The Screengrab : robert towne

Not Readily Available on Legally Authorized Commercial DVD Release in the Continental United States: Jack Nicholson's "Drive, He Said"

Phil Nugent — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 15:00:00 GMT

[Note: When this feature premiered here some weeks back, it was under the title "Not on DVD". As several readers were thoughtful enough to point out, this was not technically accurate, because there isn't anything that you can't find in some version on DVD provided you have access to an all-region player, live at one of the far corners of the earth, and know a guy what knows a guy. Since then, researchers in the Screengrab test labs have labored to come up with a title for this feature that will be both honestly descriptive and pithy. As you can see, they failed. But you get the idea, right?]

Today marks the 72nd birthday of Mr. Jack Nicholson. In 1958, Nicholson made his movie debut in the title role of the 70-minute Roger Corman production Cry Baby Killer, which would lead to more than a decade's worth of solid employment in low-paying jobs in low-budget indie films, many of them for Corman, most of them exploitation and drive-in fare, though a few of them (such as Irving Lerner's 1960 Studs Lonigan and the pair of "existential" Westerns, The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind, that Monte Hellman directed back to back on Corman's nickel in the mid-'60s. (Nicholson also wrote the script for Whirlwind and had writing credits on a few other '60s films, including Hellman's 1964 Flight to Fury, The Trip, and the Monkees vehicle Head, with whose director, Bob Rafelson, he later made Five Easy Pieces, The King of Marvin Gardens, The Postman Always Rings Twice, and Blood and Wine.) The movie that made Nicholson a star, Easy Rider, was basically an art-house version of the biker movies that Corman had made, starting with The Wild Angels, which starred Easy Rider's Peter Fonda. Nicholson had come on board Easy Rider as an afterthought, when Rip Torn, who was set to play the good-hearted good ol' boy George Hanson, got into a bitch-slapping contest with Dennis Hopper and got his invitation to join the production rescinded. In fact, at the time, Nicholson thought that his acting career was over. He was tired of bashing his head against walls trying to break into the industry and had arranged to make his directing debut with an adaptation of Jeremy Larner's 1964 campus novel, Drive, He Said. It was only when he saw Easy Rider with an audience and picked up on the crowd's reaction to his performance that Nicholson realized that his career as a movie star had just begun.

Like Richard Farina's 1966 Been Down So Long, It Looks Like Up to Me, Larner's novel (which takes its title from a Robert Creeley poem) was published early enough in the 1960s to later seem prescient about campus unrest in the Vietnam era, and both books were turned into movies that were released in 1971, by which time the campus protest movement had peaked in the wake of Kent State. Nicholson's movie was filmed in Eugene, Oregon on and around the state university. William Tepper, who looks here like a stork-legged cross between Abbie Hoffman and the Robert De Niro of Mean Streets, made his movie debut as Hector Bloom, a star basketball player who is called out by his coach (Bruce Dern) for having an attitude problem. Hector, who could have any girl on the campus he wanted, has pulled the genius move of having an affair with Olive (Karen Black), who is married to a professor played by Robert Towne, who had also labored in the Corman factory as a screenwriter (The Last Woman on Earth, The Tomb of Ligeia) before writing a couple of movies that gave Nicholson two of his most memorable roles, The Last Detail and Chinatown. (Towne took the name of his Chinatown hero, J. J. Gittes, from Harry Gittes, a friend of Nicholson's who co-produced Drive, He Said. Though the script for this movie is credited to Larner and Nicholson, both Towne and Terrence Malick are said to have taken an uncredited crack at it.) Things turn out badly, but not necessarily in the way you might expect. It turns out that Olive's husband is an overly cerebral, phlegmatic type who knows perfectly well that Hector is balling his wife--it's not easy to miss--but wants to impress everyone with how well he's taking it; a part of him is sort of proud that the great athlete deems him worthy of cuckolding. Olive eventually pushes both of them away, telling them that they're "both big babies" who "deserve each other."

