The Screengrab : natalie wood

53 Years Ago in the Screengrab: Finding "The Searchers"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 08 May 2009 15:00:00 GMT

[It's been ninety years since Charles Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., D. W. Griffith, Frank Capra, Ben Hecht, Louise Brooks, and Roscoe Arbuckle met at an open-air press conference to announce that they were combining their resources to produce a new film journal called "the Screengrab". And while it's true that the "open-air press conference" was technically a conversation between the founders and some vice cops who discovered them out in a field at 2 A.M. with 68 gallons of bathtub gin, eight underage girls, and a ram named Ulysses, and that many people think they were just stalling until their lawyers arrived, Chaplin, a man of his word, ordered his manservant to buy a printing press as soon as he was released from custody and his hangover had dimmed enough that he could once again operate his mouth. As the Screengrab approaches yet another signal moment in its ongoing evolutionary history, we are proud to reach back into our archives and reprint some rarely seen features from our illustrious past.[

1956: At 62, John Ford has the impressive, stolid quality of a small mountain who figures that either Mohammad can damn well come to him or they can both get along without each other. You don't expect a man Ford's age to be spending his days camping out in Monument Valley, but by now, this venerable Western location must feel like home to Ford--and if it didn't, Ford keeps himself surrounded by enough of his living personal history to make anyplace feel like home. The set of The Searchers, the movie he's about to wrap, is populated by crew members and technicians and actors from many earlier Ford productions, including Ward Bond, Harry Carey. Jr., Hank Worden, John Qualen--and the picture's star. John Wayne, making his ninth feature with Ford since the director guided him to his breakthrough performance in Stagecoach, seventeen years ago. (Wayne's son Patrick, who appeared in Mister Roberts and had uncredited bit parts in four other Ford films, is also in it, in the small, comic role of an eager young lieutenant.) In The Searchers, Wayne plays a former Confederate soldier who devotes years of his life to tracking down the niece who was abducted as a child by Comanches. Ford's temper is famously fiery and notoriously unpredictable. It's with no small degree of trepidation that one suggests to him that it must be hard finding a way to freshen what must seem like very familiar material to him, especially working with collaborators he knows so well.

Surprisingly, a trace of a smile spreads across Ford's face. "I imagine a lot of people will go in expecting to see something they've seen before. 'Let's go admire the old boy's craftmanship, see what he can do with his hundredth cowboy movie', like that. Well...we'll see. It's just possible they'll find something in this one that opens the form out a little."

Now, relaxed after his lunch and a few questions from the dumbass representatives of the press, Ford settles into his chair and prepares to shoot the final location scene. You can sense people snapping back to attention: it's time to go back to work. "Action!" Ford yells. Natalie Wood, who plays the niece grown to young womanhood, come running past the camera, running as if her very life depended on it. Wayne charges up behind her, on horseback. Suddenly, he reaches down and lovingly scoops her up into his arms. "Let's go home, Debbie," he says.

Suddenly, Ford explodes. Red-faced, he springs up from his chair. "Cut, fucking cut!!" he screams. Wayne sets Wood back down, and she shyly edges away from him, her face turning to ash. Wayne looks down at his feet. Everyone seems unsure what to do.

In the time it's taken him to walk to where Wayne is standing, Ford's fury seems to have turned to bewilderment and shock. "What...what was that?" he asks. "Do you...during lunch, did you..."

Wayne is uncharacteristically abashed. "I'm sorry, sir. I just...

"You've read the script?"

Wayne's face tightens, as if he were starting to get angry, but his respect for, and maybe his fear of, the older man tamps that down. "Of course, sir. I know what the scene..."

"Why!? Why did you do that? Why did you say that!?"

Wayne no longer hangs his head to look down at Ford. He stiffens to his full height, as if posing for a statue. "I wasn't planning to do that," he says. "I was going to do it like it says in the script, but when I got close to her--what I did, sir, it was instinct. Because it's what felt right!"

