[I reordered the original, more-sensible draft of this, to put what should be more interesting to most people further up front. My heuristics/standards are noted before a sketch of the history of my developing critical eye for movies. Also, my entry on Winter’s Bone is on the way; I am being especially careful with it, given the sensitively commercial and culturally esteemed nature of one or more of the people involved.]
This can’t help but be a personal, idiosyncratic matter. Saul Bellow, somewhere in his novel Humboldt’s Gift (1975), wrote (through the narrator, I think) something like, “When people are in transition, they think of going into the movie business.” And as it happens, in a very general sense, when my life is in some transition with uncertain destination, I get more concerned with movies. Usually this has meant seeing them more, “looking for something,” not really wanting to go into the movie business….
My father liked going to movies, from what I’ve heard. My mother doesn’t have much interest in seeing movies (though she can see some) or in discussing them. I can recall how movies figured in my life, almost like the one sure thing in American culture as far as something being meaningful and exalting within your own reach, sometimes coming into view when you didn’t really expect it, or couldn’t fully appreciate it yet (as you might later).
1. How I look at movies and actors
As someone who has long been a fan and critic of movies, especially regarding how they can be art—conveying aspects of the depth and breadth of life, and what people can be—I don’t write as an insider. One big benefit of DVDs is that the extras—interviews of performers, director commentary over the movie, documentaries of a movie’s making—all help you understand the process more. All this plus what I learned in the 1970s and 1980s (see second subsection) builds over time.
As far as the pipe-dream side of things is concerned, I’ve long thought that if I ever had the chance, if I was involved in movies, it would not be in front of the camera; it would be as a director and writer. And maybe a producer too, since I learn more about that arcane area of endeavor in working to rig up my own little productions; I think being a producer is being a kind of hustler, or erring on the side of that (whereas a director errs more on the side of being an artiste). I think it may be somewhat like being an editor: if someone were to ask, “What is that? Do you get certified?,” I would say, “You definitely don’t get ‘certified’; and I’ve done it for many years, but there are no rules, and I still don’t know if I quite have it down, or it seems I always have to learn something new with this, at least in terms of dealing with the peculiarities of certain individuals.”
Believe me, I know about the print media industry. I have long thought that if a lot of its fans knew a lot about its inner workings, they might like its products less. So lately, in online spiels, I try to take a break-of-sorts from the “rat race” in that field, and look at movies more as a consumer. If actors and movie-production folks would say, “You’d be disillusioned by this art, too, if you saw what its inner workings were like,” I’d say, “Probably. The more I learn about the behind-the-scenes stuff, the more I say, ‘It shouldn’t surprise me.’ But just let me talk about them [as I do in this blog] as an interested layman, because you are trying to make art (sometimes), and I want to appreciate it as such. Just as you might want to appreciate print-media products.”
Here are a few of my rules of thumb in assessing movies:
* Attitude toward actresses. When I talk about actresses’ being attractive or not, some of this (related to physical appearance) is merely dopey-subjective. But as is more key, some is also predicated on the idea that actresses by and large get entrée into their field by being attractive, or at least superficially relatable-to by the masses. So that enters into my assessment of them—partly because, I think, any attractive female, if she has grand things to say as an artist, has this ability to say things while encumbered (and also abetted) by her being attractive or otherwise charismatic in what may seem (at first) a shallow way.
This sort of thing is less sexist than it may strike some. Dustin Hoffman, in his interesting during-the-movie commentary for the 40th-anniversary DVD of The Graduate (1967), makes the observation that Katharine Ross in the movie not only is striking looking, but is remarkable for seeming as if she doesn’t present herself with an awareness of herself as being attractive. Some women have such an awareness as a correlate of their being attractive, he says, and as a result, that detracts from them a bit. He seems unsure as he unfolds part of this observation—and Katharine Ross, who is on board with him to make comments, does not contradict this remark; but I think he has a very good point.
When it comes to actresses, though, their job isn’t only about looks; especially when they are young, an emotional component is key. As their characters usually call for, they can—in fact, usually should—have the capability of being more emotionally florid than, say, men would tend to be. I think (my own little theory) that many good actresses have some propensity to mood disorder, which helps them be good actresses. Note well: As with any art, this aspect of mental illness isn’t the only thing they are; mental illness is one thing, talent another, and for them some experience of mental illness can richly inform, or be an important substrate for, an artistic performance or work, which is really what they seek recognition for. (This is also probably true for male actors, especially the ones more capable of florid anger or other emotional extremes, such as Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino, and Robert DeNiro.)