The surprising crosscurrents between the actors caught in this triangle, and also between Tepper and Dern (whose tightly focused performance as the hard-ass coach is some of the very best work he's ever done) capture what's best about Drive, He Said and suggest what Nicholson might have been able to bring to movies if he'd stuck with it as a director. Tepper himself gives an extraordinary performance as an inarticulate but deeply troubled man with the manner of a put-on artist and a romantic soul. (After Drive, He Said bombed, Tepper did some TV but disappeared from movies for a decade. In the early 1980s, he turned up in Miss Right, a comedy that reunited him with his co-star Karen Black, and he had supporting roles in the 1983 remake of Breathless and the 1984 Tom Hanks-Adrian Zmed comedy Bachelor Party, and hasn't been seen on-screen since.) Nicholson shows a free but sure hand with the cast, which also includes Michael Warren (of the TV series Hill Street Blues) and, in smaller roles, David Ogden Stiers (lean and hirsute and recognizable only by his voice, even though he's attempting a cracker accent), Cindy Williams, and June Fairchild, beloved to many for her role as the woman who snorts Ajax in the Cheech and Chong movie Up in Smoke.

For all that's brilliant (or at least brilliantly promising) about Drive, He Said, it's easy to see why it tanked in 1971. Nicholson doesn't seem to have any idea how to shape the material into a cohesive hold, so it feels like a succession of sequences rather than a movie, and the audience is left to get its bearings on its own. Probably a lot of people sat through as much of it as they could stand without ever getting them. There's also the subplot involving Michael Margotta as Gabriel, Hector's roommate, whose character must have struck some people as embarrassingly dated even in 1971. Nicholson fails to establish any basis for a relationship or even any kind of emotional bond between Hector and Gabriel, but what does come through is that, while Hector resists bending to the demands of The Establishment, Gabriel can't even consider it, and the pressure is driving him crazy, at a time when it was fashionable to view going crazy as a noble quest. Gabriel never has a quiet moment in the movie; he's always attacking the M.P.s during his draft induction physical, taking a sword to a TV set after screaming, "They staged the moon landing in Phoenix, Arizona!", throwing commodes out of second story windows, etc. At the climax, he tries to rape Olive, during an assault on her house (and body) that he (maybe with a little prodding from the director) stages as if it were a night of bad experimental theater, and after that doesn't work out, he walks naked into the campus biology lab and sets free the various critters caged there. It must be said, though, that even here Nicholson keeps a tight enough rein on Margotta's performance that only intermittently does this stuff play as foolishly as it sounds. (And in the scene in the lab, there is one glorious caught shot of one of the freed mice appearing to try to make out with one of the frogs, which spurns its advances and hops away.)

Nicholson didn't direct another movie until 1978's barnyard comedy Goin' South, in which he also starred, and that wasn't until after he'd added The Last Detail, Chinatown, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor) to his resume. After he won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Terms of Endearment, Nicholson began telling interviewers that his ultimate dream was to take home one more Academy Award, for Best Director. He pretty much stopped saying that after his third and, to date, last film as director, The Two Jakes, slithered out from under a rock in 1990. An attempted sequel to Chinatown from a fresh Robert Towne script that Towne had tried and failed to make himself five years earlier, it was the kind of movie that absolutely had to have propulsion and a clear plot line, and once again, Nicholson didn't know how to put it together so that the sum would amount to more than a pile of scenes strung together. Maybe it's not that surprising that, with so little practice sitting in the director's chair, Nicholson had gotten no better at what he had been hopeless at twenty years earlier, but he had also lost his touch at guiding his fellow actors: he couldn't even get a decent performance out of himself.

You'd have to be crazy to suggest that Nicholson took the wrong road after savoring that explosion of applause for his performance in Easy Rider. Chances are that Drive, He Said (which played at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival) wouldn't even have gotten as much attention as it did if its director hadn't been a movie star, and if Nicholson hadn't worked as hard as he did at his acting career in the early 1970s, he might not have stayed a movie star for long. (Peter Fonda, the real star of Easy Rider, sure didn't.) As it is, he became the biggest, most durable star of his generation. But he did have something special when he directed Drive, He Said, and it's a shame that, when he reached for it again, it had dissipated.

The Letdowns: Tequila Sunrise (1988)

Nick Schager — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 18:30:00 GMT

In this recurring column, we revisit (and reconsider) eagerly anticipated films that didn’t seem to fulfill their pre-release promise.

