Some Came Running

Ranking Best Picture Winners While Making Gravy

8:30 a.m: First curve ball of the day: my preferred butcher doesn’t have pork neck bones for the gravy. Suggests spare ribs instead. What the hell.

8:45—9:15 a.m.: Get list of all Best Picture winners, paste into Word document, open other word document, re-figure-out how to work with two document windows simultaneously, rank Best Picture Winners according to both personal preference and secret rule book issued to Old School (as in “non-Vulgar”) Auteurists, as if I even know the difference any more. Who can tell the dancer from the dance, yo.

9:18 a.m.: Go out for more supplies. Tally up my total of Oscar Best Picture Winners. Second curve ball of the day: I realize I have 89 Best Picture whereas that Buzzfeed piece everyone’s so agitated about only ranked 85. Da fuh? Did I repeat some? I guess we’ll find out as the day progresses.

 10:00 a.m.: Put my Rolling Stones albums in the disc changer—for some reason, early-middle Stones, starting with or around the UK Aftermath, is my default gravy-making music—and start slicing up the garlic in, yes, the Goodfellas  razor blade style. I really AM in the tank for Scorsese.

10:10 a.m.: Another curveball: As a grateful recovering alcoholic, I forgot to get wine for the gravy. And the corner licka store isn’t open. So I have to schlep over to Scotto’s. While I’m there I might as well get a big-ass Tupperware thingie, as today I’m going to do what I’ve never actually done in all my years of making gravy: I’m gonna strain it before I put it in the fridge. An experiment. Good thing I have nothing to do all day, except make gravy, and rank all the Best Picture Oscar winners. 

12 noon: Okay. The onion and garlic are in, the wine is in, the spare ribs are in, I went out and bought a spoon holder, there’s nothing to do but stand, sit, simmer and stir for three hours. Let’s get this Oscar assessment party started. 

89: Argo

That’s right, Argo. My list, I can do whatever I want with it. Eat it, 2012!

But seriously: obviously it is ridiculous to assert that this is the WORST Best Picture winner ever. It is, however, entirely arguable that it is the least deserving. Start with the smarmy Hollywood self-congratulation, add the give-with-one-hand/take-away-with-the-other politics, fold in the Jack Kirby snub…”And that’s just for starters,” as Telly Savalas used to say.

88: Cimarron

“Cimarron’s not that bad,” my friend Ed Hulse (Portly And Distinguished Film Historian, we used to call him at Video Review) likes to say. Ed REALLY likes Westerns. Anyway, I did due diligence and watched this for a Premiere magazine “Worst Oscar Winners” piece and to tell you the truth I don’t remember a thing about it.

87: The Broadway Melody

In the high eighties the distinctions aren’t all that cost effective, so now that I think about it, this early talkie musical snoozer might be WORSE than Cimarron! Sorry Cimarron.

86: Cavalcade

Now this one’s DEFINITELY worse than Cimarron. Whereas I don’t remember much of Cimarron, I definitely remember starting to lose the will to live about twenty minutes into watching this, again doing the due diligence thing. Not recommended. (God, I sure am inputting “Cimarron” a lot.)

85: Around the World In Eighty Days

Okay, now we’re out of the ‘30s and into the ‘50s. This white elephant, a particular bete noir of Sarris’ if I recall correctly,  is the sort of thing that made people think the Eisenhower administration was dumb. S.J. Perelman admirers feel as bummed out to be reminded of this as Joan Didion fans are to be reminded of Up Close And Personal. Makes It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World look like Love And Death.

84: The Greatest Show On Earth

This ill-advised foray into circus life for Cecil B. DeMille has a lot of attractive-seeming elements—great train crash scene, a really weird Jimmy Stewart performance—that one is apt to approach it from a “how bad can it be?” attitude. It’s bad.

83: The Great Ziegfeld

I love William Powell more than the next guy but Jesus H. [lapses into coma]

82: Crash

Man, we watched this the other night and it HAS NOT AGED WELL. And the shot with the Iranian guy with the gun and the American flag subtly secreted in the background oh lord. My wife and I blame it for ruining our weekend. And we dare you to…no, we don’t dare you, that’s hostile, we implore you, for your own safety, keep away from this mess. All that goodwill Paul Haggis built up with me in that Scientology book, shot.

12:20 p.m.: The gravy’s lookin’ pretty good. Sounding good, too—nice steady simmer.

Last couple of years I used a slow cooker to make gravy and while it turned out fine this year, in prepping a Sunday lasagna dinner, I felt that using the slow cooker would mean I wasn’t working hard enough. So I thought I’d go the whole watched-pot hog, do the San Marzano tomatoes. I’ve got to say that there’s something viscerally/spiritually satisfying about closely watching over the whole process.

81: You Can’t Take It With You

Cast and director and source material and all that notwithstanding, this one’s kind of a frantic mess, huh?

80: The Artist

Cloying, winsome, kinda dumb, technically slack. Other than that, fine.

