The Screengrab : michael o'donoghue

Film Poetry: Joseph Moncure March and the Roots of "The Set-Up"

Phil Nugent — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Writing in The Hudson Review (sixty years young this year, hey guys, happy birthday!), Jefferson Hunter examines the poet Joseph Moncure March and his 1928 book-length narrative poem The Set-Up, which in 1949 would become a classic minor noir of the same name, directed by Robert Wise and starring Robert Ryan as a washed-up boxer with one last fight left in him. Not a lot of tense urban melodramas include the on-screen credit "based on the poem by..." But as Hunter makes clear, March was a peculiar kind of specialist, an ambitious writer who appreciated the qualities of movies and, trying to raise those qualities to literature, decided that the best way to go about it was through stories told in extended verse. He was wrong, and is now remembered only as a pop culture oddity, a relic of 1920s culture from the moment when it became self-referential, and one who tried to point writing and the movies down a path that they, not unreasonably, choose not to follow. (The writers who really had an impact on movies, and who brought the impact of the movies into writing in an influential way at that time, were Hemingway and the hard-boiled toughs who were boiling everything down to action and dialogue.)

March got so excited about his mission to wring art from the movies that, after The Set-Up landed on the best seller list and was bought by Hollywood, he actually lit out for the West Coast and took a screenwriting job. But as Robert E. Lee Pruitt used to say, just cause a man loves a thing don't mean it's got to love him back, and after jobs on James Whale's Journey's End and Howard Hawks's Hell's Angels, his career petered out in a string of justly forgotten movies. (Some of these show him trying to elevate the masses by watering down high culture, as with the 1932 Madame Butterfly, starring Sylvia Sidney and a young Cary Grant in a non-musical version of the opera, so that you can really concentrate on the soppy plot.) March was not invited to work on the movie version of The Set-Up, which didn't happen until after his career at the big studios was effectively over. By the time the movie was made (with Art Cohn credited with the script), he might have had trouble recognizing his baby anyway. The poem is a modern tragedy about an aging black boxer named Pansy, who has some problems. For starters, he's an aging black boxer, and his name is "Pansy." March intended the poem as an indictment of racism, making it clear ("Pansy had the stuff/ But his skin was brown") that, because of it, his hero would never be given the break that his talent should have earned him. (Unfortunately, March seems to have been one of those white liberal artists who are scornful of racism in others but seek to mythologize African-Americans as something other than human: trying to convey Pansy's physical dangerousness, he likens him to a "missing link", "something to catch and cage...that belonged to a Jungle Age.") The poem ends with this "savage cat" of a man fighting a gangster in a subway tunnel. Pansy goes over the edge of the platform and, March writes, "The train screeched/And struck. THE END." As Michael O'Donoghue once wrote in National Lampoon, there are no situations that the writer in search of an ending can't resolve with a variant on the sentence, "And then suddenly he was run over by a truck."

In the movie, the hero, who is too old and broken-down to keep his career going but too proud to take a fall, is called Stoker, and is white. This change may have cut the guts out of March's conception, but as Hunter points out, it has a major compensatory effect: it means that he gets to be played by Robert Ryan. Ryan, with his gaunt, haunted look, and the presence of a man who might have been a Roman emperor before his bookkeeper stopped returning his calls and the repo van showed up, gave a performance that ranks with one of his finest; he's the single best explanation for why the movie is so much better-remembered to day than the book. Although Hunter calls March's work "a noir poem", the movie's classification as a boxing noir may have more to do with the emotions expressed by Ryan's suffering face and body than by the grinding mechanics of the plot, which pull up short from having Stoker killed: the gangsters who maul him may have finished his career, but he still has the loving wife who is embracing him in the final shot, and who clearly regards the fact that Stoker will never get into the ring again as a happy development. Hunter reports that the film's producer, Richard Goldstone, " reasoned that if Stoker were killed, he would be 'left without any problem. Whereas if he survived, he couldn’t fight, couldn’t do anything, but had vindicated his manhood, it was a triumph rather than defeat, spiritually.' ”