Having cemented his place in the screenwriting pantheon with 1974’s Academy Award-winning Chinatown, Robert Towne embarked on a directorial career with 1982’s reasonably well-received lesbian track-and-field saga Personal Best. For his second behind-the-camera outing, however, the writer/director returned to the terrain that had nabbed him Oscar gold, as 1988’s Tequila Sunrise was, like Chinatown, a knotty, star-studded L.A. noir full of shifting allegiances and difficult-to-decipher truths. Or, at least, that was the heritage responsible for the rather considerable hype that preceded Towne’s sophomore effort. Unfortunately, such comparisons now seem by and large superficial, given that the film – despite some sleek cinematography by Conrad L. Hall, a comfortable familiarity with its City of Angels cops-and-crooks milieu, and the participation of Mel Gibson, Kurt Russell, Michelle Pfeiffer, and the late, great J.T. Walsh and Raul Julia – turned out to be a striking example of a project with the ingredients for greatness that nonetheless came out half-baked.

A tale of best friends on opposite sides of the law who wind up at personal and professional odds, Tequila Sunrise charts the friction between high school buds Mac (Gibson) and Nick (Russell), the former a big shot drug dealer trying to ditch the business (for barely explicated reasons), and the latter an LAPD lieutenant who wants to keep Mac from prison but still feels compelled to nail him to the wall. Towne suitably sets up these tense dynamics, yet the central love triangle the two blood brothers eventually form with restaurant hostess Jo Ann (Pfeiffer) never gets off the ground, mainly because Towne, rather than fleshing out Jo Anne, simply reduces her to a lazy narrative pawn dressed up like an ‘80s department store mannequin. This doesn’t make her appear any less silly than Russell’s Nick, whose slicked-back hair was Towne’s deliberate nod to the coiffure of then-L.A. Lakers coach Pat Riley (whom, astonishingly, he even thought about casting). But unlike his co-stars, Russell at least has a character with clear, identifiable personality traits.

Matching Pfeiffer’s blandness, Gibson, in one of the least charismatic performances of his career, seems totally unsure of who Mac actually is, a situation caused in part by Towne’s preposterous conception of the character as a family-first average Joe without a dastardly bone in his body. The result is that Gibson mutes his every line, action and reaction to the point that Mac’s behavior seems solely spurred by the logistical plot demands of Towne’s talk-heavy, energy-deficient script. An occasional bit of sharp dialogue helps balance out the more groan-worthy hardboiled utterances about loyalty and friendship, just as Russell’s morally dubious Nick provides sporadic life to the lethargically paced proceedings. Yet whenever Tequila Sunrise seems poised to hit a vigorous noir groove, the writer/director shoots himself in the foot, whether it’s his clumsily self-conscious expressionistic imagery (such as a shot of Mac and Nick silhouetted against the sunset while sitting on a beach swing set) or, worst of all, a blaring saxophone-scored sex scene between Gibson and Pfeifer that’s literally, embarrassingly “steamy.”

Take Five: Stoned

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Oliver Stone's hastily assembled, curiously timed film biography of George W. Bush, W., opens everywhere today. "Why?" is a question for the ages; Bush is not only still alive, he's still President of the United States, and the movie was completed before one of the major events of his administration actually happened. Couldn't Stone have waited a few years? After all, Jim Morrison had been in the ground for two decades before Stone got around to making a crappy movie about him. Our own Scott Von Doviak has already done the heavy lifting of actually seeing W., and his review suggests that it's another non-triumph for Ollie; but in this case, as much as we may find the guy off-putting, Take Five comes to praise Stone, not to bury him. As we do every time he comes out with a new movie, we float our favorite theory about the man: that he's actually a very good writer who failed upwards and became a very mediocre director, a living example of the Peter Principle. With the sole (and bewildering) exception of Evita, Oliver Stone hasn't written a movie he didn't also direct in over twenty years; but lest we forget, in his early years, Stone was considered a top-notch screenwriter who was expert at plucking the key themes out of someone else's vision -- making them lean, mean, and, perhaps most memorably, violent in an incredibly compelling way. So today, we're going to look at five movies which Stone didn't direct, but whose screenplays he fully or partly wrote -- almost all of which we like more than most of the films where he was behind the camera.

