Back Where I Started

One day in early 1993 I spent a few hours in the vicinity of Times Square near the production of John McTiernan’s LAST ACTION HERO which was using the location as part of the film’s setting, both in the climax centered around the star-studded premiere of the movie within the movie and over near the grindhouses of 42nd Street, then in its final death throes before the neighborhood was prettied up. The rows on each side of the block contained various exploitation titles on the marquees and whatever you can see of it in the finished film is nowhere near as cool as it looked in real life. In the middle of it all watching over everything was a giant 75-foot Arnold Schwarzenegger balloon holding a gun in one hand and a badge in the other, changed from dynamite after the February ’93 World Trade Center bombing. Several months later I had moved to L.A. and was in Westwood Village seeing the very first show of LAST ACTION HERO the night before it officially opened. Twenty years later a lot has changed. Times Square certainly has, for one thing, and I haven’t been back there for a long time. Westwood isn’t the hot place to go to the movies on opening night anymore, for another. By now we also have even less of an opinion of Arnold Schwarzenegger than we ever did and, particularly sad, director McTiernan is currently serving a year in prison for making a false statement to an FBI agent in relation to the Anthony Pellicano wiretapping case. Time keeps moving forward, always merciless. You can’t get away from it, no matter what movie you try to escape into.

Released one week after JURASSIC PARK changed the world forever LAST ACTION HERO opened to a negative response from critics, mediocre box office and was generally seen as an overblown misfire by all involved. The first film to feature the presumed state of the art SDDS sound process, near the very end of that first Westwood screening one of the main speakers blew so no dialogue at all was heard for several minutes. Kind of amusing since, because of the nature of the film, it wasn’t immediately apparent that a screw-up had happened but it still probably served as some kind of metaphor for the whole enterprise. Free passes were handed out to everyone after the film so my friend and I used them a few days later to see the movie again. Why not, right? All the extravagance makes it tempting to try for an ‘it’s not that bad’ argument in the movie’s favor and, in all honesty, it really isn’t. But it’s still all kinds of a mess for a number of reasons and feels like a case where the very concept of the film was never fully thought out by the people making it, maybe the result of the mad rush to completion in order to get it in theaters for summer ’93 come hell or high water. There are a number of fun things in LAST ACTION HERO. There’s lots of other stuff too. Like messes tend to be, it remains fascinating as well as sometimes enjoyable.

Pre-teen Danny Madigan (Austin O’Brien) lives in Manhattan with his single mom (Mercedes Ruehl) but more often than not skips school to go to the movies especially at his favorite theater, the rundown Pandora on 42nd Street where he pals around with old-timer projectionist Nick (Robert Prosky). Danny is especially excited when Nick gives him a chance to see the new action extravaganza JACK SLATER IV before it opens but a special ticket Nick gives him which he once got from Houdini does the unexpected and transports Danny into the film where he meets maverick L.A. cop Jack Slater (Arnold Schwarzenegger) himself and sets off to take part in the actual movie. But assisting in Jack’s investigation arouses the suspicion of the movie’s chief henchman Benedict (Charles Dance) who begins to wonder who Danny really is and where he comes from.

