The Screengrab : james toback

Forgotten Films: "Fallen Champ: The Untold Story of Mike Tyson" (1993)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 01 May 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Tyson, director James Toback's feature-length sit-down with the disgraced former boxing champ, is fascinating in a narrow, claustrophobic way: with no new interview footage from anyone but Tyson himself (and only a few minutes of testimony from other--mainly Toback's boxing mentor and father figure Cus D'Amato--in the archival material that's included)--it seals the viewer inside the echo chamber of Tyson's head, and it's confusing and scary in there. The movie carries a charge, but that's partly because Tyson and Toback have similar attitudes and obsessions, especially regarding machismo, women and sex, and the supposed nobility of outlaw behavior, that they'd both have been better off dropping as soon as they hit puberty. (It's skin-crawling to listen to the convicted rapist Tyson babbling about how he once thought a "great man" was obliged to "conquer" a vast number of beautiful and powerful women, and how, rather than get over that, he came to realize that these succubi only suck the strength from the men in their grasp--especially since it's easy to picture Toback, sitting off-camera. nodding his hairy melon head.) Powerful as Toback's movie is as psychodrama, it's not the place to go to get a clear, thoughtful picture of Tyson's life and career. For that, viewers would be best off tracking down Fallen Champ: The Untold Story of Mike Tyson, a documentary made by Barbara Kopple (whose other credits range from the classic 1976 Harlan County, USA and its 1990 follow-up American Dream to the more recent Dixie Chicks doc Shut Up & Sing) for NBC TV in 1993. The film, which first aired while Tyson was serving his prison sentence, won Kopple the Directors' Guild Award for "Best Directorial Achievement in Documentary" of the year. It was released on videocassette but hasn't made it to DVD.

Tyson never knew his father, and the most he has to say about his mother (who died when he was sixteen) in Toback's film is that she was "promiscuous." Kopple found some folks who remember him as a kid in his old Brownsville neighborhood, but most of the interview subjects here who knew him when he was young entered his life when he was in juvenile detention. (One of them, his caseworker, Ernestine Coleman, later saw him on TV talking about his eagerness to do permanent physical injury to his opponents in the ring and sent him a message, imploring him to become "a man, not an animal.") It was while he was in juvie that Tyson met a counselor named Bobby Stewart, who he begged to teach him to box. Stewart told him he'd consider it if Tyson could do a good enough job of mending his ways to prove that he might be worth the trouble, and was surprised when Tyson did such a thorough job of it that he moved up a reading level. After teaching Tyson some of the ropes, Stewart turned him over to Cus D'Amato, a lovably deranged boxing enthusiast who ran a sort of halfway house cum sparring academy for wayward boys. D'Amato, who in archive footage looks like Lawrence Tierney's good twin, is described affectionately by one witness as "a cuckoo bird", but he knew how to put his stamp on fighters--his previous padwas had included Jose Torres (who had a memorable cameo in Toback's Exposed) and Floyd Patterson--and there are a lot of people who think he was the first human being who ever made Mike Tyson feel loved.

"I'm not a creator," D'Amato can be seen telling an interviewer. "What I do is discover and uncover. And when I uncover, the boys discover qualities in themselves that they didn't know they had." The quality that Mike Tyson once had that Fallen Champ uncovers is the ability to charm. Not the dubious, high-pressure charm of the brassy big-time player that he developed when he was on top of the world and taking style tips from such questionable role models as Donald Trump and Don King, but the boyish, secretly girl-shy charm of an overgrown kid who has no idea how to "be a man" but who, for a while there, was reveling in becoming the best at something and didn't have to worry too much about anything bigger. The years between 1982, when Tyson won the Silver Medal at the Junior Olympic Games, and 1985, when he made his professional debut eight months before D'Amato's death, might have been the only time in Tyson's life when he was able to have fun. Before, he'd felt alone in a dangerous environment, and felt that he had to turn to crime to support himself; once the rapid rise to the top of the world began, he felt that he had to keep the wheels turning so that the millions he was making for himself, and others, didn't disappear overnight. Watching him in the footage from that brief window when he didn't feel as if he were carrying the weight of the world, when he could celebrate a victory in the ring by bouncing around happily and jumping on the ropes, you're painfully aware of how much pressure he must have felt just about every other minute of his life.

At the same time, he was developing some scary attitudes at just the point where those who saw him as the golden goose might not be inclined to risk alienating his affections by urging him to re-examine them. A woman boxing trainer recalls that young Mike, who was too shy to ask girls to dance for fear of being rejected, once told her excitedly that he'd finally figured out the solution: you just walked up to a girl, grabbed her hand, and pulled her onto the dance floor without giving her the chance to say no. One figure close to Tyson in this period was the trainer Teddy Atlas, who's seen telling a reporter that Mike has a "weak" personality and then hastens to clarify that he means Mike is "easily misled. He needs love, he needs confidence...somebody to be with him."

Unfortunately, Teddy fell out with Tyson, big-time--a gun was involved--in a dispute over what the trainer saw as Tyson's unhealthy attitude towards women. In the end, D'Amato gave Atlas his walking papers. After D'Amato died, Tyson was managed by a team that included an old associate named Jimmy Jacobs, but Jacobs himself died in 1988, just at a point when Tyson needed sound counsel more than ever. (He had just married Robin Givens, and Don King was moving in for the kill.) Jacobs's death effectively cut Tyson's last tie to someone in his inner circle who had known him before he was a major commercial property. It isn't long before Tyson is seen demanding of the reporters at a press conference, "Are you here because you like me or because I make a lot of cash?" The fact that he could even think of putting that question to that particular gathering of lost souls tells you just how much growing up he still needed to do. (With the arrival of Givens, the media's attitude towards Tyson becomes insulting on a fresh new level. Kopple includes a clip of a sportscaster asking the blushing bride how "a woman who went to Sarah Lawrence and Harvard Medical School winds up falling in love with a guy who graduated from the school of hard knocks." Givens proceeds to top him by telling him that she and this fatherless son of an absentee mother have "a lot in common--like traditional families!")

The last third of Kopple's film deals with examining what happened between Tyson and Desiree Washington, who Toback, in his own movie, is content to write off as, in Tyson's words, "that wretched swine of a woman." Kopple uses the journalist Sonja Steptoe to provide a running narrative of the events that transpired after Tyson and Washington's first (public) meeting, interweaving it with comments from a cross section of African-American women, the women's studies professor Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, and Alan Dershowitz (who, slime all but oozing visibly from his pores, complains that by objecting to Tyson's treatment of her, Washington broke the sacred "rule of the groupies", adding that the "rule", which seems to be that male celebrities can do anything they want to women who agree to meet them late at night "is tragic, and I wish it didn't exist," but that since it does exist, it must be honored for the protection of our male celebrity population). There are also interviews with Tyson's bodyguard and driver, and provide hair-raising examples of what kind of enlightened brain trust Tyson had to turn to in the absence of D'Amato and Jacobs (sample proverb: "Women said that Mike grabbed them, but I can't grab you unless you're within reach!") and a clip of Louis Farrakhan, leader of an organization that advertises its commitment to protecting the honor of black woman, entertains the audience at a "Free Mike Tyson" gathering by viciously mocking the idea that any woman who would agree to be alone with Tyson wasn't asking for whatever she got. It all amounts to a clear-eyed, wide-ranging, and very dispiriting documentary essay on the state of the dialogue about race and sex in this country at a very low point, but Kopple doesn't lose the specific human dimension of it: at the end, she brings in Donald Washington, Desiree's father, a self-confessed Tyson "fight fan" whose composure crumbles before the camera as he describes hugging his daughter and feeling that he'd lost a part of her that he was afraid might never be coming back. Of course, Kopple's movie, unlike Toback's, ends with Tyson still in prison, leaving it a matter of conjecture whether he would ever fight again. It was impossible to know at the time that, by cutting his story off at that point, she was doing him a kindness.

