Spielberg Without the Schmaltz

I’ve taken a lot of verbal abuse through the years for my aversion to two “classics” by Steven Spielberg, specifically ET and Back to the Future.  I’m not in the camp that hates any film with Spielberg’s name on it.  In fact, I have grudging respect for Close Encounters, I really liked 2 of the 4 Indiana Jones films (the last one has some good moments), and I thought Schindler’s List was a great film.  Spielberg, in my humble opinion, is an amazing director with a great sense of camera placement and movement.  On the other hand, sometimes he is unable to pick a good script, and sometimes he can’t resist doing the cheesiest possible cinema tricks to extend a scene.

This is why I was very hesitant to see the newest Spielbergy picture, Super 8.  Now, I realize that the film is the brainchild of director JJ Abrams, but then Back to the Future was ostensibly Bob Zemeckis’ picture.  It’s long been my contention that the streak of schmaltziness that runs through the center of Back to the Future belongs to Spielberg, since most of Zemeckis’ other films suffer less from it.  And then there’s the Spielberg-(executive) produced The Goonies, which was so bad that I couldn’t even make my way through it. (Yes, I realize that there’s a group of people who think that was a great film, and I weep softly for them.)

Abrams is a mixed bag for me.  I saw some of his TV series Lost, but one of the things it lost was my interest.  I understand it spent several years building to a cheat “whoops, I’m dead” climax, something out of Twilight Zone 101.  Star Trek I didn’t see, because I just couldn’t face the idea of it.  I’ve enjoyed Abrams’ Fringe on the occasions I’ve seen it.  And, strangely, I was the one guy who liked Abrams’ writing debut, Regarding Henry.    Well, I guess there were a few others, but for some reason, there are a lot of people who hated Regarding Henry.

What generally bothers me about the Spielberg-produced “kid films” is that they all have similar themes.  You can run them off like a laundry list: 1) All of the adults are idiots.  2) The kids are magically smart.  3) There will be a stupid plot device late in the film that will be milked past the point of credulity… one that will make me squirm in my seat.  4) The main kid will have trouble with his father or father figure because Spielberg himself did, and, since he can’t get over that, we have to sit through him working it out in all his movies.

Abrams doesn’t do this!  He doesn’t fall into the Spielberg traps!  Amazingly, Super 8 does a very good job of working on two levels: a) it’s aimed at 15-year-olds with lots of explosions and chases but b) it’s not so stupid that adults wince while watching it.  This is an amazing feat these days.

People leave me nasty comments if I don’t talk about the plot a little, so I will: A group of kids accidentally capture a train wreck on film during the making of their amateur horror picture.  It turns out to be an Area 51-type conspiracy.  The train was carrying an alien who may or may not be evil and murderous.  And the Air Force wants to cover the whole thing up.

I have a number of things to say about the film, and I’ll segment it into three categories:

THE GOOD

Abrams’ teen characters are believable and feel real.  I really liked the interaction, and it did feel like it was taking place in 1979.

The 8mm filmmaking material is impeccably handled.  Extra bonus points for the courage to show the teens’ finished film over the credits.  Classy.

The adults in this film have a real story and aren’t just idiots.  Rather than being one-dimensional clichés (ET), you can see interpersonal struggles and it works well.  They are trying to be good people and parents under bad circumstances.  There is no Spielbergian happy ending in which the clueless parent suddenly wakes up and hugs his kid.  The hug happens here, but it resonated with me much better, because it was a happy reunion: the kids and the adults had come through the same troubles and worked through them.

I’ve been sick of the interminable computer-generated monsters for years.  Abrams is really smart about his monster.  We don’t even see it for some time, and then when we finally do, it’s only in little bits.  There’s an extended suspense of “what is this?” that is handled in the same way it might have been done in the 1950s.  We never actually see the alien in the full sunlight, so the spidery sinewyness of the creature is never lost on us.  Sometimes we see more when we see less.  (Please read this paragraph, Michael Bay.)

Elle Fanning as the teen romantic interest is an amazing actress.  She is able to express emotions fluidly and well.  She steals every scene she’s in.  I predict that good things lie ahead for her.

THE BAD

I’ve seen train wrecks and the one in this film is ridiculously over the top.  It lasts too long and gets silly in its excess.  I remember in physics class they taught us that momentum = mass times velocity.  Some of those cars are moving faster after the accident than before it.

I know that modern films avoid having real plots.  I’m not quite sure why this is.  Could we get more explanation of what the alien is doing on the water tower at the end?  I’m sure that there’s probably a director’s cut of this film that makes more sense than what got released.  Is it too much to ask that plot points be explained a bit?  Just a bit. Please?

There is a scene near the end that is classic junk Spielberg.  The kid who loves explosives can’t get his lighter to ignite at the proper moment, which is milked as a suspense point.  Fortunately, Abrams doesn’t drag it out interminably.  Please note that ET’s “death” and the Christopher Lloyd’s endless fumbling at the top of the bell tower in Back to the Future are far worse.

THE UGLY

Yes, it’s cool that Abrams really shot this in anamorphic Panavision.  There are a few dozen of us who actually understand this.  However, the photography in general is pretty mushy and indistinct, which probably means the digital intermediate was not done well.  Furthermore: “Yes, JJ, we understand that you love the blue Panavision lens flares.  We get it.  Please don’t do them in every night shot.  It gets old.”

Abrams does an admirable job of fluid camerawork, but some of his direction is a little too precious and brings attention to itself.  It’s faux-Spielberg, and it’s the one area in which he fails to live up to the standard.  Spielberg is a master at setups, and Abrams is simply very good.  He’d be better if he tried to be less flashy.

For some reason, it was seen as necessary to shoot Noah Emmerich’s acne scars to look as bad and deep as possible, in the classic Dirty Harry tradition.  Can we move past the tired idea that flawed face equals flawed character?  For heaven’s sake, folks, these guys should start a union: “Pockmarked actors for stock movie villains.”

THE CONCLUSION

Most of the reviews compare Super 8 to the Spielberg “classics” that inspired it, and many have said, patronizingly, that it’s a nice effort, but the old ones are better.  I disagree.  Super 8 is actually better than many of the early Spielberg films.  I hope he watches and takes some hints from it.

