The Big Screen (77 page)

There was another source of disquiet over
Heaven's Gate
: the film offered some explanation of the United States itself in which power and money tried to oppress immigrants and the labor movement while owning the land. That text is much clearer now, but by 1980 there had been a swing back toward nonthreatening movies and tranquil entertainment. No one wants to knock tranquil entertainment so long as it is as inspiring as Fred Astaire, Rin Tin Tin, Buster Keaton, Hawks on the trail, and Preston Sturges with Stanwyck and Fonda. But by the late 1970s there began to be fewer grown-up pictures meant to disturb and provoke. The
Rocky
franchise was based on the increasingly farfetched dream of a Wallace Beery figure supplanting a Muhammad Ali. (
Rambo
would be harder to stomach.) Steven Spielberg's
E.T.
was less a film made for kids than a picture designed to have adults feel like kids again. Clint Eastwood's
Dirty Harry
series shifted from being an attack on the impossible position of the police to the glorification of a very macho loner. Above all, Spielberg and George Lucas joined forces on a grandiose new version of Saturday morning serials with
Raiders of the Lost Ark
, a booming franchise, and fun at first, but having so little to do with the real world. Meanwhile, the restored business confidence of a Hollywood that was more than ever the subsidiary holdings of major international corporations asked the old question: What have the movies got to do with life? And the expanding realm of special effects had its own retort: Why, this isn't really life anymore. And why should it be?

Not everything was depressing. Woody Allen was at his best in the years from
Annie Hall
to
Radio Days
. Terrence Malick's beautiful debut with
Badlands
(1973) was not quite sustained by the studied look of
Days of Heaven
(1978), and that was followed by substantial absence. Martin Scorsese was a genius in turmoil in the years from
Taxi Driver
to
Raging Bull
.

The new possibilities for independent film impressed most people: John Sayles's
Return of the Secaucus Seven
(1979) was a literate feature film about lifelike characters, made for $60,000 and released and appreciated. That way ahead would be taken up by Steven Soderbergh with
sex, lies, and videotape
(1989), by the overall enterprise known as “Sundance,” Robert Redford's naïve but well-intended attempt to use the fruits of
The Way We Were
(1973) and such films to bolster the development and production of small-audience films. There was even one of the best films ever made in America, David Lynch's
Blue Velvet
, so complete an immersion in sexual awakening that many sober critics found it shocking and disgusting.

By 1986, the year of
Blue Velvet
, something else was apparent at the movies: as you sat in the dark, you sometimes saw young members of the audience walking out of the film and heading for the lobby. Were they going to the bathroom, in search of a smoke or candies? Were they bored by the picture? Perhaps, but the lobbies were increasingly stocked with games to play on screens. It was becoming an amusement arcade. The process had begun with Pong (released by Atari in 1972), but then came games of increasing complexity and interaction. These screens were tiny compared with the movie screen, the image was often coarse, and the material was violent or nerve-jangling. One came off those games buzzing. The screen had found a new way of being. And today people sometimes play the latest version of those games in front of the movie, on their cell phone, offering their blue glowworm against the screen's light.

Here is Anthony Minghella, the director of
Truly Madly Deeply
(1990) and
The English Patient
(1996), facing up to reality:

“Ant” was not a cynic, yet he may have discovered the need to pretend to be cynical, worldly, or amused, if he was going to survive making big pictures for such as the Weinstein brothers. After a few weekend retreats with the bosses you learn to talk their way, and sometimes you wonder if you are becoming more like them. It's a lesson in a kind of bipolarity worth bearing in mind when you think of all the old pros who lasted: Hawks, Capra, Lang, Ford, Vidor, Hitchcock, Lubitsch, Wilder, Wyler, Minnelli, Scorsese, and so on. What actors they had to be. Then consider the ones who didn't last in that way—Welles, von Stroheim, von Sternberg, Nicholas Ray, Preston Sturges—or the ones who broke away and found their escapes: John Cassavetes, Kubrick, Terrence Malick, Michael Cimino.

In what we now call the golden age of Hollywood, directors did as they were told, swallowed the lies and the language, and fretted over their imprisonment in private. They hated their vulnerability under the system, and told horror stories about the arrogance of those who ran the studios, gave them their contracts, and then trampled on their vision as a matter of right and business habit. These disappointments might be vented in the directors' pleasant houses in the hills, to their second (rather younger) wife, within earshot of the new Chagall and the European sports car they had just bought (to make themselves feel better). Their anger was being bought off, and in time that deal was sweetened by agreements to recognize “residuals” and “profit” participation. Just agreements, you understand.

