Some Came Running

But I was there...

I wasn't going to post about this, but a few of my phone pictures from the final evening of my 1980s- and-beyond home away from home Maxwell's came out pretty well, and apparently it was an historical event—lots of TV cameras, a Times photographer and more—so, you know, why not share. 

Glenn Morrow and his Individuals headlined the early set...

Outside at the block party, my old pal Guy Ewald manned the wheels of steel...

Movers and shakers, then and now: Bruce Bennett, Michael Hill, Jim Testa. 

Drummers' summit: Dave Weckerman and Bob Bert. Great musicians and fantastic people. 

"Orson Welles And Roger Hill: A Friendship In Three Acts," by Todd Tarbox

I am grateful to the critic and scholar Jonathan Rosenbaum for a good many reasons, and most recently I find that I owe him for steering me in the direction of this splendid book, a far less hyped correlative and corrective to the Henry Jaglom/Peter Biskind offering My Lunches With Orson, which I considered on this blog a couple of weeks ago. 

The eleven-year-old Welles was enrolled at the Todd School for Boys in Woodstock, Illinois in 1926. Roger Hill, twenty years Welles' senior, was an instructor there; he later inherited the position of headmaster, which had been that of his father, Noble Hill. Roger Hill was one of Welles' earliest mentors and a lifelong friend and supporter, and, according to the introduction to this book by Tarbox, a grandson of Hill's, Hill and Welles began recording their phone and in-person conversations in the early '80s in the hopes that the tapes would aid in their respective memoirs. The first recording in the Tarbox book is from November 25, 1982; the final one is from October 9, 1985, the evening before Welles' death. This is the same period in which the conversations that make up My Lunches With Orson were recorded. But while there is a certain amount of crossover, there is absolutely no redundancy here. While I'm not going to address the controversy concerning whether or not Jaglom is entirely truthful when he says his conversations with Welles had been recorded with Welles' prior consent, the Welles in My Lunches, sometimes truculent, spiteful, perverse, given to venting resentments, etc., is a particular kind of private Welles who coexists with an Orson who is very aware of the fact that he is giving a performance for a younger admirer. Is the Welles in the Hill conversations on his best behavior because he clearly knows that these conversations are in some sense intended for posterity? I would say yes and no, and I would also say that the Welles that emerges in Tarbox's book is the truer Welles. And yes, it is a Welles that is more noble than the one constructed via Biskind and Jaglom. 

That Welles lets his better angels speak through him via Hill has to do with, you'll see if you read the book, which you definitely should, his ease with Hill. The two go back a very long way, and we can infer that Hill knows Welles' quirks and foibles like almost no other, and that he forgives them all because he really loves Orson, and Orson really loves him back. There's not as much filmmaking talk in this book as there is in My Lunches; there's quite a bit of fond reminiscing about places and events and people that may not have a too-privileged place in the philosophy of those who are exclusively concerned with Welles the cineaste. But these topics are not brought up in the service of a facile nostalgia; everything touched upon in these conversations of course deeply informed Welles the artist, a deeply sophisticated man and a product of a very American culture that I sometimes fear vanished about thirty or forty years ago. 

As the title implies, the book is structured as a play. Rather than lay out transcriptions of the conversation, Tarbox provides settings and stage directions and incorporates flashbacks in which the players, Welles and Hill, read from correspondance or other texts. This may strike some readers as an overly sentimental, even quaint device, and it does lead down some awkward alleys, particularly during one conversation in which Welles admits he's speaking from a phone extension in his loo. At other junctures, however, the conceit of a stage presentation works pretty beautifully, as in an exchange in which Welles and Hill discuss a small civil-rights crusade that Welles spearheaded via his radio show in 1946: 

ROGER: Your finest hour, actually many hours, on your [radio show segment] Almanac was championing a black soldier who, returning to his hometown somewhere in the South, was beaten by a mob. What was his name? 

ORSON: Isaac Woodard. He wasn’t beaten by a mob, but by a policeman. Woodard was on a bus, not too far from his home in South Carolina. As a stop, he took too much time in the “colored” men’s room to satisfy the bus driver. A heated exchange followed, prompting the bus driver to call a cop, who, without provocation, beat the nejesus out of Woodard with a billy club, which blinded him. I immediately inveighed against this mindless madness, and, over the next several months, as the case unfolded, I continued to seethe over the air.

ROGER: Didn’t the NAACP contact you?

