Monday, June 13, 2011
Giving Rodney some respect
By Edward Copeland
There used to be a story that recurred year after year in Rodney Dangerfield's later years where someone would nominate him to become a member of the Actors Branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and each time, his application would be rejected. It sounds like a setup for one of his jokes that would end in how he "don't get no respect," but it wasn't a joke, it was true. When you look again at his performance in Back to School, which was released 25 years ago today, there's a real actor there. His Thornton Melon is quite different from his Al Czervik in Caddyshack. Oh, and the movie itself holds up pretty damn well too.
Aside from the 1971 film The Projectionist, a 1977 TV movie and uncredited work as an extra in Stanley Kubrick's The Killing, 1980's Caddyshack truly marked the beginning of Dangerfield's acting career — when Rodney was nearly 60. Of course, his career as a comedian got a similar late start. After an unsuccessful early try, he gave it up for regular work until he tried again at the age of 40. In a movie full of funny people, Caddyshack really boosted Dangerfield's image. Unfortunately, his next film, 1983's Easy Money, didn't quite work, though no one could say his Monty Capuletti was a repeat of Al Czervik either.
As a rule, the more names you see credited with writing a film, the more likely the movie will be a mess. Back to School turned out to be a great exception to that rule with three people, including Dangerfield, receiving story credit and four people named as writing the screenplay. The four credited screenwriters were Steven Kampmann, who wrote seven episodes of WKRP in Cincinnati and played Kirk, the compulsive liar who ran the diner in the first two seasons of Newhart; Will Porter, who co-wrote two films with Kampmann and an episode of Newhart; Peter Torokvei, who wrote eight episodes of WKRP as well as co-writing Real Genius and Guarding Tess; and Harold Ramis, whose resume runs too long to list. With the exception of Torokvei, everyone, including the other two people who have story credit, Greg Fields and Dennis Snee, had ties to Dangerfield, often through TV comedy specials. Many also had separate ties to each other through other projects, so I think this familiarity helped Back to School break the multiple writer curse. What surprised me just looking up things for this post is that I forgot what a huge hit Back to School was. It grossed more than $91 million at the U.S. box office and in its opening weekend, beat Ferris Bueller's Day Off (though Ferris had a two-day head start, opening on a Wednesday) by $2 million. By comparison, Caddyshack's total gross was merely $39 million. (Ferris only ended up around $70 million.)
Not too long ago, Back to School was being shown on commercial TV a lot and I caught much of it many times, but re-watching the uncut version for this anniversary tribute was the first time I'd seen it from start to finish in a long time. I had noticed that the TV versions never showed the scene where Dangerfield sings "Twist & Shout" in the bar (and what strange synchronicity that two films that opened within two days of each other in 1986 both had that song in it, one sung by the star, the other with its star lip-synching The Beatles' cover), but there were quite a few scenes that seemed to have been excised from TV versions. I was relieved that "Twist & Shout" remains on the DVD. I feared it was another example of money-grubbing music industry strong arms forcing them to remove it because they didn't keep paying them extortion and the movie's producers and copyright owners were being threatened with broken legs and cement boots if they didn't keep coughing up the dough. Television does this re-editing of movies quite often and, surprisingly, it's not for content. Edward Norton's underrated Keeping the Faith has its entire framing device removed from the TV cut as well as the hilarious blind date scene Ben Stiller's character has with a woman played by Lisa Edelstein, better known as Cuddy on House. I know they do it to shorten films to squeeze more commercials in, but some of the cuts just seem odd and I wonder who makes these decisions.
My mind may be blanking, but I certainly don't remember the TV cuts opening with the nice black-and-white prologue. The first image we see is an old style phonograph player with the needle coming down to play some opera. We then see a city street scene identified as New York 1940 and a young boy (Jason Hervey, the older
brother on The Wonder Years) admiring a fancy car pulling out into the street before he steps into Meloni's Tailor Shop, where his father (Boris Aplon) is busy working. He asks young Thornton how school was and he reluctantly hands over his report card, which does not contain glowing grades. His immigrant father expresses outrage — how does his son expect to go to college unless he gets good grades? Young Thornton says he doesn't want to go to college. He wants to work with his dad in the family business. Mr. Meloni gets angry and tells his son, "No matter how rich or successful a man is, if he don't got no education, he got nothing." Hervey even does Dangerfield's signature move and pulls at his shirt collar. As the rest of the credits roll, it's a great mockup of Thornton's coming of age into Dangerfield, changing his last name to Melon and transforming that little tailor shop into a successful chain of Thornton Melon's Tall and Fat Stores. Among the mocked up clips of Melon acquiring wealth and fame, they even sneak in a shot of him from Caddyshack, only in black and white. It then goes from the credit montage to Thornton's latest television commercial, which starts Dangerfield's verbal entrance in the film with a rapid series of one liners:"When you go jogging, do you leave potholes? When you make love, do you have to give directions? When you go to the zoo, do the elephants throw YOU peanuts? Do you look at a menu and say, 'OK?'"
