Homeland Insecurity
The Showtime series Homeland, starring Damian Lewis as a US prisoner of war coming home following years of captivity, has been described as the best thing currently on UK television. It’s also been described, by me after I raced through the whole series in January, as “a NeoCon penis pump“. Here, without any spoilers past the first two episodes, is why.
The hook of the show is that Lewis’ marine sergeant Nicholas Brody may or may not have been recruited as an enemy agent during his time in captivity. At the end of the first episode we see him beating the face off a fellow prisoner and collapsing in a bellowing heap into the arms of his torturers. At the end of the second we see him performing a muslim prayer. An “is he, isn’t he?” pattern is established encouraging audiences to flip from one side to the other. Hero! Terrorist! Hero! Terrorist!
This central premise is brilliantly dramatic, yes, but also designed to provoke insecurity. While we’re all used to watching television shows predicated on mystery (who killed Laura Palmer?) or the success of a mission (every iteration of 24, which shares producers with Homeland) this is a series-long arc defined by doubt. Whatever the final truth of Lewis’ character, one definite outcome is that we feel anxious and mistrusting. We all become a little like Claire Danes’ fractured CIA heroine – desperate to do the right thing, barely able to trust her own mind, open to illegal methods to get it done.
In this way Homeland continues the work carried out by 24. Homeland was developed by Howard Gordon and Alex Ganza, who also produced on the long-running real time terror circus (although they’re far from the lunatic fringe of 24 producers, a territory militantly occupied by Joel Surnow.) I remember the first time I saw Jack Bauer resort to torture – threatening to force a rolled towel down the throat of a suspect before withdrawing it to turn the bastard inside out – I was shocked. The dynamic in the early series was ‘How far can Jack go and still be in the right?’ By the later series it had become ‘How badly will Jack fuck up the terrorists this time?’
The debate had moved on – and, dangerously, 24 played its part in normalising torture as a miltiary act. Forget the fact it’s still illegal – it’s on TV! “That our own administration borrowed ideas from 24 is such a tragedy,” said one its own stars, Janeane Garofalo. And now, with the collective debate having moved into even more depressing territory – a bill giving the US military the right to detain citizens indefinitely without trial was signed into law during the series’ initial run – so in Homeland tracking potential terrorists through illegal surveillance which mock the rights of citizens isn’t even a major point of drama. It happens almost immediately. It is our starting point.
At the same time, Homeland invites us to be openly xenophobic. Take that episode-closing prayer scene, where the sight of Lewis performing ritual ablutions, rolling out a prayer matt and speaking Arabic is deemed horrifying enough to serve as a climactic cliffhanger. Take a second to think about what you’re reviled at there. A white guy who’s converted to Islam? An American soldier who’s converted to Islam? Positing the two as incompatible creeds posits Islam, rather than terrorists or violence, as the enemy of America.
One defence of Homeland is that it’s just following the lead of its source material, the Isreali series Hatufim. “The shock value of seeing a returned Jewish Israeli soldier reciting a Muslim prayer would have been twice as intense” ponders Jonathan Freedland emptily in a vacant Guardian piece. Yes – except the hook of betrayal and conversion is an American invention. The original is a straight take on the already plenty controversial subject of Israeli/Palestinian prisoner exchanges and the struggles of settling back into regular life. (“The more I researched it, the more I understood how rich it was in drama,” says creator Gideon Raff, who also worked on the US version.) The poisonous sleeper agent storyline is one made just for the US – stroking fears and whispering of an invisible menace. Who is our enemy now Osama Bin Laden is dead? It could be anyone. It could be the very heart of us. Stay vigilant. Do whatever we must.
As a final kick in the balls, I object to the use that Homeland makes of the excellent Damian Lewis. Lewis is terrific and I’m very glad to see him headlining a successful show. But he comes with a very particular set of on-screen baggage. It’s not just that he’s most familiar from the World War Two series Band Of Brothers, giving him immediate credentials as an American hero. It’s that in that series Lewis played a real man, Major Dick Winters – and that through Band Of Brothers’ unique structure, featuring the testimony of surviving Easy Company members including Winters at the beginning of every episode, the actor and the man were bound to one another in a unique way. His role in Homeland doesn’t represent a heroic leading man playing against type – this is a something more, bringing the memory of a past conflict and the people who fought in it to bear on a slanted justification for American foreign policy.
Band Of Brothers was first broadcast two days before 9/11, an event which is the dividing line between its compassionate patriotism and the scared, insular justifications of 24 and Homeland. Ten years after those attacks, with the war on terror more directionless and open-ended than ever, Homefront fuels fear, fuels doubt, and posits a weakening of the self as America’s greatest enemy, a decade-old echo of the shameful “You’re either with us or against us” rhetoric. It’s a brilliant TV show, but it’s also the confused ravings of a troubled, fading power.