79: The King’s Speech

When I initially reviewed this, I actually wrote that Hooper’s wide-angle excesses helped keep the movie interesting. I can really be a cockeyed optimist some times.

78: Slumdog Millionaire

Hmm. I’m not sure I’ve actually seen this.

77: Chicago

Rob Marshall is a very talented choreographer.

76: The Greatest Show On Earth

Ah! See! I did repeat one. See #84.

75: The Life of Emile Zola

The apogee of the “distinguished” studio biopic back in the day, this day being 1937. I liked Paul Muni better in I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang. Everybody else does too.

74: Mutiny on the Bounty

Legendary Laughton performance aside (Gable’s good too but bear with me) this thing’s got Thalberg Prestige written all over it, a particularly bad thing with this kinda story line if you ask me.

73: Chariots of Fire

A remarkably decrepit “distinguished” film, all attempts to contemporize the subgenre notwithstanding.

72: Gandhi

The movie that introduced the world to Ben Kingsley while also showcasing maybe about one-tenth of his range. Watchable.

71: A Man For All Seasons

This movie also infuriated Andrew Sarris: Oh wait, now that I’ve gone and gotten out my copy of The American Cinema (leaving the kitchen for a minute) it’s worse than I thought: “It is the payoff films—High Noon, From Here To Eternity, The Nun’s Story and A Man For All Seasons—that most vividly reveal the superficiality of Zinnemann’s personal commitment. At its best, his direction is inoffensive; at its worst it is downright dull.” That’s Fred Zinnemann, by the way. Andrew’s just warming up: “his true vocation remains the making of antimovies for antimoviegoers.” Whoa. Anyway there’s some people who’ll react to a dis of this movie by insisting that Paul Scofield gives the greatest performance ever given by anyone ever, and he is pretty good. What are you gonna do. The script is pretty highly regarded by some, too. 

Man, this gravy is reducing a lot faster than I thought it would. I better go out and get some more tomato puree.

1:00 p.m.: Moving along nicely. The smell of the pork flavor is starting to emerge. Soon the wine will have cooked off and I’ll be able to taste it. 

70: Out of Africa

Very pretty, weirdly dramatically moribund. And this seemed to be almost universally acknowledged at the time it got its Oscar. Awards sure are strange.

69: American Beauty

Speaking of movies I fulsomely and egregiously overrated on their initial release, this. I’m still fond of it on some levels but its honors bespeak of the fact that it’s exactly the sort of thing an academy would deem “edgy.”

68: Dances With Wolves

No, don’t slink away. Not EVERYBODY was embarrassed by this movie, it made a shit-ton of money. The screenwriter gets a point or two in my book for the shout-out to Exene Cervenka in his acceptance speech. 

67: Oliver!

Carol Reed: What Happened? 

66: All The King’s Men

Who’d have known that the only useful thing about the utterly misbegotten Steve Zaillian remake or re-adaptation of the novel or whatever you want to call it would be making this blustery mostly-mess look so much better?

65: Rain Man

“Interesting” story, good star power, moves right along, but a little opportunistic, no?

64: Forrest Gump

Hating on this movie has gotten so common, so conventional-wisdom, that I’m ALMOST ready for unreconstructed Robert Zemeckis lover Dave Kehr’s R.Z.-as-Voltaire read of the movie. It will go down easier, I bet, if I don’t watch the movie again first.

63: The English Patient

I’ve recently concluded that The Good German is a much, much better refutation of Casablanca than this movie. So there.

62: A Beautiful Mind

Russell Crowe is really good in this. In every other respect, though, this might be the most “Huh?” Best Picture Winner of all.

61: Braveheart

Really great battle scenes—it’s pretty clear Mel studied Kurosawa for real before laying this out. Little heavy on the gay-bashing and masochism though. Was there a Scottish lobby working the voters or something?

60: Gladiator

I was entertained.

59: Shakespeare In Love

The moving story of a pedigreed starlet willing to do nudity and her fateful affair with a Prince look alike in Elizabethan dress. Hence, a film for the ages.

58: Driving Miss Daisy

The good liberal movie good liberals love to hate. On the other hand, the legit theater isn’t exactly brimming with opportunities for senior-age white women and middle-aged African American males, so go right ahead and picket the next live production you find. As for the movie, it really IS well-performed, and Bruce Beresford’s an extremely able director who does not falter here. 

57: My Fair Lady

Great songs, appealing performers (unless you know a lot about Rex Harrison’s personal life and have taken it to heart), absolutely leaden direction. 

56: Amadeus

I watched this a few years ago with the “Milos Forman: What Happened” idea in mind, and was surprised and relieved to discover, lack of surreal touches and New Wave fragmentation aside, it wasn’t at all an “out of character” film for him. It’s just not in the top echelon of his work, I guess. But if you look at it without quailing at its length or thematic emphasis on Stupid Classical Music, it’s good stuff. 