There were directors who managed to stay moving targets, shifting from one studio to another on short-term contracts and building a body of work that French- and then English-speaking critics would later call an oeuvre (as if it had been designed as such from the start). John Ford and Howard Hawks are such worldly heroes, and perhaps the smarts or resolve of some of their loner heroes was modeled on the directors' own survival. They did good work over five decades. After that prolonged struggle, is it any wonder that many good American movies are metaphors for handling the system, the daily grind that faced ambitious directors?

Others became studio men: it meant stomaching Harry Cohn, but Frank Capra served Columbia (and raised the status of the place) throughout the 1930s. At Warner Bros., Michael Curtiz was regarded as a guy who could shoot anything, and to this day his facility often masks the question of personality, no matter that his credits include
20,000 Years in Sing Sing
(1932),
The Charge of the Light Brigade
(1936),
Yankee Doodle Dandy
(1942),
Casablanca
, (1942), and
Mildred Pierce
(1945). Preston Sturges had an exceptional run at Paramount, during which he was allowed to ignore the war to make sublime comedies (
The Lady Eve
, 1941;
Sullivan's Travels
, 1941;
The Palm Beach Story
, 1942;
The Miracle of Morgan's Creek
, 1944). He had so many rows with studio executives he began to feel he was a misunderstood genius, so he branched out, went independent, and fell apart. The wit, the insouciance, and the mercurial charm others loved, and which Sturges worked hard to maintain, turned into frustration and sorrow. He had a better money deal as an independent, but he soon wished he had never left “home.” The most domesticated director is probably Vincente Minnelli, who worked all his life at M-G-M and turned out a flow of films that includes
Meet Me in St. Louis
(1944),
Madame Bovary
(1949),
Father of the Bride
(1950),
The Bad and the Beautiful
(1952),
An American in Paris
(1951),
Lust for Life
(1956), and
Gigi
(1958).

The concept of “home” meant not just your own parking space on the lot and regular checks in the bank. It ensured a supply of material, stars, and craftsmen, and the greatest virtue of the factory system was that so many of those assignments were blessings. Minnelli married one of his stars (Judy Garland), and that may not have been the wisest step they ever took, but Garland's work in
Meet Me in St. Louis
is a testament to affection and trust enhancing beauty and film presence. There's a legend that the studio abused and exploited Garland, though her own mother did worse. But there were also people at the studio who loved her and wanted to look after her. Then look at the other credits: producer Arthur Freed worked with Minnelli twelve times; Conrad Salinger, an orchestrator, had ten films with him; and the head of design at Metro, Cedric Gibbons, presided throughout the director's career.

There's no reason to sentimentalize the “crew.” But anyone who has ever made a movie knows the benefit of practice and familiarity: in how to photograph a star; in how to construct sets that will facilitate shooting and scheduling; in the balance of color and the clarity of sound; in the idea of order and story that builds in the editing; and in the relatively relaxed way in which an assigned director may pursue his style and his preoccupations. Minnelli is often called a “stylist,” or someone in search of beauty, but those tasks can be aided by an effective factory system. It follows that Minnelli was more or less willing to direct films that were about whatever the studio and the story department wanted them to be about.

You can argue an offsetting problem in this factory attitude toward the nature of film: that all the films began to look and feel alike; that a way of shooting that was efficient and economical became a way of seeing that standardized life and experience and turned it toward being an advertisement. There's no doubt that this “movieness” (once so exciting) became stale, unwittingly comic, and a spur to parody and rebellion. But if you believe that making a film is one of the most exhausting and unpleasant jobs ever devised—here is Minghella again: “In the end…directing is about survival and stamina”—then the factory and the team could be a kindly climate that let directors make a lot of films. Between 1942 (when he was thirty-nine already) and 1976, Minnelli made or worked on thirty-nine pictures. (At the age of forty-nine, David Fincher has made nine feature films.)

So team is one mercy, but then consider two other liberties: such directors did not have to raise the money for their ventures, and raising money is ugly enough to scar your sense of creative integrity—in Hollywood, take note, the sense of it was more important than the thing itself. Then, when “your” film was finished, it became “theirs” and passed smoothly into what was called distribution and exhibition—it might do well or less well in the marketplace, but an audience was waiting for it all over the country, and the director was told, “The numbers are nice.” You know what that means.

The public was as much a part of the team as an orchestrator or a focus puller, and for most of Minnelli's working life, the audience came to the movies out of habit. The distribution enterprise—with Metro it was Loew's Inc.—made the prints, the trailers, and the posters, and paid for them. It had the theaters lined up; it arranged for the collection of money; it ran the publicity machine and might even have composed interviews with Minnelli to save him time. So for those who regard Vincente Minnelli as a true artist, it must be said that many of his choices were made for him. And choices can kill you as easily as arrangements. Minnelli died at eighty-three; Minghella was fifty-four.

