The Screengrab : dean stockwell

Screengrab Presents: Cinema's Greatest Comebacks (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 21:00:00 GMT

“Don’t call it a comeback, I been here for years,” implored L.L. Cool J (shortly before his mother told him to knock us unconscious), raising an interesting point in the endless Hollywood parlor game of career perception: after all, the recent Golden Globe nominations for Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem would seem to mark Vicky Cristina Barcelona as a return to form for Woody Allen...but what then to make of the fact that Match Point, Sweet & Lowdown, Manhattan Murder Mystery, Crimes & Misdemeanors, etc. etc. were all considered phoenix-like returns to form in the Woodman’s prolific (and sometimes crappy) oeuvre? How many times can a person come back if they never really go away?

Sometimes, though (as in the case of pugilist/thespian Mickey Rourke), the weepy entertainment magazine profiles and welcome home parties seem entirely appropriate. After all, the one-time heartthrob used to be a bona fide movie star (and light bondage icon) thanks to hits like Diner and 9 ½ Weeks, and though he’s done interesting work since then in films like Buffalo '66 and Spun, among others, there’s a big difference between co-starring with Eric Roberts and generating Oscar buzz.

Sure, Rourke essentially torpedoed his own career by stomping around like the Pope of Douchebag Village for years and years...but as the auto and financial industries have shown, everybody gets a second chance in America, no matter how bad you fuck up (unless, of course, you’re poor).

So, in honor of this week’s release of The Wrestler, we here at The Screengrab hereby salute...THE GREATEST COMEBACKS OF ALL TIME!

(And stay tuned next week as we ask Santa for THE COMEBACKS WE’D MOST LIKE TO SEE!)

JACK NICHOLSON in TERMS OF ENDEARMENT (1983)

Though you could be forgiven for not believing it, there was a stretch there where it looked touch and go for the continued health of Jack Nicholson's continued career and reputation. After winning the Academy Award for Best Actor for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), Nicholson jumped head first into a series of high-profile ventures -- The Missouri Breaks, Goin' South (which he also directed), The Postman Always Rings Twice, and, yes, friends, The Shining, which did disappointing box office and was badly mauled by most reviewers. However many fans it's racked up in the years since, the reaction to his performance in The Shining was typical: the conventional wisdom was quickly turning towards the direction that a man once capable of sensitive work had turned into an eyeball-rolling self-parodist, and in a Playboy interview published a year before his 1982 death, the gentle-spirited Henry Fonda criticized Nicholson for having thrown away his career and disgracing his profession. The actor's critical reputation began to recover around the time the magazine hit the stands, starting with his supporting performance in Reds and then with his starring role in the little-seen The Border, but it was Terms of Endearment that set the tone for Nicholson's successful reinvention of himself as a post-counterculture elder statesman who styled himself as a broad but soulful entertainer, someone who was still prone to go over the top but could usually make you love him for it. It could be argued that Nicholson lost something beautiful in the process -- as Anthony Lane later wrote, Nicholson rose to stardom as a man who seemed deeply pained by the state of the world, and sustained his stardom into old age by turning into someone who seemed very pleased with himself -- but it was still an audacious pull back from the career abyss. The role of the pear-shaped horndog Garrett Breedlove won him a second Academy Award, this time for Best Supporting Actor, neatly bookending his time of trouble. It also established that he was smarter than Burt Reynolds, who famously turned the role down to honor his commitment to Hal Needham to do Stroker Ace, which in career terms was like honoring his commitment to show up in front of the firing squad at dawn with a cigarette in his mouth and the blindfold in place.

