The Screengrab : jeffrey wells

Bound for Gory: David Carradine Takes No Prisoners in Rep Screening Appearance

Phil Nugent — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 15:00:00 GMT

This week's Mickey Rourke Award for the crazy man on the comeback trail goes to David Carradine, though in Carradine's case, the emphasis is a lot stronger on the "crazy man" part. Last Wednesday, Carradine was at the American Cinematheque for a screening of the 1976 Hal Ashby film Bound for Glory, in which he played Woody Guthrie. Carradine kept up a running commentary throughout much of the film, then jumped up on stage, guitar at the ready, to participate in a Q & A with film critic Kevin Thomas. They were joined by Carradine'ss co-star Ronny Cox and the movie's legendary, 87-year-old cinematographer, Haskell Wexler, who Thomas spotted in the audience. The movie was showing as part of series of personal favorites hand-picked by Thomas, but as Carradine got wound up, it became clear that he and Cox were just along for the ride.

In what is shaping up as the definitive account of this well-blogged-about event, Chris Willman writes that Carradine immediately commandeered the microphone and that his flood of anecdotes was "entertaining as all-get-out, in a had-too-many-highballs-before-dinner kind of way." There were signs of friction, though, when Carradine said that when he got cast as Guthrie, he knew nothing about the singer except that he'd written "Goodnight, Irene", and Wexler, who may or may not have been stepping on one of the star's jokes, helpfully piped up to say that "Goodnight, Irene" was actually written by Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter. But then Carradine said that labor unions don't serve the same purpose they did in Guthrie's day, and the wheels started to come off the wagon. This earned him some gentle chiding from the other people on stage, and then a woman in the audience began to holler at him. In his present-tense account, Willman writes: "Carradine starts shouting back, which might've been okay if he wasn't yelling right into the microphone, and it doesn't sound pretty. The woman doesn't let up, either, so for about two minutes both of them are going at it at once. She's the more obnoxious one, but because he's five times as loud, he's coming off as the bully. Some audience members are telling Union Lady to shut up while others angrily holler 'Let her speak!' A couple guys in my vicinity start shouting 'Let's hear from Haskell Wexler !' About a dozen people get up and walk out in the midst of this--one of them, almost unnoticed, being Cox, who makes the smoothest getaway of all time." As for Wexler, the director of Medium Cool and Latino demurred that he wasn't there to talk about politics, which has to be an all-time first and may be interpreted by some biblical scholars as a sign of the coming end of days. Carradine finally tried to get the crowd back on his side by showing his willingness to engage in debate by throwing the microphone to the woman in the audience. Unfortunately, it turns out that there's a reason why Carradine was never cast as Sandy Koufax. The pitch went short and the mike bounced off the head of Cinematheque publicist Margot Gerber--"fortunately for Carradine," notes Willman, "...probably the person in the audience least likely to file an assault charge."

When the subject turned to the look of the film, Wexler got to listen to Carradine declare that the D.P. "got an Academy Award for ruining my movie." He mentions that this is one of his all-time favorite lines, just in case Wexler doesn't know that he's been springing it on people at every opportunity lo these past three decades. (No doubt it really broke up the crew on The Warrior and the Sorceress.) Carradine complained that Wexler made the Depression look too pretty and asserts that Ashby wanted to fire him--a charge calculated to really get under Wexler's skin, since Bound for Glory marked an upturn in his fortunes after he was fired from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Jeffrey Wells has posted an mp3 of part of the discussion at his Hollywood Elsewhere blog; there, you can hear Wexler, sounding a little more pissed-off than a man his age maybe ought to get, insist that any difficulties he had with Hal Ashby were temporary and fueled by the director's coke habit. Carradine shrugs that all this proves is that Wexler is "a little down on people that snorted cocaine." He then goes into a reverie about what a titanic coke fiend Ashby was, then says that "Even Quentin Tarantino doesn't beat Hal Ashby...", and you can hear the crowd tense up, thinking that he's about to say something to the effect that Ashby was an even bigger coke addict that QT. Much to the room's collective relief, Carradine instead finishes, "...in my list of my favorite directors." Then he adds, "And Quentin is incredible. And he's a big cocaine freak, too!"

