The Screengrab : charles durning

My Kind of Red State: An Election Year Salute to The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 19:00:00 GMT

As a Yankee, born and bred in the heart of America’s elitist, communist, terrorist-embracing, tree-hugging sodomite wasteland (a.k.a. “Taxachusetts”), I grew up with a certain prejudiced view of the South that pretty much disappeared when I actually crossed the Mason-Dixon line for the first time. Driving cross-country with friend and Screengrab colleague (and Hick Flick scholar) Scott Von Doviak after college (and later relocating for a time to George W.’s old stomping ground of Austin, TX), I was pleasantly surprised to discover how generally nice and friendly the residents of the Confederacy seemed up close.

Now, back on the East Coast, the inescapable maelstrom of election coverage has got me shaking my fist at the Red States again on a daily basis...so I was pleasantly refreshed when my lovely Polish bride (in the midst of a recent spate of Dolly-mania) rented The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, which reminded me again of some of the nicer parts of Southern culture, while making me wonder afresh why, to paraphrase Rodney King, we can’t all just get along. Whorehouse, for those who’ve forgotten or never had any reason to know, is the story of the Chicken Ranch, a brothel tolerated (and frequented) by the citizens of a small Texas town for decades until a sanctimonious self-appointed TV crusader decides to improve his ratings by launching a campaign to shut the place down.

The laid-back, no-nonsense charm of the eccentric locals (and the deep-fried chemistry between Southern icons Burt Reynolds and the irreplaceable Dolly Parton) is a far cry from the typical closed-minded, dimwitted, backwards, racist, homophobic, sex-fearing redneck stereotype. In the happy singing, dancing world of Whorehouse, the characters are perfectly happy to live and let live, co-existing with an establishment that may not technically match their ideas of morality or legality, but where, as Parton cheerily warbles, there’s really “nothing dirty going on.”

That is, until Dom DeLuise’s glory-seeking, opportunistic muckraker makes an issue of it, forcing people to choose between their theoretical beliefs and the common sense reality of their day-to-day lives. Frustrated by the cognitive dissonance of the situation, Reynolds attempts to save the Chicken Ranch with the power of fact and logic: i.e., prostitution has existed since the dawn of time, and Parton’s quasi-legal operation isn’t hurting anyone...in fact, he reasons, a regulated, female-run brothel is safer and healthier for both the employees and customers. But sadly, as Charles Durning’s Texas Governor elucidates in his catchy showstopper, “The Sidestep,” politicians are swayed by polls, not logic, leading to an official result that benefits absolutely no one (except, of course, DeLuise’s comically odious pundit).

Election year politics can be maddeningly nasty and manipulative, but The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas (the top-grossing movie musical of the ‘80s, according to Wikipedia, and much better than I remembered) is a charming corrective, offering a pleasant vision of a world where Red State values are represented by sensible, positive, loving and loveable uniters like Parton rather than certain divisive barracudas I could mention.

Movies Into Theater: "Dog Day Afternoon" Sweats It Out; "Spider-Man" Aims to Rock Out

Phil Nugent — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Anyone with half a slice of ham in his DNA who's watched Al Pacino tearing it up in the 1975 Dog Day Afternoon has to have thought to himself, Man, that looks exciting. I'd love to have done that! That probably accounts for the current reincarnation of Dog Day Afternoon as a stage play performed by New York's Barefoot Theater Company. The production was written and directed by its star, Francisco Solorzano, who takes on the role of Sonny, the desperate but not dishonorable man who, with his dull-witted sidekick Sal (John Cazale in the movie, Jeremy Brena here), walks into a bank in Brooklyn on a sweltering August day in 1972, looking to stage a robbery to raise the money for his male lover's sex change operation and winds up at the center of a hostage drama that involves platoons of cops and cheering, jeering crowds getting off on the chaos and energy. (At times, as when--in a scene not duplicated in the play--Pacino's Sonny marches in front of the bank, pumping his arm and screaming "Attica! Attica!" while the crowd, looking for any reason to knock the police, roars its approval, he was practically the event's emcee.) In a half-hearted attempt to turn this into a real play instead of a chance to live the dream of starring in a beloved classic, Solorzano tinkers with the time frame and assigning the characters monologues to fill in some of the back story. The result is both more heartfelt and a lot less ingenious than the last big restaging of a movie on a New York stage, the four-member-cast high-camp version of Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps. Dog Day Afternoon, which runs through August 15, is basically an actor's fantasy and a curiosity, but it may not be a bad way to kill a hot summer evening, especially for people who already have the movie well-memorized. But memories of Pacino, Cazle, Charles Durning, and Christopher Sarandon in the original continue to loom large.