55: Terms of Endearment

Come on. James L. Brooks, Larry McMurtry, all of that. If American cinema had a domestic De Sica (albeit one without the wartime sensibility), Brooks was it for this picture.

54: Ordinary People

 Like everyone else I’m terribly upset that it beat Raging Bull, whose immortality this loss did not affect a whit, and also yeah middlebrow bourgeois psychotherapeutic clichés but there are some career-high performances here, so let’s just take a deep breath. Wanna rap about it?

53: The Sound of Music

I played Captain Von Trapp in Seltzer School’s 1972 production of this musical, and Max Detweiler in Jefferson Township High School’s 1977 production of same. I love this movie. If you have a Sound of Music problem I feel bad for you, son. I’ve got 80-something Oscar problems but The Sound of Music ain’t one.

52: Hamlet

Good speeches, looks pretty spooky. Hinges on an absolute misinterpretation—“could not make up his mind” my foot—but it gives good Shakespeare for the most part. 

51: Silence of the Lambs

Long after there are no more Oscars any more, this will be cited as the only motion picture featuring a Fall song on its soundtrack to ever win the Big One. 

50: In The Heat of the Night

Pioneered the “look at all these people sweating” genre that A Time To Kill so adroitly picked up on.

49: Wings

A silent picture, as you may have heard. Production value, a good tough directorial signature courtesy of William Wellman, great action scenes. Don’t let anybody tell you different.

48 Mrs. Miniver

Its utility value has, yes, been decreased by the fact that World War II isn’t going on anymore, but give yourself over to this picture and it will have its way with you.

47: Going My Way

Robin Wood would tell you The Bells of St. Mary’s, the sequel, is the better film, and he’s not wrong, but in my book a Leo McCarey/Bing Crosby collaboration has nothing to not recommend it. 

46: The Lost Weekend

Kate Aurthur, who wrote the Buzzfeed piece that indirectly inspired this one, is taking a lot of heat for it in the comments and in the Twittersphere and elsewhere, and as someone who reveres or just likes a lot of the movies that come in for her disdain in the piece, I understand the pain of the howlers. But Ms. Aurthur and I have some mutual friends, and I’m assured that she’s a good egg, and I believe those assurances, even as I recognize, whenever I happen to read her writing, that we don’t have a whole lot in common in terms of taste and sensibility. And as a grateful recovering alcoholic, I do wince as the “you will laugh watching it” assurance in her entry on this film—it seems a little presumptuous. I haven’t had much patience to the “alienating to contemporary sensibilities” condemnation critics so readily tar movies with, for one thing. Still. This is a Buzzfeed article we’re talking about here. We are not, for better or worse, Buzzfeed people here, so why get so bothered. Also: Nick Tosches hates this movie, too, partially because he’s very much higher on Charles Jackson’s book, and then because he thinks the movie’s an egregious piece of Hollywood hackwork. So go tell HIM he’s full of shit. And finally, the bat really IS bad. That said, I’m pretty fond of the picture. 

45: Gentleman’s Agreement

Sure it’s dated, but thanks to Kazan’s commitment—and Peck’s—it’s got more sting than you’d expect.

44: Marty

The Academy’s perfunctory bow to the “small film.”

43: Tom Jones

The Academy’s perfunctory bow to the New Wave film. That’s just how much the actual New Wave confused the Academy.

42: West Side Story

There’s a lot wrong with this movie. For instance, Natalie Wood playing a Puerto Rican girl. But—she’s Natalie Wood! All of your other complaints have pretty much the same kind of answer. Live with it.

41: Gigi

MINNELLI POWER MISE EN SCÈNE POWER CHEVALIER POWER FUCK THE HATERS

40: Midnight Cowboy

Still quite the actors’ showcase. In other respects almost as dated as that Zola movie.

39: The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King

The Academy’s perfunctory bow to the AICN/Badass Digest film.

38: West Side Story

Aha! ANOTHER redundancy. What an idiot I am.

37: Patton

The Academy’s not-at-all perfunctory bow to the “Remember When We Knew What The Hell We Were Doing Militarily” film.

36: The Sting

A last gasp of love for studio cinemacraft, amiable diversion division.

35: Hamlet

All right, enough of this nonsense, I’m starting to look bad. (“Starting?”) See #52.

34: Rocky

Marty, with boxing. 

33: Platoon

ESPN’s answer to Apocalypse Now.

32: Million Dollar Baby

As implicitly promised, here’s where my shameless auteurist bias really waves its freak flag.

31: The Last Emperor

Poetic, tragic, ravishingly beautiful. A little self-infatuated. Not really that long.

30: Ben Hur

Cheesy and self-important, yes, but also a remarkably assured and technically breathtaking mega-production.

29: From Here To Eternity

What matters here is less direction or even story than a cast that’s almost literally a collection of icons, each signifying a different mode of anxiety (Lancaster, Kerr, Clift, Sinatra, Borgnine, Reed). A magnificent cinematic encapsulation of sorts.