Related:

Screengrab Review: "Tyson"

Screengrab at Sundance: Review of Tyson

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: April 18-24, 2009

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 21:00:00 GMT

What’s happening, Screengrabbers? My buddy here and I decided to take this opportunity to clear up a few misconceptions about our forthcoming summer blockbuster, which you all will love very much. We were very disturbed to read Screengrab Predicts Summer 2009 (Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five and Six), particularly the part where Land of the Lost was predicted to be the biggest bomb of the summer! Sure, the previews may have given some people the impression that our movie is just another big budget crapfest of a cash-in, but believe you me, nothing could be further from the truth! We have the utmost respect for the original piece. We’re simply reimagining it in contemporary terms, as you might, say, with a modern-dress version of Hamlet. Or Bewitched!

While we’re here, we might as well check out some other stuff that looks interesting, like The Great Netflix-"Crash" Mystery (never saw it), Mia Farrow Plans to Fast for Darfur (looks like she already is, am I right?) and Angelina Jolie Plays Doctor (I’d like to turn my head and cough, if you know what I mean).

That’s all I’ve got time for, but my pal the Sleestak is gonna stick around and read:

Reviews: Tyson, Treeless Mountain, Il Divo, Infestation

Screengrab Q&A: James Toback

Charlie Kaufman Would You Like to Know That He Really Does Care About @#$%ing Structure!

Reviews By Request: Juliet of the Spirits (1965, Federico Fellini)

Forgotten Films: "The Daytrippers" (1987)

Marathon Day Special: The Longest Movies of All Time

The Screengrab Library of Unproduced Screenplays: John Belushi's "Noble Rot"

Screengrab Q&A: James Toback

Nicole Ankowski — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 11:00:00 GMT

By Emily Wilson

It's been over twenty years since Mike Tyson became boxing's youngest-ever Heavyweight Champion of the World. In the decades since, his demons outnumbered his titles, and the former bruiser became better known for his addictions, ear-biting and uncontrollable temper than for his victories in the ring. Filmmaker James Toback (The Pick-up Artist, Fingers, Bugsy) aims to bring some nuance to that image with his new documentary, Tyson. And he may succeed; the film was lauded at Cannes and Sundance, with Tyson himself saying, "I'm afraid of how much money and how much pussy I'm gonna get."

A self-styled provocateur, Toback has always been able to raise a tempest around himself and his extensive network of celebrity associates — perhaps because the line between him and his subjects, between his art and his life, has never been clear. As a young journalist in 1971, he was assigned a piece about Jim Brown; he ended up moving in with the football-legend-turned-actor and writing a memoir about the endless orgies at Brown's house. His film career, in many ways, has continued to blur that line, with extra provocation whenever possible. One scene in 1999's Black and White finds Tyson himself — as himself — politely deflecting the advances of a pushy Robert Downey Jr., before suddenly and shockingly punching him in the face.

The same charisma Tyson displays in that unforgettable moment animates Toback's new documentary, essentially one long interview with a very willing subject, interspersed with impressive archival footage. Tyson opens up about his childhood, turbulent relationships, addictions, prison, and the intimate, twenty-year-long relationship he and Toback have shared. It's a mesmerizing film, and perhaps Toback's best. Nerve spoke with Toback about friendship with a man whom many consider a monster.

You've known Mike Tyson for over twenty years. How did you first meet?
It was quite unexpected. He came to the set of The Pick-up Artist to meet Robert Downey Jr. He and I started talking, and we hit it off. We took a long, long walk at five in the morning through Central Park. He'd just met Jim Brown, and I had lived up at Jim's house for a couple of years. He was fascinated to find out about all the wild activities there. I told him about my flip-out on LSD when I was his age, nineteen. He was very interested in the whole notion of madness and what it meant to go crazy. His mind was very curious, in particular about that subject. I wasn't all that surprised when, years later, he flipped out, when he was in solitary confinement. In fact, he told me the first thing he thought was, "This is what Toback was talking about."

How did you stay in touch? Did you meet up or call one another?
I'd call him out of the blue. Or I'd get a call at four in the morning and he'd say, "Jim Toback, Mike Tyson." And two hours later we'd say goodnight.

Did you always talk about heavy subjects?
Yes. There was no small talk ever. Not a syllable. Very much like in the movie.

How did you decide to make this film?
It was clear to me we'd have some extremely interesting episodes together, and over the years we did. They just happened organically. There was this constant sense of invention and renewal. I felt when he came out of prison after the long stay, that would be a great time to use him because he was — and still is — an icon in the hip-hop world. I was doing [this movie about hip-hop] with the Wu-Tang Clan, Black and White. He fit very naturally within the framework of the film.

In Black and White there's a scene in the gym where he speaks in a self-reflective, meditative way about murder and humiliation in prison. I thought that voice, if I find the right cinematic style, would make a great self-portrait, filtered through my own aesthetic. I talked to him about it right away and he was all for it. It was just a question of finding the right time.

And what made this the right time?
The death of my mother, which made me feel I had to get to work on something right away or I'd have a real problem functioning at all. And he'd just been arrested for cocaine possession and was in rehab. I thought: this is going to be a period of time he can indulge in self-analysis and reflection, without having the kind of fractured, frantic life he usually has.

Do you feel you had a lot in common?
In some odd way, by making a movie about him, it raised all these subjects that all of my movies deal with: identity, and the loss of it; madness; sex; love; crime; money; death. The less likely the scenario, the more interesting it is to me. So to take a subject, namely Mike Tyson, where the backgrounds and the origins and any number of [other] superficial differences would suggest a lack of communion — and then to find there are these rather fascinating connections — made it all the more interesting.

Some of the film is painful for Tyson; he cries at certain points. Why did he agree to make this film?
First of all, clearly, he is shy on one level. But he's one of the most famous people in the world, and it's not by accident. He has a need to be known and to be understood. I think that was part of it, but I think he has a confessional nature, too. Strict Catholics find a confession booth sufficient to answer that need. Maybe Tyson's needs are a bit more unusual.

In the movie he talks about his tumultuous relationships with women.
Numerically he's had so many experiences with women, you'd almost have to say the law of averages would suggest there'd be a certain amount of problems. If your life revolves around five or ten women, you might be able to get away with a pretty tranquil existence. But at five or ten thousand, you're gonna have some mistakes.

How will this film changes people's preconceptions of Mike Tyson?
There are quite a few people who go in with a conception of him as a convicted rapist and ear-biter. And when they come out, they feel a sense of shock — that he has moved them the way he has, and that they feel that they know him in a way they didn't expect to.