In a glitzier section of the theater news department, auditions began this week for the Spider-Man musical that's planned for a fall 2009 opening. Nell Gluckman reports that the biggest news about the show so far is that it seems to be "attempting to bridge the gap between flashy musical theater and the firmly rooted New York rock scene. With music by Bono and The Edge of U2, the production's interest in a rock edge isn't a secret. But the producers and directors also seem to be cultivating a downtown vibe. Today's casting call is at the Knitting Factory, a venue with a history of performances of alternative music, booking bands such as Sonic Youth and Yo La Tengo in their early years." It sounds as if Spider-Man is looking to be the bridge between two emerging trends, the musical-based-on-a-movie (Legally Blonde) and the stage-musical-drawing-on-indie-rock--or at least, music that's closer to "real" rock than what you got with something like Hair--as typified by Spring Awakening and the Obie-Award-winning Passing Strange by the great, weird singer-songwriter Stew. One of the show's casting directors told Gluckman that, by making its presence felt at the Knitting Factory, the show hopes to attract some "people who haven't thought they should go out for a Broadway show." It remains to be seen whether their efforts will result in something that will attract people--as in, ticket buyers--who hadn't thought they'd be caught dead going out to a Broadway musical. But if there has to be a Spider-Man musical, it's sort of nice to know that the people mounting it have actually put some thought into anything besides getting the web-swinging effects to work.

Top Thirteen Greatest Fictional Movie Presidents, Part 1

Peter Smith — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 21:00:00 GMT

Jonathan Demme's documentary Jimmy Carter: Man from Plains opens this week, and while it isn't really about Carter the President so much as about Carter the Ex-President, it got us thinking about the Oval Office and the movies. Depicting Presidents is always a dicey proposition on film. In contemporary films, there are fewer ways to take your audience out of a movie than to show the President of the United States and have it not be the actual current President of the United States (another reason why Crimson Tide, with its CNN-generated Bill Clinton cameo, is so awesome). In films set in the future, it's hard to show the President and have it not feel like a ham-handed attempt at instant dystopianism. (Funny how those silly people in the future rarely elect somebody halfway decent to the office.) Our list this week focuses on Great Fictional Movie Presidents. But you'll notice that we've included two sorta-not-fictional Honorable Mentions. You may also notice that we've avoided some movie Presidents (coughMichaelDouglascough) who irritate the hell out of us.

Peter Sellers as President Merkin Muffley, DR. STRANGELOVE, OR, HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964)

Of all the roles played by Peter Sellers in Stanley Kubrick's brilliant black comedy, none leaves an impression quite like President Merkin Muffley. (The dual vagina references in the name are as sure a sign as any that anarchic comic author Terry Southern was behind the screenplay.) Allegedly based on fussy Democrat Adlai Stevenson, Muffley's role as the sole voice of reason and practicality in a film full of powerful madmen anchors the entire movie — and, on occasion, such as in the legendary and hilarious telephone conversation with the Soviet premier (much of which, like a good deal of Sellers' dialogue, was originally improvised by the actor himself), provides some of Dr. Strangelove's funniest moments. Muffley wasn't always meant to be the film's unflappable straight man; Southern originally wrote him as an extremely loopy collection of tics and affectations, including a severe head cold and an obvious and stereotypical homosexual demeanor; the former was so effective that it basically prevented anyone from playing off of him, and the latter, in rehearsal, was felt by both actor and director, to be too broad. Instead, Sellers played Muffley as almost preternaturally bland, which made his occasional forays into hysteria all the more effective.