AL PACINO in SEA OF LOVE (1989)

This entertaining, twisty little thriller made the leap to event status on the strength of its announcement that Pacino had returned to functionability. Pacino had entered into a nightmarishly sustained slump after The Godfather, Part II and Dog Day Afternoon, starring in a series of movies that rank among the very worst of their time (Bobby Deerfield, Revolution), films so thoroughly mediocre and tinny that it was impossible to imagine what appeal they'd ever had for him (...And Justice for All, Author! Author!), as well as Cruising and Scarface, which, for whatever cult status they would come to enjoy, earned him more in bad press at the time than they did in good reviews or box office. Compared to some of those misfires, the relative modesty of Sea of Love was part of its appeal at the time: it was a relief to see Pacino, returning to the screen, after a four-year absence, in a clever little cop opera that gave him a chance to look worn-down and middle-aged but not romantically implausible, enjoying the Richard Price-scripted byplay with such solid pros as John Goodman and Richard Jenkins, and -- an eternal Pacino specialty -- demonstrating that he wasn't afraid to pitch on-screen woo with an actress (Ellen Barkin) who looked as if she could fold him up and stick him in her purse. His spirit refreshed, Pacino was back a year later as Big Boy Caprice in Dick Tracy, happily gnawing the last traces of meat from the hambone.

CHRISTOPHER LEE in THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING (2001) & STAR WARS EPISODE II: ATTACK OF THE CLONES (2002)

Lee has scarcely stopped working since entering movies in the late 1940s, but his ghettoized stardom in horror movies failed to translate into mainstream screen prominence, and as the decades went by, he seemed most likely to appear in high-profile pictures when the director was someone like Joe Dante or Tim Burton, who'd cut his teeth on Hammer films and felt an affectionate debt of gratitude to the old gent. Which is nice, but self-paroding cameos in Gremlins 2 and Sleepy Hollow do not a comeback make. The first real sign in years that the then-78-year-old Lee still had strapping reserves of energy going to waste came when he turned up in the 2000 BBC version of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast, where he was dashingly costumed and looked and moved like a man twenty years younger. But the cherries on top of his career came with his villainous performances as Rings' malignant sorcerer Saruman and the abuser of the Force Lord Dooku -- subtle, George -- which, by drawing on memories of his screen past even as they threaded him into the texture of the two biggest multi-part fantasy series of the turn of the century, honored his career while tying it up with a handsome bow. After which, Lee being Lee, he called his agent and went back to work.

DENNIS HOPPER & DEAN STOCKWELL in BLUE VELVET (1986)

For most of his career, Hopper had led the league in blackballings, being driven out of the acting profession by the director Henry Hathaway, then remaking himself as a director and returning in glory with the 1969 Easy Rider. The box office success of that movie was so bewildering to the studios that Hopper was given a big bag with a dollar sign on it and absolute creative freedom to do whatever he wanted for his next movie as director, which resulted in 1971's The Last Movie...and cue blackballing number two. Hopper would spend most of the next fifteen years reeling from his intake of drugs and drink while working on a string of offbeat projects for European and American maverick directors, ranging from Apocalypse Now and Rumble Fish for Coppola and Wim Wenders' The American Friend to Neil Young's Human Highway, Henry Jaglom's Tracks and Orson Welles' unfinished The Other Side of the Wind. His performances in most of them were pretty unsteady; Hopper seemed to have his notion of artistry boiled down to the actor's willingness to do anything, but nobody ever hesitated to hire Dennis Hopper because they were concerned that he might not be crazy enough. He's said that Blue Velvet, one of a string of films he appeared in around 1986 which also includes River's Edge, Hoosiers, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre Part II, was the first job he'd gotten after getting clean and sober, though he apparently almost talked himself out of it by telling David Lynch that he had to play Frank Booth because he was Frank Booth, after which Lynch considered hiding under the table. It's a measure of how impressed Hollywood was with both Hopper's performance and the sheer feat of rendering himself employable that Entertainment Tonight had a camera installed in Hopper's home when the Academy Award nominees were announced on television so that they could record his reaction, it being a forgone conclusion that his name would be among those read aloud. (It's a measure of just how freaked out Hollywood was by Blue Velvet that the E.T. cameras got to record Hopper's momentary confusion when it turned out that he'd been nominated instead for his work in Hoosiers.) Hopper's long shadow also obscured some of the triumph of his Blue Velvet co-star, one-scene wonder Dean Stockwell, who had also appeared with him in The Last Movie, Tracks, and Human Highway. A child actor back in the 1940s, Stockwell had kept his career going into adulthood, winning the Best Actor award at Cannes for 1959's Compulsion and co-starring with Katharine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, and Jason Robards in 1962's Long Day's Journey into Night. He went counterculture and turned his back on Hollywood in the late '60s and '70s, then slowly began creeping back with parts in Paris, Texas and To Live and Die in L.A., as well as Lynch's Dune, which he later told an interviewer was the only role he wanted badly enough to screen test for. (The interviewer next asked if he'd care to explain why he'd wanted it so badly. Stockwell replied that he'd rather not.) But it was his performance in Blue Velvet that made him hot enough that he could quit his second job hustling real estate.