Did you consider interviewing Tyson's friends, or critics, for the film?
No. It only could have been this kind of movie. I had no interest at all in making the movie that was a poll of various people's views. The whole idea was to take advantage of this opportunity, to have a special, personal perspective about himself.

You say you think of him as a figure out of Greek tragedy.
Well, he's the one who said, "It's like a Greek tragedy; the only problem is, I'm the subject." As in classic Greek tragedy, you have a large-scale figure who has risen against all odds by dint of his own capacity, strength and ability — and then has brought himself down by an act of hubris.

What was his act of hubris?
Thinking he could get away with anything — handle problems and challenges that needed rigorous discipline [without that discipline]. Thinking he could get away with succeeding in the way he had, because of his [past] discipline.

How do you feel about the film?
You know, you have a general feel for what a movie is supposed to be when you start it — and [afterwards] you might feel you fulfilled it, or almost fulfilled it or, didn't come close to fulfilling it.

In this case, I think it's probably the first time it actually went beyond what I could have imagined. I didn't know it was possible to feel that. I look at it, and my imagination of what it might be is less than what it is. Whereas in previous films, I felt like this is what I wanted, or this isn't quite what I wanted. Or, in the case of Love and Money, this isn't close to what I wanted.

Tyson opens in select cities this Friday. James Toback is being honored, along with Robert Redford and Francis Ford Coppola, at the San Francisco International Film Festival, running April 23 to May 7.

Screengrab Review: "Tyson"

Nick Schager — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 16:00:00 GMT

“Iron Mike” turns out to be a sympathetically pitiful figure in James Toback’s Tyson, a documentary told exclusively through archival clips and interviews with the former heavyweight champ, all of which are fractured by the director’s splitting of the screen into visual quadrants and his deft editing of Tyson monologues into a lucid first-person narrative. Such aesthetic division seems fitting given the fragmented subject at hand, who exhibits less of the raging-bull persona of his heyday than the severely screwed-up individual that the public came to know during, and after, his precipitous personal and professional fall from grace. At times contrite, angry, amusing and scary, and always more self-analytical than one would expect, Tyson comes across as an athlete destined for greatness and a man fated to fail, an impression that Toback (who previously worked with the boxer in 1999’s Black and White) readily promotes through subtle editorializing that amplifies the idea that the fighter is something of a tragic figure. It’s a hypothesis that has some validity, as evidenced by the doc’s thoughtful recounting of his early years living with a destitute family and running scams in Brooklyn. Too bad, then, that Tyson avoids taking the steps necessary to conclusively argue its case.

The trump card of Toback’s film is its candid autobiographical chats with Tyson, who reveals an impressive aptitude for introspection. The heavyweight’s musings on the underlying stimuli that pushed him toward boxing (a schoolyard bully’s constant thieving, and his success at fighting back), as well as his astute understanding of the sweet science’s technical and strategic elements, reveal an insightfulness also found in his frequent admissions of life and career mistakes. Toback furthers his material’s depth in understated yet striking ways, most forcefully in his shrewd use of a clip of a press conference for one of the fighter’s post-prison comeback bouts. After a reporter yells out that the paroled Tyson should be “in a straightjacket,” he responds with a stream of ugly homophobic invectives that barely contain the tears threatening to surface – a momentary glimpse of sadness over his lost confidence, self-control, and reputation, as well as of his lifelong attempts to mask, and counter, emotional pain with fierce, borderline-crazy aggression. Here as in many other places, Tyson deliberately and somewhat successfully courts pity for the deeply troubled athlete, elucidating the mixture of resentment, paranoia, ego and uncontrolled fury that made him both a champion and a mess.

Toback’s use of split-screen gets at the man’s splintered psyche, and the masterfully arranged footage of Tyson’s in-ring exploits conveys the awe-inspiring supremacy of his pugilistic skills. Nonetheless, Tyson’s lack of complementary voices (pro and con) hinders its attempts to be a comprehensive, definitive psychological portrait. This is most apparent during those sections when Tyson addresses the rape conviction that sent him to prison for three years (an incident about which he’s still bitter, yet only cursorily talks about), his screwy marriage to Robin Givens (primarily, and insufficiently, summed up with “we were just two kids”), and his relationship to, and falling out with, iconic promoter Don King. As the three developments in his boxing life – after the death of his beloved manager and mentor Cus D’Amato – that most directly contributed to his plummet from the sports world’s mountaintop, they deserve not only more time than they’re granted, but more outside analysis than Tyson is willing (or able) to provide. By skirting these vital incidents’ role in Tyson’s descent into ear-biting, face-tattooing, fighting-for-easy-paydays ignominy, Toback’s doc ultimately proves too subjective to truly get at the heart and mind-frame of its iconic subject.

The Brett Ratner Book Club

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 19:00:00 GMT

We indulge in our share of Ratner-bashing here at the Screengrab, and why not? It’s not our fault he’s the director of Rush Hour 3. But we’ll give credit where credit is due: Brett Ratner has launched his own literary imprint, Rat Press. For the moment, try to ignore the fact that the crown jewel of the collection appears to be a collection of Scott Caan photographs. Scroll down and you’ll see a few more interesting entries, including Conversations with Marlon Brando by Lawrence Grobel and a book with the perfectly James Tobackian title Jim: The Author’s Self-Centered Memoir on the Great Jim Brown.

“For me, part of my film education was reading these types of books that talked about life experiences in Hollywood,” Ratner tells Movieline – and who knew Movieline still existed in any form? “I have the most incredible book collection; they’re just a big part of stuff I love to collect. But the Brando book is one that I’ve always loved, and when I met Lawrence Grobel, I told him: ‘I love your Capote book! I love your Brando book!’ And he said, “You know, the Brando book is available.” I said, “What? I want to publish it! Will you write a new outro for it?”

The Grobel book does sound like a find, if a little pricey at $25 a pop. “For ten truly remarkable days in July 1978, Lawrence Grobel spent every waking minute with legendary actor Marlon Brando and his family on Brando’s Tahitian island, Tetiaroa. It was the first time in twenty-five years that Brando, notorious for his reclusive, reticent lifestyle had granted an extended interview to anyone.”

Let’s hope the Rat Press series is a success and Ratner devotes as much time and energy to it as possible. Anything to keep him out of the director’s chair.

Related:
Brett Ratner Drinks Youngblood
Mike Tyson Speaks: Lend Him an Ear

Trailer Review: Tyson

Paul Clark — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Given his ongoing preoccupations with characters who are into drugs, crime, sexual aggressiveness, and stories that cross the lines of race and social class, it was only a matter of time until James Toback made a documentary about his pal and sometime collaborator Mike Tyson. And yet, Toback’s most recent choice of subject matter seems to exemplify what’s lacking in many of his films. In his best work- particularly Fingers and his screenplay for Karel Reisz’s The Gambler- Toback depicts intelligent men who are being torn asunder by their baser impulses. Yet in lesser Toback films such as Black and White and Harvard Man, the more sensationalistic stuff (sex, drugs, crime) dominates the proceedings, leaving little room for Toback’s philosophical or poetic side. I fear that, with Tyson in front of the camera, the same will happen with this latest film, and reviews from last year’s festival scene haven’t exactly laid this fear to rest. That said, I hope I’m wrong- Tyson is one of the most galvanizing sports figures of our time, and his life certainly warrants a cinematic treatment that takes a complex, gloves-off approach. But is Toback the director to give us that film? I have my doubts.