Tone is a tough thing. It can be even tougher when the concept of tone is as automatically precarious as it’s going to be in a movie like this, how much should be comedy, how much should be action, how much should be parody, what should even be parodied. Earlier incarnations of the basic concept of movies and real life intermingling whether SHERLOCK JR. or THE PURPLE ROSE OF CAIRO seem more comfortable with the fanciful nature of what happens without worrying so much about ‘rules’ but even this issue is merely one single point when it comes to discussing LAST ACTION HERO, one of many problems that can be found. With a screenplay credited to Shane Black & David Arnott (story by Zak Penn & Adam Leff), the first word I think of when I think of LAST ACTION HERO is big. And then huge. And then gargantuan. Revisiting it all these years later the film still plays as if it not only wants to be the biggest movie ever made, it wants that very concept to be part of the gag. And it becomes all the more strange that this massively expensive film feels like a very elaborate in-joke of self-parody coming from both Schwarzenegger and McTiernan, not to mention co-writer Shane Black (other writers worked on it too, including William Goldman) who in some ways launched this run of action movies with his spec sale of LETHAL WEAPON. Even composer Michael Kamen brings in all sorts of jokey riffs that he had already specialized in while doing the DIE HARD and LETHAL WEAPON movies and one can easily imagine him sitting off to the side, amusing himself with classical music jokes that he tosses into the score while the rest of the production is dissolving into chaos. The range of humor is pretty inconsistent although I guess with all those awful one-liners that’s part of the point—the best and most extremely dead-on jokes are the ones we hadn’t realized were jokes until just then like how the very first line is “This is one hell of a way to spend Christmas” which I’m guessing came from Shane Black. Some are a little too obvious in comparison and others like the animated cat voiced by Danny DeVito makes you wonder just what the hell they were thinking. At times what seems like might be a joke is obscured to the point of confusion--I assume that placing the La Brea Tar Pits down in Long Beach is a comment on how movie geography never makes sense but I doubt most people would notice (some are buried even deeper--apparently there are a number of deliberate continuity errors like how in one scene Benedict is reading the Wall Street Journal and then the Financial Times just a few seconds later). And when there are split-second cameos by the likes of Sharon Stone as Catherine Trammel and Robert Patrick as T-1000 it becomes even murkier what the ‘rules’ of the film are or even what this ‘movie world’ is supposed to be. After all, why would characters from other movies show up in this one? Is it saying that all movies take place in one big universe? Part of the problem of LAST ACTION HERO feels like these things were never worked out so instead lots of stuff was thrown at the wall hoping that a laugh would somehow come.

Maybe it was parody being attempted by the wrong people as if Irwin Allen, after producing THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE and THE TOWERING INFERNO, decided to make AIRPLANE! to satirize himself, unable to step back and see what the joke really was. The concept of making the film Danny goes into the fourth in a series almost indicates a commentary on the nature of diminishing returns in these sequels but aside from the joke about Slater avenging his favorite second cousin, which is a pretty great one actually, the movie isn’t really that self-aware, instead reveling in the glory of the over-the-top stylistics of late 80s-early 90s action movies. Penn & Leff’s original spec script was titled EXTREMELY VIOLENT and it feels like any satirical element making fun of the massive gunplay in those films fell away during rewrites as the PG-13 was aimed for. Producer Joel Silver, who was not involved with this film, knew where to go for the laughs in his action movies during that era and in some ways the arch satire McTiernan achieved in the original DIE HARD is the greatest example of that but maybe that’s where his sense of humor really excelled as opposed to what he goes for with the broader approach in this film. I do enjoy how much he always seems to be cramming stuff into the Panavision frame and the larger-than-life kineticism of the police station is funny but it’s tough to say exactly what the overall joke is since it’s not directly based on anything in particular. Some of the skewering of over-the-top action movie mechanics does work, like Slater realizing that the numbered cards he’s turning over are actually counting down a bomb, but when it goes for a more direct reference like a joke about 555 prefixes not only had FORD FAIRLANE done this a few years earlier the way it’s written here pretty much kills the laugh. What the film needed was someone to definitively state what the concept was, what the rules were and what the jokes could be based off that. It seems strange to say that such a wild, over the top movie needed this kind of clarification but maybe it did not just to make sense but to also work as comedy.