28: One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest

The not-even-incidental sexism in this ode to anarchy rankles like crazy—it did then, too. But Forman’s choreography of the boy’s club is just undeniable.

OK. Gravy is pretty much ready. Now for the strain and to check out the yield. Fingers crossed. 

3:00 p.m.: Well as you can see the strain yielded a pretty smooth and colorful result and I’ve got to say it’s pretty tasty too. Largely out of frame is a tomato-splatter mess I've got to mop up ASAP.

As some of you might have inferred, I’m making lasagna again. For Sunday dinner. And no, it isn’t an Oscar party. My Lovely Wife and I wanted to have a few friends for dinner, and we gave them some optional dates and the consensus was this Sunday. These friends aren’t Oscar people, so it’s likely Claire and I will be tuning in late, if at all. Last year we didn’t see the ceremony because we were vacationing in Iceland. My thing is, if you really aren’t overly concerned about Oscar ceremonies, telling the world this over and over seems a counterintuitive action. Anyhow. I haven’t eaten all day, except for nibbles at the pork ribs I used to flavor the sauce, so let’s get the top 27 over and done with, okay? 

27: The Departed

Oh the incredible irony that a movie its director, one of our greatest living filmmakers,  had so relatively little personal investment in, would gain him these industry honors. 

26: The Deer Hunter

I may be overrating this, I know. I just can’t ever shake the majesty of its first hour.

25: Kramer Vs. Kramer

I read how this movie is now unacceptable because sexism and I’m not going there, not here. My high esteem for it comes from its being the one Best Picture winner that most resembles a Truffaut film, stylistically.

24: Titanic

Love it or hate it, it’s Cinema, as I learned watching it in a theater with a 90-year-old woman who didn’t speak a word of English, and no smart remarks about my dating proclivities.

23: [Redacted]

The last title that I accidentally reproduced when making this list. Don’t make me beg you, people, how many times can I say I’m sorry for my sloppy work?

22: The Hurt Locker

Pretty tense.

21: Schindler’s List

While I agree with Kubrick’s caveat, I can’t see how American culture could have handled this subject better.

20: Unforgiven

I cannot tell a lie: Like Crash, it features of a shot in which a character is framed within portentous distance of a hanging American flag. Unlike Crash, it is a very good movie.

19: Gone With The Wind

Also Because Cinema, and the art White America has earned, and the unusual result of that intersection.

18: An American In Paris

Complaining about the characterizations in this is about as useful as complaining about the characterizations in The Gang’s All Here. Or Un Chien Andalou even.

17: Grand Hotel

Watched this on the new Blu-ray and was pleasantly surprised at how sprightly it remains. Will always be a sentimental favorite because it’s the only movie I ever saw screened at Paris’ Cinema MacMahon. Suck it!

16: Casablanca

Because Curt Bois plays the pickpocket.

15: The Bridge on the River Kwai

Because without it, no The Geisha Boy.

14: All Quiet on the Western Front

Because it’s not that stodgy.

13: Rebecca

Because Hitchcock.

12: It Happened One Night

Because Claudette Colbert.

11: The Apartment

Yeah, I’m getting pretty tired of the “because” device too.

10: Annie Hall

Not just a great romantic comedy but still a pretty damn sturdy metamovie.

9: No Country For Old Men

Not just a great thriller but still a pretty damn sturdy metamovie. Oh crap, you see what’s starting to happen.

8: Lawrence of Arabia

7: The French Connection 

6: All About Eve

5: How Green Was My Valley

4: The Best Years of Our Lives

Eat it, Raymond Chandler! 

3: The Godfather

2: On The Waterfront

1: The Godfather, Part II

You have been reading “Ranking Best Picture Winners While Making Gravy.” Thanks and have a great weekend. 

Harold Ramis, 1944-2014

I understand that both cinematic and televisual archives offer far better, or maybe more "distinguished" Ramis clips than this one—in which Ramis doesn't really start showing his stuff until about halfway through—but this is my sentimental favorite because, at the time I saw it, it really cemented my identification with the guy, or at least with the guy he's playing. Who DIDN'T want to be the genial smart-ass, especially at my age back then. All of the performers with ties to SCTV were maestros of the comic possibilities inherent in the portrayal of glibness, smarmy or know-somethingish or actually knowing or otherwise. Sorry about all the ad-schmutz surrounding the clip. But that's just how much I love it, and want to share it. 

 

Here's some stuff Ramis said in an interview with The Believer in 2006:

I can’t tell you how many people have told me, “When I go to the movies, I don’t want to think.”

BLVR: Does that offend you as a filmmaker?

HR: It offends me as a human being. Why wouldn’t you want to think? What does that mean? Why not just shoot yourself in the fucking head? Or people’ll say that they don’t want to see any negative emotions. They don’t want to see unpleasantness. I did a comedy with Al Franken about his character Stuart Smalley, which was really about alcoholism and addiction and codependency. It had some painful stuff in it. When we showed it to focus groups, some of them actually said, “If I want to see a dysfunctional family, I’ll stay home.”

