KEYNOTE ENTRY:
EASY RIDERS, RAGING BULLS
BURNING DOWN THE MOVIE HOUSE
"It's a history of Hollywood's rise and demise through a rough chronology of film reviews."
"Really? You mean like reviews other people have written?"
"No. I wrote them all myself."
"Oh? So they're like recent movies then?"
"Not at all. I think the oldest movie I wrote about is from 1934 and the most recent is 2010. It covers the Golden Age--"
"That was the Sixties, right?"
"The Sixties saw the birth of New Hollywood. What they call the Golden Age was between the late 1920s, when sound was introduced to movies, and the end of the 1940s, when the Hollywood studios sold off their theater chains. So anyway--"
"That was a sweet deal for the studios, huh?"
"Very much so. Also actors were routinely under contract to one of the eight major studio companies. Very few free agents in those days."
"But what were you saying about New Hollywood?"
"Depends on who you ask, but I would place the death of the studio system as happening with the release of Bonnie and Clyde in 1967. It doesn't matter when it happened. What matters is that it did happen. You had all these great young American talents influenced by the French New Wave, which in turn had been influenced by American and English directors from the Forties and Fifties, which perfectly parallels what happened with pop music at the same time. The Beatles and Rolling Stones and Animals and other British bands grew up listening to American acts like Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry and in the process inspired a million American imitations themselves--and at exactly the same time as this was happening with motion pictures. But just as with politics, the revolution in movie-making also carried the seeds of its own destruction. The people who had early artistic and commercial successes--many of them--became comfortable with the blockbuster: The Godfather, American Graffiti, Jaws, Star Wars."
"But I like those movies. You make it sound like a bad thing."
"I liked them too. But the studios liked them even more because even though the blockbusters' initial budgets were astronomical, the majors discovered that you could use the profits of something like Jaws and then finance smaller movies that had previously been the purview of the mini-majors and still pay homage to what they used to call art."
"I'm sensing an unhappy turn in the story."
"I'm not being fair to Jaws here. It was actually Star Wars that ruined everything."
"Wait. You do realize that you are saying that in print, right?"
"I do. Look, what the majors learned with that one movie completely changed everything. First, special affects sold tickets far beyond silly shows like Them with the giant ants. Nobody believed in giant ants. What they did believe in was merchandising and franchises, or what they used to call sequels."
"That doesn't mean the movies weren't fun."
"Hell, they were lots of fun! But there were less companies around deciding what was going to pass for fun. Mergers and acquisitions, they call it. By the mid-Eighties, multiplexes had displaced the local movie house and the drive-ins began drying up. The industry was churning out movies to fill up the cinaplexes. Most of the movies reeked. A few good films slipped through. And there the story would end, except for Silicon Valley, which had largely been responsible for the development of the high-tech aroma of the blockbusters. And technology by its very nature sides with producers over writers and directors. Investor capitalists do not much care about the auteur theory of film-making. They care about cost overruns and ticket sales and foreign subsidiary rights. So unless you have the name recognition and acceptable politics of someone such as Martin Scorsese, or unless you are born rich, you will not have a distinct artistic movie voice that people will see in the movie theater. Then enter Netflix."
"Dammit, I love House of Cards!"
"And you don't have to wait to see it. You can binge on it whenever you like. You don't have to wait. You don't have to find a parking space and pay for a babysitter. All you need is ten bucks a month. Of course, you willingly sacrifice the darkened room with total strangers who audibly react to what they see. You lose the big screen, the huge sound--"
"The gum stuck to your shoes, the screaming kids, the big guy with the hat who sits in front of you."
"That's true. Well, that's part of the perceived gain. Cocooning is what sociologists call it. Stay with your insular family group, have your meals delivered, become an entity unto yourself. Come the apocalypse, you can watch Facebook on Demand, or whatever they end up calling it. All I'm saying is that these were choices that were not necessarily of our own making and so there is value--and even fun--in discovering, rediscovering, how we got here. And since I love movie reviews almost as much as the movies themselves--"
"You decided to write a book about it. All right. But now I want one of your funny anecdotes."
