Some Came Running

Orson Welles's Passion Play

"Let's take a subject of great simplicity, some phase of life in this great country and make it screamingly funny to an amazed and happily unsettled world." Orson Welles wrote to his schoolmaster and mentor, Roger Hill, in the summer of 1932. "Even as I write this an idea for a half-opera/half-revue pops on the horizon. A history of America in, let's say, ten scenes! Discovery, Revolution, Pioneering, Abolition, Civil War, Suffrage, Prohibition, Bootlegging, Advertising, The Newspaper Business — Whoa! There's an idea! The newspaper business as an operetta! A Front Page Gershwin only more so." He was about 17 at the time. Let it never be said that the kid lacked for ambition. One supposes he thought it would be fun...to write an operetta...about a newspaper. 

If the creative fervor and precocity here is not impressive enough, it should be noted that he wrote those words even as he was failing to sell an already-written theater piece that he and Hill had collaborated on, Marching Song, an abolition play about John Brown, one that fully acknowledges Brown's fanaticism but also is pretty blunt in its position that extremism in defense of liberty is at most a minor vice. Last year Rowman and Littlefield published Marching Song in a splendid, illuminating edition edited by Todd Tarbox, who's also responsible for the superb Orson Welles and Roger Hill: A Friendship In Three Acts. 

I can't recommend the book highly enough. The play itself is a fascinating piece of work, perhaps classifiable as juvenilia but marked by a passion and commitment that's remarkable in an artist of any age. Welles was a special kind of humanist, one who knew that idealism without works is dead. Hence his portrayal of Brown. Hence his 1946 radio addresses on Isaac Woodard, Jr., which are reproduced in the copious and sensitive supporting materials buttressing the play at both ends of the volume. 

What struck me most in the play, though, was the elaborate care with which Welles (with Hill) described the work's characters. I don't read many contemporary plays and it's been a while since I looked into drama from the first half of the 20th century, but I'm not sure if I did that I'd come across anything much like the description, say, of Martha Evelyn Brown, the wife of one of John Brown's sons, Oliver: 

The front door in the parlor opens and Martha comes in. She's a truly beautiful girl with gold-brown hair and serious baby-wide blue0grey eyes. She is childishly earnest, and erratic as a child in moods and emotions. There is something puckish and youthfully impish about her, but she lacks Annie's mature sense of humor and perspective. Born in the shadow of tragedy, despite her breezy manner, she is a little girl trying to be grown up, trying to look and act like a wife, a woman of responsibilities. Her big questioning eyes mirror the wonder and bewilderment that is in her soul. In her passionate and undisciplined heart, she loves her husband, Oliver, deeply, almost wildly, but she also loves Edwin Cook and many others. There is something of the real mother, the essential mother impulse, beating in that little child heart of hers. Now, she is loaded with parcels. She kicks the door shut.

Welles' own earnestness, while not quite childlike, is kind of charming in the writing here. Whatever made him more hard-nosed (and it could well have been Herman Mankiewicz himself to an extent), a balance of cynicism and lyricism not evidenced in this early drama was clearly useful for Kane. 

Another feature that impresses is Welles' already spectacular grasp of stagecraft. The book includes a number of sketches he made for a potential production of the play, one of which I reproduce below: 

Tarbox's biographical preface, the copious Epilogue, and Simon Callow's brief but definitely not-phoned-in introduction round the book out. Like A Friendship In Three Acts, it's absolutely essential Wellesiana. 

Talking to film students about "Green Book"

I teach two recitation sections for a “Language of Film” class at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and this week the main lecturer was screening Charles Burnett’s landmark 1977 debut feature Killer of Sheep, which he was using as an example of personal storytelling. For my 75-minute recitation section I thought I’d extrapolate on another aspect of Burnett’s work by screening sections of his third feature, To Sleep With Anger (just now available in a great Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection), the opening of Julie Dash’s 1991 Daughters of the Dusk, and the phantasmagoric “praise the griot” motorcade/parade scene from Djibril Diop Mambéty’s 1973 Touki Bouki. My class is not about cultural studies or cultural difference per se, but I chose these clips to demonstrate, minimally, a thesis I have concerning modes of cinematic storytelling in what I’ll call “black film.”

This would be taking place less than a week after Green Book had won the Best Picture Oscar, an event I did not actually see take place because my wife and I don’t watch the Oscars. We got into this habit in 2013, when we were vacationing in Iceland as that year’s ceremonies were happening, and we opted not to stay up to watch. We were so spiritually refreshed at not having seen the thing we decided that, barring a genuine rooting interest or something like it, we’d make this a new tradition. Anyway.

Several of my students had previously put forward some opinions and/or speculations about Green Book. It is a film not much liked by the students who’ve seen it, and viewed with suspicion by many who have not. The students in my class are largely white; more than a few are Asian-American, a couple are Asian, and about a half a dozen are African American.

I was walking to class and I was thinking about what to say about the movie if the subject came up. It occurred to me that one of the most objectionable things about it is that it extols the virtues of peace love and understanding from within an exclusively white cultural space. That is, it says “we can and should live together, on my cultural terms.” After winning the Oscar, one of the film’s producers, Jim Burke, vented some frustration to Sharon Waxman of The Wrap: “I can’t change the fact that I was born white.” This remarkable statement raises several fascinating questions, including “Would you, if you could?” But it also lays bare the mode of the film’s construction: if it’s building a bridge, it’s building it on Burke’s terms. “Can white people have or not have a point of view on racial inequality?” Burke then sputtered.

And there you have it. Just as in Joseph Mankiewicz’s remarkable, underrated 1950 film No Way Out, it all boils down to what the born-white person is EXTENDING to the black person. (The picture remains one of the most bullshit-free pictures about race relations made by a white American director.) At the end of Green Book the Don Shirley character enjoys the bounty of a white working class Italian American Christmas by invitation.