Teamwork now is less common or protective, though there are strong allegiances, such as Martin Scorsese having Thelma Schoonmaker as his editor, the association of Steven Spielberg and composer John Williams, and the bond between director Oliver Stone and cinematographer Robert Richardson in finding the unstable, color-noir look of
JFK
and
Nixon
. You could add the history of J. Roy Helland, who did Meryl Streep's hair and makeup on everything from
Sophie's Choice
to
The Iron Lady
. But people are hired and pictures are made, as independent as well as one-off ventures. Studio money, or money that derives from the corporations that own them, has to be negotiated and gambled over—sometimes over a period of years, sometimes over a weekend. A director at the level of Scorsese has agents and lawyers to handle that business, but he may spend more time (on and off) trying to develop a project than he ever will in the shooting. Scorsese went personally broke on
Gangs of New York
.

Preparing a project can last a matter of years, with a concomitant fatigue, anger, and despair that can do damage to the fluency or playfulness of a venture. It requires a public persistence or stamina that is often at odds with the privacy of composition or meditation in much artwork. You have to sit there and listen to the producer and the money from Minneapolis tell you about their bridge game, their bridgework, or whether they will get to sleep with the actress (so they are interested in the casting). There is sometimes a force in artistic independence that simply refuses to be that ingratiating or compromising. Such intransigence characterized Orson Welles, John Cassavetes, Nicholas Ray, and Erich von Stroheim, to name just a few. But decades after the reported death of the film factory, it is hard and daunting for a real independent to make a movie.

If you want to make art, don't give up your day job. There are weekend painters and writers who teach by day (or deliver the mail) and treasure the evenings for their own work. But movie takes pride in being all-consuming, and sometimes offers itself as more than life. And thus the dilemma of many independent filmmakers—by which I mean those who don't know where the next film is coming from—can be very tough. Two of the most impressive films I have seen while writing this book are
Winter's Bone
and
The Arbor
. You may not have seen them, or heard of them, but they're worth talking about in the attempt to convey the life of a director, and I'm sure they were both done in the glorious if vain hope of reaching the masses.

Debra Granik, the director of
Winter's Bone
, was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1963. She attended Brandeis before taking an MFA in film production at New York University. She made her first feature,
Down to the Bone
, in 2004, and it won prizes at Sundance, and elsewhere, notably for the performance by Vera Farmiga as a young mother attempting to recover from cocaine addiction. It was well reviewed, but its tough subject and remorseless treatment had difficulty finding proper distribution in the United States. Like so many first films, it was made for very little, with dribs and drabs of money gathered over a long period. With a reported gross income of $20,000, it was just one of the worthwhile films that gain respect and admiration while bringing the filmmaker to bankruptcy. So that person has to ask herself, what do I really want to do?

It was six years before Granik was able to complete her second feature,
Winter's Bone
, about a seventeen-year-old girl, Ree, who tries to look after her mother, brother, and sister in the rural Ozarks while searching for her father, who faces a court date. If he doesn't make that date, the family risks losing its house. The story came from a novel being written by Daniel Woodrell (published in 2006). This picture cost around $2 million, and again the funding was raised over a long period of time, with many setbacks along the way. But the picture got “proper” American distribution, from Roadside Attractions, which placed it in fewer than a hundred theaters. Still, it was noticed. In
New York
magazine, David Edelstein wrote, “For all the horror, it's the drive toward life, not the decay, that lingers in the mind. As a modern heroine, Ree Dolly has no peer, and
Winter's Bone
is the year's most stirring film.”

Its festival showings prompted foreign rights deals, and word of mouth (the essential backup to good reviews) brought in a gross income of around $12 million. Edelstein is correct in his judgment, but by “horror,” he means the tough lives and the hardships people must battle with, and he is alluding to the physical harshness of life in the locations all found in rural Missouri. Ree has terrible problems to face, but this is not a horror film. If it had been—if Ree had been threatened by a mad killer in that same rural setting, and if the film had been loaded up with blood and suspense—its commercial horizons might have altered. Granik wanted to make a film that observed life honestly and was fair to the novel. So she ended up with a slice of life that many potential viewers would find uncomfortable—whereas the unhindered slipping into another genre, that of a slasher movie, might have been as sensational a coup as
The Blair Witch Project
(budget $60,000; gross revenue $248 million).