The Rep Report (January 30 - Feburary 5)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 19:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Positif, affectionately known as "the other French film magazine" for its often confrontational stance in regard to the institution that is Cahiers du Cinema, has its say about that matters in the American indie canon with "Mavericks and Outsiders: Positif Celebrates American Cinema", January 30 - February 5. The program, curated by the magazine's longtime editor Michel Climent, includes such cultish provocations as James Toback's directorial debut Fingers (1978); Paul Schrader's working-man dirge Blue Collar (1978); the living-tabloid The Honeymoon Killers (1970), the sole directing job by Leonard Kastle (who took over from the original hire, Martin Scorsese); Wanda (1971), a character drama written and directed by its star, Barbara Loden, a heartbreakingly gifted actress perhaps better known for having been married to Elia Kazan; the presecient my-camera-ate-my-life mock-documentary David Holzman's Diary (1967); and the little-seen 1989 Reunion, starring Jason Robards and directed by Jerry Schatberg from a script by Harold Pinter. Climent will introduce many of the screenings and also host discussions with such special guests as Toback and director Larry Clark.

If all that only serves to whet your appetite for vintage American indies, The Panic in the Needle Park, the 1971 New York City junkie drama that boasts Al Pacino's first starring role, checks into the Film Forum for a week starting today. Directed by the aforementioned Jerry Schatzberg, from a script by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, and produced by Dunne's brother (and Didion's brother-in-law) Dominick Dunne before he began his own writing career, the movie is a well-made downer that has special historical value for its location shooting, which captures Fun City at its most rat-infested and raggedy--and which is augmented by an impressively grungy-looking supporting cast that includes Richard Bright, Raul Julia, Kiel Martin, Warren Finnerty, Joe Santos, Alan Vint, Marcia Jean Kurtz, Sully Boyar, and a tubby young Paul Sorvino in a bit as a cop--and of course for the first starring movie appearance by Pacino, 31 years old and a year away from The Godfather. He plays a scuffling heroin addict who falls in love with a young slummer played by Kitty Winn and sucks her into his vortex. The movie played at the Cannes Film Festival, where, surprisingly, it was Winn who came home with a prize for her performance. She would go on to play the assistant of the mother of the possessed little girl in both The Exorcist and Exorcist II: The Heretic, and disappear from the radar a few years later.

Douglas Sirk's 1950's films Magnificent Obsession and Imitation of Life would go on to win him a high-toned critical reputation as some kind of subversive master of stormy, hyperbolic melodrama and an inspiration to later filmmakers ranging from Fassbinder to Todd Haynes. Meanwhile, the older studio director John M. Stahl is known as, well, somebody who made a batch of movies that were later remade by Douglas Sirk. (In addition to the original Magnificent Obsession and Imitation of Life, Stahl directed the 1939 When Tomorrow Comes, which Sirk remade in 1957 as Interlude. But many old-movie lovers maintain that Stahl's originals are unself-conscious, well-wrought classics that have been unfairly overshadowed by Sirk's versions, and Anthology Film Archives is giving viewers a rare chance to compare them side by side with screenings this weekend of all six movies. Just on the basis of the on-screen talent, the 1934 Imitation, co-starring Claudette Colbert and the great black actress Louise Beavers, may have a clear edge.

Screengrab at Sundance: Review of Tyson

bilge — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Screengrab editor emeritus Bilge Ebiri reports from the frontlines of Park City.

James Toback has always seemed like a documentary filmmaker trapped in a narrative filmmaker’s body. The most exciting parts of his films have always been those moments when reality intrudes: Mike Tyson suddenly punching out Robert Downey, Jr., in Black and White immediately comes to mind, but there are others. So it comes as little surprise that the maverick director’s documentary portrait Tyson might just be the best thing he’s done to date. Featuring an extended interview with the former heavyweight champ at his most candid and eloquent, Tyson is unafraid to just put its subject center stage and let him go.

Toback does give us archival footage of Tyson’s famous fights, as he should, and the sight of Tyson at the height of his powers, like a small hurricane of anger let loose in the ring, still carries with it an extraordinary charge. And this is where Toback’s narrative skills come into play: Archival footage plays out almost as if we’re watching Iron Mike’s own memories, and it helps give his journey shape.

Tyson admits that he’s a recovering addict, and one wonders to what extent Toback, a man who’s famously struggled with his own addictions over the years, is using the film as a kind of exorcism of his own demons. But there’s something genuinely confrontational about the way Toback films the champ. Tyson talks about all the ways in which he’s changed, and insists on a newfound humility, but Toback’s direct style suggests that the filmmaker doesn’t see him as a fallen, broken soul at all. With this film, Mike Tyson becomes yet another of the unapologetic fuck-ups that people Toback’s films. Iron Mike may be repentant, but Toback seems to suggest that it was all worth it for the story. He might just be right.

Sundance Roundup: Day Two

Scott Von Doviak — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Tonight it's your big chance to have dinner with Mike Tyson. A Q&A and dinner with the former champ will follow tonight's screening of James Toback's documentary Tyson. (Please don't ask if ears are on the menu.) The movie itself had its first screening bright and early yesterday at 8:30 am ("You people did more than I would have done, coming out at 8:30 in the morning for a movie!" Toback told the crowd.) According to the L.A. Times, "Toback filmed Tyson during a time when the former heavyweight fighter was in rehab for drug addiction and feeling contemplative about his life. Intercut with the interview are clips from Tyson's highlights and lowlights, including footage from his 1997 fight against Evander Holyfield that ended with Iron Mike chomping off part of Holyfield's ear. Yet despite this unflattering footage, the film is largely sympathetic to Tyson." Slashfilm has a problem with that: "Situations dealing with abuse and rape charges deserve to show the other side of the story (especially when Tyson claims they never happened). But the documentary never strays from the one on one interview with Tyson himself." The film has already been picked up for distribution by Sony Pictures Classics.

If you've been waiting for the mumblecore bromance version of Zack and Miri Make a Porno, it sounds like Humpday is the movie for you. Two college buds dare each other to make a gay porno together in a movie Salon's Andrew O'Hehir describes as "a subtle and intelligent picture that blends dudely comedy and adult relationship drama." Or as Spoutblog puts it, it's "like Bang the Drum Slowly meets Jaws. Only no one dies." Intriguing!

The New York Times notes a number of eco-friendly films on the schedule, including Robert Stone's documentary Earth Days, but wonders if the festival itself is as green as it should be. "Still, a stroll here this week down Main Street — where a dozen idling trucks were unloading supplies and equipment, while an oversize band bus, with trailer in tow, spewed fumes outside a soon-to-be-busy party site — framed the obvious quandary: how can you cram some 46,000 people, roughly equivalent to a fifth of Hollywood’s total work force, into a pretty little mountain town without contributing mightily to the problems your films hope to solve?"

Sundance Preview: Five Must-See Documentaries

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Beginning later this week, I’ll be bringing you the most comprehensive Sundance coverage possible by a person who isn’t actually going to be there. (Hey, it’s cold up there! Sure, I could have tried to fool you with this eight-year-old photo, but I don’t play like that.) But hey, I don’t have to be in Park City to comb through the Sundance website and engage in some uninformed speculation about films that may be of interest to you and me. Tomorrow we’ll look at narrative features, but today let’s look at five nonfiction films I’d try to see if, y’know, I wasn’t a thousand miles away.