Ford stares at Wayne. You can almost hear the crickets chirping. Finally he says, "For Roy Rogers, maybe! You're playing Ethan Edwards! You're a deranged killer! A psychotic racist! You fought for fucking slavery, goddammit, and that was before you lost your mind! This girl, this last remaining trace of your family, the blood of your blood, has been living with the Comanches. She's been sleeping with the Comanches! She has become a Comanche."

Wayne kicks a clod of dirt with the heel of his boot. "I know, sir," he says, in a little boys voice.

Ford is in shock. He sounds as if he's trying to explain how a light switch works to his adult son, whose basic intelligence he has never doubted up to that moment. "There's no way your character could ever be reconciled to that. It couldn't happen! Certainly not...not at that moment, that way, just like that! It would turn the movie into a joke. That's why, when you catch up to her, you grab her, you throw her down, you smash her head with that rock, then you take your knife and slit her throat, you make another incision straight down the front of her, and when Martin runs up and finds you, you're sitting there grunting like the caveman you've always been one step away from regressing to, eating her raw liver. You understand?"

Wayne is looking everywhere but at Ford's face. "Yes, sir."

Ford stares at him for a minute, then gives him a conciliatory punch to the arm. "I know it's a big stretch for you. We're gonna shake 'em up with this one, John. Now get back on your horse and get back into place. Were gonna go again and this time you do it like the stunt choreographers have been showing you all week, right?"

Wayne nods and climbs back onto his horse.

Ford returns to his chair. "Action!" he yells. Wood comes running past again, Wayne comes galloping up behind her, and again, he grabs her and sweeps her up into his arms. "Let's go home, Debbie."

"Cut!"

Ken Curtis, standing just out of range of Ford's hearing, looks at Wayne and emits a low, admiring whistle. "Man," he whispers to nobody in particular, "I didn't know they grew death wishes that tall."

"Sir," Wayne says to Ford, who's still seated in his chair, "I'd like to talk about the scene. Something inside me says to me..."

"Gosh, Mar-i-on," says Ford between gritted teeth, "there's nothing I'd like more than to have a good long chat about the scene that you agreed to do as written and that we've been preparing to do these past few months, but there's thing that we in the motion picture business refer to as "losing the light", and I'm afraid that's going to happen to us if we get embroiled in a stimulating exchange of ideas. So here's my idea, seeing as how it's my picture and all; why don't we shoot the scene, as written, Mar-i-on, and then we can talk about all the better ways we could have done, without regard to whether or not they would have rendered the preceding two hours of movie utterly meaningless and preposterous, all the walk back to Los Angeles. Is that acceptable to you, Mar-i-on?"

Wayne stares at Ford long and hard. "Yes, sir," he says, and climbs back onto his horse.

Soon, he and Wood are back in their starting places. "Action!" yells Ford. Wood comes running across the set, Wayne comes riding up behind her, scoops her up in his arms, says, "Let's go home, Debbie."

You can hear a pin drop. "Cut," Ford says, almost lackadaisically. "Not quite the right approach. Let's go again. Natalie, let me go if you need to take a break to let your legs rest." He leans his head towards his assistant and murmurs, "Start brewing up some iced tea, would you?" Wayne and Wood are back at their places. Ford looks in my direction, the first time he's acknowledged my presence since beginning work on the scene. "It happens," he whispers with a shrug. "In a situation like this, the only thing to do is to just keep shooting it over and over. Eventually, one of us is going to break. And I think Mr. Wayne is in for a surprise as to which of us it's going to be."

Screengrab’s Back-To-School Round-Up: The Top 18+ High School Films (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 20:00:00 GMT

There are two kinds of people in the world: the ones who despised high school and those who actually kinda liked it. Me, I was lucky...I was a geek, but nobody dumped pig’s blood on my head...I had zits but not a pizza face...I didn’t have many girlfriends, but as one of the straight guys in the drama club I did okay...and best of all, I grew up in a town where the rigid caste system of brains, jocks, preps, rebels and burnouts was loose enough for everyone to more or less party together, thanks to the magic of underage drinking and weed.