Lots of money is up onscreen, that’s for sure, so the movie certainly succeeds in coming off as extravagant as possible and occasionally a joke absolutely nails it—the eruption in the Westwood Village Theater at the line “No, this is California” to answer Danny’s protest when he points out that there are no normal looking women so this has to be a movie is still one of the loudest laughs I’ve ever heard in a theater. And having him call out that F. Murray Abraham showing up in SLATER IV is a sure sign he’ll turn out to be a bad guy (since why else would he be in the movie?) nails that sort of casting beautifully. But having the kid spend so much time trying to convince everyone that they’re in a movie feels like some sort of mistake on a very basic level, making him out to be a killjoy unwilling to enjoy his own experience and it’s almost puzzling why they spend so much time on it as if it was one of many things the production lost track of during rewrites. All the stuff about Houdini’s ticket also feels like empty Hollywood feel-good flash to somehow make the McGuffin pay off. Too many things bug me—the presumed ending of SLATER III that we never get to see would be way too downbeat to ever actually occur in one of those films not to mention how it seems to set up an ending that never happens, maybe one that reunites Slater with his son in the celluloid world. And too much seems to be not completely thought out so even the pacing feels off before we enter the movie, down to the protracted sequence of Danny waiting to leave his New York apartment. Charles Dance as Benedict wandering around Times Square is impressive in how depressing it gets for a few moments but the tonal shifts don’t really work so the real-life scuzzy New York clashing with the glitzy SLATER world never feels satisfying—it’s just a lot of rain. There’s lots of potential all over the place but maybe they needed more time to explore the concept in the writing to really bring out what was intriguing about the concept, like the blankness of Slater’s apartment which I always wondered if that meant it was a set we were never supposed to see. And one joke it always felt like was missing was addressing the intended plot of JACK SLATER IV, maybe even featuring a running appearance by some new partner or comic relief that gets left behind. Really, what was the actual plot of JACK SLATER IV supposed to be?

At the very least some of the movie does have a certain flair like the kinetic nature of the rooftop funeral at the Hyatt Regency down in Long Beach, a pleasure to watch now not only because of how this was all clearly filmed up there in the actual location but in how the larger than life dreamlike logic of this movie world suddenly seems to come together in an odd, baffling sort of way. Or maybe I just enjoy the ridiculousness of Arnold Schwarzenegger shouting “Elephant!” to distract a crowd of people. John McTiernan brings every ounce of his visual prowess to this sequence and all the action throughout the film so even though I don’t know if he’s necessarily satirizing his fondness for elaborate camera movements and lens flares it at least feels of a messy piece. I also can’t stress enough how much all this is stylistically unified, as much as it ever could be, by Michael Kamen’s score which not only balances out the action with whatever emotion there is, he’s also the only person involved with the film who seems to understand the concept of ‘nimble’. The movie-in-a-movie nature of it all means it’s not that big a deal when the bad guy essentially turns to the camera and explains his plot to us—on the other hand, that he does so still seems kind of weird, as if the film was desperately searching for a place to insert all this exposition to clarify things and never came up with another way. The climactic mayhem centered around the premiere and its celebrity cameos never really comes together beyond the size of it all--an appearance by the real Tom Noonan who plays The Ripper, bad guy of SLATER III, is one of those jokes that might have gotten more of a laugh if Noonan was more known to the general public. One cameo that unfortunately didn’t happen was an appearance by Sam Neill (who had starred in McTiernan’s THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER) in JURASSIC PARK garb wandering around the dinosaurs in the La Brea Tar Pits which in June ’93 might have played as the most HELLZAPOPPIN!-style joke in the entire film. Maybe part of the problem was that the concept never got clarified enough so it could overtake the in-joke nature of the whole thing. Or maybe it needed to be more committed to something for that concept to be clarified, I don’t know. LAST ACTION HERO is never bad at all, it’s just a case of a movie being too overblown while at the same time forgetting to focus on its own story, even if that story is meant to be a joke about never knowing whether to care more about movies or real life. Which, as Jack Slater himself might say, is a big mistake.