Mœbius, McQuarrie, and the mind of modern science fiction
I wanted to write a short post in celebration of the hugely influential work of Ralph McQuarrie and Jean ‘Mœbius’ Giraud (looking completely fucking awesome at an exhibition of his work in 2011, above), who both passed away in the last few days. But in digging out some images I got lost in the tangle of collaboration and cross-pollination that lies behind the look of science-fiction films for the last 40 years and I wrote this hurried look at their interwoven careers instead. Interestingly the paths of McQuarrie and Mœbius only intersect once or twice, but around them revolved a regular cluster of familiar faces.
A lot of this comes out of my long-standing interest in Dune – not just the finished, flawed David Lynch version from 1984, but the abandoned attempts to adapt the book throughout the 1970s, and the 2000 mini series. Not only are the peculiar creative coils and offshoots of the Dune project characteristic of how the wider look of Hollywood sci-fi has been crafted, but the production is also a good starting point for Mœbius and McQuarrie.
In 1971, six years after Frank Herbert’s book was published, Arthur P. Jacobs bought the film option and lined it up as a $15 million follow-up to his 1968 Planet Of The Apes. In the end Ape sequels dominated his time and the film was dormant when he died in 1973. The following year the rights were bought by a French production group for experimental Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky to direct, even though Jodorowsky was a lunatic.
And maybe they were on to something: Jodorowsky assembled what now looks an impossibly awesome team of artists including Mœbius to design characters, Chris Foss to design the space craft, and HR Giger to design the twisted Harkonnen homeworld. Also on board initially was Douglas Trumbull, the special effects craftsman behind 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Andromeda Strain who’d directed Silent Running in 1972. He didn’t stay long, and was replaced by Dan O’Bannon, who’d worked on Dark Star with John Carpenter.
Mœbius contributed hundreds of concept pieces to the production of the film, but with $2 million spent Jodorowsky’s script was still unfilmable and in 1976 the attempt fell apart. One thing that did come out of the process was a comic book collaboration between Mœbius and Dan O’Bannon called The Long Tomorrow. “Dan is best known as a script writer, but is an excellent cartoonist,” Mœbius said. “One day, he showed me what he was drawing. It was the story board of ‘The Long Tomorrow’. A classic police story, but situated in the future.” Mœbius re-drew the storyboards and the finished piece, published in Heavy Metal magazine, was an influential, original blend of science fiction and noir.
Meanwhile Ralph McQuarrie was getting to work with George Lucas on Star Wars. McQuarrie had worked as a technical illustrator for Boeing and on CBS News posters for the Apollo missions, and brought a realistic, used-future style to bear on the project. Lucas said of his work:
His genial contribution, in the form of unequalled production paintings, propelled and inspired all of the cast and crew of the original Star Wars trilogy. When words could not convey my ideas, I could always point to one of Ralph’s fabulous illustrations and say, ‘do it like this’.
The similarity of McQuarrie’s illustrations to shots familiar from the films show Lucas did just that. He also approached Douglas Trumbull to work on the effects for Star Wars. Trumbull was working on Steven Spielberg’s Close Enounters Of The Third Kind and instead suggested John Dykstra, who’d worked on Silent Running. Following the collapse of Dune, Dan O’Bannon also worked on the film, creating several computer display sequences (an excellent and detailed look at these sequences, and how they would influence Alien and Blade Runner, can be found at Den Of Geek).
What Dan O’Bannon also did after the collapse of Dune was to write the original script for Alien with Ronald Shusett. Ridley Scott directed this script, famously hiring Giger to design the alien, and fellow Dune castaway Mœbius to work on the film’s ships and space suits (the understated realism of the designs again grounding the film’s story excesses).
When Jodorowsky’s Dune collapsed the rights were bought by savvy Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis. After Alien became a hit De Laurentiis sniffed an opportunity and in 1979 he approached Scott about directing his film. Scott agreed, and brought Giger back onto the project to storyboard (this is where Giger’s paintings of non-Harkonnen objects come from, like his astonishing take on Dune’s sandworms.)
Script issues eventually sank Scott’s stab at Dune too, and at the end of 1980 the director left the project to work on Blade Runner, starring Star Wars’ Harrison Ford and with effects from Trumbull. William Gibson, who admitted to having “reeled out of the theater in complete despair” when first watching Blade Runner because of its similarities to his unfinished Neuromancer, remembers a lunch with Scott where both men were clear about their debt to Heavy Metal magazine, to “Mœbius and the others.” Recognising his debt to The Long Tomorrow in particular, Scott invited Mœbius to work on the film’s pre-production, but the artist was busy with French animation Les Maîtres Du Temps. In his place Scott used Syd Mead, who like McQuarrie had worked as a corporate technical illustrator and who would go on to be a similarly influential futurist (his description of science fiction as “reality ahead of schedule” is a good fit for much of the work under discussion here).
