Eastwood report: Joe Kidd
The two hats of Joe Kidd.
The other day I noted the sheer number of Clint Eastwood movies I hadn’t seen, an odd lapse for me regarding a filmmaker I admire so much. So I harnessed the power of the internet and bought an abnormally large number of Clint Eastwood movies. I set my budget at no more than $3 per movie and had no trouble keeping it through Amazon.com. As I stroll through this forest of Eastwoodness, I will report in to my loyal readers.
Joe Kidd hits at an odd place for Eastwood — it’s in between Dirty Harry and High Plains Drifter. The Outlaw Josey Wales, which I think of as Eastwood’s first inarguable masterpiece, is still four years off. It’s directed by John Sturges, but it’s produced by Eastwood and is obviously tailored to fit his established persona — it all but winks at us as it sets up its Eastwoody goodness. It has an "Old Hollywood" Technicolor look about it, with bright, saturated colors (the blood looks like tempura paint) and only occasionally pays attention to light in the way I associate with Eastwood. It’s got Robert Duvall in it (concurrent with The Godfather but after his bad-guy part in the John Wayne vehicle True Grit) as a rich white guy, which makes it feel very modern, and John Saxon as a Mexican, which makes it feel very old-fashioned. It’s got a screenplay by Elmore Leonard, and even bears signs of his leanness of narrative — little is explained in Joe Kidd, and the story is extremely simple.
The State of the Art
On the one hand, it’s nice to know that I’m not crazy. On the other hand, man, I hate being right.
There was a panel discussion at the WGA Theater, where a couple of screenwriters, a couple of producers and a couple of studio executives gathered to talk about development. Ace screenwriter John August reports. Over the years, I’d figured out on my own a lot of the things that were talked about, but it was both bracing and a little scary to hear my own doom-and-gloom suspicions reflected back at me.
The headlines:
Fewer movies are being developed, which means there are more writers competing for each job, which means that the very few people in Hollywood who actually pay money to writers for writing screenplays pretty much get to ask for whatever they want to: free development, multiple free treatments, free screenplay drafts. The screenwriter who objects to working for weeks, or months, or years for free (my record is two years on one project) is labeled "difficult" and is out of the running. The great screenwriter who isn’t "good in the room" is passed over for the mediocre screenwriter who makes everyone laugh at the pitch meeting.
The studios are in the control of the marketing folk. That means that any movie idea that can’t be summed up in five words is suspect and anything that takes more than a sentence is rejected outright. Italso means that screenwriter’s "ideas" are less valuable than ever, since they haven’t been "pre-sold." (My favorite story from the discussion is from Jonathan Hensleigh, who had an idea for a movie he couldn’t sell, so he bought the rights to a comic book that had a similar idea, because "the fucking idiots need a pre-branded thing to look at."
One would think that the success of Slumdog Millionaire would mean that every studio is out looking for the next Slumdog Millionaire, right? Wrong. Slumdog Millionaire has, if I’m not mistaken, four different studios and production companies’ names at the front of it — it’s obviously a movie that had a very hard time finding its financing. That was true when it was made and it would still be true tomorrow. Because, as successful as it is, there was no way to predict that. If the producer walked into a studio executive’s office, x years ago, with the script for Slumdog Millionaire in his hand and a report from the future that it would make over $100 million and win the Best Picture Oscar, complete with Variety reports and video footage, the executive would still turn it down: it has no stars (which is bad for international sales), is mostly a grim story about the difficult lives of Mumbai orphans, is a hard sell, and can’t be summed up in five words. "Mumbai Orphan Wins Game Show Through Miracle" is the shortest I could compact the story, and that’s two words too many, sorry, what about a movie based on Shamwow?
Movie Night with Urbaniak: She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
So urbaniak and I have been watching some of the classic John Ford-John Wayne movies. We started with The Searchers, because everyone does, and then moved to The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, then Fort Apache. The result: Urbaniak feels that this Wayne guy could really be going places. "He’s my new favorite actor," quoth the thespian, who apparently had never really sat down and watched a John Wayne movie before. Not even True Grit.
Some thoughts on Annie Hall and romantic comedies in general
mimitabu writes:
"Do [romantic comedies] usually have a protagonist? what does s/he usually want? "Get back into a family"? "Find happiness"? "Get over my ex"? "Become a better person so i can be a better father/mother"? Then i thought about the best romantic comedy, Annie Hall. i thiiiink you once wrote here that it has brilliant script, but i don’t believe you’ve ever posted an in-depth analysis of it. Does it have a protagonist? Is it Alvy? What does he want? "To get the eggs"? Is he just living out some sort of narcissistic pathology? Are there rules that Annie Hall follows that other successful romantic comedies also follow? If so, do they do away with the idea of a protagonist altogether?