Walter Huston as President Judson C. "Judd" Hammond, GABRIEL OVER THE WHITE HOUSE (1933)

This 1933 picture, which opened during Franklin Roosevelt's first term as president, was directed by Gregory La Cava, but the real driving force behind the production was William Randolph Hearst, who intended it as a primer designed to show FDR how he ought to go about solving the country's problems. President Hammond is a compromise candidate, a cynical party hack who couldn't care less about his country's citizens or its future. But then he's injured in a car accident and slips into a coma, and when he comes out of it, he's a changed man, and he rolls up his sleeves and begins to do whatever it takes to make things right. His methods include firing his whole cabinet, threatening to declare martial law until Congress lets him do whatever he wants, and having all the gangsters in the country rounded up and summarily executed. His reign of righteous terror climaxes with a scene where he gathers all the ambassadors of the world's nations onto a yacht and treats them to a show of American military power that convinces them that they have no choice but to disarm and quickly fork over the money they owe the U.S. from the first World War. Having rendered the United States prosperous, crime-free and dominant, President Hammond contentedly drops dead; the movie leaves open the possibility that he's been dead since the car crash and that his body has been serving as an earthly conduit for the Lord. FDR wound up being a disappointment to Hearst, not taking much from the Hammond playbook, but some historians think that the movie may have actually prophesied the administration of a much later American president.

Donald Pleasance as The President of the United States, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981)

You know, sometimes you really feel sorry for Donald Pleasance. The poor guy survived the Blitz, fought in the Second World War, and went on to become President of the United States despite the constitutional hindrance of having been born in England. And what does it get him after forty years of struggle? Some mouthy stewardess blows up Air Force One and leaves him stranded in New York (which just happens to be a maximum security penitentiary, peopled with murderers, drug lords, and assorted human scum — nothing like it is in real life, of course), where he is continually menaced by the guy who sang "Grazing in the Grass." U.S. presidents in action movies tend to break down pretty cleanly into one of two categories — the Fightin' President, who punches people and shoots down alien warships, and the Frightened President, who cowers in a corner and waits for a real tough-guy he-man to come rescue him. For most of Escape from New York's run time, Pleasance's unnamed President is decidedly the latter, and we're clearly meant to feel some degree of sympathy towards him as he awaits rescue (like Nixon, he apparently has a secret plan to end the war). Still, it's hard not to come away feeling a bit of sympathy for the terrorists — after all, the guy did turn Manhattan into a prison. Won't somebody think of the restaurants?

Terry Crews as President Camacho, IDIOCRACY (2006)

Postponed for over a year before getting a blink-and-you-missed-it release last fall, Mike Judge's cult-classic-in-the-making imagined a future in which the morons have inherited the Earth. In a world where Starbucks sells both lattes and handjobs and crops are watered with Brawndo™ Energy Drinks, it only makes sense that the President of the United States would be a trash-talking, hard-partying ex-porn star and five-time Ultimate Smackdown Champion. President Camacho, played with great comic relish by ex-NFL defensive lineman Terry Crews, is the kind of fearless leader who sports a tank top and American-flag warmup pants at Presidential functions, brandishes a machine gun during his State of the Union address, and rides a four-wheeler everywhere he goes, national security be damned. But his actual leadership skills are limited to making the country's smartest man his new Secretary of the Interior and tasking him to solve the nation's famine problem in one week, or else he'll get thrown into the ring during a nationally-televised monster truck rally. A few decades ago, it might have been tempting to read Judge's vision of the presidency 500 years from now as a dystopian satire conceived by a former high-school outcast sick of seeing the dumb jocks get all the glory. But nowadays, when having a significant speaking role in Predator is as accurate an indicator of electability as any previous public office, one can't help but wonder whether it'll even take five centuries to place us squarely in the political climate imagined by Idiocracy.

Charles During as President David Stevens, TWILIGHT'S LAST GLEAMING (1977)

Charles Durning's President Stevens is a squat, foul-mouthed sign of the post-Nixonian times. On the one hand, it's doubtful a pre-Nixon president would have been allowed to drink and curse this much on-screen: Stevens has a "fuck" for every occasion. But he's also made directly responsible for the U.S.'s post-Vietnam fallout, blackmailed by Burt Lancaster into promising to reveal — on national TV! — our cynical, soldier-killing true reasons for entering the war. Impressively naive, Stevens is forced to condemn the administrations preceding him: he retains Nixon's profanity but none of his attitude.

— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Vadim Rizov