The teaser trailer which played in theaters months before the release called it “the big ticket for ‘93” which turned out not to be the case although Gene Siskel’s comment in his review that “it may be more significant than it is entertaining” is interesting. Calling him the last action hero in a film that opened right at a point where CGI started its domination headed towards where it is today seems somewhat prophetic not to mention that the concept of a movie which completely exhausts you as the endless climax keeps going was still relatively new in ’93. And much as I may genuinely not say very much good about Schwarzenegger I genuinely liked his recent action movie THE LAST STAND which did zero business when released in January of ’13. It’s a good movie, pretty much a modern day western and one that knows what it is. That’s never a bad thing. In LAST ACTION HERO Schwarzenegger plays it as Schwarzenegger parodying Schwarzenegger which I guess means that he plays it as Schwarzenegger and the parody element works best when he’s willing to play things for straight comedy more than parodying himself so when he talks about how great Stallone is in TERMINATOR 2 or playing ‘himself’ during the climax it comes off as a little too cute. Still, maybe there’s more truth in Jack Slater telling his doppelganger that he’s brought him ‘nothing but pain’ than we know. There’s energy provided by a lot of the people who turn up, way too many to mention here, with strong, knowing bits by the likes of Anthony Quinn, F. Murray Abraham, Frank McRae, Robert Prosky and Mercedes Ruehl. Bridgette Wilson is Slater’s daughter in her first film appearance—was she going to have the co-lead before Danny showed up? Among the many cameo appearances by familiar faces playing themselves, Maria Shriver of all people seems the most willing to bring a little edge to her brief portrayal. Particularly good is Charles Dance as Benedict, the one wild card in how he doesn’t have to play his role as parody but as someone genuinely curious about what’s going on and by a certain point deciding to take deadly advantage of it. I’m hardly the first person to say it, but Dance really is a terrific actor. Austin O’Brien as Danny, is, well, a kid. The way he’s written doesn’t help. Maybe someone younger would have worked better, I don’t know. Extremely random trivia: this was the first film to feature the new Columbia logo, still in use today, although the previous logo opens SLATER IV. The last film to use that one was LOST IN YONKERS, also featuring Mercedes Ruehl, which opened the previous month.

If it’s going to be a wildly overblown summer action movie with huge shifts in tone at least it’s one that contains a sequence centered around an Ingmar Bergman film (that’s where the speaker blew, incidentally, so we didn’t hear a word of Ian McKellan’s dialogue as Death). There’s lots of things I could say about LAST ACTION HERO and a surprising amount of them are weirdly personal, like my memories of going down to Long Beach a number of times years ago and always taking note of the Hyatt Regency as I drove by or passing the Village Theater again the night after I saw it seeing Sylvester Stallone and Joel Silver, then presumably filming DEMOLITION MAN, going in to see it which is a memory that remains so vivid in my head even now I wonder if I’m making it up. Back to that first screening in Westwood the previous evening, another friend of mine was there as well and even though I didn’t speak to him that night spotting him from a distance now feels like a key element of my own personal narrative in this town for reasons I won’t even get into. Ten years after the film was released (which, come to think of it, means ten years ago now) there was a 70MM screening at the Arclight Hollywood which featured a Q&A with Zak Penn and Adam Leff, there to talk about the spec sale that launched their careers and in the process were fairly merciless in making known all the things about the movie that they felt didn’t work, saving their biggest disdain for McTiernan and Black. Of course, they didn’t claim to have all the solutions either. The mix was off in a few of the reels of the 70MM print causing the dialogue to be too low which was even commented on during the discussion afterwards. I guess I’m fated to never get a problem-free screening of this film. One thing they stated was their belief that part of the reason the movie turned out the way it did was that McTiernan and Black actually hated the action genre. Whether this may have been overstating the case is open to debate but you can make the argument that some of the most successful examples of parody ever, like Mel Brooks’ YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN, are clearly steeped in an absolute love of the genre that is being tweaked. LAST ACTION HERO, instead, makes a mantra out of stating that the hero can’t die until the grosses go down. Which doesn’t say much about art. Which also doesn’t say much about love for these movies. Twenty years after it was made even the concept of LAST ACTION HERO has been rendered obsolete considering film prints are about to die. And I’m still in this town. Wondering just how far I’ve really come.