So I feel an affinity with that, too. There was always a sense with him—as a performer and a writer and a director, as everything—of a guy who "got it." Even with a project as ostensibly retrograde/vulgar as Caddyshack. At the heart of that movie there's an intense, but never self-righteous, hatred of injustice, and a slight but definiite distrust of the fuck-it-all hedonism it poses as a counter to the class problem depicted therein. The thread of his intelligence, his sensibility, his sensitivity, runs through that film and into such an unlikely-seeming object as Analyze This and the refreshingly mordant passion project The Ice Harvest. He was unique, irreplaceable. 

Nostalgia for the rejected

From left: Jonathan Winters, Jimmy Durante, Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Mickey Rooney, and Buddy Hackett. Caesar is the most recent victim of the Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World curse; will Rooney be next?

I suspect that even people who were very, very far from having been alive in 1963 reacted with some suspicion at the narrative recited by Don Cheadle at last September's Emmy Awards show, the gist of which was that John F. Kennedy's assassination in late-ish November of 1963 cast a pall over the United States that was only lifted when the Beatles made their first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in February of 1964. While I think that lay people and historians can certainly agree about some of the pop culture ramifications of the Kennedy assassination—Phil Spector's Christmas album definitely, irrefutably took a hit, likely rendering what was already a dubious mental health picture that much shakier (in an alternate universe in which Kennedy hadn't been shot, would Spector be a free man today? I bet "yes!")—that "Beatles saved America" claim is a real reach. It wasn't until I started researching this post, which I'd merely intended to be about an idea and an emotional resonance, that I put together that this movie, directed by Stanley Kramer and recently released by the Criterion Collection in a remarkable dual-format home video package, happens to land smack-dab in the middle of the fall 1963 timeline of tragedy. 

I don't remember ever having seen It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World in a theater, although I reckon my parents had, maybe without their two kids—I had turned four in the summer of '63, and my sister Kathleen had turned three, and while my parents frequently took us on their drive-in jaunts, I reckon by November of that year it had gotten a little nippy for outdoor movie viewing and in any event it's possible that World didn't even hit the drive-ins on its initial theatrical run. The only reason I suspect my parents saw it was because it was an immensely popular picture that became the third-biggest box office hit of the year, this in spite of having been released almost at year's end and being three hours long. I remember the Kennedy assassination, or, more specifically, I remember the sense of urgency and upset that gripped all the adults in my world when the Kennedy assassination happened. As for World, as I grew older and grew up and grew into movie-obsessiveness, World was something that was always there: something that the generation before mine had identified as an instant classic, and which I came to look at as a not-particularly peculiar white elephant, as well as an emblem of everything that was "square" in cinema. But it's entirely probable (and maybe this is the seed of an idea that I ought to be pitching to a book publisher or something) that World was the nation's gloom cure rather than Beatlemania. Because aside from featuring a boatload of talents that Young Adult America had grown to love from the television (Sid Caesar, Edie Adams, Milton Berle, Phil Silvers, etc., etc.), the movie was also a soak of Old Hollywood comforts ranging from its other leading cast members (Spencer Tracy, Andy Devine,  a pre-My Three Sons William Demarest , also etc. etc.) to its production value to its hypertrophied madcapness and so on. 

Indeed, as someone who claimed to have never cared for the movie for much of his adult life, and who sincerely believed in that claim without ever feeling the need to subject it to much examination, I was slightly surprised when, watching the Blu-ray disc of the movie for the first time back in January, to find it enveloping me in a warmth that was virtually amniotic. Again, I had no memory of ever having seen it whole (I had caught bits and pieces of it on television over the years, my initial reflexive eye-rolling mutating into a snarkily ironic tolerance mutating into an aghast respect for it as a Unique Cinematic Artifact); nor could I really put my finger on the idea of its having held a truly special place in the consciousnesses of the people dearest to me in my childhood. And yet the movie embraced me in the way that has always made me feel the safest and the happiest. This particular emotional state is located in a pre-sleep state in childhood, tucked into my bed, lying maybe on my side, my hands balled up in little non-threatening fists holding tight to the blanket, the sound of the adults downstairs puttering about, chatting and maybe laughing a bit, the "all is well" place that led me gently into a dream state. 