Mead’s job right before Blade Runner was designing the V’Ger craft for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a film which featured work McQuarrie had done on an abandoned Star Trek feature and emergency effects work from Trumbull. And Mead’s job immediately after Blade Runner was Disney’s Tron, where he designed the impossibly cool and sleek Light Cycles, ridden by digital warriors which were conceived by Mœbius.
And the cycle of collaborations and crossovers continued. McQuarrie drew concept art for The Empire Strikes Back and Return Of The Jedi (not directed by David Lynch, despite Lucas’ offer), Spielberg’s ET, and eventually Ron Howard’s Cocoon, and later Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Mœbius worked with Howard and Lucas on 1988′s Willow, and with James Cameron on The Abyss in 1989 (Syd Mead had followed up McQuarrie’s craft work on Alien by designing the Sulaco for Cameron’s Aliens in 1986).
Of course that is a very myopic history focused on the careers of these departed artists. But it’s illustrative of the great tangle of ideas and minds behind the images brought to screen. I think about this tangle in two ways. On one level I like the idea of a constant, evolving production, a group of creative souls working in a Hollywood increasingly characterised by special effects to define how we conceive of the future. Since the 1970s look and image has become increasingly central to the identity of American films in particular -these are the men who crafted that look.
And in a more personal way it makes sense of a life spent loving science fiction, of that feeling I would get watching Star Wars and ET and Star Trek and Tron and Blade Runner that they were all somehow part of the same fictional universe, one that I had a special connection to. I’m a particularly good age for this, a child of the 1980s growing up with Hollywood’s special effects industry, absorbing these images and experiences which, in a reflection of the original creative process, fold in on each other and define my tastes and outlook. For that, and for the movies I’ll never stop watching, I thank these two men and the others they worked with.
There’s one image in particular that sums this up and that I’d like to end with – a design for an unmade Star Trek project which Ralph McQuarrie drew in the ’70s. It’s of the Starship Enterprise, but visually it’s pure Star Wars. I suspect it’s the closest these two giants of science fiction will ever get to co-existing.
Hugo, and the pointless raging against time
In my pre-Oscars post I talked a little about The Artist and Hugo, and how I thought The Artist would win because it was a film about filmmaking. There was also talk of how The Artist echoes Singin’ In The Rain, which is interesting because both came at a time when the way we watch films was threatened, or at least changing – television leading to the glitzy widescreen productions that included Singin’ In The Rain, and digital distribution leaving Hollywood stamping its feet and demanding that the internet be sent to its room.
The interesting point that I was too stupid to go on and make is that Hugo has even more in common with Hollywood’s 1950s wobble, as it’s part of the industry’s recent swing towards 3D (something still seen as television-defyingly cinematic) echoing the spate of post-war 3D releases like Kiss Me Kate, House Of Wax, and Dial M For Murder.
In a recent interview Martin Scorsese made a smart case for his decision to work in three dimensions, and being Martin Scorsese this case was bound up in the history of cinema and technology. He pointed out that each major technological transition in cinema has been greeted with hostility, whether it’s the move to sound fictionalised in The Artist and Singin’ In The Rain (“Do you know what those films sounded like, from 1927 to 1930? Nobody could move. They’re terrible films”) or the more gradual shift to colour, which was first introduced in 1935 but existed alongside black and white until the 1970s (Scorsese remembers in particular the critic Andrew Sarris pronouncing in 1969 that black and white was obsolete, and being “appalled”).
Of course, it was a decade after this pronouncement that Scorsese chose to ditch colour to make Raging Bull, in 1980. Why would a man so interested in exploring the possibilities of the medium, who’s now embraced 3D – why would he take a step back like that? The answer is that he loves film. The timing is no accident. Raging Bull came when colour was the established norm of Hollywood and cheap, quick-to-degrade film stock had become standard, but before the industry’s next great transition to home video or premium cable channels which would offer films a life outside of cinemas.
When colour became the norm is when colour became less stable. And when you were designing a film in colour – why do all that work, and design it in colour, and have that colour mean many different things, and within six years, why then have a faded version of that film? Faded pink and blue? I’m not going to do it. It was a political act in that way.
In other words, Raging Bull was a film that took a step backwards because the future hadn’t been invented yet. These days Martin Scorsese is a notable advocate of film preservation, his Film Foundation having “saved” over 500 films to date. In that way Hugo is clearly a film not just about films, but about saving films, which makes sense of the way Michael Stuhlbarg’s benign film historian leans into the camera to warn us that film is delicate, before restoring the heck out of Georges Méliès’ back catalogue. I’d also argue that Scorsese made Hugo in 3D for the same reason he made Raging Bull in black and white – because his historian’s eye frames technological shifts in a wider context, and in each case it was the best way to express his passion for and urge to protect cinema.