Over and over I’ve seen white folks who otherwise hold all sorts of interesting opinions about black folks call Green Book a “feel good” movie. Yes. Sure. You feel good. About yourself. Without having done anything. Without having gained, or try to gain, any knowledge of black culture. Instead, you’ve had an easy laugh at a mouthy mook telling a stuck-up black guy that the black guy doesn’t know enough about HIS OWN culture. Well don’t that just beat all.

I’ve seen some arguments that strongly implied that had the film been more accurate in its depiction of Don Shirley, it could not have made its important brotherhood points as strongly. In which case it’s only fair to ask, “Well, which points are you talking about?”  Because the film depicts Shirley in such a way as to allow the character Tony Lip to lecture the character Don Shirley about not knowing the cultural product of his own people. Whereas the actual, historical Don Shirley, in 1962, made an important recording called Piano Arrangements Of Spirituals and would subsequently record, in 1969, The Gospel According To Don Shirley.

All this came up in my discussions during the two sessions, and something came to my mind as these conversations were going on. Most of my students were maybe in second grade in 2007, when Bill O’Reilly made his visit to Sylvia’s in Harlem, and on his radio show marveled  “There wasn't one person in Sylvia's who was screaming, 'M-Fer, I want more iced tea.' […] [I]t was like going into an Italian restaurant in an all-white suburb in the sense of people were sitting there, and they were ordering and having fun. And there wasn't any kind of craziness at all." It occurred to me that Green Book is in a sense a milder iteration of O’Reilly’s racialist damage. This analogy, once I explained to the kids who Bill O’Reilly actually was —time really does fly — did not seem particularly outrageous to them.

But still. It’s worth noting that Octavia Spencer is also a producer of the movie. And that the movie has elicited warm, genuine, intelligent praise from some African-Americans. I told one of the classes that Harry Belafonte’s praise for the film threw me for a loop. Particularly because Belafonte is a crucial presence in a sequence in BlacKkKlansman which contrasts an African American cultural space (a consciousness-raising meeting in which Belafonte’s character gives a traumatic accounting of a lynching) and a white cultural space (a Ku Klux Klan initiation).       

At this, one of my students raised her hand and said “Harry Belafonte has been wrong before.”

Sartre, Kafka, Welles

"I'm The Jewish Question, by Jean-Paul Sartre. Delighted to meet you." Yvonne Blake (who was also the assistant art director on the film) in François Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451, 1966

In October of 1944, a few months after the liberation of France, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote short book called Réflexions sur la Question Juive. Its first English translations were titled The Jewish Question—it is one of the living books that announce themselves at the end of Truffaut’s 1966 adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. The currently available English translation has been retitled Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate.

Like much of Sartre, this work is noticeably imperfect, but what flashes of genius it contains are brilliant indeed, and remain pertinent. One passage that struck me is this: “Today these Jews whom the Germans did not deport or murder are coming back to their homes. Many were among the first members of the Resistance; others had sons or cousins in Leclerc’s army. Now all France rejoices and fraternizes in the streets; social conflict seems temporarily forgotten; the newspapers devote whole columns to stories of prisoners of war and deportees. Do we say anything about the Jews? Do we give a thought to those who died in the gas chambers at Lublin? Not a word. Not a line in the newspapers. That is because we must not irritate the anti-Semites; more than ever we need unity. Well-meaning journalists will tell you: ‘In the interest of the Jews themselves, it would not do to talk too much about them just now.’ For four years French society has lived without them; it is just as well not to emphasize too vigorously the fact that they have reappeared.”

As I said, Sartre wrote this in October of 1944. At that point in time Lublin was the only death camp the Allies had found. By the time Orson Welles began work on The Stranger, in the fall of 1945, the other camps had become known to the world. Welles had been cast in the film in the role of Hans Kindler, a fleeing Nazi war criminal (by the movie’s lights, a kind of wunderkind of genocide, a slightly ironic position in which to place Welles in a Hollywood picture) and was eventually persuaded to direct it as well. In the second volume of his protean Welles biography, Simon Callow writes “[t]he degree of [Welles’] input into the script has never been clearly determined, though it seems almost certain that he must have been responsible for the speeches in which Rankin/Kindler analyzes the nature of the Nazi quest, so familiar are they in theme and cadence to Welles’ own speeches, articles and columns.” “Rankin” is the alias Kindler has taken in America; another way this true believer goes undercover is to pretend to be not just thoroughly anti-Nazi, but anti-German. One of his speeches occurs at a dinner scene; Edward G. Robinson’s secret agent, posing as an antiques maven, is dining with Rankin/Kindler, Kindler’s new bride, played by Loretta Young, and her father and teen brother. The scene has many pleasures, one of them being Loretta Young pronouncing the word “Carthaginian,” it is most notable for the way the real Kindler reveals himself to Robinson’s character. Growing increasingly heated in anti-Teutonic fervor (and Callow is right; the words and the way Welles pronounces them are kind of like an inverted, zealous variant of Harry Lime’s “cuckoo clock” speech in The Third Man), Kindler says: “The basic principles of equality and freedom never have and never will take root in Germany. The will to freedom has been voiced in every other tongue. ‘All men are created equal,’ ‘Liberté egalité fraternité,’ but, in German…”

Kindler’s eager young brother-in-law, played by a very appealing Richard Long, butts in:

“There’s Marx. The proletarians unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains…”

“But Marx wasn’t a German. Marx was a Jew,” Kindler responds, almost instantaneously, calm but definite. This differentiation is what gives away Kindler to Robinson’s character. It is also a staggering dramatic manifestation of anti-Semitic thought, which Sartre dissects with incredible vigor in his own book: You’re not THIS, you are THAT, a Jew.