We realize he's watching the ad in the back of his limo, driven by his faithful chauffeur/man for all purposes Lou (Burt Young). You hear the ad espouse the store's sizes such as "heavy, stout, extra stout and their new Hindenburg line." It closes with his slogan: "If you want to look thin, hang around with fat people." Melon is en route to a board meeting at his corporate headquarters, where everyone at the conference table is chowing down. Among the ideas offered include a toy to compete with the-then popular Cabbage Patch Kids, only the Melon Patch Kids, instead of being adopted have been abandoned. The meeting gets cut short when Thornton gets a call from his son Jason (Keith Gordon) from college. His dad asks him how his fraternity and the diving team are going and Jason tells his father that everything couldn't be better, though we can see that he doesn't belong to a frat and he serves only as the towel boy for the diving team, where he's tortured by one of the team's members, Chas (William Zabka, the lead adversary in The Karate Kid). Then, Melon has Lou take him home to prepare for a party his wench of a wife Vanessa (Adrienne Barbeau) has planned and which he's dreading. As he confides to Lou, "She gives good headache." When they arrive, he tells Lou that he can't believe they've been married for five years. "It seems like yesterday — and you know what a lousy day yesterday was."
As Thornton says to a potential romantic interest later in describing his marriage to Vanessa (after decades of bliss with Jason's late mother), "I was an earth sign, she was a water sign. Together, we made mud." He hates her and she feels the same toward him, basically using him as a bank account to throw trendy parties
where people come to suck up to her. She doesn't try too hard to hide her infidelities. Thornton even catches her at the party with Giorgio (Robert Picardo). Melon does his best to embarrass her, saying how he hates tiny food and taking most of the hors d'oeuvres off a table and turning them into a sandwich. When she introduces him to a couple she's trying to impress and compliments the woman's dress and its lovely shade of green, Melon's response is "If that dress had pockets, you'd look like a pool table." That's the final straw for Vanessa who asks to see Thornton in private where she demands a divorce. "I knew we had something in common," Melon says, whipping out divorce papers he's already had prepared. Vanessa vows he won't get off that easy — it'll cost him. Melon disagrees and starts showing her Polaroids he has of Vanessa and Giorgio in various places, though he asks for an explanation on one. "There's you, there's Giorgio…What's with the midget over here?" Vanessa storms out and Thornton takes a swim, tells Lou he's free and decides to visit Jason at college.At Grand Lakes University (mascot: The Hooters), things aren't going well for Jason. In addition to not making the diving team or being accepted into a fraternity, his grades aren't doing well either. He's telling his iconoclastic dorm roommate Derek Lutz (a hilarious Robert Downey Jr., with splashes of blue and purple in his hair) that he's thinking of dropping out of the whole enterprise. It doesn't help that he's got a mad crush on
Valerie Desmond (Terry Farrell), a girl who is sort of dating Chas and who Derek reminds him is far out of the league of dorks like the two of them. Farrell, who would go on years later to be Lt. Dax on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is the movie's weakest link in a cast that otherwise amazes with the depth of its great collection of character actors. When Lou and Thornton arrive, Thornton first starts walking blindly into Greek houses looking for Jason, learning that he doesn't belong to a frat, and checks out the diving team, where he finds out he's really the towel boy. So, when Jason and Derek get back to the dorm, Thornton and Lou surprise them by already waiting inside. Jason's dad confronts him about what he's discovered and wants an explanation. Jason gives a straight-forward response, "I lied." His father hugs him but tells his son, "Jason, you don't lie to me — you lie to girls." When Jason tells Thornton that he's thinking of dropping out, Melon won't have it and repeats his father's words to him. "If you don't have an education, you don't have anything" and he decides, he's going to go through the process with him — Thornton Melon is going to enroll as a freshman at Grand Lakes University.
Now, Thornton can't just waltz into enrollment. He never finished high school, has no records or GED, ACT or SAT scores that the university can take into account when considering him, explains Dean Martin (admittedly, a cheap laugh they use too often) played by the always reliable Ned Beatty. Melon finds a way around those problems by suggesting he donate the money for construction of the future Melon
School of Business, which introduces Thornton's villain for the film, business professor Philip Barbay (Paxton Whitehead), who holds Melon in disdain and feels his admission makes the accomplishments of students who worked hard to get there lack meaning. He shows up at the groundbreaking to protest to Dean Martin, who replies, "In Mister Melon's defense, it was a really big check." The rivalry grows worse when Melon becomes a student in Barbay's class and embarrasses him when he proposes the class set up a pretend business and Thornton corrects him on all the steps he left out that you have to go through to build a factory in the real world. The final straw though comes when Melon starts wooing his English teacher Dr. Diane Turner (Sally Kellerman), who had sort of been dating the stuffy Barbay.
