The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (438 page)

2. These everyday gods aspire to the notion of Hollywood, especially to the camp nostalgia for bygone glamour. They talk among themselves about beauty and attractiveness with an obsessiveness that may be a very accurate portrait of Hollywood private life, as well as a touching evocation of a world of fans trying to emulate cosmetic mythologies.

3. But their circumstances on screen are more sordid and plain than Hollywood has shown us. Warhol’s world is one of total sexual exchange, in which heterosexual, monogamous relations have broken down into a crazy paving of alternatives, and where the element of power in sex has been reinforced by narcotics and idleness. Thus, in
Trash
, Joe has reached a forlorn state of being so filled with dope that he cannot get a hard-on. The film’s effort to restore that vigor has nothing to do with affection, simply the need to live up to the pleasure principle. Warhol’s scheme of life is bland, unthinking, and Utopian in that pleasure alone is its object; but hellish, since the pursuit of pleasure has been ruthless enough to forsake all material, bourgeois comforts. This is made clear in
Trash
by the squalor of Joe and Holly’s home, despite the residual homemaking stolidity that haunts them, and the arid magazine luster of Jane’s place, counterpointed by her neurotic, “straight” inability to confess that she is a nymphomaniac. In general, Warhol has regarded the physical decay of his world with the equanimity of a camera. But
Trash
actually moralizes and sees a Griffith-like romantic splendor in the battered but loyal Holly—“Joe, can I suck your cock”—even if she is a man who must masturbate with a beer bottle because of Joe’s limpness.

4. Like Holly, many of the characters are androgynous. Plastic people are like plastic dolls: they can go back to the maker for their sexual organs to be altered. Again, Warhol’s predilection for homosexuals and bisexuals is utterly unsentimental or lip-smacking. He is not doctrinaire; he is so open to behavior that he has disposed of deviation. The sexual flux is experimental, just as we are made to speculate about the consistency of the people.

Because of that inability to judge people—again, a characteristic of the camera, quite unlike words that pick out meanings—it is easy for a humanist to be depressed by Warhol. He believes only in visible presence: that is why his early films were immense studies of the tiny diurnal changes in the Empire State Building or the static mutability of a man sleeping; and why his method has always relied on very long takes of spontaneous action. Or, to be more precise, continuing inaction and meandering conversations about action. Warhol’s people usually sit and talk in corners. (The greater physical action of
Lonesome Cowboys
is influenced by the out-of-doors and recollections of the Western.) Later Warhol films took on greater structure. It may be Paul Morrissey who made
Heat
a mock-up of
Sunset Boulevard
, and
Trash
a journey movie of Joe in search of a hard-on. But that seems to me an irrelevant (almost “decadent”) shaping compared with Warhol’s initiating clarity. The factory, or family, could not have existed without him. His distaste for the cult of authorship is another creative paradox within his conceptual art. Nothing establishes the austerity and disabused romanticism of Warhol’s vision so much as the way he has taken to heart the influence of the camera on action, and the decision-making role of a spectator.

His films are simultaneously boring and hallucinatory—like the effect of certain narcotics. They make us ask ourselves whether we are watching actors or real people, actual sex or simulated sex. From that, it is a short step to wonder whether we are ourselves real or theatrical, performing impressions made on the minds of the people we meet; whether our sex is actual or simulated. That is Warhol’s achievement: to so simplify filmmaking that we reappraise what happens when we watch other people. His method is so lunatically documentary that we learn to reassess candor. We can think of Warhol as a primitive, as an extreme modernist, as the satirist or apologist of old Hollywood, or as the anthropological moviemaker of our metropolis. He was all of these, yet pale and withdrawn; he told us that the camera is more powerful than any purpose handling it. That the camera cannot lie has dissolved the concept of discriminating truth.

Jack L. Warner
(1892–1978), b. London, Canada
It defies understanding that no one ever made a movie about the Warner boys. There were four of them, the sons of Ben, a cobbler from Kraznashiltz in Poland: Harry (1881–1958), actually born in Poland; Albert (1884–1967), born in Baltimore; Sam (1888–1927), also from Baltimore; and Jack, the kid. They did anything. By 1923, they could claim experience with shoes, butchery, general merchandise, ice cream, the fairground business, soap, bicycles, and even motion pictures. Jack had toured as a boy soprano. They ran a theatre in Newcastle, Pennsylvania; they had been in exhibition and exchanges; and Jack had dabbled in production. Warner Brothers was established in 1923: it sounds like the turning point, yet evidently it was just one more wriggle in a series.