"Christ, I thought you'd never ask."
Through a series of odd events, I was in attendance at a Christmas party in the Hollywood Hills stretch of the Santa Monica Mountains in the year 2000. Knowing full well I was making a mistake by doing so, I couldn't resist the opportunity to theoretically schmooze with writers, directors, actors, composers and possibly a gaggle of moguls. The woman who invited me earned her living repping a variety of hotshot musicians who provided smarmy soundtracks to medium budget romantic comedies. She had encountered me winning a game of eight ball at a star bar on Vine and thought my impression of Fred C. Dobbs was hilarious. (Note: Fred C. Dobbs was a character played by Humphrey Bogart in the movie Treasure of the Sierra Madre.) The young man I was slaughtering at pool did not share her admiration and she thought it best that we get away before he carried out his threat to do to me what the bandits did to Dobbs in the movie.
The valet took the keys to her Lexus and together we strolled by the lush garden up the wine-colored walkway to what I suppose was the front door. She pressed the intercom button and the door tilted open, revealing a room bathed in dark orange. It looked like a magnificent dark room where photographers might work, but it was actually just the entryway to the rest of the house, possibly the largest house ever to permit my humble entrance. Once we felt our way through this room, another door swung open and the brightness off the outdoor pool glared through the glass walls and I found myself temporarily separated from the agent. In such a situation--not that I have been in that many such situations--I did what I always do: I adopted a false persona.
I pretended to be the Warren Beatty character in the movie Mickey One. Please understand that I am no Warren Beatty. But I had seen the movie for the second time recently and it was weighing on my mind and the suit I had fallen into resembled the one Mickey wore, so that was what I did. And so no sooner did a horde of unemployed actors swoop up the agent woman than a couple young guys positioned themselves on either side of me and continued their conversation as if I was not standing between them. You know the type. Right. I introduced myself to the one on my left. "I'm Mickey," I said. "I'm the king of the silent pictures. I'm hiding out until the talkies blow over. Will you leave me alone?"
The two bozos exchanged a nervous glance and wandered away.
The agent returned immediately with an older woman on her arm. "Gladys, my deah," she said. "I'd like you to meet--My goodness, I never did get your name?"
Sticking with the Warren Beatty concept, I switched movies. "Clyde Barrow. This here's Bonnie Parker. We rob banks. Now you might as well know, I ain't much of a lover boy."
Gladys didn't seem to know quite what was going on, but to her credit the agent picked right up on it and asked Gladys if she had a cigar, which, strangely, she did not.
It should be noted at this point that my memory is somewhat selective. Half the time I could not tell you my own middle name, but I can remember the words to any song I've ever heard and most of the lines in any movie I've ever seen. It's a curse. The curse, for me, is that the rest of the known universe does not possess this ability and so I often recede into my own social hole, which is fine by me, at least most of the time. In this case, however, I should have been projecting my own personality. Being vastly out of my element, I pulled the chicken switch instead and remained in various characters throughout most of the evening, much to the dismay of the people who were trying harder than they should have to be nice to me.
Word got around and I found myself standing at the poolside bar trying to teach my gin and tonic to stay cold. After a few minutes of watching the ice swirl in the glass, I realized a man standing next to me was looking at me as if I might be a science experiment.
I spun to face him. He smiled. "You like the women here?" he asked.
I wasn't about to let the Beatty fixation get away just yet. "You ever listen to women talk, man? Do you? Because I do, till it's running outta my ears! I mean I'm on my feet all day long listening to women talk and they only talk about one thing: how some guy fucked 'em over, that's all that's on their minds, that's all I ever hear about! Don't you know that?"
The man took me by the hands and said, "I'm Arthur Penn. There's someone I'd like you to meet."
If the name means nothing to you, I will explain. Arthur Penn was an amazing movie director. His credits happened to include Mickey One, Bonnie and Clyde, and--inexplicably--Penn & Teller Get Killed.