BIG RIVER MAN

Normally a swimming documentary wouldn’t be my cup of tea, but having read up a bit on endurance swimmer Martin Strel, my interest in Big River Man is piqued. An endurance swimmer from Slovenia, Strel has already conquered the Mississippi and the Danube, but the subject of this film is his craziest feat yet: swimming the length of the Amazon river while consuming two bottles of wine a day. “In his fifties and rather overweight, his treacherous journey brings him face to face with many obstacles, including water predators, rapids, and toxic pollution… Part world-class sporting event, part circus sideshow, the film follows the colorful characters 3,375 miles over 66 days on history's longest, most perilous swim.”

NOLLYWOOD BABYLON

Could this be the Not Quite Hollywood of 2009? Well…probably not, but just as that documentary covered the too-little-explored Ozsploitation film industry down under, Nollywood Babylon promises the lowdown on “the wild and wacky world of Nollywood, Nigeria’s explosive homegrown movie industry, where Jesus and voodoo vie for screen time… a cadre of resourceful filmmakers creating a garish, imaginative, and wildly popular form of B-movie that has frenzied fans begging for more.”

TYSON

Screengrabber Andrew Osborne has an interesting James Toback story he’d like to share with you if he ever gets clearance from our team of lawyers. In the meantime, you’ll have to settle for this profile of perpetually embattled former boxer Mike Tyson (who made a memorable appearance in Toback’s Black and White). “Candid interviews with Tyson reveal an often-misunderstood persona that encompasses a broad spectrum of decidedly human instincts… Toback manages to crack Mike Tyson’s brooding exterior to expose both the best and worst of the most explosive and controversial enigma in the history of the sport.”

WHEN YOU’RE STRANGE

Tom DiCillo has directed one movie I love (Living in Oblivion) and then…a handful of other peculiar but not particularly good movies (Box of Moon Light, The Real Blonde). I don’t have any evidence that he’s the man to make us forget Oliver Stone’s bombastic biopic The Doors, but surely any nonfiction treatment of the story would be an improvement. The Sundance guide assures us DiCillo’s take is “far from a nostalgic journey and much more than a biopic,” consisting only of original footage shot between 1966 and 1971. We thank the director for not allowing Ray Manzarek another opportunity to gas on about making the myths.

WOUNDED KNEE

The above clip is not from the new documentary Wounded Knee, but rather from Michael Apted’s 1992 film Incident at Oglala. Sorry, it’s all I could find, but both films revolve around confrontations between the FBI and Indian activists at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. While Apted’s movie concerns the murder of two federal agents in 1975, Wounded Knee takes us back to February of 1973, when “a caravan of cars carrying 200 armed Oglala Lakota—led by American Indian Movement (AIM) activists—entered Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation and quickly occupied buildings, cut off access, and took up defensive positions. When federal agents arrived, they declared, ‘The Indians are in charge of the town,' and a 71-day standoff ensued.’”

Sundance 2009 Non-Competition Lineup

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 13:00:00 GMT

Yesterday we brought you the competitive lineup set for next month’s Sundance Film Festival, and today it’s time to run down some of the notable films playing out of competition. The festival opens on January 15, 2009 with the claymation feature Mary and Max, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Toni Collette and narrated by Barry Humphries. It’s “the tale of two unlikely pen pals: Mary, a lonely, eight-year-old girl living in the suburbs of Melbourne, and Max, a forty-four-year old, severely obese man living in New York.”

Premieres that caught my eye include:

500 Days of Summer. “When an unlucky greeting card copywriter is dumped by his girlfriend, the hopeless romantic shifts back and forth through various periods of their 500 days 'together' in hopes of figuring out where things went wrong.” OK, maybe that doesn’t sound so promising, but Zooey Deschanel is in it and that’s worth something in my book. (That’s my book Zooey Deschanel, You Will Be Mine, coming to a bookstore near you once she lifts the restraining order.)

Brooklyn’s Finest. “After enduring vastly different career paths, three unconnected Brooklyn cops wind up at the same deadly location.” Training Day director Antoine Fuqua gets back to the nitty-gritty.

Manure. The Polish brothers present a “comic tale centered on manure salesmen in the early 1960s.” Billy Bob Thornton stars. What, you’re not intrigued?

And the Gun to My Head Award goes to Spread, starring Ashton Kutcher as a handsome young man who survives in Los Angeles by seducing wealthy older women. Why, Sundance? Why?

Documentaries of interest include James Toback’s Tyson (about the boxer, not the frozen food) and It Might Get Loud, “a history of the electric guitar from the point of view of three legendary rock musicians.” Who are they? Find out that and much more here.

That Guy! Special "Godfather" Edition, Part Five

Phil Nugent — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 16:00:00 GMT

This week, "The Godfather--The Coppola Restoration", a DVD and Blu-ray set consisting of newly remastered editions of the three "Godfather" films directed by Francis Ford Coppola, hits the stores. To honor the release of the home video set, That Guy!, the Screengrab's sporadic celebration of B-listers, character actors, and the working famous, is devoting itself this week to the backup chorus of these remarkable films.

TALIA SHIRE: The world of the Corleones is one that shuts out its women. Their job is to produce and raise the children, and they are basically treated as children, to remain innocent and untainted by knowledge of what their family's prosperity is based on--as if they could really not know, or as if there could be absolution in ignorance. The big exception is Michael's sister Connie, played by Francis Ford Coppola's sister, Talia Shire. (One advantage of this side of the casting is that Coppola instinctively understood how to get guys to act like brothers to a little sister. James Caan says that Coppola would engineer situations on the set, asking Caan to shoo away some bastard who was "bothering" Talia; it was only later that Caan realized that Coppola was psyching him up for the big scene where Caan's Sonny, after seeing bruises on his sister's face, performs a little marriage counseling by tracking down his brother-in-law and stomping a mudhole in his ass.) Maybe because he didn't want to seem to be playing favorites, Coppola treated Shire's character a little negligently in the first film; she doesn't really threaten to rise above the level of a victim and a plot function until her big explosion at the end, screaming that Michael has had her husband killed. But in Part II, she enters the movie like a house on fire, a fabulously turned out slightly-older woman who's going to do whatever it takes to embarrass the family she blames for wrecking her life, even if that means she has to hang out with Troy Donahue. Eventually she wears herself out with her own acting out and returns to the nest, and by the time of Part III, she's more active plotter than Michael. She has her ideas about how things ought to be done and takes full advantage of all the perks she figures she has coming to her as blood relation. And nobody is going to take her out in a rowboat and put one in her head while it's bowed in prayer.