Regardless of the actual "statement" that World aspires to make, in spite of its eccentric cinematic inappositeness (widescreen is only good for shooting snakes and funerals, Fritz Lang said something like that in Contempt; and he obviously had not seen World, else he would have added "car windshields;" Kramer's camera looks into moving car windshields more so than Bela Tarr's camera looks out of them in Satantango, and Tarr's film is twice as long and change), the extradiegetic world it inadvertently presents to the contemporary viewer with enough background to appreciate its signifiers is one in which All Is Right. Spencer Tracy, despite his character's descent into lawlessness, still functions as Spencer Tracy, the gruff but benign face of patriarchy. Buzzing in his periphery (he doesn't actually meet the band until the film's climax) are the kings and queens of comedy of this era, very few of whom made their most significant impacts in the movie realm. But their television fame renders them a little cozier. It scarcely matters if their contributions to the movie are genuinely funny; their presences alone suffice to constitute an axiom, if one is himself or herself in the context to receive it. 

The movie bore me into an innocuous past: a past of giant movie palaces, of Cinerama itself, of the Times Square my mother used to speak of where she and some work colleagues could wander into a picture show and stay in there until midnight and then catch the A to the George Washington Bridge for the bus home. A past I not only had no direct experience of but which I had conceptually rejected with extreme prejudice well before I had even heard my first Velvet Underground LP. I was so beguiled that I watched the entire reconstructed 197-minute roadshow version of the movie less than five days later, this time listening to the commentary from Michael Schlesinger, Mark Evanier, and Paul Scrabo. Full disclosure: Michael is an old and dear friend. He is also, not to tell tales out of school, a few years older than me, and hence at least a little more clearly keyed in to World's cultural moment. I have to say, objectively speaking, the commentary is one of the best I've ever heard, affectionate without being fulsome, and incredibly informative. But it is also suffused with a subtextual yearning for an ostensibly less complicated time, and the kind of movie-love expressed by these fine fellows is very much tied to notions of both show business and showmanship that have less and less purchase in the ever-digitizing landscape.

My new-found appreciation for It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World does not, as far as I know at the moment, signal some kind of move toward an aesthetic reactionaryism. It's not like I'm selling all of my Sonic Youth records or anything, although, wait a minute, the first Sonic Youth record came out, like, 33 years ago.  It probably means nothing, besides signalling the fact that I'm a human being who's aging, and who, as is not unusual, experiences a certain softening of attitude in the face of encroaching mortality, and in the realization that one's hardened attitude didn't really end up accomplishing a whole lot of good, or of significance. And a few other even less flattering things, maybe. 

Kubrick's music

While I mull over whether to compose and post an essay titled "The Woody Allen Plank" (it's not likely, I gotta say), I ask you to check out the movie website To Be (Cont'd), wherein I am engaged in a simulated prose conversation with Matthew Zurcher, a smart young critic, about the use of music in the films of Stanley Kubrick. Matt's first volley is here, my response is here, and two more installments are in the pipeline. Enjoy, I hope. 

Scorsese/DiCaprio/Ziegfeld

On Thursday and Friday of this week, February 13 and 14, the Ziegfeld Theater in Manhattan hosts a unique event: a mini-retrospective of the work of director Martin Scorsese and actor (and sometime co-producer) Leonardo DiCaprio. Thursday's screenings will be The Aviator, The Departed, and the new The Wolf of Wall Street, and the Wolf screening will be preceded by a conversation, moderated by Kent Jones, with DiCaprio, editor Thelma Schoonmaker, and screenwriter Terence Winter. On Friday the films are Shutter Island, Gangs of New York, and again, Wolf. Information and ticket purchase options can be found here. 

I recently completed a book on Robert De Niro that treats his career via ten discrete essays on ten movies; four of the essays are on De Niro/Scorsese collaborations. Certainly were Cahiers du Cinema, my publishers, to commission a similar book on DiCaprio, well, I can't think of one of the five above that I'd leave off of a list of ten. Alfred Hitchcock hit several career highs with Cary Grant and James Stewart, and vice versa, but what's unique about the Scorsese collaborations has something to do with the sequence. De Niro did not begin his work with Scorsese in the position of the director's surrogate: In Mean Streets that role went to Harvey Keitel, as Charlie. Johnny Boy, the De Niro character, was of course Charlie's secret sharer in a sense. With Taxi Driver, New York, New York, and Raging Bull the sense of De Niro speaking through and as Scorsese, or particular aspects of Scorsese, could be palpable; with King of Comedy, Scorsese's most intellectual film up to that point, a mode of detachment/examination sets in. It's only in the got-what-he-wanted-but-lost-what-he-had register of Casino that Scorsese and De Niro found that particular kind of tandem. 

With DiCaprio the synergy can be equally strong but it's used for different ends, and it functions differently. DiCaprio is not Scorsese's surrogate but his instrument. In a sense the character of Amsterdam (as in "new") in Gangs of New York is almost a "My Back Pages" rumination for Scorsese, a young perspective on the old problems he's ever grappled with as an artist. One of the great misunderstandings of Shutter Island is the insistence on reading it as a (failed or successful) puzzle movie, when it's really an emotional exploration as acute and horrific and effective as Raging Bull or the short The Big Shave. If you're lucky enough to be able to see all five of the movies over the two days, what I think will be revealed about Wolf of Wall Street is its semi-perverse expansiveness; the tragic anti-heroes DiCaprio plays in The Aviator and Shutter Island replaced here by an unreliable narrator of  bodacious braggadocio and decidedly shallow emotional affect. It's a virtuoso performance from DiCaprio that's also arguably a minefield of alienation effects. 

