Some Came Running

Martin Scorsese at the time of "GoodFellas"

My friend Brian Koppelman has a piece up at Grantland as part of its "Oscar Travesties" mini-series, called "The Boning of Goodfellas." It treats, of course, what a sham of a mockery of a sham it was that Kevin Costner's more do-gooderish Dances With Wolves swept the Oscars for 1990. While I feel Brian's pain, I can't share his indignation, for a number of reasons. But reading his feisty, funny, and for all that entirely evenhanded piece, I couldn't help recall the very first time I met Martin Scorsese, which was in late 1989, when he was in the very final stages of editing what was then called Good Fellas. 

At the time I was an editor at Video Review magazine, self-advertised on its covers as "The World Authority On Home Entertainment." The book was about to celebrate its tenth anniversary, and I, having worked my way up from editing the magazine's very tech-wonky equipment test reports (I swear I've forgotten more about this technology than most people have ever known), was one of several staffers deputized to fetch prognosticating soundbites and in some cases full essays from luminaries literary, cinematic, and otherwise. (J.G. Ballard: "I look forward to the day when specialty video producers—the equivalent of Sun Records and the like in the music business 20, 30 years ago, and the equivalent of small publishers in the book trade—really can begin to reach out to the public." Paula Abdul: "The big movie musical will return to prominence in this decade, as recording artists take the video music concept one step further.") I had already fielded essays by Paul Slansky and Dave Barry and of course the idea of approaching Martin Scorsese to do one was a no-brainer. I contacted his office and laid out our idea and terms (which were pretty good) and got a guardedly enthusiastic response from Scorsese's then-assistant. Two issues were of concern: Scorsese's schedule, which was tied up in finishing his latest film, and Scorsese's comfort level with respect to sitting down and writing something. Not a problem: I could come up to Scorsese's office with a legal pad and a tape recorder and go over the topics we wanted to cover, I'd draft an essay out of it, he'd dictate changes where necessary, then approve, and there we were. Deal, Scorsese's assistant said. 

It was right before the Christmas holiday when I went up to Scorsese's office, which was then in the Brill Building. The man immediately struck me as, sure, intense, but also warm, friendly, considerate. Not at all intimidating. We talked about the work in progress, and he invoked the old television series The Untouchables, in terms of both the pace and the brutality. The last thing on his mind was Oscars; there was a sense, almost palpable, of his delight that he was trying something really new for him, and also a slight sense of trepidation, as in "what are they gonna make of this?" And of course the work was consuming. "I ran into Paul Schrader in the hall the other day, he's finishing his movie. I said to him, 'It figures I see you here, we're the only two guys who are gonna work through Christmas'," Scorsese said, laughing the slightly nervous laugh he had back then.

We settled in to his private office and got started. He mostly stood and paced, and sometimes took a hit off of his inhaler—his asthma was acting up a little—and I'd just suggest a specific topic and off he would go. It did not take all that much more than an hour, and when we were through, I asked him to sign my copy of the then-new interview book Scorsese on Scorsese, published by Faber. I'm sitting here looking at it now; he inscribed it "To Glenn Kenny/Thanks & appreciation/Martin Scorsese/1989."

The piece came out well, I think. I was more interested in preserving Scorsese's voice than in making it work as an essay, and it shows, but I don't think that's necessarily bad. In subsequent years I would commission and edit other essays by him for Premiere, including his double obit for James Stewart and Robert Mitchum called "The Men Who Knew Too Much;" by this time, his comfort level with respect to prose writing had increased, so our interaction was a more simple matter of request and acknowledgement. 

In any case, the piece called "The Second Screen" has always held a special place for me, and even though it is now an extremely anachronistic look at the technology that has, indeed, transformed cinema and cinephilia, I think it still bears reading. So, without permission, I've inputted it into document form from my old and increasingly raggedy copy of the April 1990 edition of Video Review magazine, and am reproducing it here below the jump. Enjoy. 

"Choke," not just a novel by Chuck Palahniuk anymore

My instant (sort of) Best and Worst of the Oscars, for MSN Movies. 