Back to School was directed by Alan Metter and it can't really be said that he directed any notable films before or after this one (his most recent credit on IMDb is a 2005 Olivia Newton-John video) with a filmography that includes Girls Just Want to Have Fun, Moving, Police Academy: Mission to Moscow and, for television, The Growing Pains Movie. However, he has one bona fide winner on his resume with Back to School. It's almost wall-to-wall jokes, but it also has heart as well. No one can accuse it of being terribly original or having surprises in its plot (except for one delicious one which now, 25 years later, I'm sure every knows about). Thornton, who becomes a true party animal on campus treats college like
he does his business: He delegates, bringing in experts to do his homework. When Jason tells him that he's got a paper due on Kurt Vonnegut and he hasn't read any of the books, his dad tells him he tried, but he just didn't get them. Then, there's a knock on the dorm room door and who's standing there but Kurt Vonnegut himself. Then, to add another layer on the joke, Dr. Turner gives Thornton an 'F' on the paper because she says she can tell he didn't do it and "Whoever did write this doesn't know the first thing about Kurt Vonnegut!" For the final punchline, cut from TV because of language, we see Melon calling Vonnegut up to complain about the grade. "And another thing Vonnegut, I'm gonna stop payment on the check. Fuck me? Hey, Kurt, can you read lips? Fuck you! Next time, I'll call Robert Ludlum." 
What really holds Back to School together, other than Dangerfield himself and the high joke quotient, and helps it overcome its paper-thin, predictable plotting is the amazing cast assembled for it. In addition to the
aforementioned Gordon, Young, Beatty, Whitehead, Kellerman and Downey, we also get supporting actor extraordinaire M. Emmet Walsh as the diving team coach and a single scene of Edie McClurg (who appeared in both films with "Twist & Shout" that 1986 weekend) as one of Thornton's secretaries that he sends to Barbay's class to take notes on a dictation machine. Gordon really has the hardest role of them all because he's basically playing straight man to an entire cast as well as trying to shoulder the more "dramatic" parts of the story as he deals with the embarrassment his father causes him on campus. It doesn't help that Gordon must also moon over his would-be love interest Valerie, as played by Farrell, which provides the film's dullest moments since, to be blunt, Farrell's acting is horrid. That plot also entangles Zabka, whom you can't really judge since he's just there to be a one-dimensional frat boy asshole the same way he was a one-dimensional karate school asshole in The Karate Kid two years earlier, though we do get spared a moment at the end where his character suddenly has a turnaround and shouts, "You're alright, Melon!"
Perhaps the most memorable appearance of the film — though it was the only film in which the comedian ever appeared — is one that should ensure that the legend of the far-too-short career of Sam Kinison will go on. Discovered in his club by Dangerfield, he insisted on finding a place in the film for the brilliant wildman. There never was and never has been another comedian quite like Kinison, who was a huge influence on my friends and I during our high school years. I remember the night when I learned of his death and calling up a friend with the news, crying out, "Why couln't it have been Dice?" In Back to School, Kinison has a brief role as American history Professor Terguson, a shell-shocked Vietnam vet who has a tendency to explode into the type of rants you'd find in a Kinison standup routine. It's a hlarious, brief encapsulation of the comic's style that hopefully encourages people to seek out his actual comedy. Gone far too soon.
Of all the supporting performances that deserve special recognition, more must be said about the wonderfully droll work of Burt Young as Lou — driver, bodyguard, confidant and whatever job Thornton needs to be done. He's a man of few words, but he can earn so many laughs with no words at all, whether he's crushing a napkin
holder before proceeding to single-handedly beat up the university's football team or just laying in a chaisse lounge after Thornton and Vanessa finally split. He pulls off his one big speech when he tells Jason that he's being a big hard on his father, who needs his help for a change. "I know your pop 30 years. He understands. He's a nice guy and he's tough," Lou tells Jason. "Like me. I'm nice and I'm tough. I'll give you an idea what I mean. My two boys — I put one through college and the other I put through a wall. Your papa loves you. He's lookin' out for ya. Look out for him." Then, in one of my favorite moments, Lou gets to sit in the stands at the diving team event next to Derek who comments how no one heckles divers and blows an air horn when the opposing team dives (another scene cut for TV since it's an illegal act) prompting Lou to tell Derek, "I'm beginning to like you kid."
Back to School also offers one of the earlier Danny Elfman film scores, but it goes one step further. Elfman appears in the film himself with his band Oingo Boingo singing their song "Dead Man's Party" at a huge blowout that Thornton throws in the revamped dorm room that he, Jason, Derek and Lou share.