For a moment I thought that maybe this person holding onto me was as much a loon as myself and perhaps had deluded himself, or, on second thought, that he was some aging hipster who was playing the same kind of game I was. I studied his face a few moments longer and realized that I was in the hands of greatness and therefore allowed him to spin me around where I stood face to face with the man whose characters I had been embalming all evening.
He did not introduce himself, for there was no need. He just said, "I was listening to you earlier. You're good. I mean, I think you're good. He is good, isn't he, Arthur?"
Let me say this: Warren Beatty is and was one fine looking fellow. He looks just like he does in the movies. And he really has perfect hair. He is so good looking that even men want to sleep with him. I can't imagine what women feel.
Before Arthur had a chance to confirm or deny my goodness, I jumped into my own personality and revealed for all to see just why it is often more wise to pretend to be someone else. What I said to Warren Beatty--Warren Fucking Beatty!!!--was: "It all started with you and Arthur Penn. You guys completely changed the way people understand motion pictures. Without you guys, sure, I know, Godard, Truffaut, all that French New Wave stuff, yes, but they were just giving us back movies from the Forties. You guys took what they were doing and Americanized it and made movies real in ways they never had been before, at least before fucking Spielberg and Lucas ruined it for everyone with goddamned blockbusters."
Beatty smiled at me. He smiled the gracious smile one delivers to an orphan on Christmas. He said, "Arthur, do you have that phone number for me?"
And with that they were gone. I never did reconnect with the agent woman. I had the valet call a taxi for me.
Why the hell is he telling us this?
I am telling you this true story because I want you to watch the documentary film Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (2003). The lovely and irreplaceable Lisa Ann bought a copy for me a few Christmases ago. This is not quite as good as A Decade Under the Influence, which came out the same year. But Lisa Ann bought me the former and not the latter and now that she has passed away, I may very well watch that movie at least once a month and so should you, at least until you come to believe that Warren Beatty, Arthur Penn, Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Robert Altman, Paul Schrader and others between 1967 and 1980 made the best movies ever made. You may even get a sense as to how the blockbuster crippled Hollywood.
And if you ever run into the agent woman, tell her she owes me cab fare.
P.S.: I love you, Lisa Ann, with all the love in the world.
"Really? You mean like reviews other people have written?"
"No. I wrote them all myself."
"Oh? So they're like recent movies then?"
"Not at all. I think the oldest movie I wrote about is from 1934 and the most recent is 2010. It covers the Golden Age--"
"That was the Sixties, right?"
"The Sixties saw the birth of New Hollywood. What they call the Golden Age was between the late 1920s, when sound was introduced to movies, and the end of the 1940s, when the Hollywood studios sold off their theater chains. So anyway--"
"That was a sweet deal for the studios, huh?"
"Very much so. Also actors were routinely under contract to one of the eight major studio companies. Very few free agents in those days."
"But what were you saying about New Hollywood?"
"Depends on who you ask, but I would place the death of the studio system as happening with the release of Bonnie and Clyde in 1967. It doesn't matter when it happened. What matters is that it did happen. You had all these great young American talents influenced by the French New Wave, which in turn had been influenced by American and English directors from the Forties and Fifties, which perfectly parallels what happened with pop music at the same time. The Beatles and Rolling Stones and Animals and other British bands grew up listening to American acts like Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry and in the process inspired a million American imitations themselves--and at exactly the same time as this was happening with motion pictures. But just as with politics, the revolution in movie-making also carried the seeds of its own destruction. The people who had early artistic and commercial successes--many of them--became comfortable with the blockbuster: The Godfather, American Graffiti, Jaws, Star Wars."
"But I like those movies. You make it sound like a bad thing."
"I liked them too. But the studios liked them even more because even though the blockbusters' initial budgets were astronomical, the majors discovered that you could use the profits of something like Jaws and then finance smaller movies that had previously been the purview of the mini-majors and still pay homage to what they used to call art."
"I'm sensing an unhappy turn in the story."
"I'm not being fair to Jaws here. It was actually Star Wars that ruined everything."
"Wait. You do realize that you are saying that in print, right?"