"Singin' in the Rain:" its "attitude" toward silent cinema

I understand that everyone's kind of sick of yammering on about the relative assets and liabilities of The Artist, but I have to admit that one not-unpleasant sidebar of all the yammering is that Singin' in the Rain tends to get brought up a lot. And if there's one thing I enjoy thinking about, it's the 1952 film co-directed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen and scripted by Betty Comden and Adolph Green. 

However. What is actually kind of weird, if not actually unpleasant, about this sidebar is that, aside from one single solitary thematic point of comparison, I'm largely convinced that the two films have, if you'll pardon the vulgar turn of phrase, sweet fuckall to do with each other. Yes, The Artist and Singin' in the Rain are "about" the transitional phase from silent to sound in Hollywood history. And. That. Is. It. I consider the point so not-open-to-debate that I don't intend to dwell on it, and anybody who wants to take issue with me might want to wait until The Artist comes out on DVD, and watch it on a double feature with Singin' in the Rain, and then report back to me on The Direct Experience of such a viewing.(My conviction is that most viewers will recognize Singin' in the Rain as the complete multifaceted masterpiece of a Composed Film that it actually is, and The Artist as, at best, "nice.")  What I will dwell on, briefly, is an odd thing I've heard from some Artist boosters, which is that the Michel Hazanavicius film is actually more "respectful" of silent cinema than was/is Singin' in the Rain.

After all—I've heard the argument go—Singin' itself depicts silent-film acting as broad, exaggerated, hammy, and the makers of the films as ego-and-revenue obsessive near-hacks, not artists.  This is in fact largely the case, and so what. There's a big aspect to Singin' in the Rain that partakes of self-parody, which is somewhat distinct from pastiche. Comden and Green, we may recall, got their start in at least semi-satirical sketch comedy; they, with Judy Holliday and Leonard Bernstein and others, were founders of The Revuers, a troupe that sent up the show biz of their day and before, in a tradition that was followed by outfits as diverse as the SCTVers and the creators of Forbidden Broadway. That is to say, the mockery of tradition/convention was entirely within the bounds of another, not unrelated tradition/convention. While the movie has a great deal of fun not just with silent cinema tropes but also the technical difficulties involved with the transition to sound, it also (unselfconsciously) situates itself within a particular continuum. Most of the comic stylings provided by the almost-literally-born-in-a-trunk former vaudvillean Donald O'Conner in the Kelly/Donen film would not be at all out of place in any non-talking Sennett or Roach short. The joking on silent cinema in Singin' in the Rain is "inside" in the very best sense of the term, while the condition of The Artist is one of near-complete alienation from silent cinema. 

One more thing, unfortunately. In a piece about The Artist for the L.A. Weekly, Karina Longworth writes: "​Like Singin' in the Rain, a film to which it's often compared, The Artist is an example of the kind of mythic history Hollywood tells about itself in order to promote its own survival in times of trouble." This, despite the quasi-ass-covering qualification "an example," is a bit of an overreach, I'm afraid. Singin' in the Rain came into being because Arthur Freed thought, for reasons I'm disinclined to speculate on, that it would be swell to have a bunch of songs he wrote a couple of decades before to be featured in a brand new feature film. That a masterpiece in the form of an Old Hollywood fable happened to coalesce around that notion is, I believe, merely some sort of a happy accident. "When Rain was released in 1952," Longworth continues, "studios were struggling to adapt to both a 1948 court order that forced the studios to give up ownership and management of movie theaters, and the growing lure of television." Yes, while I look for a copy editor, I shall allow that the assertion there is sort of true, but I think the movie you're thinking of is The Robe, which is a slightly different mythic history. In CinemaScope.  

"Some Came Running" never makes money for its partners

This year MSN Movies decided to give its readers a fighting chance and, instead of letting me do Oscar predictions alone, had me compete and converse with my buddy Glenn Whipp. You should enjoy our observations, and take his advice. And be patient with the gallery. We made it for YOU. 

Gold 1

I have a very simple but at the same time very strict policy with respect to writing about the Oscars, which involves not doing it for free. I am happy, however, that my pals at MSN Movies have commissioned to me to concoct not just one but several pieces on the movie awards this year, and the first, a consideration of some particularly memorable acceptance speeches, male division, just went up. More, including a gallery of women's acceptance speeches, is forthcoming. I hope all the pieces prove suitably diverting. 

