The Screengrab : rainier werner fassbinder

15 Films That (Almost) Could've Been Directed By Somebody Else (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

3 WOMEN (1977), Not Directed By David Lynch

Like any number of David Lynch films, 3 Women starts in one genre, telling one story about a certain group of characters, then at some point the acid kicks in, reality shifts, and if you went out to get popcorn or go to the bathroom, you’d be forgiven for coming back in and thinking you’d wandered into the wrong theater (or living room) given the batshit craziness that’s replaced whatever movie you'd previously been watching. In this Altman phantasmagoria, inspired, like many if not all of Lynch’s films, by a dream, Shelley Duvall plays a chirpy sanitarium worker who makes the mistake of taking in spooky, Carrie-era co-worker Sissy Spacek as a roommate, only to see her previously unexamined life unravel as she and Spacek swap personalities with each other (and maybe even a few other people, possibly including the third of the 3 Women, a mysterious desert mural artist played by Janice Rule). Things get trippier in the final twenty minutes than Quintet and Popeye combined (or, for that matter, any other Altman film I can think of), and if none of it seems to make a lick of sense, well, Altman didn’t entirely understand the ending either, though apparently he had a “theory,” possibly involving all the film's recurring twins and triplets, the red lampshade, the Cowboy, the homeless man behind the Winkie’s, the family of rabbits, the creepy, white-faced specter of Robert Blake and...wait...what was I talking about? Oh no...it...is...happening...again...

CHOOSE ME (1984), Not Directed By Robert Altman

After a beginner's period in the early 1970s directing low-budget horror pictures with titles such as Barn of the Screaming Dead, Alan Rudolph was born again working as assistant director to Robert Altman on The Long Goodbye, California Split, and Nashville. After working on the screenplay for Altman's Buffalo Bill and the Indians, Rudolph resumed his career as a writer-director with 1977's Welcome to L.A., a movie made very much in the shadow of Altman. (The script was spun off from a "suite" of rock songs by Richard Baskin, who worked on the songs in Nashville and had a small role in that movie.) Since then, Rudolph has worked prettily steadily, sometimes writing his own material and sometimes not, often proudly displaying his Altman influence and not infrequently tripped up by it. This sex comedy, which uses Teddy Pendergrass (a big, big improvement on Richard Baskin) on the soundtrack and joins the visual lyricism of 3 Women to a fairly bouncy romantic-entanglement plot, is most likely his proudest achievement -- except for the less Altmanesque Songwriter, a beautifully directed movie which had the advantage of being written by somebody else. Both films were completed and shown in certain parts of the country in 1984, but didn't branch out distribution-wise until 1985...which means that 1985 was definitely Rudolph's year, especially considering that the Altman movie made by Altman himself that year was O. C. and Stiggs.

CRIMEWAVE (1985), Not Directed by The Coen Brothers

A pair of marginally competent criminals. A minor crime that balloons into a bloody, out-of-control mess. Cartoonish, overblown physical gags balanced by cerebral filmmaking and hilarious, quotable dialogue. Loopy, incongruous accents. Characters named Helene Trend, Arthur Coddish and Renaldo the Heel. The presence of cult and character actors like Paul Smith, Brion James, Edward Pressman, Antonio Fargas and – of course – Bruce Campbell. This has to be a Coen Brothers movie, right? Well, yes and no. Made in 1985, just after Joel and Ethan Coen wrapped Blood Simple and just before they started working on Raising Arizona, the underrated and hard-to-find Crimewave was actually directed by their good friend, frequent collaborator and college buddy Sam Raimi. The Coens wrote the screenplay, but despite the presence of some highly explosive camerawork (by Robert Primes) and the presence in the cast of a number of future Coen Brothers regulars (including Frances McDormand and Ted Raimi, Sam's brother), the direction is all Sam Raimi, who at one point seemed like an anarchic offshoot of the Coen sensibility more than the middle-of-the-road blockbuster director he later became. If nothing else, the movie stands as a unique curiosity: the only movie written by the Coen Brothers that they didn't also direct.