But of course if Hugo represents Scorsese’s fight to “save” cinema it’s also swept up in the industry’s rather less noble scrap to save itself – by thrusting 3D onto a largely undemanding audience, by awarding a stack of Oscars to The Artist and Hugo – films which ache for the past – and by aching for the past itself by campaigning for copyright measures that would artificially preserve an ageing industrial system.
In conclusion – Martin Scorsese is wise and extraordinary, and may well be proved right about 3D emerging from its awkward early technological stage to become accepted (and potentially then ignored) as standard. But also, whatever you think of them as films, The Artist and Hugo’s success at the Oscars is a sign of a solipsistic industry thinking happy thoughts and raging uselessly at the passing of time.
The Oscars 2012: What Do They Tell Us?
Have you seen all the movies nominated for a best picture oscar this year? Probably not – some of them sound really boring. Some of them are really boring. Here is a tiny guide to them all, and some things we can learn from them and their nominations.
Hugo
In which we learn: That Martin Scorsese can still get nominated for an oscar even with a “magical” kids film that makes it look like Robert Zemeckis has done a sick so big it covers the entire Gare Du Nord in glowing CG.
Hugo is a tribute to the tinkering ingenuity of cinema, and it might have been a dark, mysterious one. John Hurt lobbied for a role imagining a gritty reality, only to find the finished version “was not the film I thought it would be at all.” Not that it isn’t still wonderful in places. In particular, the places where it feels like a Scorsese love letter to cinema and its peculiar mechanical poetry – the figure of the automaton (animated by clockwork artistry and, in my favourite of all the film’s cinematic allusions, a Tin Man in search of a heart) and the railroad setting itself, which puts me in mind of this wonderful quote from Walter Murch (from this interview):
“There’s a big link between trains and film. One of the first filmed objects was a train. The clickety-clack of the projector and the clickety-clack of the train are similar. There is the idea of the voyage—every voyage is a story. I wonder if film would have been invented without the train. Somehow, the invention of tracks and all of that made us think a certain way about the world, and that led eventually to the idea of the sprocketed film, with its frame lines.”
But wowing you with cine-literacy is like making toast for Scorsese, and this is awkwardly plotted, overly sentimental and, I suspect, only nominated because the Academy loves movies that love the movies.
Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close
In which we learn: That Hollywood still conflates mental affliction with profundity. Remember how hushed everyone was about American Beauty’s plastic bag? And how fucking stupid that looks now? Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close is like if that plastic bag raised $40 million, hired Tom Hanks and made its own fucking movie with a shouting kid whose startling insights into impenetrable trauma are justified by the fact he was once tested for Asperger’s.
It’s a way of viewing a shocking event from a remove – through childhood, through illness, through pretended, mawkish innocence (the film’s 9/11 euphemism “the most awful day” is an almost perfect vomit trigger). And it’s not profound, for future reference, it’s bullshit.
The Descendants
In which we learn that: Critics who point to George Clooney putting in a career-best performance in Alexander Payne’s sad hula-drama seem to have skim-read that career to this point. Hey you guys! You should watch Michael Clayton, your cocks will fall off.
Clooney is good here, and the film is good too, though in an understated way everyone seems to have accepted as wisdom rather than pointed glibness. It doesn’t allow itself to be fun in the way Walker’s best film, Election, does, and I’ve had enough soaring dysfunctional family units to fill me full of unexpected emotional redemption FOR FUCKING EVER.
The Tree Of Life
In which we learn: That the tumbling coyness of the cosmos can be illuminated through Brad Pitt’s buzz cut and a fucking CG dinosaur.
Or rather – it really can’t, but apparently the Academy won’t laugh at you for trying. I’m a moon-sized apologist for The Thin Red Line, and Terence Malick uses the same rhythms and cadences here – drifting shots of not-action clearly culled from a thousand hours of unused scenes pieced together with ambient sound and urgent yet distant action. I barely understood any of it. Lots of it was fucking brilliant.
But it also has a CG dinosaur. I mean, I’m rooting for you guys, but if you’re selling some orange gas in space with Sean Penn whispering over the top as anything approaching the meaning of the universe and not expecting me to laugh in your face, then fuck off. Kubrick did all this in one cut, from bone to satellite. It’s over already
Also, here as in Moneyball, Brad Pitt sometimes confuses acting with jutting his chin out a bit. It’s distracting.
The Help
In which we learn: That Hollywood loves not-racism. Even though it is in many fundamental ways racist.
On that subject it’s hard to sum up The Help better than this insightful movie poster. It’s also worth noting that if you take away the civil rights issues that help everyone feel self-congratulatory and enlightened, underneath is a drama of one-dimensional characters and brazen emotional manipulation (“You’re my real mommy,” says a fat groomed child with dead-eyed emotional precision).
