feel so welcome on this night that felt something like an odd comedy and mystery in itself. I once heard somebody say that it was a shame Sondheim and Perkins never collaborated on another screenplay and while that may be true at least we have THE LAST OF SHEILA, a film which deserves to be celebrated all these years after it was made--it’s available at the Warner Archive, so treat yourself. Sometimes one film is all that matters, especially if it’s as good and sharp as this one is. Just like certain evenings can matter as well, becoming one more unexpected detour through that road which starts and ends in the city of Los Angeles, or at least what I imagine it to be even after all this time.