The Screengrab : husbands and wives

How Much Is Woody Allen's Good Name Worth? American Apparel Replies, "What Good Name?"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 17:00:00 GMT

"What is this," Woody Allen asks in Love and Death after receiving a couple of hard pats to the cheek, "Slap Boris Day?" Almost 35 years since writing that deathless scene, Allen may be feeling a little slap-happy himself. As we reported here a year ago, Allen is suing American Apparel for having used his likeness in its advertising without his permission. The case is only now coming to a boil, and in court papers filed yesterday, representatives for Allen complained that American Apparel has “adopted a ‘scorched earth’ approach”, threatening to drag his name through the mud, bringing up details of the disastrous, tabloid-friendly end of this relationship with Mia Farrow back in 1992. At worst, the company is clearly intent on doing its best to reward Allen for dragging them into court by making his left absolutely miserable. (Little do they know: he seems to kind of like it that way.) At, well, other worst, their official position appears to be that Allen is such an unredeemed slimeball that he has no rights at all, either as a human being or a marketable image. "“Certainly," says American Apparel lawyer Stuart Slotnick, "our belief is that after the various sex scandals that Woody Allen has been associated with, corporate America’s desire to have Woody Allen endorse their product is not what he may believe it is.”

Nasty comments about Woody the person are nothing new; once upon a time, Woody himself made his living as a chief dispenser of them. (Did you hear about the time he beat up the toaster?) But harsh judgements of the artist, though not unheard of, have a weird tendency to build to a sort of crescendo, then to fall away when he has an acclaimed international success big enough to count as a "comeback" (such as 2005's Match Point), only to rise up again, fiercer and more unforgiving than ever. A couple of weeks ago, in the course of lamenting the difficulty that Abel Ferrara's Chelsea on the Rocks has had finding a distributor, Danny Leigh in the Guardian really stuck the knife in: "[Ferrara] and we are left with the exact inverse of the fate of that other New York institution, Woody Allen: a veteran director making films that deserve to be seen, but which no matter how good simply can't get into cinemas." No offense to Ferrara, who is one of our favorite New York street crazies with a camera, but if Vincent Canby were to rise from the dead, the discovery that anyone in the English-speaking world could get away with suggesting that anything his beloved Woody made might have less reason to be shown than anything from the director of New Rose Hotel would only kill him all over again, just so he could spin in his grave. (Vincent Canby is dead, isn't he? I'm trying to cut back on the number of times a day that I have to go running to Wikipedia.)

Another Guardian writer, Andrew Pulver, ain't having it. Pulver writes that "what really makes me sad is that it's now so easy, and so acceptable, to give Allen a hard time. His faltering output in recent years has coincided with a general perception that he's foolish (at best) and a sleazebag (at worst). Of course we can advance arguments that an artist's life shouldn't be confused with their work, but Allen didn't help himself by regularly casting himself opposite nubile young actresses. (Thank God he seems to have packed that in.) He seemed wilfully to want to confuse the two himself; just like, in his 'early, funny' period, he used to get tetchy at people who seemed to think the nebbishy little characters he played on screen could be anything at all like the real Woody Allen. (How could anyone have got that idea?) I prefer to remember the glory days."

It is an honorable sentiment, and it perhaps speak well to the dense variety of Allen's output in the last forty years that we will be able to spend forever arguing about which days those were. (Pulver thinks that Allen's hot streak fell between 1979's Manhattan and Husbands and Wives, his last film with Farrow, which was released into the teeth of the media flare-up over their domestic messiness.) "Now, as the likes of Martin Scorsese and Clint Eastwood (his direct peers) have put their rowdy youth and questionable escapades behind them, and are relaxing into elder-statesmanship, Allen is heading the other way" in terms of his reputation and public image. That may be a bit much. (And it definitely fails to acknowledge that so many people felt betrayed, and therefore comfortable to judge Allen's morality, back in 1992 because he fell from such a high place in terms of personal reputation: however he compares to Scorsese or Eastwood as a filmmaker, he was, at his peak, an intellectual culture hero of a kind that they never were.) Ultimately, Allen's reputation, like that of every prolific major filmmaker, shifts a little with every new movie he turns out. Which way will it shift after his new Larry David picture sees the light of day? We've got our fingers and toes crossed.