In the end though, this is Dangerfield's film and he deserves credit for giving an actual performance that goes beyond being a mere joke machine. True, Thornton Melon doesn't go too long without delivering a punchline,
but he's also a character with depth, a man whose love for his son truly comes through, who can register hurt. It's a shame that in his lifetime the Academy were such snobs to always refuse him entry, especially when you see some of the people who they have allowed to join. (Hell, they allowed Barbra Streisand to join before she had her first film even released). Dangerfield made some bad movies, but he did show he could act, even in a film I despised such as Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers. Back to School though I believe contains his best performance and it was his biggest hit. There was talk before he died about trying to do a remake. Don't even try. I can't imagine them finding an equal to Dangerfield or the rest of the cast. Leave well enough alone. If you've run out of new ideas, stop making new movies and just re-release the old ones. It would be better for the studios' bottom lines and audiences would be better served. Tweet
Labels: 80s, Beatles, Burt Young, Edward Norton, Kubrick, Movie Tributes, N. Beatty, Oliver Stone, Oscars, Ramis, Robert Downey Jr., Streisand, Television, Vonnegut
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Sunday, September 12, 2010
Kevin McCarthy (1914-2010)
Though Kevin McCarthy had a lengthy life and acting career, he's always going to be remembered best as the first person to discover the existence of those pod people in the original version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The actor has died at the age of 96.
He made his Broadway debut in 1938 in Abe Lincoln in Illinois He returned to Broadway frequently throughout his career in a variety of plays including the original productions of Advise and Consent and Kurt Vonnegut's Happy Birthday, Wanda June. His last appearance was in 1985.
In the late 1940s, he began appearing in televised plays, some of which he appeared in on Broadway, before making his film debut in 1951 in Death of a Salesman as Biff, for which he received an Oscar nomination as best supporting actor.
He confined his screen work to televised plays until returning to the big screen in 1056 for Don Siegel's classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Again, he returned to television after that, adding some episodic work including an appearance on The Twilight Zone.
When he did make films, they tended to be notable ones such as John Huston's The Misfits, The Best Man, Robert Altman's Buffalo Bill and the Indians, Philip Kaufman's remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Innerspace.
He also appeared in films that fell somewhere short of being classics such as Piranha, The Howling, Hero at Large, My Tutor, Twilight Zone: The Movie, UHF and Greedy.
His television work was so prolific, I won't attempt to scratch the surface except to mention his regular roles on Flamingo Road and the Dynasty spin-off The Colbys.
RIP Mr. McCarthy
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Labels: Altman, Don Siegel, Huston, Obituary, Oscars, Television, Theater, Vonnegut
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Friday, June 18, 2010
The devaluation of history and culture
By Edward Copeland
There's a funny anecdote that I tell frequently about when a friend and I were perusing Blockbuster late one night a long time ago, trying to find some classic we hadn't seen, to rent. This was so long ago, there were no such things as DVDs and I even held my nose and didn't worry about the lack of proper aspect ratio (for a good read on the topic, check out this piece by Glenn Kenny). As we searched, a group of young teens also searched for a rental, dissatisfied with the remnants in the new releases, when one of the young men suggested "the older movie" Apocalypse Now. One of the young women in the group, in complete seriousness, asked, "Is that in color?"
I don't know if the answer had been yes if that would have ruled out Coppola's film right then, but there always has been a tendency among every generation to act as if anything that happened outside of their lifespan didn't really count, but it appears to me to have grown worse, egged on by magazines such as Entertainment Weekly which compiles lists that do their best to avoid including anything that occurred prior to the publication's existence, justifying it by saying they rely on a "new canon" instead of confirming what I suspect is the real reason for the unforgivable omissions: young writers who lack a suitable cultural education to draw from when they compile such lists.
In my freshman year of college, I had an intro to journalism class where the professor on the first day, gave us a quiz with a list of titles and wanted us to fill in the authors. It covered all mediums and wasn't for a grade, he just wanted a sense of what we knew. I tend to write the first thing that comes to my mind so when I got to the title The Stranger, I naturally wrote Orson Welles instead of the Albert Camus he was seeking, though I'd argue that Billy Joel might have been an acceptable response as well.
The U.S. educational system has degenerated enough when it comes to teaching proper knowledge of history, but cultural education isn't even taken seriously as something that needs to be taught, let alone is. It's high time that we not only turn out students who know the basics (and we're not that great at that either) but we have to emphasize cultural literacy as well and it's high time that we recognize that great films should be required learning alongside the classic works of written literature.
Forgive me if this rambles at times and seems to lack cohesion or a sense of direction. I had the idea for a certain piece early in the week, it soon morphed into something else and I had intended to work on it awhile before I posted it, but I lacked any other copy to publish today, so I put it in the best shape I could in a short amount of time. If I'd given myself more time, I probably would be happier with it, but I always tend to be my harshest critic.
It's easy to dismiss the idea of requiring a basic film education, given that it is a popular medium and produces a lot of junk, but the fact that many best sellers aren't worth the paper they are printed on (or the digital reader they scroll on)doesn't diminish the written word as a whole, especially the many centuries of great works that had nothing to do with the Twilight series. I'm still shocked and appalled when I run into people my age or older who haven't seen films such as Casablanca. What have they been doing for their first four decades or more?
