1990 was a pretty good year, at least if we’re just talking about the releases of GOODFELLAS, GREMLINS 2 and TOTAL RECALL. But that’s what wearing rose colored glasses gets you. Other parts of the twelve months didn’t go so well but I don’t want to talk about family memories and let’s also not bring up certain SUNY schools, especially if they’re located in Purchase. But we may as well move on from that for the time being. In June of that year things were looking up when I was hired on a major film shooting nearby but that wasn’t such a great experience either and I wound up working less than a week on it. The film, for anyone who remembers it, was Paul Mazursky’s SCENES FROM A MALL starring Bette Midler and Woody Allen. Detailing the satirical destruction and reconciliation of a marriage all within the confines of the enormous Beverly Center, the film was shot in several places to accommodate leading man Woody Allen who was making this rare starring appearance in a film he didn’t also direct and, of course, he didn’t like traveling too far from New York. There was location work at the Stamford Town Center in Connecticut (that’s where I worked) which has a decent similarity to the real thing, extensive studio work at the Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens as well as a little bit of exterior filming at the actual Beverly Center in Los Angeles so they at least got Woody out there for a few days. Simply put, this is a film mostly set in one location that was shot in three states and runs under 90 minutes. Which may be a more interesting fact about the film than my briefly working on it.
It would make sense to say that I don’t have particularly fond memories of the experience, but to be honest enough time has passed that I honestly don’t have a lot of memories of it at all or maybe I’ve just blocked much of that time out. No reason to dwell on things after a certain point. The experience of being present for the filming of an early parking garage scene is still vivid in my mind and when I watch that extended dolly shot (which begins at 13:53, in case you have your copy of the film handy) the sensations of that excitement come rushing back. Also, Woody wanted Snickers bars in his dressing room. But a lot of it is a blur to me now, lost to time, and the fact that it wasn’t the greatest experience doesn’t really matter anymore. Even the few names I can recall of the people I was working under aren’t listed in the credits and I’m certainly not, even with the surprisingly large number of production assistants in the end crawl, so it’s almost like it never happened. In a way, the film itself now seems a little like something that never happened, partly because of one of the names above the title but also because it’s one of those Paul Mazursky films that has been forgotten about by the entire world all these years later anyway. But all this is in the past. And, for the record, I don’t have any animosity towards the director. He had other things going on. The film doesn’t really come together in the end partly because of its own slightness, a concept for a film that in the end maybe wasn’t enough of one. Still, you don’t get films like this anymore, a dialogue heavy, character-based comedy-drama about actual grownups released by a major studio made by an auteur in the style he specialized in, even if the resulting film isn’t his best. The more that time goes by, it feels kind of amazing how we ever got films like this at all.
Sports lawyer Nick Fifer (Woody Allen) and wife Deborah Feingold-Fifer (Bette Midler), a well-known marriage psychologist whose new book has just come out, have just seen their two kids off on a ski trip for the holidays and are ready to celebrate their sixteenth wedding anniversary with a dinner party that night. Heading out to the fashionable Beverly Center to get some quick shopping done and exchange their anniversary gifts, over some frozen yogurt Nick reveals news of the affair he recently had to Deborah. She reacts with understandable anger and declares their marriage over, but they soon reconcile and are ready to start celebrating again. But just as they’re beginning to relax, Deborah reveals a surprise to Nick about her own recent past and her own secrets that she’s been keeping from him.