In other words it’s not really one of the best films of last year at all. But then again it has Emma Stone and the utterly fabulous Allison Janney, so shut my mouth.
Midnight In Paris
In what we learn: That Woody Allen still gets hard for jazz and elusive girls.
And that’s fine, because Midnight In Paris is the best Woody Allen since the fuck-awful Cassandra’s Dream wiped away all my memories of his other films forever. Owen Wilson gives a pathetic likability to Allen’s otherwise typically yearning and dissatisfied leading man, and his champagne dash through a 1920s Paris packed with literary lights and golden age artists falls just the right side of ‘being really mean to Hemmingway.’
Yes, Allen is still writing the same brashly cultured New Yorkers he was writing 40 years ago. And yes, Midnight In Paris gives him unprecedented license to wank into an intellectual cup. But how refreshing to finish one of his movies and not immediately want to cry, drink a bottle of gin and put Annie Hall on.
Moneyball
In which we learn: A bunch of stuff about baseball I’ve already forgotten.
You know what? It’s fine. It’s low-key and has moments of what could be considered poignant stillness and Aaron Sorkin’s name on the writing credits, and in that respect it’s like last year’s awards-friendly The Social Network. It also shares with Fincher’s film a detached way of examining how Important Things have changed significantly in the very recent past – the way we connect with each other, the beating heart of America’s great game.
This along with Brad Pitt and that jutting chin make sense of the nomination. But what they don’t make is any kind of sports movie. “How can you not be romantic about baseball?” asks Brad Pitt, barely pretending to be Oakland As general manager Billy Beane. And yet the movie has no fucking clue – if we’re looking at drama and power and emotional force (and, the alternative being statistics about getting on base, I really fucking am) then Moneyball should only win an oscar in the same universe as Friday Night Lights wins a Nobel Prize for Kicking Ass.
The Artist
In which we learn: That I love Gene Kelly more than Jean Dujardin. Just about.
The Artist is comfortably the best of this year’s nominees thanks to its stylistic daring and formal creativity, which is to say that it’s in black and white with hardly any talking and features a dancing dog. It’s also the favourite to win, partly because it’s another film about films, and partly because betting against Harvey Weinstein is like betting against a 400lb gorilla with a glock.
What stopped me gushing all over that beautiful little dog was that the story in The Artist is one told earlier and better by Singin’ In The Rain. The parallel’s an interesting one. In the same way that Singin’ In The Rain was part of Hollywood’s nervous response to television – taking on the small grey box with widescreen, colour and lavish productions – so The Artist arrives as the industry eyes its digital future with something approaching outright panic. Both retreat to the comfort of an earlier momentous shift – from silence to sound – and both decide that the answer to all life’s problems is probably dancing.
It’s no surprise that Harvey Weinstein should find himself in the middle of all this. He’s made a career of surfing the wave of industrial change, and launched the age of the video-educated director (he looks like he’ll be fine when we’re all absorbed into The Cloud, too). But in 2012 The Artist is an oscar favourite. In 1952 Singin’ In The Rain wasn’t even nominated. How times have changed. (Which is the point, I guess. As well as a dog who can dance.)
PS Oh yeah – I didn’t watch War Horse. Because.
Miramax: A journey through Netflix
One of the things I most thoroughly regret is not having the concentration and energy to finish the PhD I started on authorship in contemporary Hollywood. But if those years spent researching gave me anything besides quite a big DVD collection, it’s a painfully narrow and useless-in-almost-every-context-imaginable knowledge of Miramax Films.
So imagine my joy when Netflix UK launched with a healthy library of Miramax movies, providing just such a context. Here, for no other reason that it’s possible and the information exists in my brain, is a brief history of Miramax using films available on Netflix as illustration. The films mentioned in bold and in lists of italics are available to stream now. Sign up for a 30 day trial and watch them all if you want. Or don’t, because it’s not like they’re paying me.
The Beginning
Miramax was launched by Bob and Harvey Weinstein, the only studio bosses in history to have been played by puppet villains, in 1979. It was a lunatic time for the film business, with the arrival of home video combined with the rise of the blockbuster changing the industry at a crazy pace.
“Perhaps the biggest boom that has ever occurred in the independent sector was the explosion of home video in the early 80s” says Ira Deutchman, who really should know as he was president of New Line spin-off Fine Line Features. “It was a voracious market for anything with sprocket holes, and even the major studios couldn’t provide enough product to satisfy the demand.”
In the bubble that video created several small studios thrived. It was relatively easy to catch a break and make a few deals, but harder as the bubble contracted to maintain success. This is where Miramax excelled – at choosing films that played to traditional non-mainstream audiences (people have broken their minds defining these audiences, but they’re basically referring to arthouse/prestige movies, and exploitation/genre flicks) and then marketing these films aggressively by playing up sex, violence and controversy.