For some, of course, high school is a harrowing nightmare of alienation and rejection, a crucible that tests the soul (rather than simply a place of tests and The Crucible). But whether you experienced “Glory Days” or a “Teenage Wasteland” (or a little of both), the residue of adolescence is hard to shake: even retirement communities are rife with queen bees and wannabes, and the past three presidential elections (at least) have been structured as showdowns between smartypants teacher’s pets and “bad boys” promising awesome keggers while their parents are out of town.

So join us now as we skip fifth period gym class to bring you a very special tribute to readin’, writin’ and Ritalin: Screengrab + the Greatest High School Movies 4-eva!

REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (1955)

Almost indisputably the ur-document of teenage cinema, Nicholas Ray's explosive Rebel without a Cause did it all: it made a huge star out of Natalie Wood, and turned James Dean into something even huger than that – an icon. It proved eerily predictive in its on-screen depiction of poor doomed Sal Mineo. It was made at the exact moment in American history when teenagers were making the transformation from an age category to a demographic, and it became the blueprint for a million movies about how parents just don't understand. It became such an essential part of the culture that it falls under that rare category of movies that you know back to front even if you haven’t seen them. Oh, and incidentally, it's a great movie, with electrifying performances by all three leads, and an often-neglected directing job by the masterful Nicholas Ray. Dean's Jim Stark is the archetype of angry, alienated teenagers, and so perfectly does he inhabit the role that it could fairly be said that pretty much every alienated teenager in film history – in fact, every alienated teenager in reality – is just a copy of him. Most of all, Rebel Without a Cause does something quite magical: while never breaking the tensely emotional shell in which it surrounds its characters, while making their emotions as real and weighty as our own, it manages to give the sensation and perspective utterly lacking from their lives, and the lives of every teenager who would ever watch them: that this too would pass, and that the problems that seemed like – and, indeed, were – matters of life and death during high school would seem weightless as a cloud from the perspective of adulthood.

CARRIE (1976)

There are those who think Brian De Palma is a genius and those who find his "operatic" style overwrought and often downright silly, and 99 times out of 100 you can put me in the latter camp. Yet there was at least one occasion when De Palma's hyper-melodramatic emotionalism perfectly matched the source material: Stephen King's seminal "revenge of the nerd" tale Carrie. In high school, after all, every little slight, snub, or misunderstanding feels like a matter of life and death, and our most embarrassing moments seem to go on for hours – at least for those of us who weren't born to be the quarterback or the prom queen. De Palma conveys that hormones-gone-mad sensibility as if he's undergone some kind of regression therapy, particularly in the movie's two most famous set-pieces. The opening, set in the girls' locker room, transitions from woozy wet dreamland to literal bloody terror without missing a beat, while the pigs-blood prom sequence holds every agonizing note of a symphony of mortification before giving way to Carrie's deadly (but undeniably cathartic) retribution. It's the ultimate high-school-as-horror movie – because when you're 16 or so, it's hard to think of six more terrifying words than "They're all gonna laugh at you."

FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH (1982)

This late-summer teen comedy was released into the teeth of critics who regarded it as a mall-filler and promotional device for the soundtrack album, a judgment that was probably shared by the studio that released it. It quickly rode to cult status on the strength of its genuine affection for its young characters and the gentle but incisive touch of director Amy Heckerling and her screenwriter, Cameron Crowe, as well as a sprawling, talented ensemble cast. At the time, it was seen as the movie that made Sean Penn a star, and his Jeff Spicoli -- Shaggy with a surfboard instead of a crime-solving dog and a Volkswagen Microbus with a well-toasted aroma -- remains a classic comic stoner archetype. Now, though, the movie looks like one of those pictures that in one sweep introduced a generation's worth of new faces, including Forest Whitaker (as the token black football player who one kid assumes they just chauffeur in for the games), Jennifer Jason Leigh, Phoebe Cates, Judge Reinhold, Eric Stoltz, Anthony Edwards, and, in a teensy feature debut, an actor with a long face and good family connections who for the first and only time in his career was billed "Nicolas Coppola." Heavy rotation on HBO proceeded to practically burn it into the DNA of '80s kids, who used their new VCRs to make a close study of Reinhold's masturbation fantasy of a topless Phoebe Cates emerging from the swimming pool, a sequence that made budding cineastes of many an appreciative young male.