They were not doing that much, with a studio over the hill in Burbank, Jack in charge of production, Albert the treasurer, Harry the businessman, and Sam playing with sound. They proved themselves in 1927 by pioneering talking pictures: in fact, they had been more interested in music than synchronized talk, and their system was one that used discs, not sound on film. But the sequence of
Don Juan
(26) and
The Jazz Singer
(27) changed the business. Sam died in the struggle to make sound work, but the three remaining brothers worked out a tough, lean economy, with Jack in Burbank and Harry and Albert in New York. For years, Warners made small pictures, with unusual edge and realism.

Jack was shrewd enough to hire two exceptional production executives: Darryl Zanuck (from 1929–33) and Hal Wallis (1933–44). Nevertheless, he deserves a lot of credit for the talents he hired, for the genres he helped promote, and for that string of movies. Call it the era of Zanuck or Wallis, if you will; still the “Warners” style is tough, routinely black and white, gangster pictures, hardboiled musicals, adventure, costume, and a political undertone. It is Cagney, Robinson, Bogart, Raft, Paul Muni, Errol Flynn, Bette Davis, and Olivia de Havilland. It is Michael Curtiz, Raoul Walsh, Howard Hawks, and Busby Berkeley. And it is
42nd Street, Gold Diggers of 1933, Captain Blood, The Life of Emile Zola, The Adventures of Robin Hood, Jezebel, The Roaring Twenties, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, Juarez, The Letter, Sergeant York, High Sierra, The Strawberry Blonde, The Maltese Falcon, Gentleman Jim, Yankee Doodle Dandy
, and
Casablanca
.

Warner allowed rivalry to end the relationship with Hal Wallis. And so, from 1945 to 1967, he was personally in charge of production, albeit with a string of assistants. These were difficult years for the business, yet Warners stayed lively. They rescued Joan Crawford with
Mildred Pierce;
they let Hawks make
To Have and Have Not
and
The Big Sleep;
they developed the Doris Day musical; they maintained a reputation for swashbuckling (with
The Flame and the Arrow
and
Captain Horatio Hornblower);
they did
White Heat
and
The Fountainhead, A Star Is Born
, and
A Streetcar Named Desire;
they made the James Dean pictures and
Strangers on a Train, The Searchers, Rio Bravo, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
, and
Bonnie and Clyde
.

Jack Warner personally produced
My Fair Lady
in 1964, and he presided over the sale of the studio to Seven Arts in 1967. He won the Thalberg Award in 1958. He was a suntanned dandy, a loudmouth, a wisecracker; he was conservative, tough, arrogant, and often stupid. But he outlived the brothers and he is the Warner that everyone means when they allude to three or four terrific decades. If he’d been, or known, any better, he’d never have gone into pictures.

Denzel Washington
, b. Mount Vernon, New York, 1954
At the end of Spike Lee’s
Malcolm X
(92), there is a montage of stills and newsreel of the real Malcolm. He was gaunter than Denzel Washington, maybe, and he had a hardened carapace—to life and the camera—that no actor could conceive of. Nevertheless, the montage reminds us of the journey Washington has taken in the three-plus hours of the film, and of the profound attempt he has made on the real life. We seem to see matters of bearing and thought in the real Malcolm that Washington has schooled us for. The coda is proof of a major performance, not just Lee’s best work but a sign of nobility in the actor.

Washington was educated at Fordham and A.C.T. in San Francisco. He played Dr. Philip Chandler on TV in
St. Elsewhere
, and gradually developed a movie career: George Segal’s seventeen-year-old bastard in
Carbon Copy
(81, Michael Schultz);
A Soldier’s Story
(84, Norman Jewison);
Power
(86, Sidney Lumet); nominated for best supporting actor as Steven Biko in
Cry Freedom
(87, Richard Attenborough); to England for the excellent
For Queen and Country
(88, Martin Stellman); winning the best supporting actor Oscar in
Glory
(89, Edward Zwick);
The Mighty Quinn
(89, Carl Schenkel); laboring through
Heart Condition
(90, James D. Parriott); the trumpeter in
Mo’ Better Blues
(90, Lee);
Mississippi Masala
(91, Mira Nair);
Ricochet
(91, Russell Mulcahy); as Don Pedro in
Much Ado About Nothing
(93, Kenneth Branagh); helping Julia Roberts in
The Pelican Brief
(93, Alan J. Pakula); helping Tom Hanks in
Philadelphia
(93, Jonathan Demme).