MIDNIGHT EXPRESS (1978)

Directed by the erratic Alan Parker, the infamous, controversial Midnight Express was a 32-year-old Oliver Stone's first major motion picture as a screenwriter. It went on to become a huge box office success, as well as spurring a major moral panic over drug smuggling and making the words "Turkish prison" as paralyzing as an ice cube down the back of the shirt. Unsurprisingly, in later years, it became clear that Stone's screenplay was a wildly over-the-top exaggeration full of fabrications, distortions and outright nonsense, despite its claim of being based on a true story; even the real-life Billy Hayes repudiated it. But that was, and to some extent still is, the genius of Oliver Stone: he could extrapolate the juciest meat of a story and sizzle it up into an absurd paranoid fantasy you couldn't help but devour.

CONAN THE BARBARIAN (1982)

Still, in our opinion, the greatest thing that Oliver Stone has ever done, the hugely underrated Conan the Barbarian found him paired in the screenwriting duties with director John Milius. Milius, an unabashed right-wing war hawk and suspected crypto-fascist, had a habit of butting heads with '60s liberals like Stone, with the conflict bringing out the best in both of them; he'd previously worked with Francis Ford Coppola, even more of a lefty than Stone, on Apocalypse Now, and their diametrically opposed viewpoints about the Vietnam War resulted in a crazed masterpiece. Conan is no less so; Stone's cynical pro-civilization standpoint and Milius' joyously pro-barbarian views resulted in a movie that is uncannily faithful to Robert E. Howard's violent, amoral books.

SCARFACE (1983)

Even to Brian DePalma's most vociferous defenders -- a dwindling number in which we count ourselves members in good standing -- there is a general recognition that Scarface, his updating of the 1930s gangster classic to the Miami drug trade days, isn't actually a very good movie. But it is a very important movie, insofar as it influenced dozens of later thug-life pictures both better and worse than it was; and, what's more, for its many, many failings, it's a compulsively watchable movie. Even if you know about its overblown performances, its ridiculous ending, and its general sense of aimlessness and enervation, you hardly ever want to turn it off. And a lot of that is down to screenwriter Oliver Stone, who crammed it full of so many hilariously quotable lines that it became the biggest influence on hip-hop since James Brown.

YEAR OF THE DRAGON (1985)

Michael Cimino and Oliver Stone have been tied together by fate since early on. They share similar styles and similar obsessions, and both were rumored for many years as wanting to do a remake of the woozy film version of Ayn Rand's ridiculous novel, The Fountainhead. The one time they worked together was on 1985's Year of the Dragon, a film in which all of their strengths and weaknesses were apparent. Just before giving full voice to his Vietnam experiences in Platoon, Stone hints at them here, constantly and darkly; his dialogue is often flat and creaky, as opposed to the gloriously lurid bombshells of Scarface, but his characters and scenarios compliment Cimino's hyperactive sense of busy detail and rhetorical bombast, and he plays on themes of male bonding and sudden violence as a social actor that he'd later explore as a director.

8 MILLION WAYS TO DIE (1986)

The last movie Stone would write for a director other than himself (aside from the aforementioned Evita, to which his contributions were minimal) was Hal Ashby's 8 Million Ways to Die, a movie reviled by many but regarded by others as a miniature masterpiece that doesn't get nearly the attention it deserves. Whatever the case, its favors -- which, for its defenders, include some gorgeously lurid violence and dialogue so scuzzy it borders on the beautiful, as well as a nice lead performance by Jeff Bridges -- are hard to discern under lots of muddle. Did Ashby really direct, or did Stone take over when he was fired? Did Stone really write, or is Robert Towne responsible for the script Stone could no longer handle when he ended up behind the camera? We may never know; and a lot of people simply don't care.

Related Posts:

Dissecting/Debating W.

Stone vs. Iran, Round 2

In Other Blogs: Gloom and Doom Edition

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 09 May 2008 14:30:00 GMT

What will happen to “In Other Blogs” when all the other blogs disappear? There’s probably no danger of that happening anytime soon, but another week brings another one of our regular sources to an end, or at least an uncertain future. In the Company of Glenn, Premiere film critic Glenn Kenny’s hangout, is now in limbo as Kenny has lost his job. “I've just been informed that my position at Premiere.com is being terminated. What this means for this blog is still up in the air; I've got meetings this afternoon in which such things are to be negotiated. In any case, I now join the ever-growing ranks of film critics without staff positions. I very much hope to keep this blog going...and get some good freelance work, quick.”