The 84th Academy Awards and the denial of death

Apparently the Internet believes that anyone who accesses it is some kind of a human content maw that requires endless feeding, because there's really no other way to explain the reason that Oscar coverage proliferates like poison ivy despite the fact that said coverage almost invariably obsesses over how lame the Oscars are. I don't often point to myself as a positive example in any respect, but after Ordinary People...well, I don't need to go on, do I? (And yes, before you contemplate getting shirty about it in comments, Ordinary People is, by a certain yardstick, not a bad, or "bad," movie. All right?) After that, "Won't Get Fooled Again" became my Oscar theme song and, until such point as watching the ceremony became something like a professional obligation, I didn't let it trouble me. 

Recently the internet film journalist/gadfly Jeffrey Wells complained that the film producer Gavin Polone was usurping his (Wells') curmodgeonly throne by deigning to outline for New York magazine what he considered to be the problem with the Oscar "farce," as he calls it. Polone's piece is quite the earnest little finger-wag (were you aware, incidentally, that the Miss America pageant is "misogynistic?" Man!), and I suppose we're all supposed to be impressed that a MAJOR HOLLYWOOD PRODUCER is waxing so frank on the irrelevance of the event. Watch as he throws down about acceptance speeches: "by the third speech of someone thanking his spouse, agent, manager, psychic, dog walker, and the person who clears his chakras, I am always bored and left wondering why he couldn’t just have a private conversation with the person to whom he wishes to express his gratitude, and then find something more interesting or entertaining to talk about on television." 

Yes, God forbid anyone should bore the eternally tetchy Polone. Anyone remember that great profile of him in the New York Times Magazine some years ago, in which he volunteered that he and his girlfriend would never have children because the human race sucks and it's better to rescue dogs or something, and how he and said girlfriend were such monkish ascetics in spite of their Hollywood riches that they regularly breakfasted on DIRT (or wheatgrass or wheat germ or something like that, I forget what) and so on? Yeah, that makes it pretty funny that HE should be bitching about people who believe in chakras. Polone is somewhat more interesting on how awards actually skew the business itself, so at least he's complaining about something he has an actual stake in. Somewhat more mystifying is the "Fix The Oscars" interactive thingie going on at Slate, overseen by the ever-engaging Dan Kois, wherein readers and Slate's own delightfully insouciant contrarians offer exciting suggestions on how to make the televised ceremony less stodgy and dull. 

Thing is, the Academy Awards have ALWAYS been largely stodgy and dull; their whole reason for being, the initial screwing-over-organized-labor thing aside, was to confer a certain air of respectability to the filmmaking industry. One watched the awards at least in part to have a lit of a laugh over the extent to which they didn't get it. Hell, even the streaker who "disrupted" the 1974 ceremony was at least a few months behind the curve, as it were. This is acknowledged right off the bat in the intro to the Slate thingie: "Academy Awards ceremonies are laughable, even to those of us who love them." This admission begs several questions, but the answers have less to do with the actual Awards than with the civilians who believe they can improve them. They are film lovers, but not in that starry-eyed way; they have gone on record that talk of the "magic" of cinema makes them break out in hives. No, what's most important to them is their vitality in terms of identifying trends, staying on top of the latest modes of snark, embodying a sensibility that makes them not the ideal Entertainment Weekly reader but some form of an ideal Entertainment Weekly senior editor if Entertainment Weekly were still hiring, or ever likely to hire again. BUT. These people, who still talk of drinking games despite being at least a decade and a half out of college, who still bleg for recommendations of karaoke bars, are intuiting that their time in a desired or even really respected demographic ain't long. No, their coronaries are not coming like Christmas (H/T: Phillip Larkin), no, not quite yet, but they understand that they are approaching a certain age. And so are their children. They will soon be past the age when they're complaining about their snooty friends and Phineas and Ferb and one day they will wake up and not only despise the parents they were once coddled into unconditionally adoring but they will also deem all of the enthusiasms of said parents irredeemably quaint, and WORSE, they will unerringly regard every effort their parents make to adopt enthusiasms of a more contemporary variety as entirely pathetic and feeble. And as their (the parents', that is) waistlines grow even puffier and their hair thinner, the only thing that they (the parents, that is) will be able to cling to with any kind of demonstrable credibility whatsoever will be their claim that they are indeed "hipper," if not actually more "relevant," than the Academy Awards.