At that point, Washington was a lead actor. Now, over ten years later, it is evident that he is a big star—second only to Sidney Poitier in the history of black acting, if you like; yet, truly, I think he is the first black whose stardom transcends race. I felt that in not his best picture,
The Bone Collector
(99, Phillip Noyce), where he was paralyzed and utterly dominating, even to the point of having Angelina Jolie itching for his finger (the one part where he had a little action).

With that extra confidence, he has become a major American presence. Sure, there have been silly films along the way, but the command is authentic: a crucial conflict with Gene Hackman in
Crimson Tide
(95, Tony Scott);
Virtuosity
(95, Brett Leonard); very good as Easy Rawlins in
Devil in a Blue Dress
(95, Carl Franklin); very subtle in
Courage Under Fire
(96, Edward Zwick);
The Preacher’s Wife
(96, Penny Marshall), which was silly;
Fallen
(98, Gregory Hoblit), as was this;
He Got Game
(98, Lee); very sure of himself in
The Siege
(98, Zwick); so good in
Hurricane
(99, Norman Jewison) he made you forget the deceits in the film;
Remember the Titans
(00, Boaz Yakin), where he began to seem Wayne-like;
Training Day
(01, Antonio Fuqua), winning the Oscar;
John Q
(02, Nick Cassavetes).

He also directed
Finding Fish
(02) and he has produced two thorough documentaries:
Hank Aaron: Chasing the Dream
(95, Michael Tollins) and
Half Past Autumn: The Life and Work of Gordon Parks
(00, Craig Rice). He acted in and directed
Antwone Fisher
(02), and did a good standard job in
Out of Time
(03, Franklin);
Man on Fire
(04, Scott).

He was not really comfortable in
The Manchurian Candidate
(04, Demme), but it was becoming clearer that his confidence and presence could get away with nearly anything—for example, the playful
Inside Man
(06, Lee), the inane yet compelling
Deja Vu
(06, Tony Scott), and the shameless
American Gangster
(07, Ridley Scott). He directed
The Great Debaters
, he went all shabby on us in
The Taking of Pelham 123
(09, Tony Scott), and then apocalyptic epic in
The Book of Eli
(10, the Hughes brothers). A lot of it is silly, but no one since Gable has made “silliness” look so foolish a complaint.

Lew (Louis) Wasserman
(1913–2002), b. Cleveland, Ohio
It was often said during his inordinate period of authority that Lew, or Mr. Wasserman, or the guy in horn-rims and black suit, was the most powerful man in the picture business. Lew never did or said anything to discourage the prevailing wisdom, and the way he was tall, upright, silver-or steel-haired, and good-looking into old age helped the legend. He was also an outstanding figure in the fields of charitable disbursement and the organization of Democratic party politics. Do not let that divert you from the history according to which he was one of the handful of people who helped raise Ronald Reagan not just beyond his station or his dialogue capacities but to such heights that only the presidency was left. Lew Wasserman was prodigiously rich when he died, and the best embodiment of what could be done with power in America if exercised through show business. He was what a lot of people wanted to be when they grew up—yet the whole glum record gives growing up a bad name.

He was the son of poor Russian immigrants, born in a poor part of Cleveland. The father had been a bookbinder, but in America the family depended on the mother’s income as a cook. As a result, Louis was selling candy at movie and burlesque theaters by the age of twelve. That was the start that brought him to the attention of Jules Stein and The Music Corporation of America, a high-sounding agency for talent in the music business, and one that had close contacts with Cleveland’s Mayfield Road gang, one of the stalwart branches in organized crime. No, Stein and Wasserman were not indictable criminals—or, rather, they were never indicted. Which is not to say that their business style hadn’t learned valuable lessons on Mayfield Road.