The Top Ten Great Scenes From Not So Great Movies (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 20:00:00 GMT

A few weeks ago, we here at the Screengrab called on YOU, the good people of Blogtopia, to let us know what Top Ten Lists you’d like to see us forget to include your favorite movies on...and, lo, it came to pass that we did verily discuss the finest farewells and most ignominious exits in the annals of cinema o’er the previous fortnight at the behest of one “Other Matt.” (Sorry, I just got back from the free outdoor Boston Common production of All’s Well That Ends Well, and I'm still feeling a little iambic.)

Anyway, this week, we’ve taken the suggestion of just plain “Matt” (presumably the original Matt and possibly Other Matt’s Batman-esque nemesis): ten great scenes that really deserved to be in better movies!

"Kickapoo" from TENACIOUS D IN THE PICK OF DESTINY (2006)

It’s difficult to describe to the uninitiated what a colossal disappointment the Tenacious D movie turned out to be. If you’ve only seen the movie or heard a handful of songs, it would be easy to dismiss the portly duo (Jack Black and Kyle Gass) as a comic novelty act. But the fans knew better, getting hooked on the endlessly re-watchable HBO series and frequenting D concerts. And with Pick of Destiny, it felt like their dream had finally come true: a fitting vehicle for the self-proclaimed “World’s Greatest Band.” Then they actually saw the movie, at which point all hope came crashing down, leaving D fans no choice but to trudge home and forlornly listen to “Fuck Her Gently” over and over again. But before that could happen, the movie’s opening scene actually delivered everything the fans had always hoped for...namely, a kickass rockin’ D musical. The “Kickapoo” number (an all-sung origin story featuring Meat Loaf as the Bible-thumping father of young Jables and Ronnie James Dio as a diabolical mentor) promises so much more than even a good movie could possibly deliver. Which, of course, makes it all the more disappointing that the movie that follows barely even seems to try, even jettisoning Meat Loaf and Dio altogether and retreating to the relatively safe template of stoner comedy. But for five minutes, it’s pure Tenacious D bliss, the foul-mouthed, Jim Steinman-esque rock opera the fans deserved, rather than the sub-Cheech’n’Chong antics they ended up getting.

That long-ass alley brawl from THEY LIVE (1988)

John Carpenter's 1988 sci-fi allegory wasn't a terrible movie by any means; it was your basic, meat-and-potatoes B-movie, the ideal bottom half of a drive-in double bill back when such things existed. (There is dissent in the Screengrab bullpen about this evaluation, with at least one colleague proclaiming They Live to be "totally awesome," but in my book such praise is reserved for movies that don't star "Rowdy" Roddy Piper.) But Carpenter's movie does have its moment of greatness…well, actually it's a hell of a lot longer than a moment. Piper's Nada, a laborer who finds a special pair of sunglasses that allow him to see hidden messages in billboards and hidden aliens inside seemingly normal people, wishes to share his discovery with his co-worker Frank (Keith David). Frank declines. When a sensible discussion of the issue fails to bear fruit, fisticuffs ensue. And ensue. And ensue. For nearly six minutes, Piper and David beat the crap out of each other in an alley, and every time you think they're finished, reduced to nothing more than heaves and grunts, they start all over again. It's not that their fight is some brilliantly choreographed ballet of action – its brilliance (and hilarity) lies in its single-minded relentlessness.