In the end, Carradine and Wexler found it in themselves to give each other a goodbye hug, even after Wexler pointed out that for all his supposed trespasses against the ideal look of the Woody Guthrie story, he worked with Ashby on three other movies--unlike Carradine, who never worked with him again. (However, a couple of those movies were Second Hand Hearts and Lookin' to Get Out, two films that sealed the fate of Ashby's later career by having trouble getting released at all, with good reason. For his part, Carradine, in the course of extolling Ashby as a "fucking genius", declared that the director had never made a single movie that couldn't be described as "one of the best fucking movies ever made," then reeled off a list of titles that seemed to be based on the idea that Ashby's career ended in the 1970s.) Snapping awake, Kevin Thomas called the evening to a close by thanking the distinguished gentlemen for having provided him with "some fresh insights into the collaborative effort of filmmaking."

In Other Blogs: The Oxford Incident

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Did you hear the one about the film blogger who couldn’t get a wifi connection? Last week, Hollywood Elsewhere’s Jeffrey Wells reported the following: “I arrived in Oxford around 5:30 pm and checked into the Oxford Downtown Inn, courtesy of the Oxford Film Festival. And then the wireless issues began. It's now just before 6 am and the issues haven't stopped, and I've decided to cut bait as a result. That's right -- I'm outta here, flying back to NYC. Or maybe I'll drive south a bit and cruise around, find an adventure, something. Any place with decent wifi I call home…I can't do this. I won't do this. This is not 1997, and if a regional film festival is unable to provide easy, high-speed wifi to its journalist guests then no offense but it just shouldn't invite them down in the first place.”

The reaction from other participants in the Oxford Film Festival was swift and to the point. Eric D. Snider’s Blog puts it succinctly: Jeff Wells should be ashamed of himself. “He was one of the people invited to appear on the panel about film criticism this morning at the Oxford Film Festival, and I was eager to meet him. Though we’ve been attending many of the same festivals for several years, I’d never actually talked to him, and I was curious to learn whether he was as much of a condescending, humorless curmudgeon as he seems in his blog…Our introduction was affable enough, and we chatted briefly at the opening-night party. My impression was that maybe he plays the role of the ever-offended grouch online because it’s interesting and is perfectly reasonable in everyday life. And then he refused to appear on the film criticism panel because he couldn’t get wifi in his hotel room. I’m not making this up. I’m not even exaggerating. The festival invited him here ONLY to be on the panel. I’m sure they hoped he’d write about it on his blog, too, but his official reason for being there was the panel. They paid for his plane ticket. They covered his hotel room. And he refused to do the panel — remember, the ONE THING HE WAS THERE FOR — because of the unreliable Internet access in the hotel. (The free hotel.).. .Let me make this clear. This small film festival, which operates primarily on donations and the tireless work of volunteers, paid several hundred dollars to fly Jeffrey Wells out here and get him a hotel room, all so that he could be a guest on the panel. They hoped his relatively high profile in the movie blogosphere would help create cachet for the still-growing young festival. And then he repaid them by snottily refusing to fulfill his obligation.”

At SpoutBlog, Karina Longworth writes a mild defense of Wells. “In his first of three anti-Wells posts this weekend, Snider pumps the party line that Wells shouldn’t have missed the panel over concern that he wouldn’t be able to file coverage of the festival –– which is probably true –– but then proceeds with the fallacy that Wells’ coverage was less important to the festival than his appearance on the panel…Sure, no reputable festival would tell a journalist that they’d pay for their trip chiefly because the festival wants the coverage, and no reputable journalist or blogger would take that deal. But anybody who pretends like festivals don’t extend panel and jury invitations to journalists in the interest of increasing their profile with the press is delusional…But as of now, by creating a firestorm of bloggy press around a festival that none of the other invited journalists killed themselves to cover, isn’t Jeff Wells the Oxford Film Festival’s de facto best friend?”