ORSON: Yes, the NAACP brought Woodard’s plight to my attention.

ROGER: Now it comes back. Wasn’t he a decorated war hero?

ORSON: He served overseas for over a year and was decorated with a battle star.

[Scrim: Thirty-one-year-old Orson in an ABC radio studio reading his July 28 1946 commentary.]

Wash your hands, Officer X. Wash them well. Scrub and scour. We will blast out your name. We’ll give the world your given name, Officer X. Yes, and your so-called Christian name. Officer X—after I have found you out, I’ll never lose you. If they try you, I’m going to watch the trial. If they jail you, I’m going to wait for your first day of freedom. You won’t be free of me…You can’t get rid of me…Who am I? A masked avenger from the comic books? No, sir. Merely an inquisitive citizen of America.

[Lights dim.]

ORSON: Week after week, I updated my audience on the progress of the case. I was threatened with lawsuits if I didn’t cease and desist. The threats only heightened my resolve to make America aware of the bitter fruits of this man’s service to his country. A lot of people from the South and North wrote and asked what business it was of mine to involve myself in this case. 

[Scrim: Thirty-one-year-old Orson at the ABC microphone reading his Woodard script.]

God judge me if this isn’t the most pressing business I have. The blind soldier fought for me in this war. The least I can do now is fight for him. I have eyes. He hasn’t. I have a voice on the radio. He hasn’t. I was born a white man and until a colored man is a full citizen like me I haven’t the leisure to enjoy the freedom that this colored man risked his life to maintain for me. I don’t own what I have until he owns an equal share of it. Until someone beats me, and blinds me, I am in his debt. And so I come to this microphone not as a radio dramatist (although it pays better), not as a commentator (although it’s safe to be simply that). I come, in that boy’s name, and in the name of all who in this land of ours have no voice of their own. I come with a call to action.

[Lights dim]

ROGER: What became of the case?

ORSON: The Department of Justice filed charges against the rogue cop.

ROGER: Didn’t the NAACP credit you as the prime mover in causing the government to act?

ORSON: There were a number of us on the side of the angels. I was just the one with a microphone and a weekly national audience. Our broadcasts led to a benefit in New York on Woodard’s behalf. Billie Holiday, Milton Berle, Cab Calloway, and many others joined me on stage and performed for an impassioned audience of over 30,000, demanding justice for one black man and for all of black America.

ROGER: Was justice served?

ORSON: Sadly, no. Though the Justice Department took the case to trial, an all-white jury acquitted the cop. I’ll never forget a line from the defense attorney’s closing argument to the jury, “If you rule against my client, then let South Carolina secede again.” 

 

This is moving, still vital stuff, I'd reckon. And it speaks multitudes of both men, multitudes that are maybe willfully ignored in Biskind/Jaglom, whose book starts by taking too-giddy pleasure in Welles' deliberately impishly provocative pronouncement to Jaglom that "everybody should be bigoted." Peter and Henry should be ashamed of themselves. 

The Tarbox book is also generously illustrated, not just with photos but with reproduced pages from Welles' scripts, including more than a few from the Shakespeare staging adaptations on which Hill and Welles collaborated. You can buy the book via Amazon here. And you should also read Jonathan R.'s thoughts on the book, here. 

The current cinema

Svetlana Khodchenkova and Tao Okamato in The Wolverine, because you've likely already seen plenty of shots of Hugh Jackman with his shirt off. 

Also reviewed by me: Blue Jasmine. Both for MSN Movies. 

Bernadette Lafont, 1938-2013

Á double tour, Claude Chabrol, 1959

Les bonnes femmes, Chabrol, 1960

Une belle fille comme moi, François Truffaut, 1972

 

"My Lunches With Orson"

I’m pleased to be able to report that My Lunches With Orson: Conversations Between Henry Jaglom And Orson Welles (edited and with an introduction by Peter Biskind, Metropolitan Books) is a substantively better book than most of its positive notices would have you believe. To be honest, when I first heard of the thing, my immediate expectation/desire was mixed with at least a mild dread. There was this sense of a potential funhouse mirror version of This Is Orson Welles, with Henry Jaglom standing in for Peter Bogdanovich and Peter Biskind standing in for Jonathan Rosenbaum, and everything those substitutions could possible imply besides. Once first word about the ostensibly scandalous contents of the book started coming out, the dread heightened. Orson Welles, pathetically washed-up Hollywood one-time wunderkind, talks smack about the great Olivier, and so on. Imagine that. If this was gonna be the book, then the book was an ignoble enterprise, I decided.