Jon Pierson, an industry middle-man who helped sell the Weinsteins sex drama Working Girls in 1987 (available on US Netflix) said they had “an instinctual grasp of how to walk the tightrope between sensationalistic come-on and classy intellectual tease,” which sums up campaigns run for Scandal, sex, lies and videotape, Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down! and many others during this time.
Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover is a great example of a film sexed to success. It is full of gore and knobbing, but it’s also dark and difficult to watch, with Greenaway’s deliberately stiff theatrical style intellectualising the nudity and making it all but impossible to have a wank to. It was one of several Miramax movies handed an ‘X’ rating on release – the studio mustered a tabloid-like campaign in the courts challenged the very basis of the ‘X’, calling it “the property” of pornographers, thus sending out a clear message that their film was classy while also advertising the fact it contains lots of tits. (Eventually this pressure helped force the introduction of the MPAA’s NC-17 rating).
The Thin Blue Line is a superb piece of documentary filmmaking by Errol Morris which analyses the roadside murder of a Texan police officer through interview testimony. It’s so finely constructed that it needs no voice-over, yet was powerful enough to overturn a wrongful conviction. Naturally, the Weinsteins made it look like a deadline-driven Hollywood thriller.
Harvey Weinstein famously described Miramax as “the house that Quentin built,” and in that sense Reservoir Dogs is the studio’s most important early film. It finished the job sex, lies started, putting Sundance on the map and giving shape and character to US indie filmmaking for a decade (even if that shape was invariably ‘like Tarantino, but slightly worse.’)
See also: Sirens (1993)
Welcome to the Mouse House
In April 1993 Miramax was bought by Disney, which sounds fucking mental. But it made sense. The industry-wide trend for making mega-budget blockbusters with global appeal and merchandise-friendly elements meant the one market huge media conglomerates like Disney couldn’t reach with their giant evil money-claws was the ‘specialist’ sector. It was like putting a spear at the end of a missile – Miramax knew how to seduce those lucrative but small audiences who hated the crassness and obviousness of mainstream Hollywood and, besides, they really needed the money.
Pulp Fiction was the result of the new financial power the buy-out gave them. Now able to produce their own films, not just purchase them for distribution, the Weinsteins agreed to finance Tarantino’s movie for $8 million just two months after joining Disney. They were now a true mini-major studio, and a crazy successful one – Pulp Fiction is the best film Miramax made, and it earned over $200 million at the box office.
At the same time the Weinsteins realised that with a corporate hand up their arse it was a good idea to look as indie as possible, which is often given as the reason for Miramax buying Clerks at Cannes in 1994. It was even described as “shrewd” by director Kevin Smith: “Buying this scrappy black and white American independent film shot on the ultra-cheap was a great PR move for them,” he said, laudably not saying “dick” even once.
See also: The Englishman Who Went Up A Hill And Came Down A Mountain (1995), Sling Blade (1996), Swingers (1996), Emma (1996)
Another Dimension
As I’ve said, non-mainstream movies split very generally into two groups: arthouse and exploitation (the common factor being they both promise the occasional flash of skin). This is reflected in the fact that Miramax’s biggest rival was New Line Cinema, who would become the powerhouse behind The Lord Of The Rings but whose foundations were laid with a Nightmare On Elm Street, Evil Dead and Critters.
To compete with New Line Miramax set up a horror label called Dimension films, primarily run by Bob, which rose to prominence when it released Wes Craven’s Scream in 1996. Scream was a reinvention of the slasher movie that proved just as influential in its sphere as Miramax and Tarantino were in theirs (films as recent and terrible as Final Destination 5 can be blamed on Scream). And just as many of Miramax’s films pondered the institutions and industrial shifts behind Miramax’s success (sex, lies and videotape and home entertainment, Cinema Paradiso and arthouse theatres) so Scream was a self-aware horror for the encyclopaedic video-age viewer.
Scream’s smart mouth is generally credited to screenwriter Kevin Williamson, who also wrote The Faculty which was directed for Dimension in 1998 by Robert Rodriguez. It’s like a fun, good-looking version of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers without Donald Sutherland’s existentially terrifying maw, and must be considered Important as it’s probably the best Famke Janssen has looked on screen.
Because the exploitation business has no shame, when the Scream franchise ran dry it was Dimension itself that made a further giant pile of money from ripping it to pieces with the Scary Movie series, “Scary Movie” being the working title for Craven’s original film.
And mixed in with all the wry demographic-humping slashers was the occasional bit of class, like Alejandro Amenábar’s period ghost story The Others, which is excellent even before Eric Sykes turns up.