JOHN TRAVOLTA in PULP FICTION (1994)

Travolta may have mixed feelings about having had his career resurrected by Quentin Tarantino, given that he's been known to insist to interviewers that he wasn't that far down the ladder when Pulp Fiction broke -- those Look Who's Talking movies made a lot of darn money, thank you very much! -- but most people who cared knew that Tarantino's dialogue and taste in hair extensions restored cachet and hipness to a star brand that had gotten badly devalued since 1981. Travolta cemented his comeback with Get Shorty, a project that he, yes, turned down before Tarantino called him up and advised him to snap to attention. His filmography since then has more than its fair share of stinkers, but it's better remembered now than it was in 1993 that he really is a terrific actor, and he retains the special dignity of a star who came back after being depicted as having been reduced to tending bar in a '70s nostalgia club on an episode of The Simpsons, an episode on which -- the ultimate indignity! -- he didn't even get to provide his own self-mocking voice. And, lest we forget, he did get to name Harry Knowles's site.

Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

OST: "Blue Velvet"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 22:45:00 GMT

We've discussed a few great pairings between director and composer in this space before: the energetic, dynamic films of Sergio Leone, accompanied by the postmodernist, propulsive music of Ennio Morricone; the accomplished, thrilling work of Alfred Hitchcock, paired with the inventive, restless music of Bernard Herrmann; and others. Today we're going to look at one of the great film partnerships at its very inception: the mystefying, surreal films of David Lynch and the eerily gorgeous music of Angelo Badalamenti that frequently accompanies them. Blue Velvet was the first of a creative partnership that would last for two decades (and arguably reach its zenith in the Twin Peaks soundtrack) but this is where it all began in 1986.

Like a lot of the best collaborations, the one between David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti (who, despite the florid name, hails from the Mediterranean clime of Brooklyn) almost didn't happen. Mixing as it did a great deal of original score, all written by Badalamenti, and rights-managed classic rock and pop songs, the soundtrack to Blue Velvet was almost scuttled early on by clearance issues. In particular, the title track, as sung by Bobby Vinton, proved costlier to license than the studio would allow, so Badalamenti recorded his own sound-alike version -- before getting news that Vinton himself was willing to re-record it (albeit two registers lower, thanks to age's effect on his pipes). That didn't quite work out either, and they were faced with the legal and aesthetic problems of going with the copycat, until, finally, the studio decided to finally pony up for the original. Roy Orbison likewise held out permissions for "In Dreams" until the last moment, and Lynch, who'd been trying for months to secure the rights to This Mortal Coil's "Song to the Siren", eventually had to give up when the band wouldn't budge on giving him the licence. (Ironically, Balalamenti's replacement song turned out to be one of the most moving and effective pieces in the score.)

"In Dreams" is perhaps the finest example of Blue Velvet's stunning use of classic songs given a rich new dimension by out-of-context placement, even more so than the title track. Once seen, Dean Stockwell crooning the number in a freakish lip-synch as Frank Booth rampages in front of him changes the meaning of the song forever -- this a decade before Quentin Tarantino became famous for doing much the same thing. However, it's Badalamenti's original music that's the most powerful and shattering. Lynch, who'd been listening to a great deal of Shostakovich while writing the script for Blue Velvet, used the Russian composer as an earmark to guide Badalamenti, who ended up incorporating quotes from the 15th Symphony into the finished material, but while it has elements of the great Russian musical themes of beauty and tragedy, the score is all Badalamenti -- soaked in atmosphere, powerful but never overpowering, and deeply strange without ever calling excess attention to itself. Combined with the wonderful classic songs on the soundtrack, it makes for a great, if always slightly unsettling, listening experience.