The Godfather is one of two big movie franchises that dominate Shire's filmography. The other is the Rocky series, where she played Adrian, the ugly duckling who became the hero's loyal wife, hanging in there from the 1976 original through to Rocky V in 1990. (Her absence from the 2006 Rocky Balboa is explained by her character's death from, in the tasteful words of her widower, "da woman cancer.") Although she was perfectly charming in the first Rocky movie, the role called for her to return to the likable-mouse range of the first Godfather movie, and in invited audiences to like her for being so drably unimaginative and for being faithfully devoted to America's Lug. The success of Rocky did lead to her having, for a few months from 1979 to early 1980, a brief fling as a leading lady, but the movies she starred in--the uneven and off-putting Old Boyfriends and the terrible horror pictures Prophecy and Windows (which is the only film directed by Godfather cinematographer Gordon Willis, and which cast Shire as the target of a dangerous lesbian stalker played Elizabeth Ashley)--were such bombs that they left Shire open to public ridicule. The whole experience may have let her a little gun-shy; for the next ten years or so, she didn't stray far from Rocky's apron strings, and though she has continued working pretty steadily in recent years, she seems to have a pretty good sense for picking scripts whose finished films will scarcely see the light of day. I suspect that Shire may still have some surprises in her, but it remains to be seen whether anyone will arrange for them to be turned loose.

G. D. SPRADLIN: A big believer in the value of a varied CV, the Oklahoma-born Spradlin was an attorney, an independent oil man, and a politician before turning professional actor in his mid-forties. He had already built up an impressive roll call of intimidating but not always trustworthy authority figures--cops, doctors, politicians, military officers--before Coppola brought him on board to play Senator Pat Geary, a man who the Senate doorkeeper can't introduce with the words "the honorable..." without dissolving in giggles. Having earned his place in movie history, Spradlin continued to play admirals, sports coaches (including, in the 1979 North Dallas Forty, a character said to be modeled on Tom Landry), and even, in his last job before his official retirement in 1999, Ben Bradlee in the cross-eyed Watergate spoof Dick. All of these roles now seem informed by the fact that the man onscreen once set his nastiest sneer in place to go head to head with Michael Corleone, and that it took a bloody bed full of dead girl to make him blink, and shudder. Especially worthy of mention is his other job for Coppola, in Apocalypse Now, where he plays the general who gives Martin Sheen his assignment up river, and where his sad, weary face--the face of a man who by God will do the job he signed on to do, but at the time he signed on he sure didn't know he was going to be doing this shit--is like a red flag to the star, and maybe to the audience. Whatever happens next, you can't look into those eyes and say that you weren't given fair warning.

LENNY MONTANA: Six feet six inches tall and not whisper-thin, Montana (nee' Lenny Passofaro) worked as a bouncer and is rumored to have had some kind of mob connections before he entered show business as a professional wrestler, where he worked under the names Lenny the Bull, Zebra Man, and Chief Chickawicki. Lenny was 45 when he made his movie debut in The Godfather playing Luca Brasi, the old family enforcer who didn't expect to be invited to his boss's daughter's wedding. If the scene in which Luca thanks Don Corleone for having been so honored had been played and shot as written, it might have been less memorable. As it turned out, Lenny the Bull was so starstruck by Marlon Brando that he couldn't be in Brando's presence for two seconds without looking as if he were going to shit his pants and maybe bleed from the eyes a little, so after all attempts to calm him down failed, Coppola reconceived the scene: in the finished product, Luca is so overwhelmed by the Don's willingness to let him enter his home through the front door in broad daylight, and so unused to social interaction that doesn't involve threatening to leave someone with fewer body parts than he had when he showered that morning, that he has laboriously prepared a written speech for the occasion, which he has trouble getting out even in the sealed labratory conditions of the Don's office. In Lenny's other big scene, he gets to have a drink with some fellows who pin his hand to the bar with a knife and then garrote him, and Lenny played it as if getting throttled with piano wire came much more naturally to him than wedding-day small talk. Given the massive international success of The Godfather and Lenny's easily recognizable face and physique, is it any wonder that his acting debut did lead to other offers? He appeared in James Toback's Fingers, a TV film starring Frank Sinatra called Contract on Cherry Street, the Jackie Chan vehicle The Big Brawl, the Steve Martin hit The Jerk, and Robert Aldrich's ...All the Marbles, as well as in such trivia as the Italian spoof The Funny Face of the Godfather. He even took a co-writing credit on one of his last films, Blood Song, a horror flick that co-starred Richard Jaeckel and Frankie Avalon. His artistic vision more or less fulfilled, Lenny retired from the screen that year and died in Italy in 1992.

That Guy! Special "Godfather" Edition, Part Two

Phil Nugent — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 16:00:00 GMT

RICHARD CASTELLANO: Squat, fat, and fleshy, Castellano casts a broad shadow as the loyal Corleone lieutenant Clemenza. Castellano, who is said to have ad-libbed his best-remembered line--the sage advice, "Leave the gun, take the cannoli."-- makes such a strong impression in The Godfather, and is so memorable because of his work in it, that it's kind of dumbfounding to realize how little else he left behind on film. After almost a decade or so of small parts in movies, TV, and the theater, his big break came with a role in the Joseph Bologna-Renee Taylor play Lovers and Others Strangers; he was nominated for a Tony Award for it, then won an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor when he recreated his performance for the movie version in 1970. His breakout success as Clemenza led to a string of starring roles in failed TV sitcoms (The Super, Joe and Sons) and supporting roles in Godfather knockoffs, such as the TV movies Incident on a Dark Street and Honor Thy Father (based on Gay Talese's nonfiction bestseller) and the short-lived dramatic series The Gangster Chronicles. Castellano maneuvered himself out of what should have been his one sure shot at a triumphant follow-up, in The Godfather, Part II: Francis Ford Coppola wrote him out of the screenplay after being confronted with what he felt were unreasonable demands involving salary, script approval, and other perks. It's easy to understand how Castellano, after slogging away in the business for so long, would find it hard not to pass up a chance to demand a little star treatment when he felt he could get away with it; it's just as easy to understand how Coppola, who already had his plate full with the million other details to the enormous production that demanded his production, would feel inclined to tell this ego-tripping fat load to take a walk. Castellano made his last film appearance in 1982 and died six years later.

MICHAEL V. GAZZO: In The Godfather, Part II, Michael Corleone has a moment where he tells the aging gangster Frankie "Five Angels" Pentageli how glad he is that his old family house "never went to strangers. First Clemenza took it over, and then you." Thus with one speck of throwaway dialogue did Francis Ford Coppola make his one gesture to filling in whatever happened to Clemenza after Michael's ascension to the throne. After things didn't work out with Richard Castellano, Coppola was obliged to create a new character and assign to him the function in the sequel that he had planned for Clemenza: that of the leftover representative of the old ways turned alienated betrayer. It put Gazzo, the man brought in to play the part, in a tough situation: he couldn't very well do an impression of Castellano, but he had to build from scratch someone who the audience could respond to with the same kind of affection that they would someone they remembered fondly from the first movie. Gazzo, with his walrus mustache, friendly gravelly croak, and effusive but elegaic manner, actually managed to pull this off, helped by a wonderful entrance scene where he begs for a drink of water from a garden hose and then reveals that he's not too big a man to put up with Fredo's company for a few minutes. Although Gazzo, a graduate of the Actors Studio who went on to form a West Coast theater workshop in his own name, had done some acting going back to the 1950s--he's an uncredited bit player in On the Waterfront-- before he played Pentageli, he was best known for writing the "I-was-a-Method-dope fiend" play A Hatful of Rain. (He would eventually get to adapt that text for the movies, and also worked on the script for the Elvis Presley vehicle King Creole.) Godfather II effectively made him America's favorite aging goombah; it left him all but guaranteed of steady work, especially on TV, where he usually played characters whose last name ended in a vowel and who could be counted on to at some point deliver a variation on the line, "I want this Kojak/Baretta/B.J. and the Bear problem taken care of!" His second most notable movie role was in James Toback's 1978 directorial debut, Fingers, where he was funny and poignant as a whipped, washed-up loan shark who is treated protectively by his violently unhinged son, played by Harvey Keitel. He died in 1995.