Recently, Jim Emerson wrote at his Scanners blog in an entry titled "Who Killed the Movies?" of a certain existential fatigue he was experiencing, one that is not uncommon to movie lovers and especially those who make their living as critics and often have no say in what films they have to take in, from the sublime to the
ridiculous. I've felt that way before at many points in my life, especially when I was younger and for some reason felt it was my duty to try to see EVERYTHING, spurned on by a numbers contest with a high school friend over who could see more movies in one year. It got out of hand when he got a job at a movie theater and started using the perk of being able to get in to free movies even at other theaters and would skip school to attend morning critic screenings. It made me mad because of his unfair advantage, but also because I realized I was sitting through such unbelievable garbage just to boost numbers. The real depressions would come later when I was writing reviews for publications and I wasn't necessarily picking the films I had to review and, being the low man on the totem pole, ended up with a lot of the turkeys. Sure, they were free and I got my revenge in print, but it's a high price to pay for lowering the collective value of a medium I love. Still, once I stumbled upon a good one, it would lift my spirits enough to keep going and would never seriously harm my belief that film is a great artistic medium, even when wasted.It's been decades since I was in high school, but they did make a point of introducing us to a lot of the important works of Western Literature (yes, anything outside of Europe got short shrift, but considering where things have degenerated now, I feel fortunate we got what we did). Three out of four years of high
school we were taught a Shakespeare play (Romeo & Juliet, Julius Caesar and either MacBeth or Hamlet, depending whether or not you were in the honors English class). We went over the top poems and poets (as well as The Bard's sonnets), Chaucer and we did get some of the top novels such as Twain's Tom Sawyer, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. We even got to read Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. Unfortunately, we also got some real clunkers such as Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank, A Separate Peace by John Knowles and the torturous I Heard the Owl Call My Name by Margaret Craven, the only book I've ever fallen asleep reading while sitting up in a classroom desk. We also struggled through James Fenimore Cooper's The Unvanquished. I wonder what they teach now. I do know that in the case of myself and many of my friends, unless you took courses in college and, even then, if that wasn't your course of study, it was up to you to seek out the classics. It's always been the case that you have to truly educate yourself in film, but sadly that's also true with much of literature because our society places so little value on it.Of course, even history is up for grabs now, when you have politically biased boards of education such as the one in Texas seeking to rewrite history to match their own ideology instead of just teaching children what
really happened. Who was that Thomas Jefferson guy again? What slave trade? Those people abducted from Africa were just part of a trade program involving rum and molasses. Joe McCarthy was vindicated and a hero! The Texas outrage, treating history as something that is subjective instead of objective, reminds me of the quote by the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan: "You are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts." It also had me thinking back to my pre-college days and the silliness of standardized tests such as the ACT divided into math, science, English and reading. Nowhere is there a section that finds it important that incoming college students have even a rudimentary knowledge of history or literature of any kind. The SAT even blows off science, just concentrating on math, critical reading and writing. To show you how silly the multiple choice ACT was, I scored highest in the science section, which really was my weakest school subject. Of course, if education standards start going the way of Texas, I guess science and facts won't matter much anymore anyway, unless a burst of rationality breaks out somewhere.
Now, I won't even pretend to hold the answers as to how to improve this country's piss-poor knowledge of history. It's hard to get them interested or educated about current events when the so-called cable news networks will drop all coverage of other, important news because Michael Jackson inevitably drops dead about 15 years after most people expected to hear that news at any time. News priorities have gone completely haywire. The newspaper I used to work for actually had a larger Page One spread on the "been waiting for that shoe to drop" death of Anna Nicole Smith than it did on Gerald Ford. When I was in elementary school, we actually had a current events contest provided by a local TV station and most students knew what was going on. In high school, my American history teacher had her students read the local paper and then gave current event quizzes once a month for extra credit. One of the questions would always be the current unemployment rate. Does that happen anywhere now? As newspapers die, could it?
However, as far as trying to seriously create a mass curriculum on the history of the film, on that I do have some ideas. Obviously, all opinions on a movie's worth are subjective, but that applies to literature as well and there is no reason that some titles can't be agreed to and rise above petty critical fights. Besides, encouraging students to think for themselves can never be a bad thing, no matter what Texans and many home-school advocates think. A good place to start might be the Library of
Congress' National Film Registry. Since its authorization in 1988, it has added 525 titles worth preservation by the library to ensure that future generations will have access to important films. There are some unusual choices contained in there, but there also are a lot of movies that most would agree everyone should have some familiarity with: All About Eve, All Quiet on the Western Front, American Graffiti, Annie Hall, The Apartment, Back to the Future, The Bank Dick, The Best Years of Our Lives, The Birth of a Nation, Bonnie and Clyde, Casablanca, Chinatown, Citizen Kane, City Lights, The Crowd, Do the Right Thing, Dog Day Afternoon, Dr. Strangelove, Duck Soup and many, many more with a list that grows longer each year. It also includes important animated works and newsreel footage and other moving images such as the Zapruder film and the Why We Fight series from World War II (I knew I could sneak some history in there). What it does lack is anything that isn't American and that is something that would have to be corrected in any serious curriculum, unless universities get exclusive reign over studies of foreign films.Of course, no curriculum could cover all the films anyway and since they include more recent films as well, you have to assume that the close-minded, busybody parents among us would object to many titles. Hell, if titles such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1984, Call of the Wild, To Kill a Mockingbird and most works of Ernest Hemingway still are routinely challenged as unsuitable reading material for students, you can just imagine the shitstorm some of the titles on the National Film Registry would raise. I mean, some have R ratings. I remember in ninth grade after we read Romeo & Juliet, we watched Franco Zeffirelli's film version and at the crucial point, my teacher had to stand in front of the TV set to spare us the traumatizing sight of Olivia Hussey's bare bosom.