If You’ve Got History, Flaunt It!

I visited an amusement park the other day.  I won’t name it, because I’m going to rake the management over the coals.  They do deserve a good coal-raking, though!  This is an older amusement park, with large sections of it that are delightful relics from the 1950s.  They had hand-painted signs, miniature golf, sky rides, ferris wheels, and real wooden roller coasters.

But now, in a desperate attempt to compete with the “big” amusement parks, like Six Flags and Kings Island, new owners are ripping out the old stuff and installing new rides to appeal to “modern” tastes.

It’s going to kill them.  They don’t have the money or the space to do what they want to do (the place is on a little peninsula), and it can’t really be expanded.  And what they’re losing in the bargain is one of the last historic amusement parks around.  It’s not just the owners who are losing what they have.  We all are.

The problem is that it is very difficult to compete with those bigger corporate parks, and, frankly, I don’t visit those.  I have no desire to lose my lunch on a metal coaster that takes me upside down three times.  The older wooden coasters are much more fun and much harder to find these days.

I have a huge problem with people throwing out their history in a desperate attempt to seem hip and with the times.  Sometimes it’s that very history that makes them hip.  There’s nothing particularly historic about Kings Island, despite their “Coney Mall.”  I’d love to shake the new owners of this historic park and tell them that what they’re ripping out is what makes them unique.  I doubt they’d listen.

Take another example.  I’ll name these folks because I have nothing bad to say about them.  Zaharako’s is a great ice cream parlor in Columbus, Indiana that knows its niche and exploits it brilliantly.  For years, the place was in a state of disrepair.  The old man who owned it was enthusiastic enough, but he couldn’t maintain it.  I heard that he died, and I feared the worst.  I was wrong.

A new owner purchased the building and lovingly restored it.  Zaharako’s beautiful orchestrion (a mechanical organ/orchestra, from the early 1900s) was lost.  The owner found it, bought it, restored it, and put it back exactly where it had been.  The skylight was restored.  Pressed tin ceilings were restored and replaced, even to the point that the new air conditioning system uses vents carefully matched to the original ceiling tiles.  The original soda fountain completely repaired and restored (beautiful onyx!)

When you walk into Zaharako’s today, it’s as close to walking into a 1900s-era ice cream parlor as can be replicated.  You want attention to detail?  They even have paper straws.  Not this plastic stuff.  Paper.  The way it used to be.

A lot of people would have counseled the new owners to be as cheap as possible, throw in some soft-serve ice cream machines, and to cut costs to the bone.  They could have done that, and if they had, the place would be closed now.  After all, Zaharako’s is right around the corner from a Dairy Queen.

Dairy Queen is what it is.  Zaharako’s is something different, and they know it.  Zaharako’s has a historic ambience that is their greatest strength.  It doesn’t hurt that their food and ice cream are outstanding as well.

Was it a crazy dream?  Nope.  I’m happy to report that the place is filled to overflowing on most weekends, to the point that I couldn’t get a table on a recent visit.  That’s unfortunate, but it’s a nice problem I’d prefer to have.  I’ll get down there again on an off-time, and I’ll have them crank up the orchestrion.  I don’t care how many times I’ve seen it… it’s still cool.

Another historic place that does things right is the Capitol Theatre in Rome, New York.  While Zaharako’s is in a fairly healthy metropolitan area, Rome is, well, an economic disaster.  I could go on and on about things that have been done poorly in Rome.  Worse, many of their key industries have packed up and gone away.  The place is full of lovely, but often empty, buildings.

The Capitol, I’m happy to say, is not among them.  I’m always amazed to see giant old theaters that are still running the way they were designed.  I once spoke to an architect who told me his main job was rehabbing old theaters: “Nobody sees movies anymore, especially in single-screen theaters, so you gut these buildings like a fish and turn them into music venues.”  It was one of the saddest things I have ever heard, and the obnoxious echo of it still stays with me.

The Capitol is already a music venue, because it always was.  It is also a stage venue, because it always was.  It was designed for these multiple uses. Movies?  Yes, they do them as well, on a large screen.  Low-power cheap xenons bulbs or wimpy DVD projection?  NEVER.  The Capitol uses old-fashioned carbon-arc projectors, everything in 35mm.  Absolutely stunning pictures.  Someday they’ll get a 16mm working.

Art Pierce, owner of the Capitol, is smart enough to know what he has.  You won’t be seeing Transformers 3 there.  That’s not a tragedy, since all the multiplexes are running that.  On the other hand, the multiplexes are not running classics in beautiful 35mm.  And you’ll never see a stage production of Arsenic and Old Lace at a multiplex.

The Capitol has managed to become a regional theater with varied programs, and it’s working for them.  They have embraced their history and it’s paying off.  It’s one of the best-run historic theaters I’ve ever seen.

I have a soft spot in my heart for people who are determined to do things properly.  I took a lot of guff for some of my decisions on the Dr. Film pilot (many people wanted it to be 30 minutes with only film clips, but I wouldn’t allow it.)  I think the public is a lot smarter some of the cynical marketers think.

I have to feel that way.  It would drive me crazy to live in a world with only Dairy Queen and Transformers 3.  I don’t mind the easy choices so long as we have something else once in a while…

 

Why Ted Turner is Cool

Ted Turner has, at least in the eyes of film fans, perhaps the worst reputation of any living person.  The commonplace idea that I hear from fans is that he is assured of a place in Film Purgatory for his colorization efforts and that he only really deserves praise for Turner Classic Movies, which was something he didn’t care about very much.

Bunk, I say.  Bunk.

Let me address a minor sticking point here: some of my dear readers may say that since I’d like to sell my pilot for Dr. Film to Turner Classic Movies, then I probably am giving a suspect opinion so that I can butter up a potential buyer.  Again, not so.  Ted is long gone from any active position at Turner Classic Movies, and I’ve been singing Ted’s praises for years, far before Dr. Film was even a gleam in my splicing block.