HEATHERS (1989)

"Dear Diary," writes Ronnie Sawyer in her journal, in the goth-comedy that launched a thousand imitators, "my teen angst has a body count." That's as good a way as any to describe Heathers, the surprisingly subversive – and even more surprisingly successful – teen comedy that made a huge star of Winona Ryder (and threatened to do the same for Christian Slater, until he had the good taste to appear in several more movies so we could all see how ridiculous it was for him to go around claiming to be an actor). Ryder's character just wants to fit in with her high school's elite (the titular Heathers), but she's got a nasty independent streak and a Bud Cortish hobby of faking suicide, so it looks like she might be caught between her own desires and the intractable social demands of high school forever – until the dreamy Jason Dean shows up, determined to cut the Gordian knot of teen angst, no matter how many people he has to kill to do it. Heathers has plenty of problems, from its highly improbable plot to its pat ending to, well, basically everything involving Christian Slater; but the reason it grabbed us then is the reason it holds up now. It's an unsparing look at the ludicrously overblown and arbitrary pressures of high school social life, wrapped up in an extremely funny package courtesy of screenwriter Daniel Waters. It may not be as deep as it thinks it is, but it's got a nasty attitude and it's got tons of great lines, and once you're actually out of high school, and you realize life doesn't really depend on being cool, that's enough.

Click Here for Part Two, Part Three & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

The Top Ten Uncompleted Movies, Part 1

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

The sad death of Heath Ledger caused speculation that the film he had been shooting, Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, might be in jeopardy. This isn't the first time that the loss of a principle cast member has threatened to shut down a movie. Witness the battle Doug Trumbull had to fight to keep Brainstorm from being written off when Natalie Wood died. Of course, there are various movies that had not been finished for one reason or another, some through accidents and others to a simple lack of interest. What follows is a list of 10 of the more promising or at least potentially interesting films that were not released in their intended form for one reason or another.

--Faisal A. Qureshi

DARK BLOOD

River Phoenix's death in October 1993 led to the complete shutdown of George Sluzier's film. Already a troubled production, with reports of tension between Judy Davis and Phoenix, the film only had 11 days of shooting left before tragedy struck. The British company Palace Pictures, which was funding the production, decided that the film couldn't be salvaged. Even though Jim Barton's script received a postive reception when it was given a read through by the Script Factory, there have been no takers for trying to re-shoot or complete the picture.

THE MAN WHO SHOT DON QUIXOTE

Terry Gilliam's first experience of getting a film written off was luckily recorded in a documentary, Lost in La Mancha, shot by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe. After one week of shooting, Jean Rochefort, injured himself while getting on a horse, flew back to France and received doctor's orders to never ride again. There are rumours that Jeremy Thomas would take over the project and re-start production with Johnny Depp still attached, but until then all we have are rushes of Depp berating a fish.

I, CLAUDIUS

The 1976 BBC Adaptation of Robert Graves I, Claudius has been hailed as one of the greatest works of British TV drama. Forty years earlier, however, Alexander Korda tried producing a feature adaptation of the book starring Charles Laughton as Claudius and Merle Oberon as the nymphomaical Messalina, with Josef Von Sternberg directing. Unfortunately, Merle Oberon suffered an accident that resulted in the abandoning of filming. Luckily, the footage that had been completed survived and was later the center piece of the excellent BBC Documentary, The Epic That Never Was, which was itself released to film theaters.

ORSON WELLES'S DON QUIXOTE

Orson Welles had worked on Don Quixote for years, going through various scripts and cast changes, and shooting in Mexico and Spain. Financed out of his own pocket, Welles started shooting in 1955 just after he was kicked off the editing of Touch of Evil, and carried on until the death of his Sancho Panza, Akim Tamiroff. Strangely enough, the job of assembling the surviving footage into something coherent was given to Spanish exploitation filmmaker Jesus Franco, who had been Welles's first assistant director during some of the shooting. Reviled when it premiered in Cannes, it leaves one hoping that someday there will be another attempt to "complete" the job by someone with more artistry and closer to Welles's own wavelength than a second-rate horror hack.