And then, like you, me, and Gavin Polone, they will die. 

How I learned to stop worrying and hate Tom Hooper

You can't blame a guy for trying. Or can you? (Also, yeah, I know what you're thinking: I mentally replay the opening of The Fall's "Slang King" every time I get a look at his mug myself, too.)

I should also like to echo an entirely unoriginal sentiment and say I really didn't mind The King's Speech, honest I didn't.

My Oscar "Bests and Worsts" for MSN Movies are here. Feel free to vent below. 

Not, not, not, not, not, not, not, not/Your academy

I know I like to talk smack about Oscars and Oscar prognosticators, but at the end of the day I'm just another hypocrite with expensive tastes likely to subsume his "principles," such as they are, in order to fulfill said tastes. Which is to say that, sure, if somebody wants to pay me to make Oscar predictions, I'll put my best foot forward, do the heavy lifting—again, such as it is—and deliver something resembling "the goods." Or goods. Which is to say further that, despite my protestations of utter incompetence, my pals at MSN Movies decided it would be a good idea to commission me to make my call on the six major categories. For who's gonna be nominated, not who's gonna win. It's like I get to be a "Guru O' Gold" unto myself, and stuff. In any event, whether you want to bet money based on my speculations is entirely your call, but hopefully everyone will be able to enjoy my wisecracks, not to mention what I believe passes for some kind of industry expertise. The piece is here. The image above is from, of course, once again, Frank Tashlin's Susan Slept Here. 

UPDATE, JANUARY 24, 2011, 8:45 A.M. EASTERN TIME: Ramin Setoodeh? What the fuck is he doing pretending to be an Oscar pundit on Today? Wasn't he supposed to be burned at the stake, or something? And Mo'nique? Again, I understand it's customery, but WTF? They pay her? There's gotta be a better way to start the morning, and I'm about to look for it. Anyway, just as I figured, I pretty much fucked the monkey, predictions-wise, although I DID call it for Bardem, and almost for Michelle Williams, to whom I send particular congratulations.

For Armond White

Gold, nuts

Above, Debbie Reynolds cracks a walnut with an Academy Award statuette in Susan Slept Here, Frank Tashlin, 1954, about which more later.

'Tis the season indeed, and as usual, I'm not having it. In fact, I daresay, up until the event itself, which I may or may not "live-blog," as they say (leaning to not), this is likely the first and last thing you'll read on this blog relating to Oscars. The only Oscar "blogger" or film writer or what have you I read with any regularity is my sui generis pal Jeffrey Wells, and in the "the whole world is queer execpt for thee and me and even thou art a little queer" department he's definitely rising to the occasion, for instance titling a post about the David-Poland-convened Movie City News Oscar panel the Gurus of Gold, "Guru Bitches Scatter." I know that Poland's an arch-enemy of Wells, and why not, but, geez, what did Breznican, Elwood, Hammond, Hernandez, Howell, Karger, Levy, et.al., ever do to Jeff? I also like Wells' summing-up of "pro" sentiments for The Fighter: "The passion of the big guns who are with it[...]is deep and true." What was that Vince Vaughn line in that upcoming comedy that got everybody into trouble? Oh, never mind.

In any event, as a part-time student of aberrant psychology I do confess I find the workings of the Oscar-prognosticating mind somewhat fascinating; on the other hand, I haven't got the time time (as Lou Reed once might have put it) to plumb said workings all that thoroughly. So I, um, commissioned film writer Vadim Rizov, he of unique perspective and gimlet eye, to plumb them in my place. The resulting piece, "The Gold Standard, or Lack Thereof," is one of my favorites in the first issue of Nomad Edition's Wide Screen, an online publication of which your humble servant is the editor. Another favorite is by my friend Farran Smith Nehme, also known as The Self Styled Siren, about Kent Jones' and Martin Scorsese's A Letter to Elia.

Nomad is a venture designed to provide what they call "content" to mobile and other such digital devices, using a software that makes said content pretty and readable on practically every conceivable such screen. Said content is not free, but will be available at what are, in my consideration, what they used to call "popular prices." I believe Wide Screen starts off with some very good stuff, and I know there's some even better stuff in its future, so I hope you check it out. Many thanks.