BRUNO KIRBY: The son of the actor Bruce Kirby, Bruno Kirby was the epitome of the potato-faced, fast-talking, New York-honking character guy whose specialty was amusing audiences while appearing to drive everybody who has to share a screen with him right up the wall. At his most high-profile, he was the kind of actor who gets to play sidekick to the kind of actor--such as Billy Crystal in City Slickers or Albert Brooks in Modern Romance--who had to produce or direct the movie in order to star in it. Perhaps his best, most weirdly typical role was in "The Gas Man", an episode of the TV series Homicide, in which he played an embittered ex-con who was twisted and ambitious enough to plot a baroque plan for the detective (Andre Braugher) who'd put him away but not quite mad enough to carry through on it when he had the chance. In The Godfather, Part II, the most handsome item on his resume, he's thoroughly un-typical: cast as the young Clemenza, and billed as "B. Kirby, Jr.", he's not immediately recognizable in his padded suits and with his Italian accent, which inhibits him from doing his customary high-pitched jabbering. But many years later, he'd get to bring his customary type into the Corleone's world through the side door when he was cast as helpmate to Marlon Brando in his mock-Don Vito role in the 1990 comedy The Freshman. Kirby died from complications from leukemia in 2006.

Mike Tyson Speaks: Lend Him an Ear

Phil Nugent — Mon, 12 May 2008 17:00:00 GMT

“I love addicts. I love these guys. That’s the people I want to be around. You know, former users. And I think that’s really crazy.”That's Mike Tyson talking to Tim Arango in The New York Times. Now 41 and, one assumes, or maybe hopes, Tyson still has his own peculiar addictions, and one of them seems to be to the filmmaker James Toback. Tyson supplied Toback with the most memorable scene of his 2000 improvisational jam session Black and White when he turned up as himself in a party scene and gets cruised by Robert Downey, Jr., a scene that ends with the unnerved Tyson ("I'm on parole, brother, please") ringing Downey's bell. (After Downey goes down, Brooke Shields, playing his wife, rushes over to see if he's all right, and then she hits on Tyson. "“They say I raped a woman,” Iron Mike tells her politely. “They put me in the penitentiary. I don’t need no white bitch coming on to me.” At the time, there was some indication that Tyson was unhappy with how he came across onscreen and felt that Toback had set him up--not an unreasonably paranoid reaction to Toback, a self-styled provocateur who likes to surround himself with celebrities and stir up some shit. But Tyson came back for an appearance in Toback's little-seen When a Man Loves a Woman, and now he's the star of Toback's new film, a documentary simply called Tyson, "which interposes interviews of Mr. Tyson conducted last year while he was in rehab, with fight clips," and which premieres at the Cannes Film Festival.

“I look at it now, and I’m embarrassed I did it,” Tyson, currently trying to keep a low profile in Las Vegas, says about the film. “There’s a lot of information people didn’t need to know.” His claims to feel shame over his past is believable. But Tyson, who spent the first half of his career easily dominating his opponents in the ring (and the second half showing a complete inability to deal with it when he could no longer easily dominate, so that he'd do anything--go down fast, aim below the belt, turn cannibal--to just make it stop) now seems to be a glutton for this kind of punishment. (He's also working on an autobiographer with a professional ghostwriter.) This focus on sifting through his past may not be entirely based on his having nothing else to peddle. He may be hoping to educate himself. “I don’t know who I am,” he told the Times. “That might sound stupid. I really have no idea. All my life I’ve been drinking and drugging and partying, and all of a sudden this comes to a stop.” Maybe that's why he likes hanging around Toback, who recalls that when they first met back in the 1980s, “somehow the subject got on to madness. I told him about an LSD experience I had as a sophomore at Harvard. We talked about losing the self, and the difference between dread and fear.” (It's too bad that Toback's movies aren't more like his interviews.) Why Toback wants to be around Tyson, in good times and bad, is less mysterious. “I didn’t know how to be any other way," Tyson says now about his free-spending, sometimes lunatic-seeming behavior when things were good, or at lest profitable. "I felt like one of those barbarian kings just coming to conquer the Roman Empire. I was crazy.”

The Summer of Downey

Phil Nugent — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

A fresh wave of media attention, including a profile in Time magazine by Rebecca Winters Keegan and a New York Times piece by David Carr, make it clear that this summer is penciled in to be the one that takes Robert Downey, Jr. to the next level. It is hard to think of a reason to root against him. Downey, who was born in 1965, first appeared on-screen in movies directed by his father, who didn't used to have be called Robert Downey, Sr. to avoid confusion: the 1970 Pound, in which the actors pretended to be caged dogs and young Bob was supposed to be a puppy, and the 1972 Greaser's Palace, in which he was a shot dead in a Western setting, and for which he was prepared form his challenging role with a speech about how he was being pressed into service because dad wasn't really into the child-labor laws. In 1985, he was invited to join the cast of Saturday Night Live at the insistence of the then-hot Anthony Michael Hall, who Lorne Michaels wanted badly for the show, and who Downey subsequently smoked. In the fall of 1987, he starred in James Toback's The Pick-Up Artist, which confirmed that he could carry a lightweight comedy on the strength of his talent and charm, and played the fast-sinking buddy of the hero in Less Than Zero, which confirmed that he could take on a thinly written role in an unwatchable mess of a movie and use it to burn an indelible mark in a corner of the screen. The scale of Downey's talent was no secret by the time he starred in Richard Attenborough's Chaplin, but the Oscar nomination he got for that performance made it "official." Attenborough has been quoted as referring to Downey as "a little Brat Pack gadfly" with no formal training but a willingness to "work his arse off," a neat way of giving himself credit for his star's performance. With regard to his lack of "formal training," Downey, talking to Rebecca Winters Keegan, recalls "hanging around and smoking weed in the stairways with my friends who had just gotten back from class. They'd tell me the exercises. It seemed like inevitably they wound up screaming and crying—screaming at each other and crying at what was screamed. I would just call that Thanksgiving."