The satire found in the films directed by Paul Mazursky feels so specific to the time when they were made that addressing this becomes unavoidable when revisiting them. No matter how good BOB & CAROL & TED & ALICE (great) and BLUME IN LOVE (not quite as great, with an extremely problematic plot development) are, each film is so fixed in the time it was made during the late ‘60s and early ‘70s they almost feel like they’re set on another planet now when compared to what the world has turned into. But not only does this add to their effectiveness in portraying people who are trying to understand the moment they’re living in, the films are still so sharp and funny in their characterizations that they remain fascinating and at their best feel true. Mazursky’s AN UNMARRIED WOMAN released in 1978 is very much locked into the time and place it was made but still plays beautifully, a portrayal of loneliness that comes out of betrayal fighting to break through to the other side that may be his best film. His 1986 comedy DOWN AND OUT IN BEVERLY HILLS, both funny as well as a monster hit at the time, is much broader and doesn’t feel like it has much to say outside of the immediate 80s context but there’s still a lot in there to enjoy. Like that film, SCENES FROM A MALL, which opened in February ’91 (one week after THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS; it came in sixth), is also a Touchstone comedy starring Bette Midler set in, or at least near, Beverly Hills around the holidays, but this one tales a more serious, low-key approach to what it’s looking to make fun of.
Written by Roger L. Simon and Mazursky, all these years after SCENES FROM A MALL was made it feels like a look at a married couple who are more well-off than they ever want to admit, stranded at the beginning of the new decade in the middle of all their wealth in a marriage that seems perfect at first when we meet them and they’re alone together, but of course it isn’t and the truth is eventually going to come out. They’re trapped in their own insular world, the only political references they make feel out of the distant past as if the ‘80s has made them not pay attention to any of that anymore, and the only solution is to keep shopping while waiting for the next calamity to occur, unaware of any of troubles in the city to come over the next few years. I haven’t stepped inside the Beverly Center in a long time and never liked it very much anyway but here it’s the hot spot in town, a stopping point for every possible type in the city and where countless people working retail jobs can only hope they don’t get in the middle of all this.
SCENES FROM A MALL got pretty much dismissed at the time and didn’t even reach $10 million at the box office. I certainly wasn’t going to say anything good about the film, but the real problem now is that it only seems half-formed. The joke of the two main characters admitting their indiscretions, splitting up and getting back together multiple times over the day, unable to leave this massive place, is the basic ‘Bergman but funny and in a mall’ idea of the whole thing which feels a little forced and though each of the two leads do some surprisingly good, natural work within their inherently unlikable characters the material never really becomes strong enough and begins to feel like the same beats happening again and again. The funny stuff needed to be funnier and more biting, the serious stuff needed to be more dramatic and believable so what’s there falls into a no man’s land somewhere in between, missing a joke that something like the Steve Martin vehicle L.A. STORY which opened just a few weeks earlier seemed to pull off maybe because it was going for broader laughs and the social commentary could come naturally out of that. The continuous jokey nature of Woody Allen, of all people, praising L.A. over New York/wearing a ponytail/saying "ciao"/carrying a surfboard/shouting “Where’s my fucking Saab?” is a little thin to base an entire characterization on but looked at now everything involving Woody that doesn’t have the feel of some sort of in joke, like him obsessing over the color of his stress gum or the way he harangues a stranger into buying a copy of his wife’s new book, plays much more naturally.
The film keeps a bemused distance from its characters but also appears to understand them even as it thinks they’re being silly, buying and re-buying that sushi for their big dinner party over and over again, going from one place to the next in the mall as if living several entirely new versions of their marriage all in the same day, the idea being that Midler’s psychologist can approach the idea of what happens to a marriage analytically but when confronted with the emotions of her own life she’s at a loss. It’s all part of the natural way of things when living in L.A. according to this film, just not the one that I’ve ever known. Some of the moments that work best are mainly in a naturalistic way that comes out of the flow of their conversations but not enough of this sticks the way it should, there are moments where it feels like the film might be building up to something, whether a joke or maybe some sort of dramatic revelation but all they do is talk some more, no big laughs and no particular biting drama so it feels like a sketch of a movie.