He may not be the festival’s best friend, but at least they got an amusing short film out of the whole ordeal:

Ben Mankiewicz: 12 million died in the Holocaust

Vadim Rizov — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Over at Defamer, Stu VanAirsdale has received an anonymous tip about graceless behavior in the screening room. The subject: a "well-known but little respected TV critic whose son is also a well-known but little respected TV critic, trash-talking highly respected older critic who was replaced by his son." This, the site and commenters agree, can point in no other direction than Jeffrey Lyons and his spawn Ben, who — along with Ben Mankiewicz — makes up the tag-team that's replaced Roeper & Ebert on "At The Movies." Apparently Lyons senior went on to label Ebert a "pathetic old putz" and was cackling over the fact that no one wants to watch "two geeky guys."

Now, frankly, Roeper's departure from the air is no great loss; he was just a place-holder with guests of varying quality until Ebert could talk again, and who knows when that'll happen. People talk shit about Ebert and his extremely generous standards these days, and the two thumbs up/down system surely did no favors for serious criticism in the public eye. (Anthony Lane once made a sarcastic crack about "the rotation of a chubby thumb through 180 degrees." On the Brazil commentary track, Terry Gilliam more succinctly announced that Siskel and Ebert could go fuck themselves.) But Ebert did a lot of important work in the '70s, championing Herzog as fervently as anyone and generally doing a lot to expand the general public's understanding of film. He gets a lifetime pass. His successors display none of his commitment, fervor or knowledge.

But, for all their graceless, hacky evaluations and banal pronouncements, people seem to have missed Lyons and Mankiewicz's biggest blunder so far: they think 12 million died in the Holocaust.

In their review of The Boy In The Striped Pajamas — a British Holocaust drama — Lyons and Mankiewicz, unsurprisingly, prove incapable of denying how "incredibly powerful" even a mediocrely-reviewed Holocaust drama is. "This is a movie that will most likely remain with you the rest of your life," Lyons opines. (Points for piety.) Mankiewicz concurs: "Not to sound too heavy-handed here, but the Holocaust is not really a story, of course, of the murder of 12 million people, but rather 12 million individual stories of murder."

What?

Six million European Jews died in the Holocaust; if you factor in all the other targeted groups, the total lies roughly between nine and 11 million. I'm forced to conclude that Mankiewicz mentally doubled the number for no real reason, other than either ignorance or simply indifference to this "powerful" subject. I'm also forced to conclude the show has no fact-checkers for anything outside the press kit, and that — amazingly — no one working on the show bothered to check or correct this.

(To see the clip in all its stupid glory, go to the At The Movies website and click under the "Now Playing" tab. The stupidity - after a little over a minute of plot summary - comes in roughly at about 1:20.)

PTA's Milkshake: Damn Right, It's Better Than Yours

Paul Clark — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 20:00:00 GMT

As Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood still awaits its full-on nationwide release, the buzz for the film has become practically deafening. It's appeared on a raft of critics' top 10 lists, and has raked in heaps of awards for Anderson, star Daniel Day-Lewis, and the score by Jonny Greenwood. But while critical accolades have a definite appeal to a certain portion of the moviegoing audience, it's going to take more than that for the film to break through to the general populace.

That's where the blogosphere comes in. Numerous web sites have seized upon the movie as a kind of cult object, in particular Daniel Day-Lewis' line "I drink your milkshake!", which he bellows near the end of the film. One enterprising webmaster is offering free idrinkyourmilkshake.com e-Mail accounts for a limited time through his web site. In addition, Hollywood Elsewhere's Jeff Wells has proclaimed the line to be "the golden ticket that will sell this thing to people who are too lazy to read reviews and don't care that much about awards." He goes on to suggest that Paramount spearhead the Milkshake campaign by printing up t-shirts, buttons, bumper stickers, and the like.

Me, I'm of two minds about this. On one hand, part of me cringes at the idea of the public awareness for P.T. Anderson's first film in five years being reduced to a catch-phrase that really doesn't make much sense outside the context of the movie. But having seen the film, I realize that a film with such an dark and unsparing view of human nature- even a great one like There Will Be Blood- is going to be a tough sell with the public. Though whether the Milkshake campaign would have much effect on box office remains to be seen, I think every possible effort should be made to put butts in seats. Besides, it could give us a welcome reprieve from Anchorman-inspired t-shirts.

Oh, and Paramount: want another suggestion on how to make the movie appeal to a wider audience? Give it a wider release already. I gladly drove three hours to catch it, but most people (even many movie lovers) wouldn't, so why deny them the chance to see There Will Be Blood?