FAR FROM HEAVEN (2002), Not Directed by Douglas Sirk or Ranier Werner Fassbinder

Douglas Sirk was born to direct Far from Heaven. Its combination of lush, stylish visuals, soap-opera-style emotional fireworks, and ever-present societal pressure was right in his wheelhouse – it was the sort of movie he'd built his reputation upon making. Unfortunately for the movie's producers, Sirk was unavailable to make the movie, having unfortunately died fifteen years prior. The next logical step would be to hire a fellow German director who was, in many ways, Sirk's inheritor, both in terms of high drama, visual flair, and expertise at making tangible the invisible pressures exerted by society. In a further bit of bad luck, it turned out that Ranier Werner Fassbinder was also dead, having perished some twenty years before. In the end, they had to go with the guy who had written the movie in the first place: the pioneering queercore director Todd Haynes, who, even since his first student films, had seemed like an exceptionally talented amalgam of both Sirk and Fassbinder. For years, he had talked about how the two German filmmakers had influenced him, from their elegant visual styles to their focus on the taboo, but it wasn't until he did the positively retro Far from Heaven (which was dedicated to the memory of Douglas Sirk) that the influence turned into an outright homage. Setting its story of repressed homosexuality and interracial love smack dab in the middle of Sirk's 1950s, and infusing Sirk's forbidden romantic obsessions with Fassbinder's much more explicit treatments of racism and homophobia, Todd Haynes managed to create something that comes across as exactly the movie Sirk or Fassbinder would have made, were they able to escape death and the tenor of their times.

Click Here For Part One, Part Two & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

The Gay Pride Top Twenty (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 20:30:00 GMT

DESERT HEARTS (1985)

Unlike the much-heralded 1982 Olympic-athletes-in-love drama Personal Best, 1985’s lower-profile lesbian romance Desert Hearts (based on a novel by Jane Rule) was (A) actually directed by a woman (Donna Deitch) and (B) depicted a love story where neither participant ultimately winds up going back to a man after a tentative Sapphic fling. Like Marilyn Monroe’s character years before in The Misfits, Helen Shaver’s restrained English professor Vivian Bell finds herself in Reno, Nevada, sweating out the state’s six-week residency requirement in order to obtain a quick divorce from her husband. While killing time in a no-boys-allowed guest house (run by Jack Tripper’s old landlady, Audra Lindley), Vivian meets a free spirit named Cay (Patricia Charbonneau) and, much to her own surprise, discovers an intense spiritual and sexual connection she never experienced with the XY chromosome set. Given the don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t even acknowledge that homosexuality exists mindset of the story’s 1959 setting, Vivian isn’t even entirely aware that she’s been living in a closet, but once she’s out, her feelings trump her fears of a life less ordinary, and she invites Cay to follow her back to New York, and Cay admits that Vivian “reached in and put a string of lights” around her heart, one of the great swoony lines in the annals of romantic cinema.

THIS FILM IS NOT YET RATED (2006)

A funny, real-life detective yarn, a brief history of film and a timely exposé of American cultural hypocrisy...all that AND a compendium of notorious, uncensored sex scenes? What's not to like? This Film Is Not Yet Rated is a gotcha! documentary in the Super Size Me tradition, where the filmmaker explores a larger topic by subjecting himself to a series of misadventures. In this case, the subject is the shadowy, puritanical Motion Picture Association of America, an unelected, unimpeachable board which subtly shapes our national cultural agenda by determining which films (and values) are "family-friendly" and which are marginalized by means of the current G-PG-PG13-R-NC17 ratings system. Combining movie clips and filmmaker interviews, director Kirby Dick demonstrates how the MPAA habitually demonizes sex in movies (particularly the homo- variety) while letting violence slide...but the real fun of the movie is watching the ironically-named Dick track down the secretive MPAA board members together with a spunky private detective (who, coincidentally but with obvious thematic irony, also happens to be a lesbian mother) before submitting the very film you're watching to the very group it's about for a rating in a great meta moment of "Fuck You" brio.

REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE (1967)

Long before the "Don't ask, don't tell" era, a Southern army post was probably the least healthy environment for a deeply closeted homosexual imaginable. That's certainly the case in John Huston's adaptation of the Carson McCullers novel Reflections in a Golden Eye, in which pretty much every character has a psychosexual hang-up of some sort. Marlon Brando is Major Weldon Penderton, whose pride is entirely tied up in being something he's not: a portrait of courage, a leader of men. Elizabeth Taylor is his wife Leonora, one of the all-time ballbusters, and she's definitely got his number. "Firebird is a horse," he grumbles one morning, annoyed at his wife's devotion to the animal. "Firebird is a stallion," she hisses, and though it may have taken the 1967 audience a while to catch on (the words "gay" or "homosexual" are never mentioned – probably couldn't be mentioned), Penderton could hardly feel more emasculated if she horsewhipped him across the face in front of his colleagues – which she later does. A pent-up bottle of rage and self-loathing (he rides a horse like he's got the post's flagpole up his ass), Penderton finally pops his cork when he catches the object of his obsession, a hunky but dim young soldier played by Robert Forster in his movie debut, in his wife's bedroom sniffing through her undies. The movie's ending is a bit overheated, but Brando is brilliantly bizarre as a gay man who is definitely in the wrong place at the wrong time.

FOX AND HIS FRIENDS (1975)

He certainly wasn’t the first gay filmmaker, but a legitimate argument can be made that the brilliant German director Rainier Werner Fassbinder was the first gay filmmaker of importance. Fassbinder himself was openly gay, and homosexuality often played a part in his films, whether obviously or subtly, but Fox and His Friends was the first movie he made where a homosexual romance was the centerpiece of the plot. More importantly, though, as the director stressed in interviews, the gayness of the characters is not “a problem, or a comic term”. Fassbinder wanted nothing more – and nothing less – than to bring us a moving, tragic soap opera romance in which the main characters were not heterosexual. To accomplish this, he had to make the movie extremely personal (he filmed many of its scenes in the gay Berlin demimonde he frequented in his private life, and he chose to play the character of naïve working-class lottery winner Fox Biberkopf himself), but he also had to ensure that the movie would neither humiliate nor glorify its gay characters. In order for it to work, he had to show that gays were just as noble, as innocent, and as decent as other people, but he also had to show that they were just as base, as manipulative and as cruel as other people. The result is a masterpiece that contains everything that is great about Fassbinder as a director, and one of the most sad and human stories in the history of film drama: what Fox gives up for love, and the way his need for acceptance and affection leads him to ruin, resonates universally. That’s what good movies – be they ‘gay’ or ‘straight’ – are supposed to do.

BEN-HUR (1959)

One of the most iconic gay performances in cinema history came from a man who not only wasn’t gay, but apparently had no idea he was supposed to be playing a gay character, and when he found out, vehemently denied it for decades. The story goes that director William Wyler and screenwriter Gore Vidal found the notion that Messala and Judah Ben-Hur would have been so close, only to come to a position of extreme hatred over a fairly arcane dispute over politics, a tad hard to believe. Vidal, whose reputation as a bit of a troublemaker has never been a secret, came up with the notion that the two men had been lovers when they were young, and their split was not over politics, but over Ben-Hur’s eventual rejection of Messala. Wyler thought it was worth a shot, and while the two men discussed it with Stephen Boyd, who played Messala, they dared not bring the subject up with Heston, who was none too fond of gays. Naturally, the script never directly mentioned the situation either, but given the way Heston’s adult Ben-Hur interacts with Messala (the result, according to both Vidal and Boyd, of precise wording in the script and careful direction from Wyler), it’s a bit hard to believe that Heston couldn’t figure out that something was going on. Still, for reasons of his own, Heston spent the next forty years as the sole representative of the “I did not play a homo in Ben-Hur” position, going so far as to deny Gore Vidal had anything to do with the finished script of the film – a claim Vidal handily disproved, using, among other things, passages in Heston’s own autobiography as a source.

Click here to read Part One, Part Three and Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Andrew Osborne