Elsewhere in Sartre, he writes, of the frustrations the Jew experiences in French society: “…it seems to him at one and the same time that his efforts are always crowned with success—for he knows the astonishing successes of his race—and that a curse has made them empty, for he will never acquire the security enjoyed by the most humble Christian.” Sartre continues; “This is perhaps one of the meanings of The Trial by the Jew, Kafka. Like the hero of that novel, the Jew is engaged in a long trial. He does not know his judges, scarcely even his lawyers; he does not know what he is charged with, yet he knows he is considered guilty; judgment is continually put off—for a week, two weeks—he takes advantage of these to prove his position in a thousand ways, but every precaution taken at random pushes him a little deeper into guilt. His external situation may appear brilliant, but the interminable trial invisibly wastes him away, and it happens sometimes, as in the novel, that men seize him, carry him off on the pretense that he has lost his case, and murder him in some vague area of the suburbs.”

Anthony Perkins, Orson Welles, and Max Haufler in The Trial, Welles, 1963

Orson Welles made a film of Kafka’s The Trial in the early ‘60s. Like The Stranger, it was not a project of his own conception. The picture was brought to him by the producer Alexander Salkind, and while the project was plagued by intense money problems it turned out to be one of the very few productions up until that point on which Welles enjoyed complete artistic autonomy right down to the release cut. Setting the story in a stark, black-and-white, completely commerce-and-media-free version of then-contemporary Europe, Welles deracinates the story in particular by casting Anthony Perkins in the role of Josef K. I have not been able to dig up anything in my Welles library to suggest that Welles located a particular kind of otherness in Perkins’ being a thoroughly closeted gay man. Callow addresses the situation thusly: “Perkins’ performance—inherently neurotic, though not notably anxious—does indeed suggest a man with a secret (not much acting called for there).” Perkins’ all-American mode of nervousness suggests Edgar Allan Poe more than Kafka and of course it also suggests Alfred Hitchcock. One thing it never suggests is Jewishness.

And yet Welles, in interviews years after making the film, discusses The Trial in terms of Kafka’s Jewishness. In an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, explaining why he tampered with the ending of the book, Welles extrapolates: “In the end of the book he lies down there and they kill him. I don’t think Kafka could have stood for that after the deaths of six million Jews. That terrible fact occurred after the writing of The Trial and I think it made Kafka’s ending impossible. If you conceive of K as a Jew, as I did. I don’t mean as a Jewish Jew, but as a non-Christian. It just made it morally impossible for me to see a man who might even possibly be taken by the audience for a Jew lying down and allowing himself to be killed that way.”

Is that true? We have no way of knowing. People on social media today frequently cite a quote from Kafka about there being an infinite amount of hope—but not for us. The quote’s source is a statement he made to his friend and biographer Max Brod, translated in 1947 as “Plenty of hope—for God—no end of hope—but not for us.” More reliable, perhaps, is the aphorism: “In the struggle between yourself and the world, back the world.” Welles’ argument with Kafka is summed up by Callow thusly: “man is guilty but mankind is not doomed.” Welles’ confusion concerning Kafka has theological roots, as well: “K is not metaphysically guilty at birth as conceived by Kafka, since Kafka was a Jew. The idea of guilt at birth is Christian,” he said to Bogdanovich.

Sartre insists: “The disquietude of the Jew is not metaphysical, it is social.” In Welles’ film, the anxiety is not social as such, it’s free-floating, often hovering between the stools of the metaphysical and the erotic, as Perkins’ Josef K is befuddled in turn by Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider, and Elsa Martinelli. Andrew Sarris called The Trial “the most hateful, the most repellent, and the most perverted film ever made,” but the movie’s particular feel comes from Welles’ specifically American form of optimism abrading Kafka’s pessimism. Which, as Sartre teaches us, was far less abstract than we sometimes like to make it. And as visually beautiful and thrilling and unsettling as Welles’ movie is, one constantly senses that it is a work that is tortuously uncertain of what it wants to mean. This is never in doubt, I think, when reading Kafka.

In the prologue to the film proper, Welles observes of Kafka’s novel: “It has been said that the logic of this story is the logic of a dream. Of a nightmare.” Welles’ film is best seen as the filmmaker’s own dream/nightmare of Kafka. While I would not go so far as to say that a work of art palpably changes with the times, the times compel us to see works of art differently. Today’s circumstance does not compel a new reading of Welles’ Trial, but it does demand that we adopt Sartre’s reading of Kafka.

Dropping The Ball With Olivia De Havilland

In the late summer of 2004, I had the great honor of being invited to interview Olivia De Havilland for Premiere. We spent a little over an hour and a half in a suite at The Pierre in Manhattan, and out discussion ranged over a large number of points in her career and life, not including her musical number in Thank Your Lucky Stars or her strained relations with her sister, Joan Fontaine. And of course Gone With The Wind came up. I no longer have a transcript of the interview, but I do have the finished article. I structured the piece so that my questions were not included (I rather enjoy this anachronistic practice, particularly when more and more these days when I read interviews with performers and directors the questions are longer, more tortured, and more self-important than the answers), and so, Miss De Havilland's thoughts about the movie appear as below, in the article under a subhead of the film's title. 

The movie has universal appeal for not only individuals but for whole nations. I got letters from every country in the worlds. All countries have experienced war and defeat. And survival. They can identify with that film for, I think, that reason. Whole populations know what it’s like to flee. And then of course individuals, their lives go through great crises and events and disappointments and worse than that.

The film was beautifully cast. It’s a most remarkable job of casting. Vivien, especially. Perfect, perfect, perfect. Clark was perfect, perfect. Prissy [Butterfly McQueen] was perfect. All of the others.

It was an immense responsibility for the different actors. Especially for Clark. Because he had to match in the film the readers’ impression, image, of Rhett Butler. And his career was at stake. And, well—he matched the image, didn’t he?

