The Screengrab : harold and maude

Bud Cort’s Worst Breakfast Ever

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Bud Cort was in Austin recently to present a mini-festival of his films at the world-renowned Alamo Drafthouse, including one of the oddest entries on the Robert Altman filmography, Brewster McCloud, and the one movie pretty much everyone knows him from, Harold and Maude. The usual procedure with this sort of personal appearance is to do a few interviews with the local press in advance, so they can get into print in time to publicize the event. For example, this piece in the Austin Chronicle, in which Cort attributes Harold’s status as the original goth to “the costume designer on the film, Bill Theiss, who met me in New York and took me shopping. We bought this great black trench coat and then lined it in red, and there's one little scene in the film where it kind of blows open in the wind and you see, just for a second, that little line of red. It's so subtle, but it's so cool.”

And then there’s the interview Cort did with the Austin American Statesman’s Chris Garcia on the morning of his Alamo appearance. Neither interviewer not interviewee comes off particularly well in the piece, which ran nearly two weeks after Cort left town. I’m all too familiar with the awkward clamminess of an interview gone awry, and this article drips with it, from the description of Cort’s “loose, wet scrambled eggs” to the actor’s impromptu rendition of “Moon River,” as sung by Truman Capote, which calls to mind “the unnerving noise of an emphysemic Munchkin…It's something he does in Kinky Friedman's show when Friedman takes his touring act to Cort's home town, which will go unnamed here at Cort's request. (He believes he has a stalker.)”

Despite his willingness to introduce Harold and Maude at the Alamo and discuss it with the Chronicle, Cort clams up here. “Let's just say that I don't make any money on Harold and Maude, and I never have.” Apparently unable to elicit much in the way of usable quotes, Garcia instead devotes a few column inches to armchair psychoanalysis. “Cort ticker-tapes a litany of professional injustices with an acrid whiff of rancor, frustration and, just maybe, delusion and paranoia…Cort emanates an air of entitlement born of bad luck or bad choices or whatever it is that makes Hollywood such a torture chamber of heartache, anger and rejection.”

It’s hard to say which party bears more responsibility for this breakfast of infamy (Cinematical compares the situation to "Steve Buscemi's take on the matter in Interview"), but Cort, for one, was not amused by the published piece. In a letter to the editor, Cort writes: “The breakfast interview he concocted was not only malicious, it was inaccurate and contained downright falsehoods, which he had the gall to attribute to me. I declined his original requests for an interview, as the piece would not run in time to publicize my three appearances at the Alamo Drafthouse theater…It was shockingly condescending. This mystified me because I thought at the time that he was extremely nice … if unprepared. I basically had to carry the ball during the entire conversation, which was tantamount to sitting with a sponge.”

It’s always possible that neither Cort nor Garcia is a morning person. Next time, guys, schedule the interview for happy hour.

Screengrab Review: Charlie Bartlett

Peter Smith — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 19:00:00 GMT

December brought us Juno, a teen movie (over)written by a thirty-year-old ex-stripper; February brings us Charlie Bartlett, a teen movie apparently written by a twelve-year-old whipped into a frenzy of high-school anticipation by every other teen movie ever made. It's an odd creature, this Charlie Bartlett — thick with references to Rushmore, Harold and Maude and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, it feels persistently unreal, untempered by real-life experience of high school. The "drug" sequences seem to come from someone less familiar with altered states than with the pot montage in The Breakfast Club, and a key virginity loss is mysteriously set inside a scene from Sixteen Candles. You might find this annoying, or you might find yourself getting wistful for the worst years of your life.

Charlie (Anton Yelchin) has been booted out of every private school in the state — not for bad grades, of course, but for persistent attention-seeking prankery. He's desperate for popularity, and at his new public school, he finds it by psychoanalyzing his classmates and prescribing them medication via the bevy of shrinks thrown at him by his doting, overbearing mother (Hope Davis, who chastizes him for not eating his dinner with the line, "I've cooked you a perfectly Oedipal meal" — or at least that's how I heard it). Simultaneously, he befriends a bully (one Tyler Hilton, who looks far too much like a young Morrissey to be threatening) and romances the principal's daughter (Kat Dennings, of The 40-Year-Old Virgin). But the principal himself (Robert Downey, Jr., entertaining as ever) turns out to be a problem, though not too much of a problem to resolve in a ludicrous climax. Basically, this is not the next Rushmore, Donnie Darko or even Ferris Bueller, despite Charlie's preference for a Bueller-esque shades-and-beret combo. It's not without fun, though. You can scoff at it if you like, but if you're twelve, you'll probably find it highly plausible. — Peter Smith

The Rep Report (November 27 - December 4)

Peter Smith — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 17:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: The Senegalese writer-director Ousmane Sembene, who died last summer, gets his first major posthumous respective at Film Forum from November 30 to December 12. The series kicks off with Xala, the 1974 satire that climaxes with a memorably ghastly, well, spitting scene, and includes the early works that put Sembene on the map (Black Girl, Emitai) as well as the more recent films (Faat-Kine and his last movie, Moolaade) that showed that he was still in strapping form. This is a rare chance not just to pay tribute to a fallen master but to catch up with the work of a major filmmaker who remains sorely underrepresented on DVD.

Pier Paolo Pasolini has been dead for a good long time now, but doesn't seem to have become much less controversial, an accomplishment that might have put a smile on his face. The Film Society of Lincoln Center's Heretical Epiphanies: The Cinematic Pilgrimages of Pier Paolo Pasolini (November 28 – December 4) covers his career from the neo-realist debut film Accattone to the hyper-scandalous, posthumously released Salo. On December 4, Lincoln Center also presents the U.S. premiere of Accattone in Jazz, a live presentation in which "Pasolini's celebrated screenplay for Accattone is revisited by Italian movie star Valerio Mastandrea, as he weaves a unique interplay of words and music together with Italian jazz legends and longtime collaborators Roberto Gatto and Danilo Rea."

The Brooklyn Academy of Music's twelve-film Max Ophuls retrospective begins on November 28 with a week-long run of a new print of the 1948 Letter from an Unknown Woman, the best work done in Hollywood by an artist who got too few opportunities to work at anything like his full capacities. It ain't The Earrings of Madame de. . . , but boy, will it do. . .

SAN FRANCISCO: From November 27-30, the Castro salutes director Hal Ashby, with three nights of double features, starting with the 1979 Being There, paired with the cult classic Harold and Maude. The real keeper may be on the 30th, when the theater shows the masterful, Robert Towne-scripted Shampoo and Ashby's amazing, unavailable-on-DVD debut film, The Landlord (1970).

— Phil Nugent