Back in 2001, NPR's All Things Considered set aside two whole minutes of precious airtime to allow something called Stephen Lynch--it wrote for the Orange County Register, and I'm sure it's mama is proud of it--to take note of Downey's then-latest brushes with the law and the rehab centers and insist that Downey's reputation as a tragically misguided bullet of talent was inflated by the supposed glamour of his messy personal life. As an actor, Lynch declared, "He wasn't"--note the use of the past tense--"that good." What had this keen observer been smoking? One of the surprises of the recent interviews with Downey is the unexpected but not illogical connection he now draws between his triumph in Chaplin and the tabloid slide downhill. He tells Winters Keegan that he knew that he had "just knocked one out of the park", a feeling that carried an expectation that everything about his life was about to change. When everything didn't, it led to "this huge anticlimactic thing that basically took on different shades of awe, wonder, acceptance, bitterness or disassociation for the next—-what year is it?—-17 years. There was this kind of lull, and I never really found any momentum to focus my creative energy after that, so pretty expectable things happened." Cut to a few years down the line, and Downey was capable of accepting a recurring role on Ally McBeal for his next comeback, and further capable of getting himself written out of the series when his comeback was followed by more tabloid headlines, this time involving an arrest "in a hotel room with cocaine and a Wonder Woman costume". What's striking about Downey's rough patch is that, even with his troubles, he was a dependable hire in terms of getting the role done; there are very few duff performances in his resume--one of them is in U.S. Marshals, a sequel to The Fugitive that he credited with pushing him once more over the edge, because, he once said in an interview with Mike Figgis, he wasn't in the best psychic condition to spend a few weeks running around playing "Johnny Handgun"--and he was assured of some kind of comeback every time he gave a performance that was widely seen. No one less stupid than Stephen Lynch--a select group that includes Mel Gibson and a dog I used to have that was killed trying to shake hands with an eighteen-wheeler--could fail to detect how much talent was there. The problem, in an industry where there are insurance forms to fill out, was getting someone to hire him at all.

Downey has said that he wanted to star in Iron Man in part so that he'd be in the kind of movie he could take his son to, but then, he said the same thing about U.S. Marshals. He's also said that he was tired of making movies that nobody sees, and it's bracing to hear someone intimate that he might regret having been in A Scanner Darkly or Zodiac, or at least that he'd be happier if they'd done better business. Elsewhere, Downey has cited Johnny Depp's success in a series of films based on a Disney theme park ride--"If Depp is on a Slurpee, I want to be on a Slurpee"--in a tone that seems to suggest that they amounted to giving him a kind of permission to headline a franchise for Marvel Comics. The fact is, both Pirates of the Caribbean and Iron Man point up what it is that, in a world where the media is as obsessed with box-office numbers as the studios, just what a Johnny Depp or a Robert Downey, Jr. might someday find himself being forced to prove. Nobody who's been paying attention can be in doubt about Downey's being a major actor; what he has to show, if he wants to have the power in terms of freedom and the options he must crave, is that he's a movie star. Which doesn't just mean the ability to command the screen or even the additional ability to put asses in seats but the control to show up and do the press junket and repeat the necessary drivel to reporters over and over without throwing a vase at somebody's head. And, yes, to look right on a Slurpee.

Norman Mailer (1923 - 2007)

Peter Smith — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 21:00:00 GMT

Norman Mailer's death on November 10, at the age of eighty-four, was a great blow to American letters, and also to film lovers, robbing us as it did of a major literary artist whose relationship to the movies was just about unique. Mailer always said that he was seduced into writing by the novels of James T. Farrell, and he claimed Ernest Hemingway as a personal hero. Both Hemingway and Farrell reacted to the new primacy of movies by stripping their writing down, but Mailer wasn't really quite of that school. His style was sometimes downright baroque, and he loved to delve deep into the psyches of his characters, of real people, of himself and the events in which he was taking part. Nor did he have much truck with the common attitude among literary figures of his era that the movies were the enemy. Mailer loved the novel as a form and feared that it might be dying out, but he tried to keep it alive by writing as if he were making a movie on the page. And he went about that goal not cynically or opportunistically but whole-heartedly.

Mailer loved the pulpy immediacy of movies and envied them for their ability to insinuate themselves in modern audience's consciousness and place their stamp on society. At the same time, he deplored the unadventurousness of mainstream Hollywood fare of the 1950s and early 1960s, the period when he was making his name and finding his voice as a writer. In his novels An American Dream and Why Are We In Vietnam? and also in the great journalistic works in which he cast himself as reporter-hero, Mailer wrote the movies that he thought American filmmakers should have been making: unpredictable, crazy, symbolically charged and determined to grapple with current events and the deeper concerns of the country. Years later, in his awesome The Executioner's Song, he shifted gears and created the ultimate docudrama of post-sixties America, epic in scope, spare in style and altogether emotionally confounding. To read the books and then compare them with the movies that Hollywood did make of The Naked and the Dead and An American Dream is to see just how inadequate Hollywood would have been to make good on Mailer's ideas, even if it had wanted to take him up on it. To see the 1982 TV movie version of The Executioner's Song, starring a young Tommy Lee Jones as Gary Gilmore, and adapted for the small screen by Mailer himself, is to see that Mailer himself had better ideas about what movies ought to be than he had about how to make them.

That was already clear from the movies that Mailer made himself in the sixties — Wild 90 (1968), Beyond the Law (1968) and Maidstone (1970). These were edited down from hours and hours of unshaped improvisations with Mailer, who plays the lead in all three, and his actor buddies and various other celebrities taking off from a vague situation (a buncha gangsters hanging out, a buncha cops hanging out. . .) and saying and doing whatever comes into their heads. The proudest moment in all these hours of celluloid comes at the end of Maidstone, in which cast member Rip Torn, feeling unfulfilled at the end of the shoot, attacks a surprised Mailer with a hammer after everyone else thought the film had wrapped; the two men end up tussling on the grass while Mailer's children, with whom he had been shooting home movies with leftover film stock, can be heard crying off-camera.

These movies were based on Mailer's theory about bringing an exciting new level of "reality" to movies, a theory that he explicated in such essays as "Some Dirt in the Talk" and "A Course in Film-Making," and also in his essay on Brando and Last Tango in Paris. When Mailer's long-unavailable films were brought back for a special retrospective screening in New York this past summer, Gerald Howard called Maidstone "a video transmission from the faraway Planet '60s — a civilization in the throes of a crackup" and described the agony of waiting so long to see it after reading the "extraordinary essay" about its making. The fact that the film is unwatchable, to Howard, was kind of beside the point. That the essays Mailer wrote about what he was trying to do as a filmmaker are so much more vibrant and intellectually thrilling than what he did, is not just an example of empty hype. They're proof not that he wasn't onto something but that he was a writer, not a filmmaker. The essays will outlast the movies, and some distant future generation may feel disappointed if nobody finally cares enough to preserve the last prints of his beloved eyesores.

Mailer also gave scattered appearances in other people's films, playing Stanford White in Milos Forman's Ragtime (1981) and Harry Houdini in Matthew Barney's Cremaster 2 (1999). He had a celebrated dust-up on The Dick Cavett Show and once brought his comedy stylings to the set of Gilmore Girls.

He also wrote scripts for TV movies about Robert Hansson and the O.J. Simpson trial, to be directed by his friend Lawrence Schiller. He contributed sound bites to documentary features on James Toback, the romance of Greenwich Village, the exploitation of 9/11, the Ali-Foreman fight, and Deep Throat. He contracted to write and star, with his actress daughter Kate, in an updated version of King Lear (with a Mafia setting, and with Norman to play "Don Learo") that was to be directed by Jean-Luc Godard and financed by Golan-Globus productions. Mailer apparently decided that this was too much even for him and fled the set, with his daughter in tow, after one day of shooting, though Godard went ahead and finished the film, or finished something anyway, with Burgess Meredith and Molly Ringwald. If Mailer made a public ass of himself and worse on more than one occasion, so did a lot of other people who didn't also manage to dash off The Armies of the Night. You will be missed, sir.

— Phil Nugent