Ted may be the single greatest contributor to film preservation in the history of the 20th Century.   He’s certainly in the top 10.  Don’t believe me still?  Here’s why:

MGM has had a troubled history since the late 1950s; they had a big sale of their studio memorabilia as early as 1970 and they were bought and sold and bought and sold and bought and sold (I think that’s actually the right number.)  At a particularly low point in 1986, Ted bought MGM—the entire studio, films, buildings, everything… lock, stock, and barrel.  People said he was crazy.

That wasn’t the first time.  Turner bought a floundering TV station in 1970, renamed it WTCG.  It was still broadcasting in black and white, so he held a telethon to raise money to get color equipment.  He sold bumper stickers and sold ad time cheaply just to keep cash flowing.  People said he was crazy.

He was one of the first people to buy space on one of those giant, old-fashioned satellites.  These are the ones that used to litter the countryside at every hotel with a FREE HBO sign.  But Turner’s station was just up there for free, not some premium channel.  He generated his money from ads.  People said he was crazy.

Turner dreamed of having a media empire, and he had only a measly UHF TV station and a space on a satellite.  He renamed his station WTBS, nicknamed it the Super Station, and then set his sights on another goal.

He started another station, this time on satellite only, and called it CNN.  It was a 24-hour news channel.  Everyone said he was crazy.  There wasn’t enough news for a 24-hour cycle, they said, and tiny Atlanta, Georgia was too remote from the hubs of the universe (Los Angeles and New York) to get any decent news coverage.  I remember people making fun of him.

In the late 1980s, with CNN a success, Turner fought for squeezed space on the large satellites and got another station on the air: TNT.  He did every deal he could with as many carriers as he could to get it on the air.  People said he was crazy.

But I jump ahead of myself.  Remember I said that Turner wanted a media empire?  He dreamed of owning a movie studio and making his own movies.  In 1986, with MGM in the doldrums, having merged with United Artists, also in the doldrums, underwater with debt from films that failed to make money, Turner thought it might be a good chance to buy the studio.

It didn’t work out.  Many people claim that Turner was acting as a corporate raider, just cherry-picking the items he wanted from the studio, but I tend to believe that Turner hoped to maintain the studio as it had been.  For whatever reason, Turner and his investors sold off the studio and its assets one by one, except for one item: MGM’s film library.

In the mid-80s, with one station, and another planned, it made sense for Turner to have access to a large film library, and MGM had it: the entire Warners library pre-1948; the entire MGM library to 1986, and the entire RKO library.  All of this material was deemed worthless by most experts.  It had been played to death on local television over a period of 30 years.  There was no real home video market for any but a few titles.

Amazingly, Turner did what no one else would do.  He poured money into preservation.  New 35mm prints were made for distribution to theaters.  MGM’s restoration efforts, which had started years earlier, were stepped up and enhanced.  Turner entered the home video market, even the laserdisc market, which was just starting.  Anything that even had a chance of selling was issued.

When TNT (Turner Network Television) launched in 1988, Ted scheduled it full of films that hadn’t been seen in years.  They were all transferred from beautiful 35mm prints.  That lasted until he found he could make more money with newer material, so the movies got forced out.  Those were great days at TNT, though, because there were movies shown there that have rarely been screened since.  In the early days of the channel, everything was fair game.

There was a channel dedicated to older films at the time, and that was American Movie Classics (AMC).  They even had a long-term lease on the RKO package that eventually expired and reverted to Turner.  In those days, AMC was commercial-free, its fees paid by the cable companies who carried it.  Turner started Turner Classic Movies in 1994 following AMC’s model.  He also made sure that anyone picking up TCM had to pick up WTBS and TNT as well, guaranteeing that he’d have some extra income from the movies.

Ted felt that the best thing he could do was treat his investment with respect so that he could make as much money off it as he could.  I say more power to him.  Some people look at classic film as some supreme royal sacrifice, something that one does just for art’s sake.  Turner did it and made it pay.  And he made it pay the right way.  Restoration, video availability, cable showings, 35mm booking prints.

We only need look to the example set by Hallmark recently for the other end of the spectrum.  They purchased the Hal Roach back library, rather unenthusiastically, as a tax loss investment.  They were begged to release Laurel and Hardy films, maybe some Charley Chase titles.  SOMETHING.  Eventually, Turner Classic Movies got a package out of them.  Hallmark couldn’t be bothered to look through what they had.  They didn’t care, and the materials languished.  Thank heaven UCLA now has all of it and is giving it the care it deserves.  The problem is that this stuff could have made them money–maybe not a lot, but some.

OK, I avoided talking about colorization, but here goes.  I hate it, I’ve always hated it.  It looks fake.  Turner’s pushing it was obnoxious, and I didn’t like it.  I never saw a single picture that looked better with it, although I’d nominate the nasty color version of King Kong as the worst one.  That being said, it’s an interesting technical experiment.

I’ve always rather suspected that Turner never really wanted to change the world with colorization, but only to get some publicity with the idea.  After all, boring old movies never get any press, and he sure got it.  He ruffled feathers in the process, but that never bothered him.

Eventually, he even got a chance to make his own movies, and they’ve gotten a fair amount of respect.  Maybe he was right the whole time about needing a studio.

(As an aside: you want loyalty to friends?  Ted’s your man.  Anchorman Bill Tush [with a short u] started with Turner in the WTCG days.  He stayed as a news anchor until Ted gave him a weekly show in 1980, a groundbreaking original comedy.  When that didn’t gel, Tush got a cushy job at CNN that lasted for many years.  Ted takes care of his friends.)

Having accomplished what he set out to do–creating a media empire–Turner sold his stock to Time Warner and cashed out.  Turner, for all his flamboyant crazy behavior, seemed to run his stations more efficiently than the conglomerate does.  The crown jewel in the collection is probably still Turner Classic Movies, which showcases classic movies from most of the major studios.  I love the irony that Warner Brothers bought back their own, “worthless,” catalog of films when they bought Turner Broadcasting.  Who’s really crazy?

Turner strikes me as somewhat of a throwback to the brazen showman/marketer types like Merian C. Cooper in the 1930s.  Turner had a vision, and was going to pursue it.  He was loyal, but anyone who criticized him could be stepped on.  Quality was paramount.  Even if it was pro wrestling, he wanted it done well.