I just loved the character of Melanie. And had wonderful help, both from George Cukor and from [director] Victor Fleming in developing the character. She was such a loving person. Of course, to play a loving person well, you become loving. And you become happy. I think loving people are happy people. Scarlett did not have that happiness. She had other emotions, but I don’t think she had happiness. Melanie did. So she was a beloved character and one that blessed me during those six months of playing her. 

As I mentioned, I don't have the transcript so I can't tell you what my question was, but I still do recall, vividly, how disarmed and surprised I was when she began talking about the film from the perspective of countries/populations experiencing war and defeat. And I thought, in all honesty, that her perspective was interesting and legitimate, and it helped me look in the movie in a new way, because for a very long time I considered it a movie about how awesome plantations were, and as awesome as they looked in the film, designed as they were by the great William Cameron Menzies, I took some exception to that view. 

And of course Gone With The Wind is about more than how awesome plantations were, and it is about what De Havilland was talking about, and I was happy to, when I brought up the film, let her take the conversational reins. I declined to interject, "But racism!"

One the one hand, this arguably makes me a bad journalist. On the other hand, why should I, in the context of an interview meant to constitute a career retrospective, hold De Havilland responsible, or answerable, for what was/is in fact a systemic concern? I mean, quite a few of the people responsible for adapting Margaret Mitchell's Pulitzer-Prize-winning (yes it did!) novel to the screen were not un-progressive in their politics, at least for their time. David O. Selznick might have been a garden-variety Yankee racist in his everyday life but he did not advocate slavery. George Cukor was a gay man. The racial politics of both the film itself and the people who made it are delved into in revelatory detail in a 1999 Atlantic article by Leonard J. Leff that I recommend highly. 

"I, for one, have no desire to produce any anti-Negro film," Leff quotes Selznick, in a memo to screenwriter Sidney Howard. I have no doubt that Selznick was sincere. But, not to be a kind of socio/psychotherapist, that statement also underscores how poorly Selznick understood whatever racism he himself harbored. Because there's no doubt that Gone With The Wind is a racist film. It doesn't merely put forth "unfortunate racial attitudes" (and what a very caucasian phrase that is), racism is in its DNA. It is not a difficult point to understand. Try a thought experiment: were you to undertake a remake of Gone With The Wind that would expunge the material of its racist content, how would you go about doing it? Well, easy, right: first thing you'd do is take it out of the antebellum South. Oh wait. 

 As Claudia Rankine points out in a recent New York Times Magazine essay, "Anti-black racism is in the culture. It’s in our laws, in our advertisements, in our friendships, in our segregated cities, in our schools, in our Congress, in our scientific experiments, in our language, on the Internet, in our bodies no matter our race, in our communities and, perhaps most devastatingly, in our justice system." It is quite explicitly on display throughout Gone With The Wind, in ways, as Leff's article demonstrates, that its filmmakers were somehow completely unaware of. But to acknowledge that it's a racist film makes many, many people uncomfortable. Which one could take as an indication of the way racism is so deeply ingrained in the white American character. I allow that people can have a meaningful relationship with Gone With The Wind either in spite of or without acknowledging its racism. But to use weasel phrases like "unfortunate racial attitudes" instead of "racism" is pure nonsense. 

I bring all this up, of course, because my friend Lou Lumenick recently turned some heads with his brief essay in the New York Post suggesting that Gone With The Wind ought not enjoy pop culture pantheon privilege. Reading the piece now, it looks quite a bit milder than its many detractors are making it out to be; in the time-tested tradition of Salon think pieces, it asks why "we" continue to embrace GWTW while deploring the Confederate flag. And then it says "maybe" the movie's best off relegated to museums rather than regular theaters for its 75th anniversary. And for that "maybe" Lou gets called a Nazi! Whoa!

I actually don't agree entirely with Lou. And I've long pondered the fact that in some corners Gone With The Wind gets the conventional-wisdom cultural pass that Birth Of A Nation doesn't, merely on the unstated grounds that GWTW's racism is arguably less virulent/more "benign" than Nation's. How virulent does your racism have to be before you recognize it as racism, I wonder? Because, you know,  Hattie McDaniels' Mammie turned out to be the best friend Scarlett ever really had, even if Scarlett was too Scarletty to know it. As if Mammie had any choice in the matter of her association with Scarlett. "Unfortunate," you betcha. 

So one may well be befuddles by the fact that cultural attitudes with respect to Gone With The Wind haven't caught up with those on Nation, but the answer to the question it brings up should be blindingly obvious: The ostensible Post-Racial Society is a contrivance. 

And I wasn't going to make Olivia De Havilland my poster child for that. Premiere wasn't The New Inquiry. As for the current Wind concern, I'm not really with what people think Lou said. I think it should be shown everywhere that people want to see it.  I think the secretive, stubborn self-censorship that Disney executes on its objectionable content of past years is craven and shameful and I much prefer Warners' practice of putting an informative disclaimer at the front of the content in question. That said, there has to be a cast of mind in which one can admire Gone With The Wind's portrayals of suffering, and of goodness, and of petulance, and of perseverance, while acknowledging, with eyes wide open, that the engine on which its story runs is at least partially powered by a particular kind of hatred. 

Growing Up Lee

Joseph Failla, my movie-going pal from the late 1960s on, and a sometime DVD reviewer for Premiere back in the early aughts, wrote me with some reminiscences and observations on the late Christopher Lee, which I reproduce below: 

It was my mother who first introduced me to the world of Christopher Lee when she bought me the Famous Films issue #2, CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN / HORROR OF DRACULA magazine, which featured both Hammer classics in pictorial form. Except for the cover art, all the pics used were in black and white, the magazine did, however, get across the unique tone of the films. Already having a background in Karloff and Lugosi, I knew (so to speak), I wasn't in Kansas anymore. It thrilled me to read a film in comic book form, in a sense this  became my first keepsake of an actual movie.