BEST TRACKS: Curiously, due to copyright issues, some versions of the Blue Velvet soundtrack don't feature any version of the title song -- Vinton's or anyone else's. However, it's easy to find one that does, and it combines with Roy Orbison's otherworldly "In Dreams" for one of the most stunning one-two punches in the history of pop on film. Amongst Badalamenti's original score compositions, the standout is "Mysteries of Love", his collaboration with partern Julee Cruse, which replaced (and improved upon) "Song to the Siren". Also noteworthy is the mysterious, brooding main title track, the elegaic "Blue Star", and the screeching, slashing, almost atonal "Jeffrey's Dark Side", which recalls Bernard Herrmann at his best.

Forgotten Films: "The Fastest Guitar Alive" (1967)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 16 May 2008 17:00:00 GMT

"You better stick to singing," Sammy Jackson, one of the two male leads of The Fastest Guitar Alive tells his partner. "I don't think you've got much future as a spy." It turned out that hardly anybody connected with this movie had much of a future except for Jackson's sidekick--Roy Orbison, who, as it turned out, did stick to singing. The movie, which coincided with the start of a long career slump for the most beautifully masochistic of white rock crooners, was Roy's one fling at movie acting. In this Civil War-era Western, he plays the performing half of a team of snake oil salesman and saloon entertainers who ride from town to town hauling a wagon full of dancing girls. Sammy pitches his miracle elixir and serves as manager to Roy, who hits the stage at the local watering hole and sings the songs written specially for the movie, such as the Marty Robbins knockoff "Pistolero", the Ren-and-Stimpyesque "Happy Party Time" ("Have a good time party,dance the night away/ Have a good time party,it's time to laugh and play") , and "Snuggle Huggle" (" I want to be as snuggle as a buggle in a ruggle/ When my sweety does the snuggle huggle with me"), which was deemed to hot for inclusion on the soundtrack album. This serves as their cover while they go about trying to break into the U.S. mint to steal gold to help fund the Confederate state. The title itself refers to Roy's special guitar, which is also a secret weapon; when he plucks a particular string, a long, thin gun barrell slowly emerges from the side--an image whose unintentionally hilarious phallic overtones are not helped by the funny sound effect that accompanies it. Shooting an interloper's hat off just to get his attention, Roy warns him, "If you're interested, I could kill you with this, and play your funeral march at the same time."

Roy doesn't actually kill anyone; we're repeatedly informed that, despite the fair amount of fancy shooting he does, he somehow "couldn't" use his fast guitar for to lay anyone out permanently. The movie also features a tribe of Borsht-Belt-style Indians (including Iron Eyes Cody, the Italian-American actor who specialized in pretending to be Native American, and who starred in the iconic public service announcement whose message was, "People start pollution--people can stop it!") who might have been run off the set of F Troop. When they get wind that Roy and company are passing through, they ready to attack, though just before they mount up we hear Cody say, "We'll just give 'em a good scare, not hurt 'em, huh Chief?" Maybe because it took its cues from Orbison's innate gentleness--he must have radiated less natural rebelliousness than anyone else who ever stopped for a cup of coffee at Sun Studios--Fastest Guitar keeps declaring how undangerous it is. Even the fact that the heroes are spying for the Rebels during the Civil War-- a choice that may have been dictated by the thickness of Orbison's country-fried accent--is treated as just one of those fluky things; they never talk about the pros or cons of either side in the conflict, but they're overjoyed at the end when they learn that the South has surrendered, just so they can stop running around and settle down.