There would be plenty of possibilities for subject synergy: read Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence and then watch Martin Scorsese's extremely faithful film version and discuss the two mediums. When studying Coleridge's poem Kubla Khan, see how it relates to Welles' Citizen Kane. On the historical side, you could use Kane's fictional take on William Randolph Hearst to lead into a discussion of how the real Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer used their papers to pump up the Spanish-American War. Also for history, use newsreel footage of parts of the Why We Fight series to accompany teaching of World War II. With a kindly "fuck you" to Texas, use real footage of the McCarthy hearings and Edward R. Murrow's dismantling of the disgraced demagogue on the airwaves. Imagine the positive press corporate sponsors could receive by helping to subsidize the material. Believe it or not, television has worthy culture as well.
Now, I do not want to leave the impression that I'm just a cranky middle-age man raging against those young vulgarians who dismiss things that don't relate to them. In many ways, it isn't their fault, because the people
with the money who market to them design it to be that way and the youth certainly can't be blamed for the failures of the education system. Why should new generations seek out films that are 20 or 25 years old when Hollywood produces unnecessary remakes of so many of them that soon after the original? A Nightmare on Elm Street came out all the way in 1984 — did they have color then? (OK, neither film should be part of public education, but you see my point.) Besides, I've run into many a person older than myself who are ignorant of history and culture and have no excuse. Years ago, at a newspaper I used to work for, we were going over the stories at the news meeting and one that was mentioned was that we would be covering a speech that night by Kurt Vonnegut. A senior editor who is about 15 years older than me literally had no idea who Vonnegut was. This was a man who came of age and went to college in the 1960s and the 1970s, yet a literary icon such as Vonnegut drew a blank. I wish I could say that man and that story were isolated incidents, but I've encountered many older than me that didn't know things that they should — and many of these were supposed journalists in the news business who had an appalling lack of information about recent historical events. One thing that drew me to journalism is that I'm a news junkie, but I was amazed how few news junkies existed in the various newsrooms in which I worked. Why did they even choose the career? No wonder news is dying.The biggest problem to the idea of teaching film as literature to public school students really extends beyond the rabblerousing of cranks and the resistance of educators is the state of our nation's economy. Teachers are losing their jobs across the country and school districts are being forced to make budget cuts and, inevitably, among the first things to go are arts programs and there's no doubt in my mind that even if film education was considered part of English education, the requisite costs would doom the idea. Doesn't that make it an excellent opportunity for the movie industry to give something back? If they helped with the study materials and films themselves, what a lucrative marketing tool they could have. Imagine if a teacher assigned a weekend homework assignment of seeing a certain film at a theater and a studio provided vouchers for the students so they didn't have to pay. Granted, one would hope it would be a worthy film and not the latest Transformers, but you get the idea. How about encouraging the industry to do more mass re-releases like they used to do? Remember when Disney used to bring back their classics every seven years or so. Certainly, a plethora of serious writings exist on most important films to help teachers along.
The idea I'm suggesting is not a full-blown film study course of the type you would take in college, but just of integrating the medium into the studies of other literary works you learn (or damn well should be learning) before you graduate high school. The value that seems to have been placed in this country of late on ignorance, spurned on by our political leaders, is truly frightening. It's truly outrageous how freely misinformation is allowed to be spread because it's to the gain of both parties and the news media either is too lazy or ignorant to call them on it. How many times do you hear it repeated that the IRS will fine you if you do not purchase health insurance under the new health care reform when the legislation specifically prohibits any punitive measures. The GOP continues to spread the lie to get people angry and the Democrats let them because they fear if the truth was widely known, the plan falls apart because people won't purchase the insurance. Both parties should be ashamed, but do politicians know what shame is anymore? As columnist Mark Shields once said, "Stupidity is not a victimless crime."
Children need to be taught more than just how to score well on a test on the basics, they need to know where we came from and I'm not talking about evolution. You know the saying: Those who do not learn from history...
While Hollywood certainly churns out a lot of crap, the worldwide film industry throughout its history has produced some exquisite works of art that deserve to stand alongside the greatest works of written literature. A better educated populace, even in areas of culture, can be the first serious step in dealing with the politicians who treat us like morons and the ignorant masses who fear that their children and others might form their own ideas and the ability for critical thought.