See also: The Prophecy (1995), Scary Movie, 2,3,4 (2000), Dracula 2001 (2000), The Others (2001), Equilibrium (2002), The Amityville Horror (2005), Sin City (2005), Death Proof (2007), Planet Terror (2007)
Chasing Oscar
Miramax’s success altered the landscape around them. Other big studios launched or acquired ‘boutique’ side operations to compete (New Line at Warner, Sony Classics, Fox Searchlight) and indie films became big business. Budgets bloated, and Miramax’s output changed.
The company still made small, sharp movies. Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy is a good example – it’s his best film, and a look at the funny but disciplined filmmaker he might have been. Also on Netflix are heavy drama In The Bedroom, which did us all the favour of making Tom Wilkinson a name in Hollywood, and searing Brazilian import City Of God, which proved the Miramax name was still on thrillingly good films as late as 2002.
But after the success of The English Patient at the Academy Awards in 1997, Miramax and Harvey Weinstein’s focus shifted to prestige films. Films with classy themes, with the names of Booker Prize-winning authors written on the poster in fucking big letters, set in the desert or by the sea or some other bastard poignant place. Films which win Oscars.
It was a sensible switch of strategy. In the arthouse arms race winning the Oscar is the final stamp of quality. And, like dragging the MPAA to court because you’re ‘shocked’ your Spanish movie about a BDSM-fetish rapist got an ‘X’, it’s also great free publicity. The problem was that as time went on Miramax’s award-chasing films got costlier and drearier, from The Cider House Rules at $24 million in 1999 to Chicago’s $45 million in 2002 and Cinderella Man’s $85 million in 2005. Miramax was no longer independent, specialist, or very interesting.
See also: The Castle (1997), Wings Of The Dove (1997), Rounders (1998), Chocolat (2000), Serendipity (2001), Kate & Leopold (2001), The Son’s Room (2001), Infernal Affairs (2002), Frida (2002), Hero (2002), The Station Agent (2003), Kill Bill 1 & 2 (2003/4), Finding Neverland (2004), Jersey Girl (2004), Kinky Boots (2005), The Brothers Grimm (2005)
The Mouse That Roared
With Miramax clearly not fulfilling the function for which is was originally intended, the Weinsteins’ contracts were wound down and they were effectively ousted by Disney execs in October 2005.
The company continued for a few years following their departure and made some excellent films. Maudlin noir drama Hollywoodland did the seemingly impossible and made Ben Affleck look good again after the tabloid ruin of Bennifer and Gigli, and then his directorial debut Gone Baby Gone made him look positively fucking golden. The Lookout was a tough thriller from Out Of Sight scripter Scott Frank which caught Joseph Gordon-Levitt on his rise to being the coolest guy in Hollywood, and There Will Be Blood is a raging geyser of thick, blinding, black fury. (It’s really good).
See also: The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas (2008) but watch out because it’s really sad.
The Weinstein Company
The Weinsteins took Dimension with them (I’ve not separated the pre- and post-divorce films in the list above) and set out to make more Academy-friendly films of tedious quality with slightly less money. Evidence on Netflix includes Miss Potter from 2006, and Hannibal Rising from 2007 (the Weinsteins having not learned Dino De Laurentiis’ lesson that, if you didn’t make Silence Of The Lambs, it’s over.)
What makes tracing the path of Miramax and the Weinsteins on Netflix particularly interesting, and the reason I decided to write this post, is that tucked away in the documentary category is Barry Avrich’s Unauthorized: The Harvey Weinstein Story. It takes in the same basic story as I’ve just laid out, without as much swearing and with visual reference to Peter Biskind’s extra-terrestrial moustache. It puffs up and re-uses a lot of old Weinstein stories – He shouts! He edits! He went to see 400 Blows by accident! – but they are good stories.
See also: Derailed (2006), The Forbidden Kingdom (2008), Outlander (2008) but actually, don’t.
Afterword
The documentary’s one failing is reflected on Netflix: it leaves the story too soon. Smarming on the failure of Miss Potter, it all but condemns Harvey as an Oscar has-been just months before he owned the 2011 awards with The King’s Speech.
Tellingly, he looks set to do the same again this year with The Artist, a film made for just $15 million which features more charm, style and brains than anything he’d made at Miramax this century. And if not The Artist then maybe his other frontrunners My Week With Marilyn or The Iron Lady – Harvey Weinstein, without Disney’s money and apparently with a sharper sense of hunger, is on a legitimate roll. I’m glad to see him back.
David Lynch’s Best Forgotten Characters
When I saw that Time Out had done a list of the best 50 Lynch characters my reaction was something like, “Jesus, 50? That’s click-bait madness”. Then I took a look at the list and realised that not only were the 50 choices all excellent, but that there were plenty of other brilliant characters missing.
What it really brought home is how exceptionally good Lynch is at making even the smallest part memorable. He is a master of the odd behavioural tic, the unexpected casting, the bizarre frozen moment of heightened significance. And as a small tribute here are my favourite seven Lynch characters that embody that skill, and weren’t included in Time Out’s 50.