"I do. Look, what the majors learned with that one movie completely changed everything. First, special affects sold tickets far beyond silly shows like Them with the giant ants. Nobody believed in giant ants. What they did believe in was merchandising and franchises, or what they used to call sequels."
"That doesn't mean the movies weren't fun."
"Hell, they were lots of fun! But there were less companies around deciding what was going to pass for fun. Mergers and acquisitions, they call it. By the mid-Eighties, multiplexes had displaced the local movie house and the drive-ins began drying up. The industry was churning out movies to fill up the cinaplexes. Most of the movies reeked. A few good films slipped through. And there the story would end, except for Silicon Valley, which had largely been responsible for the development of the high-tech aroma of the blockbusters. And technology by its very nature sides with producers over writers and directors. Investor capitalists do not much care about the auteur theory of film-making. They care about cost overruns and ticket sales and foreign subsidiary rights. So unless you have the name recognition and acceptable politics of someone such as Martin Scorsese, or unless you are born rich, you will not have a distinct artistic movie voice that people will see in the movie theater. Then enter Netflix."
"Dammit, I love House of Cards!"
"And you don't have to wait to see it. You can binge on it whenever you like. You don't have to wait. You don't have to find a parking space and pay for a babysitter. All you need is ten bucks a month. Of course, you willingly sacrifice the darkened room with total strangers who audibly react to what they see. You lose the big screen, the huge sound--"
"The gum stuck to your shoes, the screaming kids, the big guy with the hat who sits in front of you."
"That's true. Well, that's part of the perceived gain. Cocooning is what sociologists call it. Stay with your insular family group, have your meals delivered, become an entity unto yourself. Come the apocalypse, you can watch Facebook on Demand, or whatever they end up calling it. All I'm saying is that these were choices that were not necessarily of our own making and so there is value--and even fun--in discovering, rediscovering, how we got here. And since I love movie reviews almost as much as the movies themselves--"
"You decided to write a book about it. All right. But now I want one of your funny anecdotes."
"Christ, I thought you'd never ask."
Through a series of odd events, I was in attendance at a Christmas party in the Hollywood Hills stretch of the Santa Monica Mountains in the year 2000. Knowing full well I was making a mistake by doing so, I couldn't resist the opportunity to theoretically schmooze with writers, directors, actors, composers and possibly a gaggle of moguls. The woman who invited me earned her living repping a variety of hotshot musicians who provided smarmy soundtracks to medium budget romantic comedies. She had encountered me winning a game of eight ball at a star bar on Vine and thought my impression of Fred C. Dobbs was hilarious. (Note: Fred C. Dobbs was a character played by Humphrey Bogart in the movie Treasure of the Sierra Madre.) The young man I was slaughtering at pool did not share her admiration and she thought it best that we get away before he carried out his threat to do to me what the bandits did to Dobbs in the movie.
The valet took the keys to her Lexus and together we strolled by the lush garden up the wine-colored walkway to what I suppose was the front door. She pressed the intercom button and the door tilted open, revealing a room bathed in dark orange. It looked like a magnificent dark room where photographers might work, but it was actually just the entryway to the rest of the house, possibly the largest house ever to permit my humble entrance. Once we felt our way through this room, another door swung open and the brightness off the outdoor pool glared through the glass walls and I found myself temporarily separated from the agent. In such a situation--not that I have been in that many such situations--I did what I always do: I adopted a false persona.
I pretended to be the Warren Beatty character in the movie Mickey One. Please understand that I am no Warren Beatty. But I had seen the movie for the second time recently and it was weighing on my mind and the suit I had fallen into resembled the one Mickey wore, so that was what I did. And so no sooner did a horde of unemployed actors swoop up the agent woman than a couple young guys positioned themselves on either side of me and continued their conversation as if I was not standing between them. You know the type. Right. I introduced myself to the one on my left. "I'm Mickey," I said. "I'm the king of the silent pictures. I'm hiding out until the talkies blow over. Will you leave me alone?"
The two bozos exchanged a nervous glance and wandered away.