Fastest Guitar was directed by Michael D. Moore--no connection to that Fahrenheit 9/11 fellow--who had just started his nothing-much directing career a year earlier with the Elvis Presley picture Paradise, Hawaiian Style. As little as he (and most other movie directors) got out of Elvis, he didn't get much more out of Orbison; resplendent in a gleaming black pompadour and with more costume changes than La Streisand on a good night, Roy walks through in a good-natured way, as if he had no idea what these movie people wanted of him but didn't have the heart to tell them to leave him alone after they were nice enough to come looking for him and offer him the role. (Sometimes he absently looked to his left and right in between saying his lines, as if he'd just registered that the camera was on and wanted to see what they were filming.) His presence gives this tacky, motorless musical Western a trace of sweetness that it wouldn't otherwise have, but he's so out of his element that it's pretty funny that it would turn out to be a movie--Blue Velvet, with its instant-classic scene of Dean Stockwell lip-synching "In Dreams"--that would unexpectedly revive his career twenty years later. The Fastest Guitar Alive was eventually released on VHS, and the soundtrack has been issued on CD, but both are now out of print, and no DVD release is in sight (though it turns up about once every couple of years on Turner Classic Movies). Which is fine, really. It's the kind of theoretical-cult movie that's a straight drag to actually watch but can be a blast to see immortalized on the Internet.

The Rep Report (February 7--14)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 18:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Over the course of a remarkably long career, Sidney Lumet has taken a crack at directing just about every kind of movie, while making a certain kind of film — the high-energy, acting-centered New York melodrama — his own. Last year he enjoyed a bit of a comeback with his 44th feature film, Before the Devil Know You're Dead, so the career retrospective at the Film Forum that kicks off this Friday with the 1976 Network couldn't be more timely. Highlights include Long Day's Journey into Night starring Katherine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, Jason Robards, and Dean Stockwell, the greatest production of Eugene O'Neill ever caught on film and the high point of Lumet's sideline as a TV-trained specialist in filming plays; The Hill (1965), The Anderson Tapes, and The Offense, all of which feature powerfully charged performances by Sean Connery, an actor who Lumet was prescient in seeing as having the potential to be more than James Bond; and of course the two "based on a true story" films co-starring Al Pacino and the city of New York, Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon, which had such an impact that Lumet and his star could have practically taken out a copyright on Fun City in the seventies. Also, from 1939: One Percent of a Nation, a little-seen, independently produced New York film that includes the only record of the director's work as an actor. (He was fifteen at the time.) On Monday, February 11, the director will appear in person to discuss his career in "An Evening with Sidney Lumet", to be moderated by historian Foster Hirsch.

On the afternoon of Sunday, February 10, the Museum of the Moving Image will host "A Tribute to St. Clair Bourne", in honor of the documentary filmmaker, who died last December. The critic Armond White, film and literary scholar Clyde Taylor, Black Enterprise columnist George Alexander, and journalist and poet Esther Iverem will discuss the filmmaker's career and show clips of his work.

PORTLAND: The 31st Annual International Portland Film Festival opens Thursday, February 7 and runs through the 23rd, offering more than two weeks worth of jam-packed programming of feature films and shorts from around the world, in the city that Scott Favor and Bob Pigeon were proud to call home.

Take Five: Resident Aliens

Peter Smith — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 20:00:00 GMT

The ever-busy John Cusack stars in Martian Child, opening wide this weekend. Based on an award-winning novel by legendary sci-fi author and Star Trek scribe David Gerrold (who also executive-produced the film and had final approval on the script, ensuring that, if nothing else, it’ll be loyal to its source), the film focuses on an older man — Cusack, essentially playing a straight version of Gerrold himself — who, battling his own personal demons, adopts a disturbed young boy who thinks he’s from Mars. It’s not your typical science-fiction scenario, but it’s one that echoes a number of other films in the genre that play on the ambiguity, or at least strangeness and charm, of the idea of an alien among us. As with many other types of genre films, science fiction is often at its most successful when it eschews the gimmicks, special effects, and labyrinthine plots and focuses instead on drama, revelation and humanity, even if the human is very possibly an alien. Here’s a fiver of films to get you in the mood for Martian Child.

THE BOY WITH GREEN HAIR (1948)

Directed by film-industry trouper Joseph Losey, The Boy with Green Hair gives us the spectacle of, well, a boy with green hair. Not technically an alien-among-us sci-fi story, it nonetheless functions in that same sort of parable mode, bringing us what is now a terribly dated and hokey message of tolerance. At the time, though, it probably seemed a lot more subversive; it was made even before the Hollywood blacklist was in full swing. Its post-war setting and refugee metaphors also must have scored some points about Jews and blacks that weren’t likely to be made explicit at the time. And despite how archaic it may seem today, it’s worth seeing for one reason: the ten-year-old protagonist is played by a young Dean Stockwell.