1. Guild Navigator – Dune, 1984
Dune is a brilliant mess of ideas Lynch clearly fell in love with and a commercial mode of filmmaking he couldn’t get a grip on. It’s a dichotomy that gave us the unspeakable. But it also gave us this – a giant spice-breathing space slug in a big jar capable of folding space with its mind.
2. Major Briggs – Twin Peaks, 1989
The big recurring cast of Twin Peaks presented Lynch with opportunities for all kinds of oddballism. My favourite – Major Garland Briggs, the father of petulant juvenile Bobby whose stiff bearing becomes rigid military poetry when he’s exposed to the euphoria of the White Lodge.
3. Piter De Vries – Dune, 1984
Lynch takes Frank Herbert’s notion of Mentats as human computers and makes them awesomely compelling mind-junkies by inventing a weird chant and giving them huge fucking eyebrows. “It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of sapho that thoughts acquire speed. The lips acquire stains, the stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.”
4. Agent Phillip Jeffries – Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me, 1993
This is the best moment in Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me. I have no explanation for it, except that David Bowie’s Phillip Jeffries seems to have been taken by the forces of the Black Lodge. But I love the stunt with the security camera – removing our faith in the recorded image at a stroke – and the spiralling urgency which Bowie’s appearance provokes.
5. Rebekah Del Rio – Mulholland Dr, 2001
Del Rio’s short appearance in the Club Silencio section of Mulholland Dr is one of the rare things I’m allowed to call ‘stunning’ without sounding like a hyberbolic dick. It’s crammed with ideas: she’s introduced as “La Llorona de Los Angeles,” a modern take on a Mexican folk tale of a ghostly weeping woman and the latest in a long line of women singing on stage in Lynch’s work (Lady In The Radiator, Isabella Rossellini, Julee Cruise). Her performance is an echo of Dean Stockwell’s sleazy torchlit strut in Blue Velvet – where he mimed to Roy Orbison’s In Dreams, she pours herself into a Spanish translation of Orbison’s Crying. And of course, she’s found to be miming too, the resounding emotional power of her voice mocking the audience’s investment as she collapses to the floor and underpinning the film’s fractured take on what is and isn’t real.
6. The Yellow Man – Blue Velvet, 1986
The weirdness of Blue Velvet’s small town suburbia reaches its apotheosis when Jeffrey discovers the still-warm murder scene inside Dorothy’s apartment, featuring Dorothy’s dead husband and, standing impossibly next to him, The Yellow Man. He’s neither alive nor obviously dead, lobotomised on the spot and – along with the whining, broken television – giving us the sense that Jeffrey is interrupting something active and ongoing.
7. Audrey Horne’s fucking shoes – Twin Peaks, 1989
Which speak entirely for themselves.
Let’s (re)do this Thing
I watched the prequel to John Carpenter’s The Thing today, which is also called The Thing because it’s not really a prequel but a remake with incidental changes.
It adds very little to what Carpenter’s film had already laid down. In fact it gets some of it wrong. What Carpenter understood – or at least didn’t have the budget to explore – is that his film didn’t need anything more than a shapeshifting alien and loads of fucking ice. The film is very tightly wound around key concepts – intense paranoia heightened by Arctic isolation, our heroes surrounded by ice and only able to kill the enemy with fire. The alien’s ship is unexplored, its consciousness a blank. Even the exact process by which it transforms into and disposes of bodies is left to our imagination.
The remake leads us into areas best left unexplored. It gives us a clumsy brace of horror cliches – a long autopsy-table look at the alien’s body, then a microscope-lens view of its spiky, evil cells replicating the shit out of a human host. There’s some power to the half-formed man uncovered in its stomach (is he half-ingested, or half-formed?) but effective as it might be, I don’t want to see details. In Carpenter’s movie, the discovery of a two-headed corpse was heavy with monstrous meaning. It’s a beautiful symbol of shattered identity, fallen man, agony – was this a human host resisting the parasite? A creature tortured by its own mutated existence? Oh, no – the new film tells us it was two people whose heads were pressed together by a fucking alien. And for fuck’s sake, don’t set the climax down some fucking air vent on the alien ship as its engines are powering up. Jesus.
All of which is stupid, because remaking The Thing is easy. Don’t believe me? Here are three ways of doing it that are way better than last year’s average attempt.
This is a music video made for a track called ‘Driving This Road Until Death Sets You Free’ by some men from France called Zombie Zombie, which sort-of remakes The Thing with GI Joes.
Here’s a more direct remake set in the world of Pingu, which for reasons unexplained is not called Thingu.
And here’s an incredible piece of work which recuts the film as a musical, set from the perspective of the alien and sung in the style of Frank Sinatra.
That wasn’t so fucking hard, was it?
Nathan Ditum