Jack & Sam's hellacious squabble from HUSBANDS AND WIVES (1992)

It was a perfect storm for Woody Allen in 1992: his personal life was splattered all over the tabloids, and his new movie came packaged with provocative similarities to the headlines. Most critics were quick to slap a label reading "Woody's latest masterpiece" on Husbands and Wives, praising the shaky camera work, jump-cuts and foul language as well as the perceived highly personal subject matter. This was a breakthrough, a new raw, down-and-dirty Woody Allen – except for those of us who saw it as the same old Allen with a derivative, migraine-inducing stylistic tic wholly unsuited to his Upper East Side world. Sure enough, it didn't take long for Woody to revert to his tried-and-true long master shots and PG-13 dialogue, but there is one scene in Husbands and Wives that delivers a short, sharp shock of the rawness Allen was targeting. It doesn't involve his character or Mia Farrow at all – and you could speculate that Allen couldn't bring himself to completely abandon his audience's affections, though I've seen too many of his subsequent films (Deconstructing Harry, Anything Else) to make that mistake – but rather the late Sydney Pollack in the role that really turned the remainder of his career towards acting rather than directing. As Jack (the best friend role that had often gone to Tony Roberts or Michael Murphy in the past), Pollack is a married man romancing a younger woman, Sam (Lysette Anthony), described by Allen's character as a "fucking cocktail waitress." Pollack dismisses Allen's snobbery until Sam embarrasses him at an upscale party by voicing her New Age-y thoughts about tofu and astrology and whatnot. What follows is sort of the Woody Allen version of the They Live fight – a corrosive "let's get outta here" scene that escalates into a kind of mortifying slapstick.

Click here for Part Two & Part Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Scott Von Doviak

Sydney Pollack, 1934--2008

Phil Nugent — Tue, 27 May 2008 01:00:00 GMT

Sydney Pollack has died at the age of 73, ending a recent struggle with cancer. As a young theater buff, Pollack, who grew up in South Bend, Indiana, went to New York after graduating high school and enrolled at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater, where he first studied under and later served as assistant to the legendary acting teacher Sanford Meisner. Early in his career, Pollack appeared on Broadway in A Stone for Danny Fisher and The Dark Is Light Enough as well as on TV, incluyding episodes of Plyahouse 90, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone, and Have Gun, Will Travel. After Burt Lancaster, who he would later direct in the late sixties in The Scalphunters and Castle Keep, suggested that Pollack consider directing, he stepped behind the camera for work on several TV series and eventually broke into movies with the 1965 The Slender Thread. He brought a skilled rapport with actors and a taste for old-Hollywood glamour to his feature film work, and he became associated with certain high-caliber performers who placed a lot of trust in him--particularly Robert Redford, who he directed in seven starring roles, beginning with the 1966 Tennessee Williams adaptation This Property Is Condemned and including the winner of the 1985 Academy Award for Best Picture, Out of Africa. They also worked together on The Way We Were with Barbra Streisand, probably the most successful of Redford's old-style romances, Jeremiah Johnson, Three Days of the Condor, Havana, and The Electric Horseman, which paired Redford with Jane Fonda. Pollack was also an important figure in Fonda's career, having directed her in the 1969 They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, which marked her transformation from sex-kitten comedienne to hard-edged dramatic actress. That picture went a long way towards establishing Pollack as a new-style Hollywood pro; it won Academy Award nominations for Fonda, Pollack, and Susannah York, and earned Gig Young a Best Supporting Oscar for his brilliant performance as a dance-marathon emcee.

It was the 1982 Tootsie, though, that really took Pollack's career to a couple of different levels. A massive hit and instant classic, it elevated his profile as a director. And because Pollack earned many of the film's biggest laughs in his on-screen performance as Dustin Hoffman's agent, it unexpectedly revived his acting career. (Pollack took on the role at Hoffman's insistence; the actor apparently thought that the movie could benefit from the brio that Pollack brought to the many legendary screaming fights that the two of them were having off-camera.) After Tootsie and Out of Africa, he directed such big pictures as The Firm, Random Hearts, and The Interpretor; he also contributed memorable performances to Robert Zemeckis's Death Becomes Her, Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives, and Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, where he was brought in an emergency replacement for Harvey Keitel. In the last several years of his career, he also branched out as a producer of others' films, including The Fabulous Baker Boys, Sense and Sensibility, The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Quiet American, 40 Shades of Blue, and Michael Clayton, where he also played George Clooney's boss. He also served as executive producer on his own last film as a director, the 2005 documentary Sketches of Frank Gehry.