 

And this brought me into the orbit of Christopher Lee, who would have such a presence outside the confines of horror and fantasy that when the time came for me to widen my view into other genres, Lee was still there in full force. Although I was never quite able to separate him from the humble Hammer productions where I first learned of him, he remained a recognizable, charismatic and enduring connection to my own youth as my movie appreciation and understanding continued to grow.

 

To explain the longevity of my relationship with Lee and his films, the first time I saw Lee onscreen in a theatre was in DR. TERROR'S HOUSE OF HORRORS in 1964. The first time I saw HORROR OF DRACULA, it was on Super 8 black and white film, projected on a sheet in a friend's garage, even though it was only snippets of the film's highlights, it was extremely exciting to experience in any form regardless. It would be another 30 years before I could see a 35mm print with slightly faded color, projected properly in a legitimate theater.

 

While HORROR OF DRACULA cannot be beat for shocks, tautness, and the teaming of Lee with Peter Cushing, I may actually prefer DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE as my favorite Lee Dracula film since it's the most religious of the series, making the struggle between good and evil even more profound.

 

Lee was the best of all possible Fu Manchus in some of the oddest films made about the character. 

 

He was a great Bond villain in one of the weakest Bond films. Which led to him saying about playing a Bond villain, his only regret was "you can only do it once". 

 

A favorite Lee performance was a rare turn as the hero battling sin and depravity in THE DEVIL RIDES OUT, a wonderful flip side second feature with HORROR HOTEL, starring Lee as his own devil worshipping "opposite number" .

 

His expert swordsmanship was on full display in Lester's THREE and FOUR MUSKETEERS. It was here he seemed to inherit the same fate of Basil Rathbone, who also could slice up any of his fellow performers but was not allowed to win any of his screen sword scuffles as we could not ask for a more effective villain.

 

One of the great strengths of Jackson's Rings Trilogy of films is the casting, even down to the smallest of roles. But no actor was made better use of in this series than Lee himself. He was a most believable practitioner of the black arts, having demonstrated an affinity for such mischief in a host of prior films setting the foundation for a evil film persona in stone.

 

Perhaps now his involvement in the STAR WARS prequels will garner a little more respect for the much disliked recent series of chapters. I for one couldn't have been happier to see Lee join the ranks of STAR WARS in any capacity but his Count Dooku, while recalling his gothic villainy, complete with cape and castle bring more of a sense of symmetry and coming full circle with the original trilogy than any other element I could imagine. Although belated, Lee would now join his former screen partner Peter Cushing once again as a participating co-star, at least in spirit. 

Martin Amis on "Goodfellas"

Me, in my living room, holding up the October 1997 issue of Premiere. 

The actual 25th anniversary of the U.S. release of Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas isn't until September, but already it is being commemorated; there was a special screening at the Robert De Niro-spearheaded Tribeca Film Festival, a newly mastered Blu-ray disc is out (haven't watched yet; I've been busy), and my proposal for a making-of book on the movie was passed on by at least a dozen publishers in the past year. And I guess others are preparing their own appreciations, and starting on their research; hence, a post last night on Twitter from New York Post film critic Kyle Smith, asking "Where oh where can I get a copy of the Martin Amis essay on Goodfellas," and calling me out by name, as if I were perhaps some kind of underground Premiere archivist. 

Well. I did commission the Amis piece, for the 10th Anniversary special issue of Premiere (cover stars were Mel Gibson, Jodie Foster, and Kevin Costner, deemed "The New Visionaries," well that didn't exactly pan out), and I edited said piece (actually not so much—I made one suggestion for an amendation, via fax, to Amis' agency, and got back a fax from M.A. telling me to go ahead with it—the assent did contain a hint of audible eyeroll as I recall—and then I didn't even make the change I had proposed, but at least if I wanted to I could say I had done something), and I do have the issue in my not insubstantial but hardly complete personal archive of Premiere print editions. 

The nearly 20-year print run of the magazine has never been digitized, and it's tiring to retell the story of why that's the case, and of how much I despise the individual who I hold responsible for the whole thing, etcetera. Every now and then I'll be looking for an old Premiere piece—one of my own, one of somebody else's; turns out it was a pretty good magazine overall, and a useful historical research resource—and I'll find that some enterprising soul with a lot of time on his or her hands has input the article (badly, in many cases, but that's a side hazard of amateurism in nearly every sense), which is considerate. Possibly not exactly legal but good God it's the Internet. 

The question of who actually has the rights to digitize the print run of Premiere is not one that I can answer, although I've sometimes thought about a crowd-funding campaign to do it myself. If such a thing ever got off the ground, inevitably someone would approach me and say, "You can't do that," which might be initially unpleasant but would also force the issue: shit would get sorted. 

In any event, I was up at around six this morning, and Amis' piece is pretty short (the David Foster Wallace piece on Terminator 2 that found a home in a U.K. bookstore house organ and is reprinted in Both Flesh And Not had originally been commissioned for this 10th Anniversary feature package, "10 Movies That Defined Our Decade" [cover line: "10 Movies That Rocked Our World"], but Dave, as was his wont, brought it in at WAY over the three-to-five-hundred-word length that our format for the package dictated, so we agreed to drop it rather than shoehorn it in, and Christopher Buckley ended up with the T2 piece which was aptly brief and crisp; Amis' essay is, hmm, let's see here, a hair under 500 words), so I figured rather than go out to Kinko's or something and scan a PDF of the thing, I'd just input it myself and put it up on my poor and often content-starved blog. So here it is. Thanks for the bug in my ear, Kyle Smith, and thanks to my now-neighbor Martin Amis. And apologies, maybe, to the Andrew Wylie Agency. 