Well, the book is not an ignoble enterprise, and I can’t even be snarky and add that it’s not for lack of trying. But it’s not entirely unproblematic, either, as we’ll get to further down. I should have had a little more faith in its subject and main speaker. The value of My Lunches With Orson lies in about 250 pages worth of the company of an artistic genius who was also a first-rate mind (as we know these qualities are not always mutually exclusive) and the sheer conversational, philosophical, polemical and emotional pleasure such a thing organically affords. There is poignancy here, too, afforded by Welles’ frequently querulous personality and his roundabout ways of acknowledging his flaw.

While Bogdanovich, in his more formal interviews of the ‘70s, was not content to have Welles the cineaste, but persistently tried to formulate his idol as a cinephile, to often hilarious effect (see the exchanges with respect to Mizoguchi in This Is Orson Welles), Jaglom, taping his lunches with Welles in the early ‘80s after the latter’s falling out with Bogdanovich, played the eager audience and potential co-conspirator. And Jaglom WAS a good audience, although some might fall over in their chairs at the extent to which he was a seemingly willfully ignorant one; e.g., “Now [Carole] Lombard could not have been very bright.” Now THERE’S a real “WTF” moment (I like to imagine my friend the Self-Styled Siren heading for the fainting couch), but friend Welles merely responds “Very bright,” and elaborates, delightfully. This is right before he lays the conspiracy theory stuff about Lombard’s plane crash death on Jaglom. This assertion got played up big time in the gossip columns—well about as big time as anything concerning Orson Welles can get played up in the gossip columns nowadays—but, as with so much in the book that’s supposed to put Welles in a nasty or kooky light, it’s something that plays better in context. First off there’s the not unpalpable sense of Welles playing up to Jaglom with I-know-where-the-bodies-are-buried lore. And he also adds, “Now I cannot swear it’s true. I’ve been told this by people who swear it’s true, who I happen to believe.” There’s an entire county of nuance in Welles’ saying “cannot” rather than “can’t;” the “who I happen to believe” is a nice touch as well. It’s the voice, the changes of register he puts into his dishy improvisations, which provide the real and deep fun, not the data itself.

Similarly, there’s a peculiar, tetchy evenhandedness and even sometimes affection in Welles' putdowns. The stuff on Olivier, which is dropped throughout, is peculiarly fascinating. He thinks the actor/director kind of a dolt (one can almost hear him rolling his eyes as he recalls the opening of Olivier’s Hamlet, in which Olivier, narrating, calls the play “the story of a man who could not make up his mind”) and also a mean, malicious person, but throughout his rages there’s also a more than tacit acknowledgement of Olivier as a peer and prodigious talent. While he hasn’t much time for Sternberg, he schools Jaglom well in Stroheim, but he’s largely kinder to performers than other directors. Even after irritatingly dismissing Richard Burton, there’s a sense in his rancor that he’s talking about a recalcitrant relative. He dumps pages of resentment on Charlie Chaplin, and proclaims Keaton Chaplin’s filmmaking and comedic superior, but still insists, rightly, on Chaplin’s genius. The only performer for whom he expresses unambivalent contempt is Woody Allen, and there largely on a matter of personal taste. What Steven Soderbergh terms “rude” in his blurb on the book’s back jacket is bracing, to be sure. But the mitigating circumstances pertaining to the rudeness make something like a window into the great man’s psyche. And Chapters 21 and 22, in which Welles wrestles with the idea of directing what would many years later become Tim Robbins’ highly questionable film The Cradle Will Rock, and then gives Jaglom some script notes for what would become Jaglom’s film Always, provide mini-seminars on two very different but ultimately not unrelated aspects of filmmaking, and show a true master not at work, but unselfconsciously brandishing the brilliance that made his work what it was. Remarkable.

Which isn’t to say that Welles doesn’t trip himself up, wisdom-wise, from time to time. Speaking of a never-to-be-realized film of King Lear, Welles ponders shooting at a studio near an airport: “It’s a great location, and you can make multiple deals, but only if you’re making a silent picture. Or else dub it afterwards which, if you do that with Shakespeare, it comes off as totally fake. You simply cannot do it.” Except the maestro had already done it, with the sublime Chimes at Midnight. At other places, it’s both exhilarating and sad to see him mulling over ideas for casting films that will never be made. Regretfully rejecting Robert De Niro for a role as an up-and-coming politico in The Big Brass Ring, he says, “My candidate is a fellow who’s got to carry Kansas. I really don’t see De Niro carrying Kansas.” True then, true now.