We could use a few more people like that.  Viva Ted.

Maureen O’Hara Vs. the Egg People

I get really upset about people showing movies or running video with the wrong screen shape.  I’ve been warned that this forum should stay a “math-free” zone, so I won’t mention ASPECT RATIOS and use numbers, but we shouldn’t need them.  While I rant about this–and expect me to go on about it–let me interrupt with an aside that’s particularly telling.

I went to a screening of The Quiet Man (1952) a few years ago.  Maureen O’Hara was in attendance before and after the film, but she went out to dinner during the showing itself.  She said she’d seen the movie enough and didn’t need to see it one more time.  I was dismayed to see the picture start with the grand Republic Pictures logo, an eagle over a globe… this time only to say A Republic… (without the Picture.)

You see, the projectionist had decided not to do his homework on this film, and he ran it in widescreen format.  If he’d bothered to check, he would have known that in 1954 the industry switched from conventional “Academy-sized” format (almost square, like most tube-TVs), to widescreen (much like your newer flat-screen TVs).  The problem is that if you run an older film in widescreen format, you cut off the top and bottom of the image, which is what was done with The Quiet Man

ALL THE WAY THROUGH…

I found this highly annoying, since it ruined much of the movie’s great photographic composition.  I plotted my revenge against this idiot projectionist until it dawned on me that I might have a much more powerful ally.  Ms. O’Hara did a nice Q&A session with the audience, and I saw that this is a woman who takes no guff.  From anyone.  Ever.  She’s very nice about it, but whenever someone said something stupid or wrong, she corrected the error.

I wanted the projectionist to be in big trouble for screwing this up (after all, they’d taken my money for the show), so I figured the best thing I could do was to tell Maureen O’Hara about it.  I waited until the Q&A was over and went to the reception.  Gingerly, I approached her and introduced myself.  (Forgive the numbers here… but I am reproducing what I told her…)

“Are you aware that they ran that entire picture at 1.85?” I asked.

Her eyes flashed.  “What?  That’s not a widescreen picture!”

I was happy that she knew exactly what I meant without explanation.  She went on…

“What about the scene when Duke is dragging me across the glen?” she asked.

“You were off the bottom of the screen during the entire shot,” I answered.

“I ruptured a disc on that scene!  I’m going to speak to them about this!”

I reported this story to a friend of mine who’s in “the industry,” and he was amazed.  This fellow had met O’Hara as well.  He had only one question:  “What did she do with the bodies?”

The projectionist had decided that they had a wide screen, and he had to fill it.  I’ve heard the quote from people before: “I paid for a wide screen, and I’m going to fill it up.”

And you can do that, but you’ll have to stretch, crop, and malign the image so much that any artistic intent of the original filmmakers is completely lost.  In this case, the projectionist cropped the image.  This annoys me in the extreme.

The problem is that there are several different screen sizes, and they literally do not fit with each other.  The rectangles are different shapes.  That’s why they call the newer formats “widescreen.”

These are the notable ones:

1) Movies 1894-1954 are generally in what’s called “Academy format,” which is a narrow rectangle slightly wider than it is high.  (Yes, film geeks, I’m aware that silent aperture is different, and I project them properly, but that gets a little technical, so don’t bug me.)

2) Movies 1954- adopted a widescreen format that is wider.  In America, this is a bit wider than in Europe, so there a European widescreen and an American one.

3) Cinemascope/Panavision (1953-) uses a special photographic process to squeeze a widescreen image into the older Academy format and that yields an even wider screen. (Yes, I know that’s not quite accurate, film geeks… lay off!).

4) Finally in the 2000s, TV got into the act, adopting another screen size that is between the size of American widescreen and European widescreen.

The upshot of this is that we have to mix and match screen sizes all the time.  If you run a widescreen movie on a narrow Academy screen (like old TVs), then it doesn’t fit, so you either have to crop off the sides (ick) or “letterbox” it, where we see black bars at the top and bottom of the screen.

These black bars aren’t there because we’re masking off part of your narrow screen, but rather because the narrow screen isn’t wide enough to accommodate the picture.  See what I mean here:

The opposite problem is now occurring because we have widescreen TVs that are showing older Academy programs.  That, properly shown, would leave black bars at the sides of the image, like this:
Instead, the vast majority of TV owners opt to stretch out the narrow image to fill the black bars, like this:

 

I HATE THIS!  When the picture is stretched out this way, thin people look fat and fat people look enormous.  I call it “the egg people,” because everyone has an oblong, egg-shaped head.

Here is a brief animation showing how the image is stretched in your TV to create egg people:

I’ve had people tell me that “you get used to it,” and that they like the screen filled up.  Well, I don’t get used to it, it’s wrong, and don’t expect me to get used to something that is wrong.  I hate watching movies and sports this way.

I’m telling you all that if you don’t reset your TVs to eliminate the egg people, I’m going to send Maureen O’Hara out to your house.  She’ll do it for you.

And she’s not as forgiving as I am.

The Big Push

I’m going to let you in on a secret.  This blog is only a ploy to get you to look at the rest of my web site.  Well, it’s not really a secret.

You see, I created Dr. Film as a TV show a couple of years ago, and the web site has been up for ages.  I couldn’t get anyone to look at the site.  No one wanted to look at my demos, either.

There will be another screening of the complete show on August 4, 2011, at Garfield Park in Indianapolis.  Here’s the link if you’d like to attend.  It’s free.  If you don’t know about the complete show, then read on, Macduff.

The reason this is “the big push” is that I’ve only now figured out a decent marketing campaign, and the show is now going to a number of venues.  I spent more time figuring out a marketing campaign than I did making the show.  There is new art, an upgraded web page, and I’ve got a publicist on board.  I hope this will put us over the top.  It’s a lot of work for a show about old movies.

You see, I love old films, and it bothers me that so few people watch them anymore.  It’s my feeling that most people are uninitiated and just don’t understand what they’re seeing.  I think that some people are a little put off by the hosts on the major channels.  They treat film as high art (which it is), but we sometimes miss the raggedy fun of a strange old film we’ve never seen.

