THE FORM PERSISTS

Even, and perhaps especially, in revolutionary upheavals we see that the form persists.

The revolutionists can change the slogans and supplant those currently in power with their own. They will call this justice, but it’s only switching the racing colors on the jockeys.

The fascists and the Communists banished Religion, but both the Hammer and Sickle and the swastika are crosses; and Lenin took much of his strategy from the Jesuits.

The white hegemony in a century of pictures has been replaced by a Black hegemony^I—each is a struggle for power over competitors and its imposition on a (perceived) audience.

1940s: “Of course there are no Black Stars, what are you, a _#$%^& Lover…?”

2022: “Of course we are only casting People of Color, what are you, a Racist?”

This is close to the mechanics of the porn industry, casting the Male Lead based on the size of the fellow’s penis (his performance is actually irrelevant, as the film can be cut).

As films approach near and nearer to outright pornography, the current mechanism of control becomes clearer. A question: Is it a “good idea” to make Wuthering Heights with a mixed-race cast? Yes? No? How about a biography of Harry Truman, with the lead portrayed by an Asian woman? If that seems absurd, perhaps the entire mechanism might stand some scrutiny.

Are current executives skewing the casting process “in good faith”? When did they ever do anything in good faith?

In the old days, Directors came up through the ranks, and got their jobs, in the main, because they became skilled at doing what they loved.

Those in the Italian suits might condescend to spend a quarter hour on the set, trying to stay awake and smiling. But we actual moviemakers loved it.

Mike Nichols had a framed New Yorker cartoon in his living room. Two circus seals, one saying to the other, “Of course, what I’d really like to do is direct.”

Where did the directors come from? Many of the greats were originally actors. And many wrote and directed the films that they starred in. I cite the Three Originals, Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin, and, the greatest of the greats, Buster Keaton. And many of their progeny began as actors and went on to direct: Vittorio De Sica, Jean Renoir, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen; and Jules Dassin and Barbara Loden.

Jules was blacklisted by McCarthy and went to France. He had no money and didn’t speak the lingo, but he’d directed Night and the City, Brute Force, and The Naked City, three of the great tough-guy films. He found a little cash and made the best of heist films, Rififi.

The fellow cast as the Italian Safecracker in Rififi got sick, and Jules stepped in to play his part.

There were always great women directors. What better documentarian than Leni Riefenstahl? (All that to one side.) We had our Dorothy Arzner, turning a significant contribution to Gay Film, with Kate Hepburn as the aviator Christopher Strong.

And our gallant Soviet ally had the works of Larisa Shepitko, than whom no better director ever lived (The Ascent, Letter Never Sent).

Barbara Loden (1932–1980) was a fine actress. (See her in Wild River or Splendor in the Grass.) She was married to Elia Kazan.

She wrote, directed, and starred in Wanda (1970), as good and odd a crime drama as it’s possible to make. It was said that Kazan gave her a hard time about the film, and I don’t doubt it, as she was the better director.

She had, and he did not, that which our Teutonic Friends call Fingerspitzengefühl, feeling in one’s fingers. (See the films of Paul Thomas Anderson.)

In a Kazan film one could admire this or that “touch,” but one never responds that way to a film of Paul’s, as one is actually otherwise occupied, engrossed in the entertainment.

Kazan was successful, inter alia, as a conversationalist, for did he not share the names of all his friends with the House Un-American Activities Committee?

And today, Show Biz trembles under the constant threat of denunciation.

As with the cross and the swastika, the situation continues, the new practitioners merely changing their name tags. The impulse to obey, to go along in order to get along, not to make waves, and, finally, to escape censure or pain, persists, it being a cornerstone of human nature.

For what sin is committed other than for a Good Cause? The cause may be “peace,” or The Atmosphere, or Equity, or (most usually) “because I want it and I’m worth it” (whatever the object of desire). Who ever says, “I’m doing this because it’s a bad idea”?

Dino De Laurentiis and Ridley Scott one summer came to Martha’s Vineyard to convince me to write the script for Hannibal.

I asked Dino about his longtime colleague De Sica. He said De Sica was a degenerate gambler who’d borrow money from him in the casino, run off to lose it, and return to mortgage his next two or three films in return for more. (We can see De Sica in his Gold of Naples playing an addicted gambler deprived of funds, across the kitchen table from a ten-year-old boy, gambling for matches.)

I wrote the Hannibal script, and, right on time, they hated it. They fired me and hired Steve Zaillian to write a new one.

He called me before the film was released, and said that, in justice, I should take the sole screen credit, as, in justice, it was my script on which Scott relied. (Greeks bearing gifts.)

That’s right. I went to the premiere, and there was my name in first position, but where was my script? They’d shot what I assume was Zaillian’s script, which was a pile of shit, as was the film; and I have to give Zaillian credit for his perfidy, as he gave credit to me for the film.

My first impression of Movies, being in, came at the meet and greet for Postman. Chateau Marmont, 1980: in attendance, Jack Nicholson, Jessica Lange, Bob Rafelson, and me.

Jessica had just returned from making King Kong. She treated us to her rendition of the film’s producer, Dino De Laurentiis.