Half The Time We Part That Way

The other day I was walking down the street when I passed a guy. In one arm he was carrying several books. Around his other arm was the girl he was walking with. Naturally, I immediately felt extreme pangs of envy for whoever this bearded Silverlake doofus was, a guy presumably living a life that I can only dream of right now, filled with knowledge and conversation and all the wonderful possibilities those words imply. I probably felt even lonelier after that than I’d already been feeling that day. But I’ve been in a weird mood lately, alternating between wanting to go to a bar looking for a girl to strike up a conversation with and just wanting to stay home so I don’t have to deal with anyone. Which is pretty much what I’ve been doing. I’ve got my reasons. Maybe I’m just thinking about certain people in my life, trying to figure out the meaning of certain relationships, wondering about the dead end I’ve reached, knowing the answers but not wanting to face the reality full-on. I’m in the middle of one of those periods where I find myself awake into the late hours wondering about a lot of things. And how they could ever possibly be different than the way they are.

I’m still holding out hope that before the show ends its run the American Cinematheque or someone will do some sort of ‘Road to MAD MEN’ series spotlighting films of the 60s that either mirror parts of the series or explore similar terrain of middle-age malaise along with what was happening between men and women as it was felt over the course of that decade. Of course, it would also be an interesting look at how that portrayal changed as the 60s moved forward—Gene Kelly’s A GUIDE FOR THE MARRIED MAN, Richard Lester’s PETULIA, Irvin Kershner’s LOVING, Frank Perry’s THE SWIMMER, John Frankenheimer’s all-holy SECONDS, but one I would be very interested in seeing screened is Richard Quine’s underappreciated STRANGERS WHEN WE MEET from 1960, the year when MAD MEN’s first season was set. Beginning his career as an actor, Quine went on to be one of those intriguing journeymen from the era who seems mostly forgotten now despite making successful star vehicles featuring the likes of Jack Lemmon, Audrey Hepburn and Kim Novak who he directed in four films. He was based at Columbia for a while and his career interests me for a variety of reasons, partly because of his association with Blake Edwards who had early screenplay credits on a few of his films and together they even created the short-lived THE MICKEY ROONEY SHOW: HEY, MULLIGAN in 1954. There seems to be an intriguing commonality in their approaches and thematic sensibilities—Quine’s pleasant Jack Lemmon service comedy OPERATION MAD BALL which Edwards was a writer on almost feels like a warmup for his considerably crazier WHAT DID YOU DO IN THE WAR DADDY? that he directed later on. In 1963 Andrew Sarris even wrote, “As Blake Edwards’s stock has risen, Richard Quine’s has fallen” and his book “The American Cinema” is rather dismissive of Quine, dumping him in the ‘miscellany’ section but in pointing out that his more successful films aim for ‘lower key seriousness’ as opposed to their comic goals much as I might enjoy something like HOW TO MURDER YOUR WIFE—and why don’t I own that one on DVD?—maybe Sarris isn’t entirely incorrect in this viewpoint.

Quine’s best-known film now might be 1958’s BELL, BOOK AND CANDLE which seems to be a confirmed classic in the mainstream and of which I’m probably risking some sort of harm by admitting that it’s really not a favorite of mine, maybe always playing a little stodgier than I’d like. Yes, the bouncy main theme is pretty much stuck in my brain, there’s a nice Christmasy feel of old New York to the thing and, well, Kim Novak after all, so I’ll watch it on TCM but still wish it were just a little bouncier, a little more madcap but maybe that wasn’t what Quine was ever going for. There’s something in his smooth directorial style that reminds me of the screen presence of Ernie Kovacs who appeared in three of his films— at home in the 50s (or maybe what we think of as ‘the 50s’), laid back, sly demeanor, well-groomed, with an air of hipness that feels as if it’s straddling the line between the coffee houses of Greenwich Village and the cocktail lounges the ad men of Madison Avenue inhabit. Quine’s comedies are likable if a touch serene never hitting the manic highs that Edwards would achieve as director which is maybe why he seems so much more at home for something like STRANGERS WHEN WE MEET, a devastatingly heartfelt look at suburban alienation and adultery in Los Angeles during a time when the town probably seemed much emptier than it does now, when what was going on inside certain homes felt much more constricted even if the doors were unlocked and when a secluded hideaway up in Malibu really was secluded. The film hasn’t been forgotten so much as overshadowed by other films the various leads starred in around this time but either way the low profile is a shame. It’s a film that presents a concept of yearning which crystalizes in the Cinemascope-Eastman color time that it was made in and yet does so in a way that I’ve rarely ever seen.