Shirley Temple 1928-2014

With Henry Fonda in Fort Apache, John Ford, 1948. Of course I'm going to pick the most obviously auteurist option. (Although I would be remiss to not mention Temple was also a great favorite of Allan Dwan, who directed her in Heidi and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm in the late '30s, and that the feeling was mutual.)

Some wag once remarked that had she never existed, Graham Greene would not have written The Power and the Glory. (Look it up.)  Western and particularly North American culture still goes into regular conniption fits over the ostensible sexualization of the child performer; and it is arguable also that had Temple never existed, Toddlers and Tiaras would not, either. She was an exceptional performer and by all accounts a bright and sane person, and she may have been her most on-the-mark critic when she put herself in the category of Rin-Tin-Tin, not by way of diminishing her own gifts, but in recognizing her precocious persona as a shiny object that could bring cheer to fed-up, downtrodden folks seeking distraction. 

"My Life In Pornography," Part 1: "A Girl's Best Friend"

From the end credits of A Girl's Best Friend, Henri Pachard, 1981

My Life In Pornography is the title of a memoir I completed in the summer of 2012. Its first section, titled "A Girl's Best Friend," about the making of the motion picture of that title, is now published on Thought Catalog. You may read it here. 

The book, which I'd been messing around with in some form or other since the early 2000s, has five parts. The second part, titled " 'Goin' Through The Motions' " is about my relationship with Susan Merchant, later Susan Walsh, and contains a misadventure at a live sex show. Susan, a fine writer and a dear friend, disappeared in 1996; iterations of her story have been told on two different television series, Unsolved Mysteries and Investigation Discovery. The third part is called "Meet Dick Filth" and recounts a trip to Las Vegas with David Foster Wallace, Evan Wright, and Nathaniel Welch to cover the AVN Awards in 1998, and the editorial challenges that ensued a little thereafter. Part Four is "The Connoisseur," about my participation in the motion picture The Girlfriend Experience. It is a different—less jovial—account than the "set diary" published by MUBI in 2009, a piece that had originally been commissioned for GQ by Dan Fierman and ultimately rejected by editor-in-chief Jim Nelson. The fifth and final section is called "Documentation" and wraps everything else in a manner that one reader complained was "too postmodern," but I like it and I'm keeping it as it is until some actual editor talks me out of it, or something. 

Why publish this section now? Well, after seeing the New York Times feature on the DVD label/film distributor Vinegar Syndrome titled "Smut, Refreshed For A New Generation," and  then learning of Williamsburg venue Nitehawk Cinema's "Nighthawk Naughties" series of midnight shows, which kicked off with a screening of Radley Metzger's 1976 The Opening of Misty Beethoven (from which my Erotic Connoisseur quotes a line in GFE), I thought, "Well I've had a pretty good retro-porn tale on tap for a few years now, why just leave it lying around?" Obviously I am also hoping to generate some interest from editors and publishers. But mainly of course I'm doing it for YOU, my readers...well, yeah, actually why else, right? I hope you enjoy it and I do hope the opportunity to get the whole thing out there in dead tree form and/or otherwise arises soon. 

Heroin and creativity

Art Pepper, the jazz saxophonist, wrote, with his wife Laurie Pepper, one of the great books about art and addiction, his memoir Straight Life. After describing his childhood, and his discovery of music, and his development as a musician in the Central Avenue "scene" of the 1940s, and his stint in the Army, Pepper writes, with great frankness, of the sexual compulsions he struggled with as a rising star in jazz. Then he writes about the first time he got high on heroin, and how, in a flash, he realized he had "found God."

"I loved myself, everything about myself, " Pepper writes. "I loved my talent. I had lost the sour taste of the filthy alcohol and the feeling of the bennies and the strips that put chills up and down my spine. I looked at myself in the mirror and I looked at Sheila"—Sheila Harris, the singer who was getting Pepper high—"and I looked at the few remaining lines of heroin and I took the dollar bill and horned the rest of them down. I said, 'This is it. This is the only answer for me. If this is what it takes, then this is what I'm going to do, whatever dues I have to pay...' And then I knew that I would get busted and I knew that I would go to prison and that I wouldn't be weak; I wouldn't be an informer like all the phonies, the no-account, the nonreal, the zero people that roam around, the scum that slither out from under rocks, the people that destroyed music, that destroyed this country, that destroyed the world, the rotten, fucking, lousy people that for their own little ends—the black power people, the sickening, stinking motherfuckers that play on the fact that they're black, and all this fucking shit that happened later on—the rotten, no-account, filthy women that have no feling for anything; they have no love for anyone; they don't know what love is; they are shallow hulls of nothingness—the whole group of rotten people that have nothing to offer, that are nothing, never will be anything, never were intending to be anything." 