It’s hardly news to say that Francis Ford Coppola made three movies about the mob. They form an obvious trilogy, purchasable in a video three-pack. Rather less obviously, Martin Scorsese is responsible for a mob trilogy too. The films are Raging Bull, Goodfellas, and Casino—with Mean Streets as a kind of poetic preamble or portent. 

Mario Puzo’s The Godfather is essentially trash: gripping trash, but still trash. In Coppola’s hands, the Puzo novel is, so to speak, rewritten by Nabokov, and the penny dreadful becomes an operatic masterpiece. The elevation is drastic, and brilliant, but it isn’t quite seamless. Puzo was cowriter on all three pictures, and his vulgar romanticism remains a contaminant. Although Coppola’s moral critique is both intelligent and severe, a laxity in the script accidentally allows the Corleones to be taken at their own evaluation. These men are not, or not simply, the murderous whores of Mammon; they also owe allegiance to a Puzoan fritto misto of honor, blood, uxoriousness, church attendance, and Sicily. In real life, of course, the mob had long abandoned such marginalia. After the Godfather craze, ludicrously, obeisances came back into gangster fashion, as postmodern accessories.

Somewhere along the way, Martin Scorsese, or his subconscious, made a crucial decision; his trilogy is nonfiction, based on first-person accounts. “True crime,” as a form, always entails a certain trade-off. You gain in authenticity, but you cannot rearrange the narrative to give it artistic cohesion, artistic shape. You are left with happenstance and inadvertence—with the messiness, the loose ends and false leads, that attend any human life. Scorsese, however, finesses the difficulty. His visual logic provides a guideline through the chaos. And for him, anyway, the mess is the message.

According to Nabokov, the artist doesn’t punish the gangster merely by staging his downfall—a “tiptoeing conspirator,” say, with his cocked handgun. The artist punishes the gangster through ridicule. In Goodfellas the antiheroes blunder through a terrible anticomedy of shootings and beatings, of stabbings and stompings, their lives an unexamined nightmare of contingency. Coppola portrays the mob as a trade union of warrior capitalists. Scorsese’s hoods are sociopaths trapped in a category mistake. And they don’t even get the joke. 

Scorsese has a literary model: Kafka. The influence is most obvious in After Hours, in which Kafka is explicitly quoted, but it also sustains Scorsese’s vision of the underworld. Nothing could be more Kafkaesque than the central tenet of mob life, which runs as follows: This man is your lifelong friend, but he may want to kill you for money; you have to understand that; that is “this thing of ours.” In its dealings with the cosa nostra, Scorsese’s camerawork displays all its inimitable edginess and urgency; but we shouldn’t overlook the director’s steely moral wit. His goons see mob culture as a vibrant alternative to the schmuckville of 9-to-5. Scorsese insists, however, that they are money’s slaves and money’s fools. And he has them bang to rights. 

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. 

Jean-Luc Godard, 83 today

Godard in Eric Rohmer's Le Signe du Lion, 1959, when he was about 30.

"The public is neither stupid nor intelligent. No one knows what it is. Sometimes it surprises, usually it disappoints. One can't count on it. In one way this is a good thing. In any case it is changing. The old average cinema audience has become the television audience. The cinema audience has divided in two: those who go at the week-end, and those who seek film out. When producers talk to me about audiences, I tell them: 'I know what they're like because I go to all sorts of cinemas and I pay for my seat; you never go anywhere, you don't know what's happening.'"—Godard, in an interview with Cahiers du Cinema, December 1962.  

One of the things I learned during the recent Film Society of Lincoln Center Godard retrospective is that condemnations of late Godard running run across lines of "we prefer your earlier cooler films" are, while perhaps tenable on the ultimately utterly banal grounds of individual taste, built on an essential fallacy. There is no divisible Godard. The idea that you can have A bout de souffle and shrug off Le vent d'est is convenient and comfortable but ultimately impossible. If you are talking about the fashion-industry approved version of Godard you're not really talking about Godard at all, but of an aspect of Godard that's been removed from the host organism, so to speak. 

Here are a few things I've written about Godard that I don't find entirely embarrasing. 

1) An off-the-cuff NYFF-screening based consideration of Film Socialisme.

2) A review of an excellent compilation of Godard/Mieville short films.

3) An official review of the aforementioned Film Socialisme. 

4) A reconsideration of some Godard writing that I do find entirely embarassing. 

5) A look at the "War on Christmas," Godard/Chandler style.

Cormac McCarthy/Truman Capote/Herschell Gordon Lewis

"He strums the wire with his fingers." From The Counselor, Ridley Scott, 2013

Ridley Scott's The Counselor, from an original script by Cormac McCarthy, inspired quite a bit of critical hyperbole on both sides of the assessment scale, the most ridiculous of which was Andrew O'Hehir's very silly "worst movie ever made" screed, which was in part based upon the extremely dubious proposition that Hollywood executives use the phrase "the devil's candy" with the regularity of  a Porky Pig stammer. I don't want to be "meh" about the movie, which I greatly liked in part, but...I was kind of "meh" about the movie. The profound moral schema that a few of its admirers cite was kinda spoiled for me on account of the whole (speaking of spoilers, um, skip this part if you're still looking forward to seeing the movie) femme-fatale-comes-out-on-top finale, which is the sort of thing that tries to raise misogyny to a near-mystic level and never really comes off. (See Basic Instinct.) (I also found Cameron Diaz's performance as said femme fatale to be borderline disgraceful.)

There's also the fact that this is a genre movie with an almost self-consciously literary veneer on it. Now this doesn't bother me, except, in this case, for the self-conscious part. That's to say, Cormac McCarthy is in a sense both a literary writer and a genre author. I've never found the two to be mutually exclusive myself. In McCarthy's case, the genre could well be some kind of horror (see Child of God), crime (No Country For Old Men), or the Western, sort of (see of course, Blood Meridian, a novel very much beloved of David Foster Wallace, who knew quite a bit about fiction both literary and genre). My reservations about how this works in the context of an original script directed by a visual virtuoso such as Ridley Scott are...well, they're actually immaterial to what I want to talk about in this post, which is this whole decapitating-a-guy-on-a-motorcycle-with-a-wire -strung-across-the-highway thing.