After architect Larry Coe (Kirk Douglas) meets up with rising novelist Roger Altar (Ernie Kovacs) to discuss building a house for him, one that Larry hopes will be an original, he encounters neighbor Margaret Gault (Kim Novak) who like Larry has a son about the same age as well as a homelife that is somewhat lacking. Almost immediately their mutual attraction begins to take effect and as Larry begins construction on Roger’s house in Bel Air their affair begins. As it coincides with pressures Larry encounters at home with wife Eve (Barbara Rush) the affair brings to light both a key event in Margaret’s past and the curiosity of neighbor Felix Anders (Walter Matthau), the local grocer who can tell pretty easily what’s going on between the two lovers and decides to use that knowledge to his own particular advantage.

The quiet of the film’s very first moments as the two leads first notice each other indicates a tranquil quality to STRANGERS WHEN WE MEET that permeates every scene even as the genuine intensity and despair between the characters becomes more and more clear. With a screenplay by Evan Hunter adapted from his own novel it’s one of those films I feel oddly drawn to even if I have no experience in matters like adultery. Maybe it’s because of a certain honesty that comes through in the movie’s portrayal of absolute yearning. It touches a chord somehow, over fifty years after it was made. Suburbia, friendship, longing, women, individuality, creativity, what it means to be an artist, if one even is an artist. Because of the suburban backdrop it’s tempting to tie the film into the more famous Douglas Sirk soapers from the period but unlike the openly dramatic portrayals of societal taboos in those films the conflicts of STRANGERS WHEN WE MEET feel more internal somehow, not delving into the hysteria of Sirk so much as focusing on what needs to be kept behind closed doors regardless and what rises to the surface as a result revealing what’s really going on when the cocktails aren’t being downed. It’s felt in Larry’s architect, desperate to prove his earlier promise, Margaret’s loneliness poking its way through her veneer or the deceptively friendly Felix, making sure all his customers are happy as he smokes his pipe but keeping a closer eye on what’s going on than anyone realizes.

Beautifully photographed by Charles Lang the glossy surface is almost as intriguing as what lies underneath and STRANGERS is a film from that period which makes a somewhat unique use of how it presents Los Angeles that sets it apart from a simple generic backdrop, with even certain establishing shots like Roger Altar’s apartment over on Rossmore offering the right flavor. Much of the film is set on suburban streets where the main characters live over in Brentwood, even if the area is never specified as such -- websites have even catalogued where certain scenes were filmed and I was surprised to discover how often I drove down a few of these streets when I spent time in that part of town. There’s also the site of the house construction off in Bel Air, presented as a sort of untouchable Eden that Larry is adding his genius too. The architect as played by Kirk Douglas is someone who wants to express himself through his designs, not by erecting some grand city that he never even visits but a single thing that he really cares about that he can work over while walking through it, feeling the land, feeling the layout, feeling what it could be. He wants this without being smothered by his suburban existence of friendly neighbors asking advice about crabgrass during dinner parties in a way that only Kim Novak can provide and he brings out something in her as well, a lonely housewife resigned to people being the same everywhere. And they’re more similar than they ever realize, down to each spending time getting their sons to drink up their milk.