Beyond the Multiplex laments this turn of events, along with other doom and gloom for indie film fans. “I am not the first to ask what the doggone heck the point of that site is without Kenny on it. And Warner Bros. announced, also on Thursday, that it will close down both Picturehouse and Warner Independent Pictures, its two semi-autonomous ‘specialty’ divisions…Kenny is one of the finest, most erudite and funniest commentators in the business, and I can't imagine he'll remain unemployed for long. (I consider Glenn a buddy, though we don't hang out away from our interlocking professional lives.) But this is clearly another illustration of the precarious status of film criticism, and all other forms of independent critical intelligence, in a rapidly changing -- and perhaps rapidly imploding -- media universe. It's too early to evaluate the effects of the Warner news, but it ain't good.”

The House Next Door, now under new management, has an account of legendary screenwriter Robert Towne’s appearance at the San Francisco International Film Festival. “Still sharp as a shiv and filled with ideas for projects, he is nevertheless weary of the way things have changed since ‘the old days,’ and, following frustrating experiences directing his most personal projects, has apparently accepted the role of Hollywood’s resident script-doctor. The clip reel preceding the interview tells the tale: Spiky, expansive dialogue in iconoclastic films (a sort of pungent poetry voiced by Jack Nicholson as a sewer-mouthed sailor or as a shamus digging for rot) segueing into tidy jobs in Tom Cruise blockbusters (included in the montage is, tellingly, a passage from Mission: Impossible with barely a word in it).”

This week in List-o-mania, Cinematical has a sort of cousin to our own TV-to-movie list; it’s the Cinematical Seven: When an Animated Series Goes Live Action ... and Gets it Right. Honestly, I wouldn’t touch most of the movies on the list with a ten foot pole, but it’s always nice to see Popeye get some love. “Robert Altman's offbeat ode to the famous Fleisher cartoon starring the spinach-eating strongman and his darling Olive Oil is the great misunderstood work of the director's career. Robin Williams and Shelley Duvall manage to bring utterly ridiculous characters into a realm of believability that you could never imagine when watching the show. Suddenly, Popeye made sense -- goofy, almost surreal sense, but sense nonetheless -- in the real world.”

Finally, a call to action! If you have a favorite film blog you feel we’ve been neglecting, even if it’s your own blog, let us know in the comments. After all, if our usual resources keep shutting down, pretty soon we’re going to have to devote this column to mushroom blogs.

The Spirit of '67

Phil Nugent — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Pictures at a Revolution, a new book by Entertainment Weekly staffer Mark Harris, zeroes in on a signal moment in popular culture — 1967, a time when the old Hollywood studios were losing their grip on mass taste and hip young American filmmakers were beginning to be influenced by the European New Wave directors — by examining the making of each of the five films nominated for that year's Academy Award for Best Picture. The list consists of In the Heat of the Night, the eventual winner, and the four also-rans, Bonnie & Clyde, The Graduate, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and Dr. Dolittle. The films themselves go a long way towards making Harris's point that Hollywood was cracking apart at the time from confusion, internal conflict, and dry rot; it's hard to believe that they were all made in the same year, let alone that an industry would have chosen all of them to point to with pride as the best of which they were capable.

The ones that seem most clearly of their time are Bonnie & Clyde and The Graduate. The latter was a crowd-pleasing zeitgeist movie, a time-stamped movie of the moment, but Bonnie & Clyde was a genuinely revolutionary film at the time — the writers, Robert Benton and David Newman, had originally hoped to attract Francois Truffaut to direct — and a certified classic. It was also a movie that, had it won the Oscar, would have set off a chain of massive coronaries through three-quarters of the executive suites in Hollywood. As for In the Heat of the Night, it was recently re-issued on a new DVD, which set off a fresh round of condescending notices pointing up its flaws. It is in fact an entertaining little murder melodrama with a number of strong virtues — notably the dazzling cinematographer by Haskell Wexler and Rod Steiger's Oscar-winning performance — but it is the kind of movie that was overrated in its day and is now fated to be underrated, as punishment for being a good movie that won an award that should have gone to a great movie. It looks even better if compared to the other big racial-tolerance message movie, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, which is where most of the dry rot settled.