QUATERMASS AND THE PIT (1967)

The Quatermass series was something of a predecessor to Dr. Who, with many of the same themes and concerns, but the good doctor has never come close to cranking out a story this unexpected and unsettling. In it, a scientist discovers a Martian spacecraft, millions of years old, buried beneath the London underground, and as soon as it’s unearthed, it bequeaths the aliens’ final legacy to us: violence, madness and directionless hatred. Quatermass eventually discovers that it was these ancient astronauts who shaped us into the dominant species on Earth, by carefully guiding our predilection for mayhem; in this underseen and underrated sci-fi thriller, we have met the alien, and he is us.

THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (1976)

In a role originally intended for Peter O’Toole, David Bowie — who was simultaneously, in his music career, playing at being an alien — puts in one of the finest, creepiest performances of his career. In this supremely weird, often affecting Nic Roeg vehicle, Bowie plays an urbane visitor to Earth who’s come here in search of water, establishing himself as a multimillionaire (using high-tech gadgets entirely familiar to the modern viewer) in order to do so. Admirable support is turned in by Rip Torn and others, but it’s Bowie’s ultra-frosty, near-reptilian performance, shot through with transcendent humanity at just the right moments, that will have you wondering if the guy really was an alien after all.

THE BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET (1984)

John Sayles made this movie to raise a few bucks and bide the time while making Matewan, but it’s quite an accomplishment on its own. The story of a stranded alien who arrives in Manhattan wearing a black man’s skin — in which he is surprised to discover he merits different treatment — The Brother from Another Planet manages to rise above its exploitation origins (and often goofy genre conventions, such as grade-Z special effects and bizarre superhero subplot) and deliver some fine acting and interesting insights into matters of race and class. Taken on its own, it’s worth seeing, but it especially works in the greater context of Sayles’ work.

STARSHIP TROOPERS (1997)

Forget Showgirls — director Paul Verhoeven’s most misunderstood film is this adaptation (and subversion) of the classic Robert Heinlein novel about total war in space. Verhoeven, in typical black-comic style, takes the creepy, quasi-fascist tone of the Heinlein book and completely upends it, making one of the most damning statements on film about the futility and stupidity of war. It also functions, in its treatment of the utterly inhuman and thus utterly disposable buglike aliens, as a presciently barbed statement about our human tendency to dehumanize the enemy in times of war.

— Leonard Pierce

Top Thirteen Greatest Fictional Movie Presidents, Part 3

Peter Smith — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 17:00:00 GMT

Christopher Jones as President Max Frost, WILD IN THE STREETS (1968)

This A.I.P. exploitation classic from the hippie era predates the lowering of the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen. Here, a presidential candidate played by Hal Holbrook courts the youth vote by promising to lower the mandatory voting age and turns to rock star Max Frost (née Max Jacob Flatow, Jr.), the voice of his generation, to help him with his campaign. Max startles everyone by publicly demanding that fourteen-year-olds be given the right to vote, then, after Holbrook is elected, starting a national drive to lower the minimum age for election to public office to fourteen as well. Inevitably, Max runs for president himself, and after his youthful hordes propel him into the White House, he decrees that thirty is now the mandatory retirement age and has everyone over thirty-five bused to "re-education camps" to spend the rest of their days forcibly blitzed on LSD. But Max's reign may not last long; the movie ends with ominous shots of children giving the fish-eye to their teen-aged overlords and murmuring that they, too, will soon get theirs.

Biff McGuire as The President, THE WEREWOLF OF WASHINGTON (1973)

This extremely low-budget film — long on under-lit sets and expository narration — stars Dean Stockwell as a presidential cabinet official who comes down with a bad case of lycanthropy and spends his full-moon nights rampaging around the nation's capitol in a furry Halloween mask. The Nixonian president and his advisers (including Michael Dunn as a dwarf named "Dr. Kiss") conspire to blame the werewolf's bloody killings on left-wing radicals. In the end, Stockwell is killed, but not before mauling the president, who, having thus been contaminated, is heard turning into a howling monster during a broadcast address to the nation.