Worrying about how it’s been eight years since he won a prestigious award, held back in his passions by his much more pragmatic, if still loving, wife and confronting the drifting nature of insecurity the film looks ahead in an intriguing way to the later TWO WEEKS IN ANOTHER TOWN featuring Douglas, a film with different goals but also both a portrait of its time and place as well as a ‘what the hell do I do now?’ storyline that the lead finds himself in the middle of. Kim Novak’s Margaret, or Maggie as Larry begins calling her, with her deepest secrets revealing the crack beneath the perfection of her own surface, brings to mind VERTIGO but practically all of Novak’s films bring that to mind anyway. It’s the two halves that we associate with Novak—the cool detached Madeline Elster that everyone seems to think Margaret is and in the pleading way she asks her husband, “Don’t you think I’m pretty?” the more lost Judy Barton of that film’s second half. Played by John Bryant, her all-business husband barely seems to be a person in how he doesn’t seem to notice it’s Kim Novak that he’s married to, living in his very own house, treating her desire for an evening at home as if he’s been taken over by the pod people in INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS and he doesn’t seem to think that she would have any kind of desires at all which has its own weight to it—every line in the screenplay by Hunter, every moment as staged by Quine seems to comprise both text and subtext at once. A key scene involving Walter Matthau late in the film plays as if his character simply decides to drop the pretense of what he’s avoiding saying midway through, turning it into gradually more imposing text making what’s still left unspoken all the more unnerving. More often than not the film is focused on the continuing battle between everyone being the same and the individual wanting to deny this. And what is more desirable deep down.

Just as Kirk Douglas uses his own determined anguish to prod Ernie Kovacs’ novelist into writing a book the way he wants to while using the argument to build the house he wants (one which will also help him see the world more clearly, thanks to Maggie’s suggestion that it needs lots of windows) it’s one of those films where it feels like the production of it seeped into the story being told... or maybe the other way around. As discussed in a 2008 LA Weekly article by Philippe Garnier the making of STRANGERS WHEN WE MEET could have been a film itself—for one set in 1960, it probably would have been a hell of a lot better than HITCHCOCK. The Bel Air house that Larry Coe is so passionate about was actually being built during production. Very much involved at the time, Quine and Novak were engaged and the studio was going to give it as a present upon wrapping--“Home For Kim Novak Movie May Be Honeymoon House” read one headline. The marriage never happened—Novak was the one who ended the affair—but Quine apparently kept the house. The degree that the film goes beyond his earlier, pleasant comedies like OPERATION MAD BALL as if genuinely trying to make a grand statement about existence, about the need to stand out and make the art that matters to you more than anyone, makes it seem as if the film was as important to Quine as the house being built is to Larry Coe, a chance to express everything he has with this particular woman there to guide him. The director actually worked one more time with Novak after this and although some of his later films in the 60s like SEX AND THE SINGLE GIRL and HOTEL have their qualities they feel more like the work of a director-for-hire than someone looking to make a personal statement. His work in the 70s included three episodes of COLUMBO. The final film he worked on, leaving partway through production and not receiving credit, was 1980’s THE FIENDISH PLOT OF DR. FU MANCHU which also turned out to be Peter Sellers’ last. After a period of illness and depression, Quine shot himself in June 1989. Blake Edwards was quoted as speculating that he was just tired of waiting for the phone to ring.

But STRANGERS WHEN WE MEET, made almost thirty years before this event, feels like it’s about the possibility of connection, even a temporary one, how that can jumpstart our creativity, our desire to actually feel alive and just for a brief period what’s connected to that can seem absolutely the way we want things to be. That’s what happens when strangers meet and eventually, “half the time we part that way” as Ernie Kovacs’ novelist says, enriched by having known someone a little but of course never entirely. But sometimes, if we’re lucky, there’s a connection, where everything comes together out of nowhere. The moments of clarity, of discovery, are handled differently in a way that feels more internal than Sirk in moments like the Cinemascope framing of Douglas’ face as he takes in what Novak tells him about her greatest secret or the low angle of Walter Matthau’s Felix near the end as he realizes the depths to which he’s sank and in the very same moment how it becomes clear that he doesn’t feel the least bit ashamed of himself. As much is revealed in dialogue coming from the main characters much is still left unspoken but the film seems to know that there’s much that doesn’t need to be said. There’s not really a final exchange in a few scenes near the end once it’s made clear where things are going to go, where they have to go. Things simply are going to be the way they are even after all that’s happened and the brief moment of accidental recognition that occurs in the film’s last moments is what they’ll have to live with, leaving behind the house that represents the accomplishment of what they briefly had. STRANGERS WHEN WE MEET offers a sense of connection coming from what feels like Quine’s own connection to the material that is genuine and gives it a unique power, almost to the point that I can’t think of many other films like it. Do I know that Quine was intending it to be his great dramatic statement? Not at all. But maybe that’s how it turned out. It strikes a chord, almost more than I fully want to understand. It insists on these themes while quietly pointing out that as much as people may desperately try to be different they’ll still all be the same. Maybe there’s no choice. Maybe the differences are only noticed by the ones who matter.