The agent returned immediately with an older woman on her arm. "Gladys, my deah," she said. "I'd like you to meet--My goodness, I never did get your name?"
Sticking with the Warren Beatty concept, I switched movies. "Clyde Barrow. This here's Bonnie Parker. We rob banks. Now you might as well know, I ain't much of a lover boy."
Gladys didn't seem to know quite what was going on, but to her credit the agent picked right up on it and asked Gladys if she had a cigar, which, strangely, she did not.
It should be noted at this point that my memory is somewhat selective. Half the time I could not tell you my own middle name, but I can remember the words to any song I've ever heard and most of the lines in any movie I've ever seen. It's a curse. The curse, for me, is that the rest of the known universe does not possess this ability and so I often recede into my own social hole, which is fine by me, at least most of the time. In this case, however, I should have been projecting my own personality. Being vastly out of my element, I pulled the chicken switch instead and remained in various characters throughout most of the evening, much to the dismay of the people who were trying harder than they should have to be nice to me.
Word got around and I found myself standing at the poolside bar trying to teach my gin and tonic to stay cold. After a few minutes of watching the ice swirl in the glass, I realized a man standing next to me was looking at me as if I might be a science experiment.
I spun to face him. He smiled. "You like the women here?" he asked.
I wasn't about to let the Beatty fixation get away just yet. "You ever listen to women talk, man? Do you? Because I do, till it's running outta my ears! I mean I'm on my feet all day long listening to women talk and they only talk about one thing: how some guy fucked 'em over, that's all that's on their minds, that's all I ever hear about! Don't you know that?"
The man took me by the hands and said, "I'm Arthur Penn. There's someone I'd like you to meet."
If the name means nothing to you, I will explain. Arthur Penn was an amazing movie director. His credits happened to include Mickey One, Bonnie and Clyde, and--inexplicably--Penn & Teller Get Killed.
For a moment I thought that maybe this person holding onto me was as much a loon as myself and perhaps had deluded himself, or, on second thought, that he was some aging hipster who was playing the same kind of game I was. I studied his face a few moments longer and realized that I was in the hands of greatness and therefore allowed him to spin me around where I stood face to face with the man whose characters I had been embalming all evening.
He did not introduce himself, for there was no need. He just said, "I was listening to you earlier. You're good. I mean, I think you're good. He is good, isn't he, Arthur?"
Let me say this: Warren Beatty is and was one fine looking fellow. He looks just like he does in the movies. And he really has perfect hair. He is so good looking that even men want to sleep with him. I can't imagine what women feel.
Before Arthur had a chance to confirm or deny my goodness, I jumped into my own personality and revealed for all to see just why it is often more wise to pretend to be someone else. What I said to Warren Beatty--Warren Fucking Beatty!!!--was: "It all started with you and Arthur Penn. You guys completely changed the way people understand motion pictures. Without you guys, sure, I know, Godard, Truffaut, all that French New Wave stuff, yes, but they were just giving us back movies from the Forties. You guys took what they were doing and Americanized it and made movies real in ways they never had been before, at least before fucking Spielberg and Lucas ruined it for everyone with goddamned blockbusters."
Beatty smiled at me. He smiled the gracious smile one delivers to an orphan on Christmas. He said, "Arthur, do you have that phone number for me?"
And with that they were gone. I never did reconnect with the agent woman. I had the valet call a taxi for me.
Why the hell is he telling us this?
I am telling you this true story because I want you to watch the documentary film Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (2003). The lovely and irreplaceable Lisa Ann bought a copy for me a few Christmases ago. This is not quite as good as A Decade Under the Influence, which came out the same year. But Lisa Ann bought me the former and not the latter and now that she has passed away, I may very well watch that movie at least once a month and so should you, at least until you come to believe that Warren Beatty, Arthur Penn, Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Robert Altman, Paul Schrader and others between 1967 and 1980 made the best movies ever made. You may even get a sense as to how the blockbuster crippled Hollywood.
And if you ever run into the agent woman, tell her she owes me cab fare.
P.S.: I love you, Lisa Ann, with all the love in the world.