John Ritter as President Chet Roosevelt, AMERICATHON (1979)

This busy, wilted satire, based on a play by Peter Bergman and Philip Proctor of the Firesign Theater but co-written and directed by Neil Israel, of Bachelor Party and the Police Academy movies, is set in a "future" 1998 when the United States has exhausted its energy reserves and is near bankruptcy, with a running-shoe cartel headed by Chief Dan George threatening to foreclose on the country. President Roosevelt, who operates out of a Marina Del Ray condo known as "the Western White House" and who permits his live-in girlfriend to sit in on cabinet meetings, decides to try to raise enough money to pay off the national debt by sponsoring a thirty-day telethon organized by Peter Riegert and hosted by Harvey Korman. Things get complicated when the president is kidnapped by terrorists while enjoying a tryst with a Vietnamese rock singer (Zane Busby), but in the end everything turns out all right: the telethon is a success, Riegert wins the faithless president's girlfriend, and the presidential hulking, dim-witted bodyguard, Jerry (Richard Schaal) is sworn in as chief executive.

HONORABLE MENTION: Two Real-Life Presidents Who Might As Well Have Been Fictional

Philip Baker Hall as Richard Nixon, SECRET HONOR (1984)

Playing an iconic figure like Dick Nixon is hard enough, particularly when the script calls upon you to portray him both as a sympathetic figure and a self-deceiving monster. And when you're the only guy in the movie, it becomes next to impossible. But if anyone is up to the challenge, it's the always-outstanding Philip Baker Hall. In this little-seen but compellingly watchable Robert Altman film, Hall portrays a fictionalized, almost mythological Nixon, recording what are putatively notes for his next book but which, with the aid of alcohol and encroaching paranoia, become a confession to the American people and a titanic, defensive apologia, a referendum on a man's entire life. As an impression of Nixon, it's only partially successful, but as an evocation of him, it's perfect — truly a titanic performance, alternating between enraged ranting, deceptive resentment, touching memories of childhood, and total re-invention; as Hall's Nixon raves, spews, laughs, bellows and accuses for an hour and a half, we get a sense of both his mammoth ego and his homely humanity, often in the same speech. The final scene, where a defiant Nixon screams "Fuck ‘em!" to everyone who ever crossed him — his enemies, his allies, the American people — seems both outrageous and inevitable.

Brian Keith as Teddy Roosevelt, THE WIND AND THE LION (1975)

John Milius has always has a soft spot in his heart for Teddy Roosevelt, who in his eyes was the ultimate hard-living American man's man. Milius re-created Teddy's famous charge up San Juan Hill in his 1997 made-for-TV movie The Rough Riders, and in 1975's The Wind and the Lion he shows us Roosevelt (played by Brian Keith) after his rough ridin' days were over. President Roosevelt, more than a little weary of politics and diplomacy, suddenly springs into action after the abduction of American heiress Eden Pedicaris (Candice Bergen) by the Berber prince Raisuli (Sean Connery). Proclaiming the need for "respect for human life and respect for American property," he mobilizes the Army to find Eden, questionable ethics be damned. In Teddy's words, "Why spoil the beauty of the thing with legality?" Sure, the fact that it's an election year may partly explain his motivation, but it's more likely that Roosevelt relishes another chance to embark on a ballsy mission in an exotic, especially one against a worthy opponent like Raisuli. But Roosevelt's finest moment in the film comes when he states: "The American grizzly is a symbol of the American character: strength, intelligence, ferocity. Maybe a little blind and reckless at times. . . but courageous beyond all doubt. And one other trait that goes with all previous — loneliness. The American grizzly lives out his life alone. Indomitable, unconquered — but always alone. He has no real allies, only enemies, but none of them as great as he." It's a rousing and eloquent tribute by Milius, both to the man he so idolizes and to the country they both love.

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