After all, Citizen Kane is great art, but how many times can you watch it?  And in my experience, there is so much stuff that is sitting out there unseen and unpreserved that it saddens me to see the same old warhorses trotted out for the “old movie show.”  Theater owners and TV stations think that if it isn’t a title you know, then you won’t watch.

I’ve got some experience in this.  I’ve taught film history and appreciation, and people seem to like my classes.  I also remember the old days of TV, with the rough-edged local host doing a movie.  I thought that if I could combine the come-what-may atmosphere of the old days, no suits, no slickness, and weave in a little real history, we might have a good show.

That’s what Dr. Film is.  Or what it will be.

The show is designed to highlight unusual films that you don’t see on television much.  It’s definitely got a “what the heck is that” factor built into it.  I’m hoping to catch some errant channel flipper on his way past the classic film channel.  I hope he stays long enough to see what we’re showing.

Yes, I did make a complete pilot that’s broadcast-ready at 96 minutes.  I’ve taken some heat for not posting it.  It’s not on iTunes or YouTube either.  Why not?  Because it took so much time and effort to make the episode that I can’t afford another one.  If I give this one away, then the networks look at the show as “contaminated” by having been out there in the “free” world.

Trust me, in an ideal world I’d love to do this for free.  The stats are painful, though.  Three full days of shooting, many, hours of rewriting, days of film transfer work and re-transfer work.  Then the ultimate: I had to add titles, artwork and composite the show.  It took me a solid month to do it.  I admit that Episode 2 would take less time, but it’s still a lot of work.  I can’t spend this kind of time on a show unless I can get money back out of it.

The good news is that I’ve got the whole thing down to a staff of 3 people, and I’m the one who does most of the work.  That means that I can crank out episodes for a pretty inexpensive price compared to what other places have to charge.  Sometimes being a film geek and an engineer has its benefits.

I hope you’ve seen enough of the site to be excited about the show.  I hope you’re excited about the blog.  I’m the worst person in the world on marketing, but I know one thing.  I call it the marketing triangle.  I need three people to do effective marketing.  If I tell you that my restaurant is great, you won’t believe me.  I’ve got a stake in it, and you’ll raise your eyebrow and walk away.  It’s human nature.  But if a buddy of yours tells you that my restaurant is great, you’ll give it a chance.

I can’t just tell people that Dr. Film would be a cool show, and that this is an interesting site.  You have to tell a friend.  Hopefully, your friends will tell friends too.

What else can you do?  Well, if you have a friend with money who might like to sponsor the show, then let him know about it.  If you know any potential network or cable outlet that might like to pick up the show, then let me know.  Please don’t pester people, but a polite, “Hey, this is good,” is always welcome.

Would you like to have a free commando screening of the pilot episode?  That’s great, and I can help arrange it.  I realize that people want to see the show, and that’s fine.  I just can’t go making copies of it for public consumption.  Terry Gilliam got Brazil released on word of mouth.  I’m hoping that Dr. Film might get the same reception.

I know it’s crazy.  I’m told that often.  But one of my blog posts recently went viral in Europe.  I got about 20 pingbacks in an hour.  I never thought that would happen.  Maybe this can happen too.

Plan 9 from Out of Sequence

Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959) gets the name of being the worst film ever made.  It isn’t; it isn’t even Ed Wood’s worst film.  Plan 9 does have that oddly poetic Wood dialogue that doesn’t make sense and can’t quite be read properly by his actors.  It also has a raft of really awful cinematic mistakes, particularly in editing.

Some of you may be unfamiliar with the film.  It’s a low-budget story of aliens who come to Earth and re-animate dead people.  For some reason, the aliens believe this will frighten the living into listening to a dire warning: mankind is on the brink of a discovery that could threaten the entire universe.  If this doesn’t make sense, then you should watch the film, because that doesn’t make sense either.  Plan 9 is also notable for being Dracula star Bela Lugosi’s last film.  Lugosi died suddenly in 1956 during tests for a movie that was to be called Tomb of the Vampire.  Three years later, Wood cribbed this footage and used it to make Lugosi seem to be one of the walking dead.  For most of the picture, he’s awkwardly doubled by a guy holding a cape over his face.

When I teach classes in film history, I use the graveyard scene chase from this Plan 9 as an example of bad editing.  The scene is intended to be a tense chase through an old cemetery.  The walking dead chase Mona McKinnon as she struggles to stay ahead of them. This aim fails completely, because Wood has cut it in such a way that there is no consistent geography to it.  The shots are all over the map, some out of sequence, and some just wrong.  Now, that monster is… over there… and… over there, and she ran through that set once, no, now backwards, and that monster moved left to right and now right to… oh, I give up.

The other problem that the editing exposes is the utter poverty of the film.  Bela Lugosi’s double basically trips over a cardboard gravestone, and we see it bobble.  Wood hired an actor with a gigantic posterior to pick up Mona McKinnon at the end of the scene, and he cut it so that the posterior is seen far too often.  Tor Johnson has a nice shot in which he is seen emerging from his grave, but the bulky actor can’t quite stand upright, and struggles to get to his feet.  Rather than cut away… please CUT, Wood leaves it in, because big Tor looked so cool.

Watch Ed’s cut for yourself.  Now that I’ve pointed out the myriad errors, we can move on from there.

This is a sequence that lends itself to reordering, because the soundtrack is essentially just the Plan 9 theme.  The music is actually pretty good.  The monsters are at least somewhat spooky.  The photography is fine.  The problem is that the sets are cheap, and the editing is horrid.  Apart from one shot at the beginning of the sequence, there’s not a single shot with a monster and Mona McKinnon in view at the same time.  This is not fixable, but a good editor can minimize it.