Because as he’s offering up these scintillating and edifying transcribed bits, editor Biskind is also constructing a narrative, a narrative of Orson Welles never making that final film. It’s heartbreaking when Jaglom has to bear the news that their last best hope for a Brass Ring lead, Jack Nicholson, is for all intents and purposes turning Welles down. And in Chapter 26, the penultimate one, Welles and Jaglom are joined at their Ma Maison table by an HBO executive named Susan Smith, whom Welles perversely cuts dead the second he perceives something—disinterest? disrespect? ignorance?—in her that he disapproves of, and can’t let go of. It’s a hair-raising exchange and for Welles lovers it will bring to mind the scorpion-and-the-frog parable Welles relates in Mr. Arkadin/Confidential Report, a bit that Andrew Sarris applied to an analysis of Welles’ career as far back as 1968, in his The American Cinema.

Given the evidence of the book, that 1955 is not much dreamt of in Biskind’s philosophy. If you are already conversant with Welles’ life and career, you may find much of my former colleague’s introduction to the conversations troubling, or funny. Writing of the immediate post-Ambersons period, Biskind states, “With his directing career sidelined, he found work as an actor, performing in pictures such as Journey into Fear (1943), Jane Eyre (1943), and The Stranger (1946), much of which he unofficially directed.” Rumors/accounts of Welles’ directorial participation in Fear and Eyre are common, but as it happens The Stranger is actually signed by Welles, so, you know. This is the sort of error that can arguably arise out of a copy glitch, but I still cringed when I read Biskind credit his editor for “refus[ing] to let anything slip by her.” The assertion that Lady From Shanghai was “mutilated by the studio” is contradicted by Welles himself in interviews with Bogdanovich, in which the director’s sole complaint is that Columbia head Harry Cohn slapped an unsatisfactory music score on the picture [UPDATE: this bit of gainsaying on my part is destroyed below in comments, and I apologize here again for shooting from the hip with respect to this issue];  the provenance of a Jean-Luc Godard citation is muffed; and so on. Biskind’s description of Janet Leigh’s character in Touch of Evil is so peculiar and hostile that one would suspect that Peter is going through a bout of [Jeff] Wellsian late-middle-age women issues, but I’m confident the passage is just misguided editorial assertion, which is also applied to Elia Kazan in the book’s “Partial Cast Of Characters” appendix. (It’s telling, by the way, that even as he expresses disapprobation of Kazan, Welles still revers to him by his old nickname “Gadg.”) Biskind’s explanation of the auteur theory as propagated by Sarris is reductive to the point of inaccuracy, and it almost seems as if he expects Welles’ and Jaglom’s dismissive remarks about Howard Hawks to compel Hawk’s admirers to pack up their tents and go home. As the guy in the commercials used to say, “Sorry, Charlie.” I was also uncomfortable with a passage late in the book in which Welles and Jaglom discuss their former friend Bogdanovich’s book about Dorothy Stratten; their views may be useful or pertinent in the context of an actual scholarly work, but as reproduced here, there’s a distinct whiff of, for lack of a better term, scab-picking.

And the mirror-image of This Is Orson Welles idea holds, for better or worse, through all of that. The Bogdanovich/Rosenbaum endeavor was lively with a scholarly bent and execution. Jaglom/Biskind volume is conceived and executed as a pop culture entertainment; it doesn’t even have an index. It is nonetheless an essential and, yes, largely enjoyable addition to one’s Welles library. I look forward to reading…oh wait...

Bugs Bunny cuts Florida loose

Hat tip: Harry Allen.

The current cinema

Three, count 'em three, very good to very-very good movies reviewed by myself for MSN Movies this week: Pacific Rim (a still from which, featuring Rinko Kukuchi, is seen above), Fruitvale Station, and The Hunt.

Also: I read Henry Jaglom and Peter Biskind's My Lunches With Orson this week, and it's a better book than its positive reviews would indicate. I'll have a longer post about it some time next week, as musical activities are going to take up the remainder of this week's time. 