The same year that The Set-Up was published, March published another book-length story poem, The Wild Party, and though Hunter is kind enough not to dwell on it, that poem too has had a complicated life that includes a movie version, which came out in 1975, two years before March died. The poem is a Jazz Age blow-out describing all the seamy, sordid affairs at the titular throwdown hosted by Queenie, a sort of Jean Harlow from Hell, and his thuggish lover, Burrs. In 1994, Art Spiegelman saw to the re-publication of a new edition which featured his own illustrations and a pull quote from William S. Burroughs, who insisted that March's poem was the work that had made him want to become a writer. If you ever meet anybody who claims that the 1975 movie, which was directed by James Ivory and produced by Ismail Merchant, made him want to become a filmmaker, do the right thing and push him off a subway platform. The film, which was made before Ivory/Merchant productions became synonymous with respectfully upholstered adaptations of classic literature, is a misguided exercise in anti-nostalgia that turns Queenie (Raquel Welch) into the petulant bedmate of a Fatty Arbuckle-like silent film star, Jolly Grimm (James Coco), who's throwing the party to grease the wheels for his comeback. (In a clip we see of his new masterpiece, Coco, wearing missionary's robes and a Moe Howard haircut, is stuffed into a cookpot by African savages despite his protesting that "You can't boil me! I'm a friar!") The movie features snippets of March's poem being read on the soundtrack by a narrator who sounds as if he's due to be shot at dawn, and there are also bits of faux-twenties songs that analyze the characters, providing such helpful insights as, "Funny man! Trying so hard to be funny! Is it because if we knew the real you, we might frown?" (Is that what it sounds like inside Jay Leno's head?) More recently, the poem actually managed to inspire two different musicals that opened near-simultaneously, one on Broadway and the other off-Broadway, in 2000. Both are said to have been better than the movie, but then the only way that they could have been any worse would have been if the chorus lines had departed the stage to repeatedly kick every single member of the audience in the crotch.

Saying Goodbye to Bernie Brillstein

Phil Nugent — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Last week marked the passing of one of the most important behind-the-scenes figures in American comedy of the last forty years, Bernie Brillstein. Brillstein, who was 77, had a rare combination of taste, people skills, and bulldozing smarts, all of which he applied to his job as an agent and manager. (He was also, not incidentally, one of the best interview subjects on the West Coast.) Eager to embody every cliche of the classic talent-agent success story, Brillstein worked his way up from the mail room at the William Morris Agency, after anti-Semitism kept him from entering advertising in the Mad Men era. ("I loved them," he later said of the WASP agency heads who advised him that he was wasting his time trying to break in, "for being honest.") While he was still at William Morris, Brillstein met his first meal ticket in the form of a gangling, painfully shy young puppeteer from the Washington, D. C. area: Jim Henson. The two were quick to recognize what each could do for the other, and after Brillstein set himself up in private practice in 1970, Henson and the Muppets were his first steady star clients. Another was Lorne Michaels, which explains not only how the Muppets came to be regular cast members during the first season of Saturday Night Live--an arrangement probably best remembered for having inspired Michael O'Donoghue's remark, "I don't write for felt."--but how Brillstein came to guide the careers of many of SNL's stars and to score producing credits on some of their biggest movie successes, including the Ghostbusters films. In 1990, he joined forces with producer Brad Grey. As packagers of talent, their TV credits would include The Larry Sanders Show, The Dana Carvey Show, NewsRadio, Mr. Show, Politically Incorrect, The Steve Harvey Show, Primetime Glick, and the Tea Leone vehicle The Naked Truth, which would go some way to balancing out the fact that Brillstein also had a hand in Alf. (Once you've made a few bucks off puppets, it's hard to go cold turkey.) He also wrote a book called Where Did I Go Right?

On Monday, clients and well-wishers got together for a memorial service honoring Brillstein, and from the sound of it, it was a suitable testimonial to a man who sounds a lot like Santa Claus if Santa would have cut your throat with a broken bottle if it were, you know, in the best interests of the talent. Describing the action, Michael Cieply reports that "Martin Short, master of ceremonies for the event at Royce Hall on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles, set the tone when he described a man who had no enemies and always spoke well of others. 'It would be so much easier tonight,' Mr. Short said, 'if we were memorializing someone like that.'” Getting into the spirit of things, Jon Lovitz "got in his own jab at a former manager when he prayed, 'Why, why, why couldn’t it have been Marc Gurvitz?' Mr. Short, on taking back the stage, noted that the well-tanned but still portly Mr. Lovitz did not look bad 'for someone who let himself go.'”