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Labels: Books, Coppola, Criticism, Disney, Hemingway, Misc., Scorsese, Shakespeare, Television, Twain, Vonnegut, Welles
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Tuesday, January 27, 2009
John Updike (1932-2009)
"At the moment when Mary Pickford fainted, the Rev. Clarence Arthur Wilmot, down in the rectory of the Fourth Presbyterian Church at the corner of Straight Street and Broadway, felt the last particles of his faith leave him. The sensation was distinct — a visceral surrender, a set of dark sparkling bubbles escaping upward."
From In the Beauty of the Lilies by John Updike
By Edward Copeland
For a long time, a friend and I had an agreement: When the unfortunate day arrived that the great Pulitzer Prize-winning writer John Updike died, we would drop whatever we were doing and make a pilgrimage to his funeral to honor him. Sadly, my condition, a severed friendship and the evil practices of the trucking industry prevent that, but I can still at least pay tribute to the late, great man here.
I purchased my first John Updike novels when I was in the seventh grade. He'd just won his first Pulitzer Prize for Rabbit Is Rich so I bought the entire trilogy at once. Alas, even though I was slightly advanced for my age, I wasn't ready for the brilliant,
deep prose of Rabbit, Run yet, and I put the books aside. When I was a junior in high school and my English teacher told us to select a novel for a five paragraph essay, I wanted to do a John Irving, but she said no, calling him "a cheap knockoff of Kurt Vonnegut." I substituted The Witches of Eastwick, which I had purchased knowing a Jack Nicholson movie version was forthcoming (The movie and the book have very little to do with one another). It was a revelation as I was then ready for Updike. Every sentence, every paragraph was a wonder to behold. That summer, I had my wisdom teeth pulled, and as I recovered, read the Rabbit trilogy back to back. In a way, I think that's the best way to do it, because you can see Updike's gifts actually growing since they were written 10 years apart dating back to around 1960. The novels and the artist get better. Hungry for more, my friend Jennifer loaned me her copy of his short novel Of the Farm, a lovely little chamber piece and I was hooked and Updike held a permanent place as my favorite author that he still holds, though he eventually shared the title with Philip Roth.This isn't to say that Updike was perfect. He was a much better writer than he was a novelist and I have to admit that there were some that I just didn't finish. However, they were few and the glorious ones way outnumbered them: A Month of Sundays, Couples, Marry Me and one of my very favorites, the undervalued In the Beauty of the Lilies. Of course, I can't forget that there was a great fourth Rabbit book, Rabbit at Rest, which won him a second Pulitzer Prize and many fine short stories, essays and works of criticism.
I even listened to him read some of his own novels on tape and after that I couldn't read anything by him without hearing his voice in my head. Because of frequent headaches, I can't read books as fast as I used to, so lying on my nightstand happens to be his final novel, The Widows of Eastwick. Somehow, it seems appropriate that my life with Updike starts and ends in Eastwick and there is a little comfort knowing that I have one novel left.
RIP Mr. Updike. I can't possibly add up the hours of joy you've given me over the years.
"Maybe the dead are gods, there's certainly something kind about them, the way they give you room. What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones who watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand."
From Rabbit Is Rich
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Labels: Awards, Books, Fiction, Irving, Jennifer, Nicholson, Obituary, Roth, Updike, Vonnegut
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Thursday, April 12, 2007
Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007)
As with many, my experience with reading Kurt Vonnegut started with his most famous work, Slaughterhouse-Five. Often, when a book and/or author has an almost mythic reputation, starting with their most famous book can disappoint. Slaughterhouse-Five, with its flights of fancy spun intricately with horror and heartbreak did not disappoint. Unfortunately, I never got around to reading as much of his work as I wanted to.
I also read Deadeye Dick, which I actually bought before Slaughterhouse-Five, but didn't read until after. In 10th grade, the description of the story of Deadeye Dick lured me to its purchase as at the time I was writing a similarly (in terms of story, not style or talent) absurd novel. The book jacket read:
"In the euphoria of colossal innocence, he shot a bullet in the air. By the time it fell to earth, twelve-year-old Rudy Waltz was condemned as a double murderer, committed to care his ruined parents — his mother, whose ultimate fate rested on a radioactive mantelpiece, and his father who — in his salad days — had found his best and only friend in a hapless young art student, Adolf Hitler. It was an odd beginning, if not an auspicious one. What can you expect when you're born in an Ohio City destined to be depopulated by a "friendly" neutron bomb?"
The novel didn't live up to the description, but it was still good. Another of his books that I loved was Cat's Cradle, one of the quickest reads I ever had thanks to its insanely short chapters, but it was a meaningful read.
I also enjoyed a mostly forgotten 1995 made-for-Showtime movie based on a Vonnegut story called Harrison Bergeron, a futuristic satire about a man who is smarter than everyone else, something that isn't allowed as the entire society has been purposely dumbed down in the names of "equality" and television ratings.