You read that right. There's a lot of talk in The Counselor, but every now and again there's some grisly, vividly shot and edited action, and one of these sequences involves stopping a speeding motorcyclist—a criminal courier of sorts—in the most extreme way possible. By cutting off his head as he's speeding down the road. 

In McCarthy's screenplay, the description of the setting up of the decapitating wire is done in sober, meticulous detail that would likely pass muster in Popular Mechanics. McCarthy introduces a man "carrying a roll of thin monel wire over one shoulder," crossing the road and going to where "a tall metal pipe is mounted to one of the fenceposts."

"He loops the wire around the corner post and pulls the end of the wire through the loop and wraps it about six times around the wire itself and tucks the end several times inside the loop  and then takes the wire in both hands and hauls it as tight as he can get it. Then he takes the coil of wire and walks out and crosses the road, letting out the wire behind him."

At the side of the road from whence this man walked, there's a "vertically mounted iron pipe at the right rear of the truckbed." The man "threads the wire through a hole in the pipe and pulls it taut and stops it from sliding back by clamping the wire with a pair of visegrips. Then he walks back out to the road and takes a tape measure from his belt and measures the height of the wire from the road surface. He goes back to the truck and lowers the iron pipe in its collars and clamps it in place again with a threaded lever that he turns by hand against the vertical rod. He goes out to the road and measures the wire again and comes back and wraps the end of the wire through a heavy three-inch iron ring and walks to the front of the truck where he pulls the wire taut and wraps it around itself to secure the ring at the end of the wire and then pulls the ring over a hook mounted in the side rail of the truck bed. He stands looking at it. He strums the wire with his fingers. It gives off a deep resonant note." See, I wasn't kidding about that Popular Mechanics stuff.

"The wire hums." And so it goes, until McCarthy calls for a "shot of the green rider with his face turned back to the floodlight now behind him." And... "suddenly his head zips away and in the helmet it goes bouncing down the highway behind the bike."

 Yikes! Ridley Scott being the visual virtuoso that he is, he pulls off the scene with great dispatch and to ostensibly impressive effect, so much so that you might forget for a moment that the whole thing is preposterous on several levels. Yet there's something about the whole Guignol aspect of the killing method that makes it arguably irresistable for a writer. As it happens, another literary writer who showed an oblique affinity for genre, Truman Capote, described just such a mode of murder, while simultaneously acknowledging its preposterousness, in his 1975 sort-of non-fiction novella Handcarved Coffins. Handcarved Coffins finds Capote trying to return to the form he claimed to have invented with In Cold Blood, but having dissipated a good deal of his genius, he here approaches it from an easier angle, making himself a character in the crime narrative and telling quite a bit of the story in the form of scripted dialogue. Capote's guide and docent in this "account of an American crime" is an investigator named Jake Pepper, and early in the narrative he tells Capote of the killing of his friend Clem Anderson, decapitated while driving what's described as his "homemade jeep" over a "narrow ranch road." Here's their exchange:

TC: The wire, yes. I have never understood about the wire. It’s so—

JAKE: Clever?

TC: More than clever. Preposterous.

JAKE: Nothing preposterous about it. Our friend had simple figured out a nice neat way to decapitate Clem Anderson. Kill him without any possibility of witnessed.

TC: I suppose it’s the mathematical element. I’m always bewildered by anything involving mathmatics.

JAKE: Well, the gentleman responsible for this certainly has a mathematical mind. At least he had a lot of very accurate measuring to do.

TC: He strung a wire between two trees?

JAKE: A tree and a telephone pole. A strong steel wire sharpened thin as a razor. Virtually invisible, even in broad daylight. But at duck, when Clem turned off the highway and was driving in that crazy little wagon along that narrow road, he couldn’t possibly have glimpsed it. It caught him exactly where it was supposed to: just under the chin. And, as you can see, sliced off his head as easily as a girl picking petals off a daisy.

TC: So many things could have gone wrong.

JAKE: What if they had? What’s one failure? He would have tried again. And continued till he succeeded.

TC: That’s what’s so preposterous. He always does succeed.

JAKE: Yes and no. But we’ll come back to that later. 

Lifting, or borrowing, from Capote, is one thing. But given that the ostensibly factual content of Handcarved Coffins has, since publication, been cast into considerable doubt...well, there's a lot of stuff on the Internet featuring latter-day variations on this improbable decapitation scenario, but its actual origin in the arts may in fact go back to 1968, and to uber-schlock-meister Herschell Gordon Lewis' very hard to watch (I couldn't even bring myself to look at it again for the purposes of this piece) She-Devils On Wheels. In which the aforementioned She-Devils contrive to kill some guy in precisely the same way as it plays out in The Counselor, only on a cheap budget and with an anti-virtuoso directing the proceedings. 

This infuriated description of the scene, from an equally infuriated long-form account of Lewis' movie, at the very dedicated website Jabootu's Bad Movie Dimension, is a vivid an, to the best of my own recollection, accurate one: "The gang slowly trundle out to their bikes, and after a cut we see them wrap wire around a pair of telephone poles, so that it stretches across the road at neck-height. HGL doesn’t actually tell us what the wire’s for, but he sure takes his time letting us see the girls get it prepared. Then we see the biker poster girl spin around.

"Remember how the bartender didn’t know where Joe-Boy’s gang hides out? You’re smarter than HGL, because HE didn’t remember that event – we now see Whitey and another Man-Eater ride up to Joe-Boy’s hot-rodders. Seriously, HGL – it was like a minute ago you told us that Queenie didn’t know where Joe-Boy was.