Everything the two of them might possibly want is right in front of them to purchase and they still can’t figure out what they really need from each other so the mall feels like a version of purgatory that they can’t leave, going from one store to another, one restaurant to another for more drinks and it probably was what the Beverly Center was like then but still reminds me how the place always seemed kind of dull. I always preferred the outdoor Century City mall back then (totally redesigned some years back and it’s horrible now), which had a better vibe, better movie theater, better celebrity watching, even the food court was better. Set during the holidays with lots of decorations and Christmas music heard all around the mall so let’s call this a Christmas movie, but the portrayal of the Beverly Center just feels too mild although the two-level set filmed at Kaufman Astoria Studios is extremely impressive and likely very expensive. It does come off a little as a record of what L.A. was like then, even the extras seem to have the right look to them, but it’s all done in a way that feels too listless so it’s not a particularly interesting record of the time and even the opening shot of Los Angeles looks like an overcast early morning that could itself be a comment on what the town really looks like or they just didn’t want to wait for a nice sunny day to film it. The multiplex at the mall has PREDATOR 2, ROCKY V, THE GODFATHER PART III plus SALAAM BOMBAY! which is playing to a nearly empty house in its third year, so I guess the topical humor is that everything is either a sequel (Disney wouldn’t let Mazursky use their own THREE MEN AND A LITTLE LADY?) or an arthouse film which is about as mild a satirical comment as you can get, on the level of the overall “It’s L.A.! Everyone has car phones!” take the film has on the city. Incidentally, the movie theater at the Beverly Center, which had many more screens than portrayed here and is now long gone, was lousy too.
Although, since it’s part of that sequence, if you want to see Woody Allen going down on Bette Midler in a movie theater where the film being shown just had a Criterion 4K announced and is directed by the mother of the leading mayoral candidate for New York City, this is the film for you. SCENES FROM A MALL is almost entirely a two-character piece, with the closest thing to a third being the running joke of an ever-present mime played by Bill Irwin, so a certain amount of repetition is unavoidable, with some phone calls to never seen characters breaking things up. Their kids are only seen at the start and pretty much every single other person with dialogue is a bit player at the mall. Oh, and Fabio is in there too. If anything, a Paul Mazursky film like this can at least be separated from all the other (less personal, more profitable) wacky comedies that came out during the heyday of Touchstone Pictures with a little more individuality and compared to anything now this one almost feels like an art film plus it’s definitely more expensive than something like this would be today. Removed so far from its context, the result is not at all uninteresting, just a little too slight and feeling in need of another rewrite to get some more laughs as well as some truly insightful observations mixed in there along with the therapy speak and rationalizations, the talk that leads to more talk as these two try to figure out why they even got together in the first place. Some of the dialogue does catch the rhythm that can only happen between two people who are very familiar with each other and its portrayal of the mall as a microcosm for all of life in this upscale world isn’t a bad one so I suppose I can admire the film’s purity, to steal a line from Ian Holm in ALIEN, but it’s not enough. The script isn’t on the level of Mazursky’s best work even if it does fit in with the other versions of foreign films that he spent some of his career making (like WILLIE AND PHIL, also not one of his best), digging into his own version of Bergman along with fanciful moments like Woody Allen emerging from smoke wearing a snazzy Italian suit as the Nino Rota theme from Fellini’s AMACORD plays, a moment that could just as well have come from one of Woody’s own films, just like the Cole Porter and Louis Armstrong selections that also play on the soundtrack. The film even opens and closes with an iris in the shot, which feels like a possible Jacques Demy tribute.
Maybe the Paul Mazursky aesthetic made the most sense from ’69-’78, where it felt in tune with the cultural wave of either New York or Los Angeles so the slightly shaggy and loose nature of his plotting fit in perfectly with the time but here it never feels connected enough to the real world. The two leads actually do have chemistry and when they fight it’s believable, it’s just the material comes off as a little too surface level so the end result plays like it’s caught between what wants to be an introspective, if comical, examination of a relationship and the Bette Midler laff riot that the studio most likely would have preferred. Mazursky made a surprising number of films that touched on infidelity, yet his own marriage lasted over sixty years, his wife is even in this one playing a woman at an information desk, although this is one where both halves of the couple are responsible not just George Segal or Michael Murphy. The shot near the end where after a public fight between the two everyone in the mall crowd walks off until it’s just the two of them standing there which really says it all in a much more concise, and cinematic, way showing how in the end it’s just the two of them to work out their own problems like it or not and even though the film goes on for a few minutes longer it feels like the proper concluding point to make.