I noted several key problems with the scene:

  • Mona McKinnon takes forever to run out of the shot with Lugosi’s double, and there’s no sense of drama in it.  Too long.
  • Tor Johnson’s grave emergence takes too long and slows the pace.  If we start it earlier and shorten the whole thing, making it seem as if he’s coming out just as McKinnon is going through the cemetery, then we’d have more tension.
  • McKinnon goes through the same set 3-4 times in different directions to pad out the scene.  It’s confusing, and too long. CUT.
  • The actor who rescues McKinnon at the end takes too long getting around the car and his posterior is embarrassing.  Let’s help him out by minimizing that.
  • OK, we all know that Bela Lugosi was long dead by the time this movie started shooting.  Wood’s use of test footage is actually pretty clever, but the double (Dr. Tom Mason) is glaringly obvious because he looks nothing like Lugosi.  In order to give us a little illusion, let’s not hold on long shots of Mason.  Let’s also not use the same shot of Lugosi six times just because he’s billed in the film.  If it doesn’t make sense, it needs to go.

I had to fudge a little.  I didn’t have access to the sound stems (the separate tracks for music, sound effects, and dialogue), so I was stuck using the sound as it was on the finished soundtrack.  By the time dialogue occurs, late in the scene, I’d cut the better part of a minute out of it, so I had to overlap two pieces of disparate music to make it work.  Here’s what I did with it:

The point in all of this is to show what an editor does.  People think he just cuts out the boring parts of a movie.  That can be true (it was in this case!), but he’s also responsible for making the film flow properly.  He takes a bunch of shots that the director supplies him and has to make sense of it.  If the film’s shooting was a disaster, then he’s essentially trying to rescue the film at the last moment.  There are people known as film doctors who specialize in taking footage from troubled films and creating something better out of them.

One of the episodes of the Dr. Film TV show will be dedicated to editing techniques and how films are put together, as we trace the development of the art through the years. Look at this and sort of a sneak preview of what is to come if the show gets picked up.

Stephen King directed Maximum Overdrive (1986).  He told an interviewer that when he saw the “rushes” of the film with his editor, he thought he had another Plan 9 from Outer Space on his hands.  The editor told him that all films look like Plan 9 until they’re cut properly.

Plan 9 would never have been a good movie, but Wood’s editing makes it a lot worse than it had to be.  Sometimes it’s what you do with the lemons that makes all the difference.

The Reclusive Collector, or How Films Become Lost

Film people are a different breed.  It’s a necessity.  Some of you have heard the legends about some guy who has discovered the only print of Lon Chaney’s London After Midnight (1927).  The story goes that he’s just waiting to cash in on the bonanza when the film’s copyright expires.  Well, there isn’t a bonanza.  The potential market for a video release of London After Midnight is so small that the money probably wouldn’t even cover the costs of transferring a nitrate print to video.

Film collectors don’t collect films because we want something rare and valuable (there are a few, but not many, who do that).  We collect films because we love them.  We collect films because they look beautiful on the big screen.  We collect films because we know that many will be neglected and thrown away unless we keep them.  Most of us would like to do more public shows, but the way the laws are written makes it difficult.  (See my other post on “The Marx Brothers Explain Copyright Law” for a more detailed rant on this).

The rules for public performance of music are much more civilized than they are for film.  I can even bend the artist’s intent and still get by with it.  If I decided that I wanted to become Hitler Elvis, and that I wanted to sing Elvis songs in German while doing a “Sieg Heil,” I could probably do it.  I’d have to pay the BMI/ASCAP fees and keep a record of which songs I played, but I could do it.  I use this example not because I’m advocating it, but because artistically it’s about as far from what Elvis did as I can imagine.

But for film it’s different.  Say I wanted to run a retrospective of Walt Disney movies, and I wanted to do it respectfully using quality prints.  Say I wanted to pay the proper royalties and contacted the people at the Disney corporation.  They’d file charges against me!  Sure, I can be disrespectful to Elvis for a price!  But even paying proper respect to Mickey Mouse gets the Feds at your door.

It’s much easier for a collector to sit on his collection and not let anyone see the films he has.  No hassles, no effort.  It avoids all kinds of issues.  I’ve been called evil and greedy by people who want me to release a copyrighted film on video (I won’t).  I’ve been called evil and greedy by movie studios who are upset that I saved something they threw out.  Don’t believe me?  Here’s a real story…

A number of years ago I was in an old film exchange in Vincennes, IN.  They were going to close it and throw out all the films that no one wanted.  Down in the guts of the building was a 35mm print of a film listed as Going All the Way.  I recognized the title. It was based on a best-selling novel by Dan Wakefield, and much of it was shot near my house.  The owner of the building wanted $50 for the print, so I figured I could watch it once and trade it.  At least I’d see it on a big screen.  Remember, I have 35mm projectors at my house.

How, you may ask, did a print end up here?  It happens all the time.  The studio makes a decision: “Are we going to make enough money off a future show to justify paying for return shipping on this print?”  If not, they just leave it for the owner of the theater or film exchange.  This is a long-held tradition in the film industry.  Dawson City, Alaska became the last-stop dumping ground for hundreds of silent films, and they were miraculously preserved due to the low temperatures.  The practice of dumping continues to this day, which is how I found this print.

A few years later I happened to meet the author of the book Going All the Way, Dan Wakefield, at a poetry reading.  Knowing that there’s an audience for personal appearances, I asked him if he might be willing to appear at a screening of the film if I could arrange it.  He was very nice and told me that he’d be happy to do that.  Unfortunately, I had no idea who owned the film, and he apparently didn’t, either, so that made it doubly difficult.

Like many independent films, Going All the Way only barely got made.  Even though the book was a best-seller, and Dan Wakefield is a major author, it was a tough sell.  Since there’s a fair amount of sex in it, the major studios shied away.  Studios like to make films with explosions and not ones from character-based books.

Going All the Way got sweet revenge on the studios by being one of those rare independent films with a long shelf life.  Ben Affleck appeared in it (before he became famous), which suddenly makes an obscure indie into a marketable feature.  The copyright records indicated a complex web of finances and loans. Unfortunately, I couldn’t track down who owned it for a theatrical screening.  The rights history is online, but there are video rights and theatrical rights, and all sorts of other ancillary things.   After a while it looks like buckshot on a rural stop sign.