The Top Ten Uncompleted Movies, Part 2

Phil Nugent — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 20:30:00 GMT

APT PUPIL

Bryan Singer's adaptation was not the first version of this Stephen King novella. In 1987, British Director Alan Bridges had Nicol Williamson and Ricky Schroder in the leads of this story concerning a teenager discovering his elderly neighbor's Nazi past. Unfortunately, the film ran over budget and with ten days of filming left, the financing ran out and the film shut down. Accounts vary of just how much was left to shoot. Stephen King had reportedly seen a 3/4 rough cut and commented it was "really good" while the writers, Ken and Jim Wheat, reported seeing an assemblage of forty minutes' worth of footage. By the time financing was found to complete the shoot a year later, Schroder had grown too too old to continue in his role and there was no way to finish the film short of a full re-shoot. To date, the footage has never been shown to the public, though if there's ever a special edition of Bryan Singer's version, one hopes that the director would be able to snag the rights to include Alan Bridge's version as a bonus feature.

IN GOD'S HANDS

It is a tragic fact that many early feature films have been lost forever due to negligence and poor preservation. What's horrifying is to find out that even in the 21st Century, an entire feature film can be lost due to an accident, especially when its not the new Eddie Murphy comedy but it comes from someone like filmmaker Lodge Kerrigan. In God's Hands was produced by Stephen Soderbergh's Section Eight outfit and starred Peter Sarsgaard and Maggie Gyllenhaal as a couple who've lost their child. Unfortunately, the entire camera negative of the film was damaged, causing it to be lost. I'm still stunned that someone on the film didn't realize something was wrong after the first few days of shooting just by checking the rushes, but the damage had been done. Kerrigan, who bounced back with Keane, has expressed no interest in trying to re-shoot In God's Hands. This is one of those cases that could be used as a backhanded argument for abandoning film to shoot digital.

THE THIEF AND THE COBBLER

This British animation has the distinction of having had the longest production phase ever. Renowned animator Richard Williams started the project in 1965, animating it part time and financing the project through the odd commercial jobs and work on other films, such as Murder on the Orient Express, The Charge of the Light Brigade, and the credit sequences on some of the "Pink Panther" films. After endearing himself to the powers that be by serving as animation director on Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Williams was finally able to get financing to complete the film, but a variety of factors resulted in its being taken away from him by Mirimax and handed over to television animator Fred Calvert. Despite numerous promises from various parties to try and complete the film according to Williams's original design, this probably won't be happening anytime soon. The original workprint of the film can be found on YouTube. The "completed" bastardisation edition can be bought from your local Blockbuster Bargain bucket, hidden under a couple hundred copies of Norbit.

MY BEST FRIEND'S BIRTHDAY

Unofficially considered by those in the know as Quentin Tarentino's directorial debut, this is a far cry from Reservoir Dogs. Shot on Super 16mm over a few years, the completed 70-minute cut was lost in a fire, and so what survives is about 30-40 minutes of rough footage. Is it watchable? It has certainly has had a cult following grow around it, and despite its technical issues, it is in, IMHO, a far more enjoyable time waster than Death Proof.

ARRIVE ALIVE

Jeremiah Chechik is one unlucky man. His second film was supposed to be a comedy featuring Willem Dafoe as a hotel manager who falls for Joan Cusack as one of the guests. It was co-written by National Lampoon and Saturday Night Live veteran and self-styled "dangerous comedian" Michael O'Donoghue and produced by Art Linson. Unfortunately after two weeks of shooting, Linson pulled the plug and wrote off a couple of million dollars. Why? Apparently, it was due to Dafoe's performance, an attempt to bring "edge" to a romantic-comedy leading-man part that Linson, in his book A Pound of Flesh, described as "terrifying". Chechik managed to bounce back with Benny & Joon before his career was nearly destroyed with The Avengers, one of those productions where 50% of the production ended up on the cutting room floor.

QUE VIVA MEXICO

This was to be Sergei Eisenstein's first film made outside Russia, co-produced by renowned American novelist, Upton Sinclair. Unfortunately, after cost-overruns and other problems, Eisenstein was summoned back to the Soviet Union by Stalin (who can refuse an invitation like that?) leaving behind over 200,000 feet of unedited footage. Despite promises to send the footage to the USSR for the director to edit, this never came to pass, and instead several different edited versions of the film have appeared under different titles over the years, most of them falling into obscurity. None of the versions come close to what Eisenstein may have wanted but the film is still inspiring people to take a shot at it. (This YouTube clip is a trailer to promote the latest attempt at a restoration from Lutz Becker).

--Phil Nugent; Faisal A. Qureshi

Click here for Part 1.