In addition to wishing the writing was even sharper or maybe that something else would happen and if there was a way to get around the inherent repetition in things like the two of them fighting while going up one escalator then fighting while going down another, it didn’t happen. Another character appearing would help break up the monotony and it would make sense for them to run into someone they know but most likely the decision was made that the film really had to be just about just the two of them which makes sense but for a movie that runs only 87 minutes, with end credits that roll earlier than that, it feels longer. To be completely honest, I don’t mind the film as much as I did then, maybe because I can appreciate what it’s going for and can understand the idea of a fight that never ends a little better. If Woody was going to do a movie for the paycheck, which from various accounts is what was happening here, he could have done a lot worse. The film almost becomes an artifact of a much earlier age the way BLUME IN LOVE feels now but the material doesn’t stick as well and there’s a hollowness to the whole thing. The real joke of the film is about how thinking that simply talking out the problems can make them go away but sometimes you’re just stuck with each other, nothing to do but keep talking but it all leads nowhere since you’re going to stay together anyway, so what’s the point. It’s a healthy way to look at things, but not enough substance for a film to get to the ninety-minute mark.
It's still a little surprising that Bette Midler never appeared in an actual Woody Allen film but here they go together extremely well, with chemistry that does feel effortless. The material is a more naturalistic key for Bette Midler to play in than in some of her other Touchstone films at the time, but that broader tone comes out when she screams at her co-star, especially with a lot of people crowding around. And up against that Woody’s own performance plays surprisingly naturalistic now, seeming willing to play the material that goes against his persona so the way he says the name ‘Springsteen’ sounds surprisingly genuine coming from him and he brings the right energy to the ongoing argument. When the two of them stand together silent near the end it really does look like a married couple who know everything about each other and the only thing they can do is stay together.
The prominence of the Beverly Center in the city likely lasted until around 2002 when The Grove opened up nearby, right next to Paul Mazursky’s beloved Farmer’s Market. Feeling more like Disneyland than a regular mall, since The Grove was outside it was a much more pleasant place to be and except for during the holidays when it gets really crowded doesn’t have the same feeling of being trapped like in the Beverly Center. Besides, when you’re in southern California don’t you want to be outside anyway? Maybe the much lower-budget version of this film made today would be set in a nice house with everything just getting delivered by Amazon and nobody else being bothered. The Stamford Town Center has, no surprise, gone through its own tough times recently but is now apparently the largest indoor pickleball center in the country which sounds like something that Paul Mazursky would utilize in a film if he were still around to make it. The later COAST TO COAST, actually Mazursky’s final film which he made for Showtime in 2003, is largely a more interesting version of what SCENES FROM A MALL explores, written by TWO FOR THE ROAD and EYES WIDE SHUT’s Frederick Raphael and though it’s hampered by a moderate budget forced to present a road trip across the country filmed entirely in Toronto, the marital drama between stars Richard Dreyfuss and Judy Davis has a good amount of bite to it. It can be found for free on some of the streaming sites, so keep an eye out. Years later when attending a career tribute that was likely Paul Mazursky’s final public appearance, I found myself thinking that it was very possible I was the only person there who had been on the set of this film, however briefly. Much of his career was spent taking a bemused look at the tensions between couples that are always lying under the surface, like it or not, but he understood the strength that enabled such people to stay together if they could accept certain things about each other. The films remain interesting even, maybe sometimes especially, with their flaws, but at their best those tensions have a real spark. SCENES FROM A MALL may be part of a bad memory for me and the film is never good enough to overcome that but I suppose we all need some of those memories since they helped make us what we are and what we want to be. Just like some of those relationships do.