"Anyway the Man-Eaters get off their bikes, and again it takes both of them to put one of the bikes on its kickstand. While Joe-Boy’s gang watches quietly, Whitey stabs a hole in a car’s tire. Joe-Boy runs up all aggressive and in-your-face but gets sprayed with a can of … deodorant? Hairspray? Something like that. Joe-Boy, horrified at the threat of chlorofluorocarbons on the ozone layer, recoils, hands to his eyes, and the girls double up on Whitey’s bike and ride off, leaving one of their bikes behind.

"Joe-Boy, enraged, gets on the abandoned bike bait without a second thought, and his gang rush to their cars. Don’t worry about the gang though – we never see them again. Any of them.

"Off Joe-Boy rides in pursuit to the sound of the James Bond theme(!). We see him on the bike, then we see the wire with all the Man-Eaters watching. Then we see him. Then the wire. Then the Man-Eaters. Yes, HGL, I think we 'get it.' You’ve explained it enough. At least this time you only did it with repeated camera shots, not with dialog. That’s a slight improvement.

"Joe-Boy rides into the wire with what one of my viewing companions immediately dubbed, 'The worst decapitation I’ve ever seen.'"

So there you have it. A compelling backward line from Cormac McCarthy to Herschell Gordon Lewis. Who says that "blogs" don't do relevant work in cultural archeology? 

UPDATE: Commentator Jason LaRiviere, below, cites "the greatest film to ever feature motorized decapitation by wire is Fellini's Toby Dammit." Indeed. The best segment in the omnibus film Spirits of the Dead, and one that Lewis could not have ripped off (unless he'd just heard about it), because that film was premiering at the Cannes Film Festival just as She-Devils was making its non-illustrious  U.S. theatrical run. Hmm.

And the movie didn't even occur to me as I was writing this, even though it's an old favorite of mine. The reason: In the Fellini movie, there's no attempt to make the event plausible in a materialist empirical sense. The wire that cuts off Toby's head is, for all intents and purposes, put in place by a supernatural agent who need not concern him or her self with, say, the chances that the wire will catch some other idiot in a sports car. I am reminded, I have to say, of the Patti Smith poem "robert bresson," and its treatment of a scene in Au hasard Balthasar, and the scene's larger implications. This is the last section of the poem: 

there is oil on the road.

the oil is the cause of the car going out of control.

what we want to find out is who put the oil there

and what the motive was.

who put the oil there?

i did

motive

art

 

i had to recreate the death of Jackson Pollock

w/the same radical destiny that spun from the

hallowed designs of his own death.

image: no. 11, 14 and portrait of a dream

image: the woman, lee krasner, shading her eyes

with hands brown and spotted.

here we have no accident no crime but a lateral

translation of a man going out of control

the initiation of a girl

(the intimacy of model and clone)

who would teach

as her teacher

taught her.

axle grease

film of sorrow

who put this oil here?

i did.

motive

art.

who was your teacher?

robert bresson

Humor in punk rock

R: Did you ever read Nietzsche

L: Ha Ha Ha

R: Legs, listen to me, he said that anything that makes you laugh, anything that's funny, indicates an emotion that's died. Every time you laugh that's a serious emotion that doesn't exist with you anymore...and that's why I think you and everything else is so funny.

L: Yeah, I do too, but that's not funny.

R: That's 'cause you don't have any emotions. (Hysterical laughter)

—Richard Hell interviewed by Leg McNeil, Punk, Issue #3, March 1976, reprinted in Punk: The Best Of Punk Magazine, !T/Harper Collins, 2012

[...] I had become a manic-depressive. I was hopeless. I could only laugh at someone else's expense and I thrived on negativity. I can see now how it was only natural that I would gravitate towards Tommy, Joey, and Johnny Ramone. They were the obvious creeps of the neighborhood. All their friends had to be creeps. No one would have ever pegged any of us for any kind of success in life. But that's how it goes. 

—Dee Dee Ramone, Lobotomy: Surviving The Ramones, Thunder's Mouth Press, 2000

I always liked seeing Dee Dee, and to my mind he was the best example of a certain rock and roll essence that punk sought to embody. He was a street kid who was purely talented—he wrote most of the great Ramones songs—and who radiated lovable innocence, even though he'd worked, for lack of a better way to earn a living, as a gay hustler on the street. Or maybe that's where he'd learned the innocence. Like Jerry Nolan, he'd been a hairdresser for a while, too. He had a strongly defined personality—that funny dizzy dumb style—that he had to have developed as a defense. He was like a toddler, stumbling and misunderstanding what just happened, but who recovers instantly to plow ahead grinning proudly, endearingly, hilariously. With him the comedy was deliberate, if so deeply habitual that it became who he was. The other side of his childlike goofiness was his tantrums. But he was so funny, usually about himself. My favorite example is something he said for a piece I did about the Ramones for Hit Parader in 1976. (It was the first time I'd done any journalism and the first article about the Ramones in a national publication.)

The band had gathered at Arturo Vega's loft for the interview. Arturo was the Ramones' art director and best friend and main booster. I turned on the tape recorder and started asking questions. In a minute Dee Dee was explaining the group's songs and he said the first one they'd written was "I Don't Wanna Walk Around With You," and the next one was "I Don't Wanna Get Involved With You," and then "I Don't Wanna Go Down to the Basement." I don't wanna this and I don't wanna that. Finally he offered, "We didn't write a positive song until 'Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue.'" Someone who was actually dumb would never be able to think of that, which of course makes it even funnier.

—Richard Hell, I Dreamed I Was A Very Clean Tramp, Ecco/Harper Collins, 2013

I bring all this up because it's kind of staggering the way, to judge by the trailer, the upcoming CBGB movie bollixes the droll anecdote Mr. Hell relates.