A buddy of mine tipped me off that the theatrical rights might be owned by a particular studio.  I won’t implicate them, partly because they’re generally pretty nice, but they’re known the world around.  I called my contact there, and he told me that it was owned by a studio sub-division, and he gave me the contact information.

The lady yelled at me and screamed that I was an evil film pirate, and that they would sue me.  I thanked her and told her that I’d suddenly lost the film and I wouldn’t be showing it.  Normally, I’d offer to let the studio borrow the print or use it for remastering, but not with an attitude like that!  She confirmed that they didn’t have a negative or print material on it.  (It’s not surprising… I think I counted twelve ownership changes since the film was released.  Studios just bought rights in bulk and didn’t check to see if film shipped on every title.)

I point out that this explains why there isn’t a legitimate DVD or Blu-Ray of Going All the Way.  With the film masters missing, no one has material good enough to reissue the film.  It’s not exactly lost, but it’s the next thing to it.  We’ve got the low-definition master tape made for cable release and VHS.  That’s it.  Amazon has some bootleg DVDs made from the VHS tapes.  I’m sure they look terrible.

Let me interject here that projecting 35mm is a lot of work.  You have to change reels every 20 minutes.  It’s heavy, and everything needs to be rewound afterward.  I don’t do it unless I really need to.  So this film had been sitting in my basement, unseen, for all this time.  I will also interject that it was on Agfa stock, important because Agfa is an undated stock that a lot of independent films used, because it was pretty cheap.

Fast forward another year or two.  A film festival wants to run Going All the Way.  They want to get Mr. Wakefield to attend the screening.  They’ve heard I have a print.  They contact me and ask what I know about it.  I tell them that the owner studio is hostile, but if they can get a legal clearance, I’d be happy to let them use the print.

But first, I’d need to watch it to make sure the print is in good shape.  In all these years I hadn’t seen it.  I figured it was time.

I put in the first reel.  It was ratty and brittle, but runnable. A couple of splices made with masking tape.  Ick.  The credits came up with the title, and a 1950s car.  Looked OK.  As  I let it run, I realized that Ben Affleck wasn’t in the movie, nor was anyone else I knew from the cast.  This wasn’t the right film!

What I had gotten was a soft-core drive-in film called Goin’ All the Way (no g—that’s the key).  I hadn’t known it because it was on undated film stock. I never had the film that I thought I’d had.  The festival ran the correct movie from VHS (gag). All that work to track down the owners and the rights, threats of lawsuits, and nothing!

And still, it’s possible that Going All the Way will never be recovered on film.  It was made in 1997!  If this film were a person, he wouldn’t be old enough to drink yet!

This is how films become lost.  It’s also how collectors, people who want to play the rules, will say, “I don’t have that.  I don’t know anything about it.”

No wonder that 50% of all films made before 1950 are said to be lost today.

Kongo Speaks! Karloff Clams Up!

I had an interesting conversation last year at a film convention.  I had brought a chapter of King of the Kongo (1929), which didn’t go over especially well.  That’s not a surprise; it’s not particularly good.  Most of the Mascot serials aren’t particularly good.  They’re a lot of fun, full of action, and most of them don’t make a lot of sense.  This was where the conversation came in.

It’s known that King of the Kongo was film was released in both silent and sound versions.  I’d seen another version of the serial on VHS tape, and it trumpeted the serial’s theme song, “Love Thoughts of You.”  My print didn’t say this.  With this missing, I simply assumed that I’d gotten the silent print.

Not so, said the gentleman speaking to me.  How could I ignore the fact that there were long stretches of film that showed actors speaking–without intertitles?  The film didn’t make any sense!  I figured that the producer sent out the same print regardless of who ordered it, and if it was for a silent show, then he just didn’t ship the sound discs.

King of the Kongo was produced as a sound-on-disc film, which meant that the sound had to be played back from a set of records that accompany the film.  There are tons of these films that were made in the early sound era.  The problem is that in order to see the films today, it’s necessary to have a copy of both the picture and the discs.  By early 1931, all films went to the easier-to-use optical soundtracks that we still use today.  (Well, they’re similar… no hostile notes please.)

The gentleman went on to tell me that he knew of collectors who had sound discs for King of the Kongo and, to top it off, several people told me of the legend that “a reclusive collector” had the complete serial on film.

That reclusive collector is yours truly.  Many years ago, in 1989 to be exact, I bought a 16mm print of King of the Kongo from a collector named JM Gillis.  (I can use his name because he’s deceased now.)  He was liquidating a collection of films he’d amassed since the 1950s.

I wanted King of the Kongo because it was historically important (it was the first sound serial), and because I love Boris Karloff.  I bought it even knowing the print was silent.  Other people wanted it, so it went for a premium.  Even though it was licensed by a video company, I never made my money back on it; they didn’t sell very many copies.  No one was ever interested in putting it out on DVD, much less Blu-Ray.

Gillis told me that he’d had a guy make several 16mm reduction prints from 35mm back in the late 1950s.   It was that song credit for “Love Thoughts of You” that kept bothering me. I wondered if the lab technician who’d made Kongo just snipped it out because he didn’t have the discs.

As I mulled it over, I wondered if the guy at the film convention had been right all along. I might have the sound version, but with the song credit removed.  That would explain the long sections without dialogue.  It would also explain why I was never able to make heads or tails of the plot.

The idea occurred to me that it might be possible to test my theory by getting access to some of the extant sound discs.  I contacted Ron Hutchison at The Vitaphone Project, which is dedicated to finding lost movie sound discs.  It’s named for the Vitaphone process that pioneered the successful sound-on-disc movies in the 1920s. Ron told me that he had material for 3 reels of King of the Kongo.  He was more than happy to make me CDs of them.

The complete serial is 21 reels!  He had only 3: Chapter 5, reel 1 and 2, and Chapter 6, reel 2.

I went to the basement and grabbed the two chapters involved.  I quickly transferred Chapter 5 to video and loaded it into my snazzy new computer.  With a few minutes of work, I saw that I could roughly get a dialogue scene to work in the first reel.  It was going to have to be done all by hand, not by calculation: my print had some splices in it, and was missing a few frames at the end each reel.  The length of the soundtrack proved that the credit for “Love Thoughts of You” had indeed been chopped out.  The sound was about fifteen seconds longer than the actual reel, just enough time for the missing title.