In its general outlines, this will be familiar territory to many readers of film books; the Bonnie & Clyde story has been especially thoroughly covered already, but even the ringer, the expensive and unwatchable Dr. Dolittle, has already been dealt with at some length in a well-known book: John Gregory Dunne's 1969 The Studio, a first-hand journalistic account of how thoroughly that movie's tortured production bollixed Twentieth-Century Fox at the time. But Harris is a good writer and has managed to wring fresh material from such interview subjects as Mike Nichols, Arthur Penn, Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman, Robert Towne, and Buck Henry, while plugging the gaps with well-chosen insights drawn from such sources as Sidney Poitier's memoirs. Overblown title and all, Harris's book is a fascinating, five-sided snapshot of a remarkable moment in movie history.

The Rep Report (November 27 - December 4)

Peter Smith — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 17:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: The Senegalese writer-director Ousmane Sembene, who died last summer, gets his first major posthumous respective at Film Forum from November 30 to December 12. The series kicks off with Xala, the 1974 satire that climaxes with a memorably ghastly, well, spitting scene, and includes the early works that put Sembene on the map (Black Girl, Emitai) as well as the more recent films (Faat-Kine and his last movie, Moolaade) that showed that he was still in strapping form. This is a rare chance not just to pay tribute to a fallen master but to catch up with the work of a major filmmaker who remains sorely underrepresented on DVD.

Pier Paolo Pasolini has been dead for a good long time now, but doesn't seem to have become much less controversial, an accomplishment that might have put a smile on his face. The Film Society of Lincoln Center's Heretical Epiphanies: The Cinematic Pilgrimages of Pier Paolo Pasolini (November 28 – December 4) covers his career from the neo-realist debut film Accattone to the hyper-scandalous, posthumously released Salo. On December 4, Lincoln Center also presents the U.S. premiere of Accattone in Jazz, a live presentation in which "Pasolini's celebrated screenplay for Accattone is revisited by Italian movie star Valerio Mastandrea, as he weaves a unique interplay of words and music together with Italian jazz legends and longtime collaborators Roberto Gatto and Danilo Rea."

The Brooklyn Academy of Music's twelve-film Max Ophuls retrospective begins on November 28 with a week-long run of a new print of the 1948 Letter from an Unknown Woman, the best work done in Hollywood by an artist who got too few opportunities to work at anything like his full capacities. It ain't The Earrings of Madame de. . . , but boy, will it do. . .

SAN FRANCISCO: From November 27-30, the Castro salutes director Hal Ashby, with three nights of double features, starting with the 1979 Being There, paired with the cult classic Harold and Maude. The real keeper may be on the 30th, when the theater shows the masterful, Robert Towne-scripted Shampoo and Ashby's amazing, unavailable-on-DVD debut film, The Landlord (1970).

— Phil Nugent

Stop Smiling: Hollywood Edish

Peter Smith — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 18:00:00 GMT

Movie lovers will find a lot to enjoy in Stop Smiling 32, the "Hollywood Lost and Found" issue: interviews with Robert Towne and Robert Evans (not in the same room, thank God) and Bruce Dern, Susan Tyrrell, and Harry Dean Stanton (ditto); film scholar and Los Angeles Plays Itself director Thom Anderson and Diane Keaton offer their takes on L.A.; a Jim Hoberman essay on Sam Fuller's The Steel Helmet, illustrated with pages from Fuller's World War II notebooks; tributes to Barbara Stanwyck, Preston Sturges, Fritz Lang, Louise Brooks, Dorothy Malone, Frank Tashlin, and other worthies; and reflections on the movies by poet John Ashberry and underground comics god Kim Deitch. All this plus a photo, from 1985, of cinematographer Caleb Deschanel letting his tiny daughter, Zooey, take a look through the camera lens, that will redefine your previous conception of the term "Awwwwwwww!!" — Phil Nugent