In Pepper's unstuck-in-time rant of resentment (the actual scene is set in 1950, but his voice goes ahead to his stint in prison, and speaks to a number of attitudes he was still coming to terms with as he was composing the book) will of course remind one of Lou Reed's song "Heroin," in which the protagonist,  asserting his intention to "nullify [his] life," sneers at "you sweet girls with your sweet talk," and celebrates the fact that "when the smack begins to flow/then I really don't care anymore/abouts all the Jim-Jims in this town/and everybody puttin' everybody else down/and all the politicians making crazy sounds/and all the dead bodies piled up in mounds." The key phrase is "really don't care" and the key word is "really." The ecstasy of heroin, if ecstasy it in fact is, is the ecstasy of genuine indifference. You REALLY just don't care. And really not caring can seem like an exceptional blessing to people of exceptional sensitivity. Hell, to people of average sensitivity, even. Who knows. 

Arguably, indifference does not enhance creativity; it shuts out creativity. True indifference creates the craving for more true indifference, because giving a shit about anything, you've figured out once you've properly numbed yourself, is just too fucking painful as it turns out. Who needs it? I turn to Pepper again: "All I can say is, at that moment I saw that I'd found peace of mind. Synthetically produced, but after what I'd been through and all the things I'd done, to trade that misery for total happiness—that was it, you know, that was it. I realized it. I realized that from that moment on I would be, if you want to use the word, a junkie. That's the word they still use. That is what I became at that moment. That's what I practiced; and that's what I still am. And that's what I will die as—a junkie." 

And Pepper did die, in 1982, a junkie who had been up and down and up again and who created some great music along the way; and he created that music, it's pretty clear, in spite of being a junkie. Art Pepper Meets The Rhythm Section, with Paul Chambers and Red Garland, a milestone of hard bop recorded in 1957, made by a strung-out Pepper who hadn't picked up a sax in six months and whose instrument had old dried cork stuck in its neck. And so on. The book has plenty of such stories, and it ends on a particularly good one, in which Pepper recounts being challenged to a cutting session by the great altoist Sonny Stitt on a bandstand in San Francisco. Stitt, Pepper writes, "did everything that could be done on a saxaphone, everything you could play, as much as Charlie Parker could have played if he'd been there. Then he stopped. And he looked at me. Gave me one of those looks. 'All right suckah, your turn.'"

"And it's my job; it's my gig," Pepper writes. "I was strung out. I was hooked. I was having a hassle with my wife, Diane, who'd threatened to kill herself in our hotel room next door. I had marks on my arm. I thought there were narcs in the club, and all of a sudden I realized it was me. He'd done all those things, and now I had to put up or shut up or get off or forget it or quit or kill myself or do something." He concludes: "I forgot everything, and everything came out. I played way over my head. I played completely different than he did. I searched and found my own way, and what I said reached the people. I played myself, and I knew I was right, and the people loved it, and they felt it. I blew and I blew, and when I finally finished I was shaking all over; my heart was pounding; I was soaked in sweat, and the people were screaming, the people were clapping, and I looked at Sonny, but I just kind of nodded, and he went, 'All right.' And that was it. That's what it's all about." 

"I was given a gift. I was given a gift in a lot of ways," Pepper writes at the beginning of this section of the book. "I'm one of those people, I knew it was there. All I had to do was reach for it, just do it." Heroin creates nothing; rather, it obliterates, among other things, the inclination to reach for anything, except more heroin.

I only tried the drug once myself. It was 1993 or 4 or so.  I was hanging out at Sally's Hideaway, the old drag bar on 43rd Street, the old ballroom of the Carter Hotel—it was later transformed into The City, the nightclub where that schmuck Sean Combs got into his gun trouble, and I don't know what it is now—and I was in the company of a charming preoperative transsexual who went by the name of Christina Piaget, and she was undergoing some sort of personal paroxysm of self-disgust that ended with her spoken resolve to never do heroin again, and handing over to me a small glassine envelope containing the substance, and then quitting the venue. Soon as she was out of sight I scurried to the first available lavatory stall and hoovered it up, and I have to say that my direct experience of it was pretty much as Pepper describes. Although my articulation of delight was decidedly more banal: more along the lines of "Wow, this is the greatest thing ever!" And of course my subsequent resolve was a different: "Good thing I don't know where Christina got this, because if I did I'd be in a cab on my way there now and I'd never come back." And for a good decade and change after, I got a lot of venal self-congratulatory personal mileage out of the fact that I hadn't been "stupid" enough to become addicted to heroin. It's kind of funny. But not really. 

Philip Seymour Hoffman, 1967-2014

Above, in Magnolia, Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999. 

This one hurts particularly badly for a variety of reasons. My thoughts and prayers are with him, his family, and his family of collaborators, who I know cherished him, and will cherish him, always.