The lab work on this particular chapter was pretty bad.  It was dark and hard to see.  I loaded it into a video enhancement program and corrected it the best I could.  That way I could at least see the lip movements.  I sent the audio to sound king Dave Wood; he scrubbed it and got it resynchronized until it looked OK.

The results?  Well, with about 15 hours of work, I have a complete, restored Chapter 5.  The serial is not a great work of art, but it never was.  The sound sequences give the story a lot more clarity!  It appears that they had already finished the serial as a silent and then added one talking sequence in each reel.  The rest is silent with the original 1929 score on the discs.

I felt sorry for the actors.  In the early days of talking films, the microphone was heavy and nailed down. Later on, as microphones got lighter, and mike booms were invented, the sound man could follow the actor.  In Kongo, the microphone is in one place and the actors have to dive for it to say their lines. Immediately, they must move away for the next poor guy.  Quality acting is out the window.  The idea is to get through the scene without having to stop and cut. Incidentally, Boris Karloff has no lines in the available sound footage, although he’s highly visible in the rest of the chapter.

And then the song.  “Love Thoughts of You?”  What is this doing in here?  It has no place in an action serial.  The song is pleasant enough, sung by a typical 1920s tenor, but it clashes with the hard-edged African atmosphere of the rest of the film.  It even distracts the cliffhangers.  Typically, when the hero is in dire peril at the end of the chapter, the music swells dramatically and we cut to the “Don’t Miss the Next Chapter” title card.  Not here.  As Walter Miller is charged by the baddies, the title fades up, accompanied by a bubbly instrumental of, yes, you guessed it, “Love Thoughts of You.”

I have no idea if any archive has a better print of King of the Kongo.  I’m certain that it’s not high on anyone’s restoration list.  I doubt that my material is good enough to make a proper restoration on archival film.  Next year, there may be a world premiere special showing of the complete chapter–on video.  And you can see two clips of the dialogue sequences here.

How’s that for a so-called reclusive collector?  That’s a discussion for another day. Call me crazy… I think this material should be seen!

 

Midnight in Manhattan, er Paris

It seems difficult to review a Woody Allen picture these days without discussing his personal situation.  The problem is that, much as he denies it, Woody’s pictures are often subtly autobiographical.  Allen’s new picture, Midnight in Paris, is about a screenwriter disenchanted with his work in Hollywood who wants to start over in Europe.  Um, well, there goes art imitating life again.  Allen’s last several films have been financed and shot mostly in Europe.

Many people have suspected that Allen was losing his touch.  His films were not as self-assured, and they had less of a smooth feel than he’d been able to achieve earlier.  I’m happy to report that this now seems a temporary aberration.  Midnight in Paris marks a return to the “classic” Woody style, whatever that is.  It’s not like one of his “earlier, funny films,” and it’s not like his Bergman-obsessed works like Interiors, but it has elements of both, and they work together well.

In Midnight in Paris, a screenwriter (Owen Wilson) is visiting Paris with his fiancee (Rachel McAdams) and her family.  Weary of his hackneyed Hollywood jobs, he’s working on a novel about a guy who works in a nostalgia shop.  While McAdams and her mother shop all over Paris, they meet up with a blowhard know-nothing (Michael Sheen).  He’s the type of guy who doesn’t really know all that he thinks he knows, especially about art and history.  These scenes are extremely reminiscent of ones in Allen’s film Manhattan, as is the entire sub-plot in which McAdams’ character falls for Sheen’s.

But that’s fine, since the bulk of the plot covers some familiar themes in very nice new ways.  Disgusted with those around him, Wilson goes off for a walk and discovers himself in the Paris of the 1920s.  Allen handles this masterfully.  The shift happens in an old area of the city that could have been in the 2000s or 1920s, and we’re not quite certain how it works for a while.  The mechanics of how the time travel actually happens are never explained or even explored.  It’s simply a plot device.  Allen uses it but doesn’t exploit it.  James Cameron, please pay attention here.

Once in the 1920s, the film takes off.  If you’re one of those people who knows nothing about Paris in the 1920s, then you may be left out of a lot of the plot.  I’d encourage you to read up a little on it before you see the film.  It doesn’t stop to spoon-feed you along.  Wilson’s character meets Salvador Dali, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and a host of others.  The casting is impeccable.  Of particular merit are Kathy Bates as Stein and Adrien Brody as Dali.

While in the 1920s, Wilson meets Adriana (Marion Cotillard).  Cotillard’s character, like Wilson’s, feels stuck in the wrong time.  While Wilson would prefer to live in the time of the 1920s, Cotillard (native to the 1920s) yearns for the Paris of the 1890s with Lautrec and others.

There’s no point in giving more of the plot away; the rest of it is quite engaging and shows Allen’s comic introspection wonderfully.  The question of whether to live in the past or the present is addressed quite humorously.

The real revelation in Midnight in Paris is that Owen Wilson is quite good!  I’ve long considered Wilson a lightweight comedic actor of limited talent.  He’s been in more of his share of movies that are overloaded with fart jokes, and I was beginning to think of him as limited to those kinds of things.  I had quite liked him in The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), but most of the rest of the time, he’s been like a cut-rate Adam Sandler.  His character in Midnight in Paris is clearly written as the Woody Allen character… you can hear the text is written for those inflections.  The challenge for Wilson is to play a Woody character but still make it his own.  I’m happy to report that he rises to this challenge admirably.

There are still things I’m not quite enchanted about in Midnight in Paris, but very few of them.  The most striking one is that we know it’s a Woody Allen film because the colors are biased dramatically toward yellow all the way through.  There’s less of this than there has been in previous Allen efforts, but I hope he gets it out of his system some day.

I’m trying to recommend this film to everyone I can, because I’m really not pleased about the current trend of movies that have to credit Stan Lee and have a roman numeral in the title.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that… but there is something wrong that we have so much of it.  Midnight in Paris is smart, not based on a comic book, and it’s not a sequel to anything.  May it play to packed houses.