SOMETHING'S GOT TO GIVE

Marilyn Monroe's final film, which was shelved after her death. On paper it looked great, with George Cukor directing and a cast that included Phil Silvers and Dean Martin. The story, a remake of the 1940 My Favorite Wife (which was itself derived from Tennyson's "Enoch Arden") involved a husband who has his wife declared dead after she's been missing for five years, only for her to turn up when he's getting re-married. Unfortunately Monroe's inability to come in to shoot her scenes (she was apparently off 17 days out of 30 of the duration of the production) and with Fox hemorraging money from the even more expensive, Cleopatra, decided to sack the actress and re-organise the production. Unfortunately, Monroe's death killed the project altogether, and it wasn't until 1999 that Fox allowed the release of 39 minutes of footage shot for the film to celebrate Monroe's 75th birthday. (My Favorite Wife was ultimately remade as Move Over, Darling, with Doris Day and James Garner.)

--Phil Nugent, Faisal A. Qureshi

Click here for Part 2.

How the East Was Won: The Soviet Western

Peter Smith — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 21:00:00 GMT

"How," Jean-Luc Godard once wrote, "can I hate John Wayne upholding [Barry] Goldwater and yet love him tenderly when abruptly he takes Natalie Wood into his arms in the last reel of The Searchers?" You could chalk that up to the paradox of being French, but it turns out that even a Godless Russian Communist wasn't sure how to respond to the Duke's charms. According to documentarian Lucy Ash, writing in The New Statesman, "Stalin was both fascinated and infuriated by John Wayne; the American actor's anti-communism so disturbed Uncle Joe that, according to Orson Welles, he once sent the KGB to California to assassinate him." Some of the Soviet leaders who came to power during the post-Stalin thaw were puppies by comparison, reduced to puddles of fanboy mush by far lesser lights. Leonid Brezhnev, it seems, had a jowly man-crush on Chuck Connors. "At a party hosted by President Nixon, Connors presented a delighted Brezhnev with a pair of Colt .45 revolvers. The general secretary returned the favour by allowing the American series [The Rifleman] to be shown on Soviet TV."

But as in all things, the Kremlin really sought to demonstrate their cultural superiority by showing that anything the capitalist swine could do, they could do better. Thus was the Soviet "Western," or "Eastern," born. In these films, "the backdrop is the steppes or Siberia. The Ural Mountains stand in for Monument Valley, the Volga replaces the Rio Grande and the heroes sport civil war-style budyonovka hats or fur-lined shapkas instead of Stetsons." The standard setter for the genre is the 1969 White Sun of the Desert, "set in Russian central Asia during the civil war. The hero, Fyodor Sukhov, is a Red Army soldier who has just been demobbed and is desperate to go home, but gets caught up in a showdown between a Bolshevik cavalry unit and some Basmachis (the Russian name for armed counter-revolutionaries) in the deep south of the USSR. These Islamic Turkic rebels are the bad guys, the equivalent of the Indians in an American western. The arch-villain is Abdulla, a Basmachi warlord fleeing the Reds. He kills a handful of his wives and abandons the remaining eight in the desert, and so the gallant Soviet hero is forced to come to their rescue. The film was originally called Save the Harem." As played by the blond, blue-eyed Anatoli Kuznetsov, Sukhov is "the embodiment of Russian macho cool. . . laconic and unruffled." Ash suggests that one key to the movie's enduring popularity is that it offers contemporary Russian viewers a heroic masculine image at a time when that sort of thing seems to be in short supply. In fact, Russian cosmonauts became so taken with it that they latched onto it and began to watch it as part of their ritual preparations for a space launch. When the Microsoft billionaire Charles Simonyi became a space tourist and contracted to spend ten days at the International Space Station, the Russians with whom he ferried out made him watch the damn thing first. His stoic verdict? "Not bad for a Soviet movie." — Phil Nugent