In his autobiography “The Ragman’s Son” Kirk Douglas doesn’t say much at all about STRANGERS WHEN WE MEET outside of an anecdote detailing the pitfalls of working with a director and lead actress who were involved. SPARTACUS was happening around the same time so that’s probably where his memories are focused on but even if he doesn’t think much of the film he gives an excellent performance and if there was any sort of frustration felt during production that not only comes though onscreen in all the best ways that possible response almost becomes another subtext in itself. Kim Novak is also wonderful—not only does she do some of her best work here her very presence is enriched by Quine’s direction, even down to how he situates her mouth at the top of the frame in her big scene as Douglas listens to her confession, an effect which is almost hypnotic. Barbara Rush (as in, “I do Barbara Rush” for all you SHAMPOO fans) is particularly strong as Larry’s wife always keeping the balance of her understandable pragmatism and the ultimatums she sets down just right. As the smiling cobra of a friendly neighborhood grocer who ushers his wife out of the room at the first sign of a dirty joke, Walter Matthau does some of the best work of his early career with his side character slithering his way into the primary drama before anyone seems to realize it while the relaxed nature of Ernie Kovacs always feels totally genuine and fascinating. Watching the way he and Douglas play off of each other remains one of my favorite things to look forward to on repeat viewings--for a good time check out Kovacs’ narration of the OPERATION MAD BALL trailer from several years earlier.

You meet somebody, you want them to be a certain way. Desperately. Often it doesn’t happen that way but sometimes, every now and then, there’s a moment where everything feels in synch and such crazy thoughts almost seem possible. STRANGERS WHEN WE MEET is one of those cases where what sets it apart from the rest of the director’s career makes it all the more fascinating since there isn’t much else to compare it to. The DVD is now out of print, going for high prices on Amazon. Thanks to the friend who loaned it to me. It is a product of its time, of 1960, of what people seemed to believe then about all sorts of things, and though it occasionally becomes evident that it isn’t a perfect product (the bridge in Charles Dunning’s syrupy main theme always sound a little too much like “Volare” for my taste) there really shouldn’t be anything wrong with that. Some of it does seem to be a story that comes from another place and some of it seems so much of now that it hurts. I almost can’t help imagine Larry Coe sticking around in Hawaii longer than he says he will, maybe even years down the road bumping into Don Draper at some point during a scene in the MAD MEN 6th season premiere that we didn’t get to see. They’d look at each other and understand everything without saying a word. What this all meant for Richard Quine, I don’t know but Blake Edwards’ 1986 film THAT’S LIFE! was also about an architect. Played by Jack Lemmon, a star who worked with both filmmakers, this architect was considerably older and yet also worried that he hadn’t lived up to his potential. No matter how hard you try, no matter how old you get, it’s impossible to not care about what other people think. It’s even harder when all the people around you don’t care anyway. And as you wonder about the serenity of having books in one arm and a girl in the other, it’s the person who you want to care most of all that never seems to hear what it is you say, at least not the way you want them to. That’s just the way it is. Time doesn’t stand still. And eventually you stand there alone. Still a stranger.

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.