Of course, he also made a memorable cameo as himself in Back to School, helping Rodney Dangerfield's millionaire college student write a paper on Kurt Vonnegut — and he still got a less-than-stellar grade, an absurdity right up Vonnegut's alley.
I also found a bit of a kinship with him when I learned that he and I were both born in Indianapolis, albeit decades apart. In his later years, he turned into a wonderful misanthrope, outraged by what had become of his country under the current administration.
However, it always will be Slaughter-House Five for which he will be remembered, inspired by his personal experience witnessing the horrors of the World War II bombing of Dresden, Germany. Now though, Vonnegut has left us physically, but his works will live forever. The cause of death, according to an obit, were brain injuries he suffered in a fall a few weeks ago. So it goes.
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Labels: Books, Fiction, Obituary, Television, Vonnegut
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Saturday, December 17, 2005
From the Vault: Christina Ricci
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED MAY 26, 1995
When Casper director Brad Silberling tried to make a cultural reference to illustrate a point to his star, Christina Ricci, the actress had to remind him that she "was born in 1980." Meeting Ricci in person and observing her words and demeanor certainly belie the fact that she's merely 15 years old.
Ricci first gained notice as Cher's youngest daughter and Winona Ryder's little sister in 1990's Mermaids before making an even more vivid impression as Wednesday in the two Addams Family movies. The young actress has been projecting the image of someone much wiser than her years since those two films, but she says she doesn't get annoyed by being told that repeatedly.
"People tell me that. I don't see how I could get tired of that. People don't really realize that most teenagers aren't little kids. Most kids, if you really sit down and talk with them, they're not stupid, they're not infantile. I don't really think I'm an exception."
Still, her constant references to being "cynical" and her admission that she is reading Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle as well as the 3,000-page classic Clarissa by Samuel Richardson primarily because it is so lengthy (her argument being that if you get involved in a really good book, you want it to go on forever), make it clear that she isn't just your average teen. She also has distinct likes and dislikes that may seem more likely to come from the mouths of adults.
"Of course, I guess everyone says it now, but I guess I have to be trendy and say it too but I really do love Quentin Tarantino. I saw Pulp Fiction like six times and I loved it."
However, the young woman doesn't mince words about what's not cool either.
"I probably am going to get into big trouble for saying this, but I think True Lies is not cool. I found it the most uncomfortable movie to watch, being a woman, sitting in the theater. It was such a hostile movie toward women and toward Middle-Eastern people. ... I think the way they humiliated Jamie Lee Curtis' character was disgusting."
The teenage star admits to missing out on some childhood experiences since she began performing at 8, but has no regrets.
"I definitely have missed out on some things, but if I had to do it again I would happily sacrifice for the other things I've gotten to experience."
These other things include the fact that most 15-year-olds aren't starring in a Steven Spielberg-produced special effects-laden motion picture event such as Casper, a live-action updating of the classic character of the friendly ghost. Ricci originally met Spielberg when she auditioned for Jurassic Park. She didn't get that part, but Spielberg called her back for Casper. Meeting the young yet legendary filmmaker was quite an event in Ricci's life.
"When I met him, it was just incredible. It was like going in and meeting a superhuman."
The dream of bringing Casper to movie life began with Spielberg, who served as executive producer on the project. Given her age, Ricci wasn't familiar with either Casper's cartoon or comic book origins and she made no attempt to seek them out.
"It's a different story, basically. I mean, he's the same character, but what else is the same?" Ricci asked. Ricci also had some reservations about the project itself.
"When I first heard about it, I was afraid of it being real cheesy... but the script was totally not what I expected. (It was) really sarcastic and cynical and had this really cool edge."
Ricci says she is somewhat pleased with the finished product, though she admits she isn't easy on her own work.
"It's really hard for me to judge because — and I'm sure most people do this, but it sounds totally egotistical — but I spent the whole movie really focused on myself, which I guess is natural. I usually don't like my own stuff, but I liked it. I thought it was pretty good and really funny and kind of touching. My mom cried, so I guess that's a good sign."
She also thinks that Casper will appeal beyond just young kids.
"I think it appeals to a wide variety of people. Baby boomers will appreciate it because it is Casper, which they grew up with, and little kids will love it because Casper appeals to little kids — it's ghosts, these spectacular effects and I think people my age will like it because of the effects and because of how revolutionary all the stuff is. I think that will be a big draw — to see the visual effects of it."
As for the future, the beginning of summer is making Ricci as antsy as a workaholic businessperson.
"I want a job. I haven't been working for four months and I'm going crazy. I need to work."
Her future projects include The Gaslight Addition, in which she plays a character who grows up to be played by Rosie O'Donnell. The film also stars Melanie Griffith. However, Ricci has no desire to return to Wednesday in another Addams Family film since the death of Raul Julia, who played her father Gomez in the movie.
"It's incredible. We don't realize how much we have, until we lose it. He was such a talent, such an asset. I think the more wonderful people we have in Hollywood, the better that work is going to be just from their presence."
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Labels: Interview, Spielberg, Tarantino, Vonnegut, Winona
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