Book Worms

The last couple of weeks I’d been spending my spare time reading about movies rather than watching them, which worked out quite well. The session started with Final Cut, Steven Bach’s intimate chronicle of the making of Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, continued with Peter Biskin’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, and then carried on to Julie Salamon’s The Devil’s Candy, which I’m only part way through.

The impetus to go back to Final Cut after all these years was reading of the recent, untimely death of its author, the one time Head of East Coast and European Production at United Artists who saw his career derailed by Cimino’s train wreck of a movie. Although everyone, not least the studio, was brought down by the director’s hubris and megalomania, and there’s no doubt that Cimino is a total cock, I was interested to be reminded how it came apart so spectacularly.


Having found The Deer Hunter, however celebrated, to be one of the most tedious movies I’ve ever had the misfortune to watch, I have to admit I did enjoy Heaven’s Gate when it was eventually released, in its original 219-minute uncut version, in London sometime in the mid 1980s. Not to sound like an old softie, but when the final title card announcing “What one loves about life are the things that fade” appeared, I was a complete mess. I suppose I should get hold the vanilla-disc DVD to see if it still holds up. I suspect there’s no point holding out for a special-edition set.

Back when I first read Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, as entertaining as it was, I figured it was best to take Biskind’s account with a pinch of salt. After all, to drive home his point required ignoring not just a vast portion of what was happening in Hollywood, with directors who had flourished during the days of the old studio system still churning out masterpieces, but the emerging filmmakers who still made great movies without acting like complete cocks. Then again, it’s always the fuck-ups that provide the best copy.

Although set in the business, it’s really a morality play about how a bunch of young upstarts acted appallingly and got their just desserts. The book’s subtitle, How the Sex-Drugs-And Rock ‘N Roll Generation Saved Hollywood, still confused me a second time around. Maybe I missed something but how did they “save Hollywood” exactly? Most of these fuckwits behaved so badly and flushed away so much money on their useless vanity projects that by the 1980s the producers had taken charge, leading to the sort of nonsense that gets released nowadays.


While I’ve talked about all the great films of the 1970s that I miss due to their unavailability on disc and non-appearance on television, most of them aren’t covered in Biskind’s book. It may be sacrilege to say this but I couldn’t stand Easy Rider when I saw it at a late night screening during my art school foundation year. I’d have been quite happy for the shotgun-toting rednecks to turn up in the first couple of minutes and blow the arseholes away so I could have gone home and got a few extra hours of sleep.

When it comes to Robert Altman, while I love The Long Goodbye, MASH, and even Brewster McCloud, Nashville, which is regarded as his masterpiece, just leaves me utterly cold because the characters are just fucking annoying. If only the obligatory mad gunman had turned up earlier, with automatic weapons, and flamethrowers, in a tank, with air support. That aside, if he was the monumental arsehole that Biskind depicts in the book, he still managed to make a better fist of it than the likes of Bogdanovich and Billy Friedkin.


Even when it comes to the survivors of the decade, as lauded as Scorsese is, by the time I caught Bringing Out the Dead in a small cinema in the northeast corner of Key West, having ducked out of scuba classes, I’d had my fill. Having dutifully gone to see every new release, including the god awful New York Stories but barring Kundun, and caught up on the earlier films at repertory cinemas or on tape, however technically accomplished they films were, I’d more than had enough of investing in thoroughly repellent characters that I simply didn’t want to see again.

Reaching for The Devil’s Candy, which was the next book on the shelf , reminded me that I had been in New York all through the filming of The Bonfire of the Vanities. Every time I left the apartment and headed past a newsstand the Post was usually trumpeting some story about the madness involved in the making of the picture. Ultimately the movie was a diabolic mess that simply didn’t work when they tried to redeem the central characters, but you have to admire the optimism of Brian De Palma who, thinking he had a big hit on his hands, allowed a journalist from The Wall Street Journal unrestricted access to the production.


Whereas a more manageable tabloid hack might have stayed on the set getting all doe-eyed over the leads, Salamon spent more time roaming the production offices to discover how bad decisions and compromises brought the film down, especially once the press got the scent of blood in the water. At a Coro Foundation where Spike Lee and Tom Wolfe were featured speakers, the filmmaker mentioned to the author that the latest script draft rewrote the end of his book, giving the newspapers another field day. I loved how Salamon described Lucy Fisher, the Executive Vice President of Production at Warner Bros dealt with the situation, which basically says it all about the Hollywood game:

When she finally got through to Wolfe, the issue was settled with a brief, polite exchange. Spike Lee, however, was another matter altogether. He wasn’t an outsider like Wolfe. No matter how hard he worked at posing as the last angry black man, he made his films with Hollywood money. That made him part of the community and subject to its rules.

“How would you like it if you had a movie and someone else got up and started talking about the end of the movie and it was in the paper?” Fisher snapped at Lee. “How would you like that?”

Lee’s apology was sufficiently deferential to Wolfe, De Palma and Warner Bros,. though Fisher wasn’t entirely satisfied. She would have liked to yell at Lee a little more, but she hoped someday to work with him and didn’t want to press her luck.

Oddly enough, when I came back to the UK I found myself working for a producer who was ex-BBC Pebble Mill and therefore thought she was God's gift to television. Having dealt with Lee in some capacity when he had been interviewed for some damn programme she was involved with, she had described him as an insufferably arrogant prick. Given the histrionics and bad behaviour of both herself and her husband, that was saying something.

Between all the reading, the one programme I did make a point of catching was The South Bank Show profile of William Goldman. It’s been a while since I’ve seen an episode of ITV’s flagship/only arts programme and as bad as it used to be, it seemed to have gone rapidly downhill since. Goldman should be interesting, right? Instead it seemed to have been cobbled together from two interviews that covered the same ground that rather boringly stuck to the highlights and even allowed Goldman to almost contradict himself at one point.

It had all the depth of a saucer of water that had been left out in the sun for a few hours. While I could understand why Sir Richard Attenborough, who had directed both A Bridge Too Far and Magic, was invited to reflect on the man, along with Robert McKee who was there to comment on Goldman’s scripts, but why the fuck had Hugh Grant been brought along to contribute? I would have thought The Princess Bride would have got a look in. Having struggled to read Goldman’s absolutely appalling adaptation of Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, mention of his failures might have been as interesting as recycling the oft repeated anecdotes regarding the successes.


Then on Saturday evening I put the book aside and sat down to watch Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain. As I mentioned previously, I thought Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children were great pieces of cinema and Alien Resurrection an absolute mess. I’d missed Amélie even though everyone had said how brilliant it was, so with Channel 4 screening it, I figured I ought to make the effort to watch.

As a big fan of the great Ealing comedies and the Powell & Pressburger classics, I’m not adverse to whimsy, but after watching forty minutes of this utter nonsense I was overwhelmed with an urge to hurl a blunt object through the television screen. It actually made me want to slip in the DVD of Armageddon solely for the scene where the asteroid splinter creams Paris. Two days later, and having gone right back to the books, I’m still trying to figure out whether Amélie is the most irritating film ever made.