Mizzou Tigers

At Maxwell's

Saturday evening my wife Claire and I took the ferry over to Hoboken to see The Feelies play its final sets at Maxwell's, the indie rock venue of myth and legend that will cease to be such at the end of the month. It was a sold-out show and The Feelies played beautifully, as they do. These days the band doesn't have an opener, rather they play two sets of generous length with a break between them. During the break, Claire and I joined the scrum at the foot of the stairwell that leads down to the basement, which is both storeroom for various restaurant supplies and a makeshift dressing/rest area for the bands. I said hello to various band members—I've been both a fan of and friendly with The Feelies since my college friend  Bob Nickas introduced me to their music around 1977—and caught up a bit with Barre Duryea, another old friend who worked as a roadie and guitar tech for The Feelies for about a decade, then with Patti Smith for another decade, and now runs the music stage for Conan O'Brien's show. 

Dave Weckerman, the band's percussionist, spotted us chatting and came over. "I opened one of my old journals the other day," he began immediately, "and right there on the page I opened to was an entry for April 13, 1980, a Sunday night. It said 'The Feelies played tonight for the first time at Maxwell's, a small rock club in Hoboken, New Jersey.' I also noted the band's tally, which was six hundred and fifty dollars." Dave paused. "A princely sum at the time." 

Dave also came upon a clipping of one of the narrow vertical column  ads the club would run in papers such as The Village Voice advertising a gig he was involved in. "Mr. Baxter was opening for the Violent Femmes. I think it was the Violent Femmes first New York area show, or something like it. It was a Thursday night. And that week...well, the ad ran like this. Tuesday night, The Replacements. Wednesday night, 'From England,' The Fall. Thursday night, The Violent Femmes and Mr. Baxter. Friday night, The Fleshtones. Saturday night, R.E.M. And The Fall had the black 'Sold Out' bar over their name. And R.E.M. didn't."

"I remember that Violent Femmes show," I told Dave.  "And I could never remember why I went, because I wasn't so interested in them that I was going to check them out on a Thursday night, even if John Zorn HAD produced their first album. If Mr. Baxter was opening, that makes sense." Mr. Baxter was a twisted rockabilly duo/occasional trio fronted by Larry Henchey, a very talented singer/guitarist, with Dave on drums. They did a cover of "Dr. Robert" that was very Gang of Four by way of The Cramps, and other good things besides. My band's keyboard player produced an EP by them that never saw official release but which I was one of two rock critics to vote for it in that format's "Best" category in some Pazz and Jop Poll or other. 

"Do you know that Peter Hook book, not the one about Joy Division, but about The Hacienda?" Dave went on. "There's this part where he's talking about New Order's first American tour, and he says they first came to a club in the town of Maxwell, New Jersey!"

"That was when they were just a trio," Barre recalled.

"And I couldn't go, and I was fascinated," Dave said. "I was talking to someone who went, and I asked, 'Well who SINGS?' and he's like, 'The guitar player, Barney...' and 'What did they play?' because they didn't have any New Order songs yet. I have a picture of Frank at that show"—Dave indicated a friend standing nearby—"and he's over by their equipment cases that still have 'Joy Division' stenciled on them."

"Their equipment got stolen at that gig." 

"Maybe Frank did it."

A little later in the break we hung outside with Steve Fallon, who got the whole thing started. Reminiscing, Steve mentioned Pat Clark, who roomed with him for a while back in the day; I remembered Pat fondly, not only because he was a sweet guy but because  he had bestowed a pretty cherry gig on my band at his short-lived joint, the Silver Dollar, in Elizabeth or some place like that. He deemed us "dark psychedelia" on the flyer, which we liked. Opening for us was a duo called Drunk Driving: Peter Missing on guitar and vocals and Bob Bert on drums. Bob's wife, Linda, who like Pat is no longer with us, was the most enthusiastic booster of all the boosters in the audience, dancing around and throwing confetti during both sets. Anyway, Steve was remembering how Pat would bring home burgers from the local White Castle and reheat them in the oven with them still in their cardboard containers, which Steve found problematic. 

Most of the other reminiscences are not, as they say, for publication. The second set was also inspired, with a particularly impassioned cover of Patti's "Dancing Barefoot" one of the highlights. (In the first set they covered "Who Loves The Sun" and "Ticket to Ride," warming various particular cockles of hearts.) We actually decided not to stay for the entirety of the show; for some reason, we thought it apt to head back to Brooklyn while the music was still playing. 

"Vampyr"/"Shoah"

Henriette Gérard, Vampyr, Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1932

Henrik Gawkowski, Shoah, Claude Lanzmann, 1985