“Whenn-a dan new Kong die, evvraboddy gonna cry.”

Jessie played Frances Farmer in that biopic.

This is an irrefutable sign of decay, songs about songwriters, films about stars; what can it mean other than an announcement that the Great Days Are Gone, and the attempt to monetize their residue?

Jessie was wonderful in Frances, as she is in everything; but bio-pics fall afoul of Aristotle’s wisdom about aesthetic distance. He warned against taking the audience out of their role of guests and recasting them as judges.

If one knew the actual work of Frances Farmer, one could only say, of any impersonation: a) Yes, that’s just like her; or b) No, that’s not a bit like her.

Each takes the audience out of the moment.

You might object, what if one did not know the real Frances? In that case, why in the world make a film about her? If the film were a good drama it would succeed absent the announced impersonation; if not, the character’s name would make no difference.

Do see the true Frances Farmer (Son of Fury, South of Pago Pago, Come and Get It). She was an impossibly lovely, brilliant actress, her performances so true and odd that one blinks at the first moment, thinking, What, then, is this…?; and then one can’t get enough of her. You think afterward, Oh, I see. That was acting.

In this Miss Farmer was the equal of the greatest of the great, the biggest star on Broadway in 1923 and then in the movies, Jeanne Eagels.

Eagels went from the stage to the silents, and then to sound, making only The Letter and Jealousy.

The Letter, remade with Bette Davis in the Eagels role, is a lesson in the difference between talent and genius. Jeanne died young, of drugs and alcohol, and Frances of cancer, after a life of alcoholism and depression. May they rest in peace.

We in Show Business are like our Brothers, the Criminals, and theirs, the Politicians. Discarded or aged-out, we can never go straight. Their racket, like ours, is their life; supplying excitement, comradeship, and the possibility of gain, glory, and fame. For us in Show Biz these were always just one lucky break away.

The rooms at Versailles were tiny, unventilated, filthy, and dark, but the Nobility considered any other habitation exile.

See: the self-proclaimed Socially Conscious. Translation, “arrogant”; for all people are conscious of their society. The phrase capitalized means “… to the exclusion of acknowledging the possibility of any alternative positions.”

The Socially Conscious, I say, want to use films to “do good.” But the lesson of the dramatist is that no one acts from the desire to do wrong. Each person thinks his acts good. The addict cycles between withdrawal, remorse, resolution, and reversion. Each step, in its time, is understood by him as the ultimate good. The wife-killer himself is, during the act, more assured of its rectitude than he is of any other thing in his life.^II

Those of us capable of assessing our actions truthfully must conclude, from time to time, that we were wrong. In the healthy person this leads to remorse, shame, regret, and perhaps then to resolution.

Watching the good comedy or drama, we are very much ahead of the misguided protagonist. We can appreciate his fall, as he is other than we; our appreciation is heightened by the simultaneous knowledge that we are the same.

Melodrama is the useful (and pleasing) removal of that second perception.

Here we know that the Villain is not an aspect of the Hero (OURSELVES) but a complete other. We knew him of old by his Black Mustache, or his Black Hat; and today by his white skin. Or he may be fantasized as a Supervillain or monster, his signs of evilness many wings, or arms, or the blue-screen display of his Awesome Power to produce discomfort.

The historic “You must pay the rent,” “I can’t pay the rent,” “Well, then I shall tie you to the railroad track” becomes, in today’s shake-and-bake tentpole, “Or I shall destroy the world, with my secret Power of _______.”

Who are these, our own Village Idiots, the suits of Hollywood, insisting on the audience’s need for animated renditions of Norse Sagas?^III Their films are made for the Youth, and the Youth love fantasies of power. I myself was fair addicted to comic books.

The Execs of today are yes-persons at one with the voters who ban schoolyard dodgeball as too violent. At the awards, Hollywood cries out against Violence, otherwise making its living by its depiction.

To add to the enormity, the guns in films are wrong. One cannot silence a revolver; a revolver has no safety. A Colt .45 or a semi-automatic must be cocked in order to shoot or threaten. And. No one in film ever recorks the bottle after pouring a drink. What drinker (actor or character) would do that? And yet we do not object.

No character in a film getting shaved by a barber ever finished the shave. He was always called away in its midst, wiping his half-shorn face of the lather.

And my bête noire: no film Judge, gaveling the room to order, and threatening in its absence to Clear the Court, has ever cleared the court. I’d watch a film of only the Judge Clearing the Court.

The male characters in classic films are always guzzling milk. They order milk in bars, to show they are good. I just don’t like it. Too much pointless milk.

I. A market strategy engineered by the white hegemony.
II. My favorite New York story. Nineteen eighty-five, two sculptors, Carl Andre and his wife, Ana Mendieta, quarreled. The neighbors heard the screaming. They lived on the thirty-fourth floor, and she took the quick way down to the ground level. He called 911 and said, “We had a quarrel about the fact that I was more exposed to the public than she was and she went to the bedroom and I went after her, and she went out of the window.” Genius.
III. If you put cilantro on it, Californians will eat cat shit.