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Clint Eastwood: the good, the bad and the ones I haven’t seen
I’ve been thinking a lot about Unforgiven lately, which leads me to think a lot of Clint Eastwood, which leads me to think of, strange as it sounds, Woody Allen. It’s hard to think of Clint Eastwood and Woody Allen as even existing on the same planet, much less as comparable artists, but they are two of my favorite living American directors, they are roughly contemporaries (Eastwood is five years older), they both get to make just about any kind of movies they want to make, and, since the mid-1960s, each has managed to get at least a movie a year into the theaters, on their own terms and following their own particular muses. Nobody gets to make movies in this manner any more.
(Thinking about Clint Eastwood also, inevitably, leads me to think about John Wayne, whose work urbaniak and I have been soaking up lately. I grew up watching Clint Eastwood movies, assuming they were some sort of "answer" to John Wayne movies. Wayne, popular imagination had it, was a reactionary crank who stood for everything Just and American, while Eastwood was a cold-hearted psychopath intent on critiquing everything that Wayne stood for. I thought all that without ever watching a John Wayne movie, and so now I’m lost, because I’m learning that John Wayne, too, was also intent on critiquing everything that John Wayne stood for. And then, of course, Eastwood has spent a good deal of his career critiquing everything that he has stood for. It’s all so confusing.)
Anyway, nobody asked, but because I’m a list-making sort of person, here is my listing of Clint Eastwood movies in order of preference:
They grow up so fast
Sam (7) and I were watching the groundbreaking series Planet Earth the other day, the "Shallow Seas" episode. To give a little shape to its eye-popping array of fabulous images of animals doing things, "Shallow Seas" incorporates a little tiny "plot:" a mother humpback whale gives birth to a calf at the Equator, then hangs out with it for five months while it gets big, then swims with it to the North Pole, where the seas are rich with whatever humpback whales eat. In this arduous five-month period, the mother humpback eats nothing.
Anyway, Sam and I are watching "Shallow Seas," and they tell us about the mother humpback and her devotion to her calf, and then they tell us about coral reefs and sea-snakes and brittle stars and a whole bunch of other critters, and then they come back to the mother humpback and her calf and "check in" with them, as they’re heading north on their long trek.
And Sam says: "Wait. Did they follow this humpback and her calf all the way from the Equator to the North Pole? Why would they do that? Wouldn’t it make more sense to shoot one humpback and calf at the Equator, then go to the North Pole and find another humpback and calf that just kind of looks like the first one? I mean, it’s not like anybody could tell the difference."
Already a producer.
Nota bene
Michael Kupperman, one of America’s greatest cartoonists, has a blog. You should go read it.
Favorite Screenplays: Death Proof part 3
Part 2 of Death Proof begins with the "Psycho scene," where an "authority figure" declaims, for the audience’s benefit, the subtext of Part 1 — Ranger EarlMcGraw tells us what we’ve already grasped, that Stuntman Mike is a dangerous psychopath who crashes his "death proof" car into women’s cars for his sexual gratification. The scene is a gentle dig at Psycho‘s famously inept coda, but Tarantino adds a couple of icky layers to it: first, he includes Dr. Block, a character from Death Proof‘s co-feature Planet Terror, and gives her a weird, violent reaction to kindly, wizened Ranger McGraw, a reaction that can only be appreciated by watching the other movie (Dr. Block having her own problems with men). Then, after McGraw has finished his spiel on Stuntman Mike and his sick pathology, he announces that he’d rather follow the Nascar circuit than investigate Mike’s crimes, placing Mike’s MO in the broader context of a national malaise: there are millions of people who find some level of gratification watching stock cars smash into each other.
Favorite Screenplays: Death Proof part 2
It sounds like a strange comparison, but Tarantino, in one way, reminds me of Spielberg, in that his movies are always thematically quite dense. Death Proof, like, say, Jurassic Park, features a strong theme that resonates down to the smallest of details, from broad story outlines to the tiniest of gestures.
Happy Valentine’s Day from What Does the Protagonist Want?
Click for larger view.
Sam’s valentine for his class this year. In case it’s not clear, that’s Indiana Jones, clutching a stolen heart, being chased by a giant rolling m&m. (Small bags of m&m’s were taped to the back of each valentine.
As an added attraction, beneath the fold I’ve compiled a collection of my favorite valentine designs from around the internet. If you "get" every single one of these jokes, congratulations! You’re a geek.
Feel free to post your own finds.