* Visual/photographic understanding. I don’t know as much as I should about photographic processes; I do recognize from certain scenes when lenses are different, and I know generally that some are tailored to specific effects or are appropriate in some cases and in others not. I have only a crude grasp of color-wheel ways of looking at color, though today, with digital processing, old ways in which color films could have their color altered have changed (for instance, removing magenta from a three-color scheme [such as magenta, green, blue] no longer is the key to providing a sort of bluish-darkish look). [Update: I was being very summary. Generally, color TV uses green, red, and blue light to make a picture, while color film is "separated" into red, blue, and yellow components. Last I knew, anyway.] Also, I am of the understanding that, today, if a film is to be in black-and-white, it has to be filmed in color first, then the film developed (digitally) into black-and-white, because old-style black-and-white film processing is now too expensive.
* My simplifying sound understanding. When I talk about sound, I may discuss sound editing, as if “underscore” music and sound effects are all part of the same package. But I do this only from a crude consumer standpoint; I am aware that sound effects and soundtrack music are two very different animals, regarding the crews that produce them, and even regarding the awards (like Oscars) given to them respectively, though such crews can work in close coordination on a given project.
* Tolerance for trivial continuity errors. I try not to focus on issues of visual continuity too much, while I know that in places like the errors section of IMDB pages on movies, a lot is represented under errors subsections (by fans, obviously) about visual continuity errors, which I think is the forte of young viewers (so, accordingly, I call these mavens Kontinuity Kids). It seems to me that, generally, when a film is edited (with bits of scenes assembled, the aggregate for a given scene comprising “coverage”), when it comes to continuity, the frame of reference for the editor is primarily the story, as if he or she is assembling a cut of the film to match the script before any other criterion. (Even the visually flashy and innovative Orson Welles has been noted to have said, suggesting a fundamental principle [I paraphrase], “Film always starts with the written word.”)
2. A tiny sketch of my youthful developing awareness of movies as art
One of my earliest memories of a movie is the image of the “star child” near the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. My family, with me, was going to see it at a theater in Wayne Township
It wasn’t, I think, until the movie first appeared on TV in 1977 that I first saw the whole thing. And at that time, some people had an almost religious-hermeneutics way of talking about it, showing some of the “mystical” approach people took to realistic outer-space stories such as informed Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters (released in 1977; I did not see it then).
There were numerous other movies I saw with my family, both when my father was alive and after; I vaguely recall a snatch of Downhill Racer (1969); and I saw the movie 1776 (1972) as part of a class trip, supportive of a history lesson, probably. I saw one of the Pink Panther movies, in 1976, at a drive-in. And there were plenty of others I saw—I probably saw more esteemed movies of the 1960s and ’70s on TV than in the theater in those days.
In November 1977, the two Godfather films were shown on TV in a special edition, I believe with the parts of both interwoven in chronological order; and what impressed me at the time (I was 15, and entering the darkest part of my life) was how the director, Francis Coppola, and I think also the writer, Mario Puzo, were given time to offer comment, rather like hosts, or explaining things a bit in periodic appearances. Both the movies’ being shown, and including the director, conveyed seriousness and importance. (Of course, among those in the know, he was familiar as being an impresario for his own works as well as a director and occasional writer.) By 1979, when Apocalypse Now was released, I was aware of Coppola as one of the most esteemed film directors, as hopes were generally high when the long-produced movie was finally coming out; and of course, as became evident among some after it appeared, and became more settled in cultural history over the years, his star began to fall with that movie.
But by 1979, I was old enough to have some standard for what made really estimable movies, and that the directors could be respected artists, as the main ones responsible for these movies. Stanley Kubrick was another hallowed director, and when The Shining was in the offing, I was ready as someone who knew him as the auteur behind 2001. Also, I knew about the lionized actors; Jack Nicholson’s being in The Shining meant cachet, and great expectations.
1979 also brought Kramer vs. Kramer, with Dustin Hoffman, also a great by the accepted wisdom (and not just for The Graduate); it also had a Meryl Streep, a new actress who was lauded for her role.
This is an oversimplified look at the start of my consciousness of movies, as art, and in my eyes as a discriminating consumer. I suppose my eyes were shaped by the way the older baby boomers (I was at the tail end, birth-wise, of that brood) had reshaped Hollywood
3. An admiring mouse nibbling at the edges of movie production
I don’t claim to be a movie-production insider. I have never worked on a movie. And on a point I mentioned above, I never wanted to be a movie actor (or any kind of actor). But my scattered experience with related matters may interest you.
In addition to aiming to be a writer, which I’ve done (starting with short stories) since late 1976, I ended up in other creative involvements that, later, I would see as not only teaching me about what it means to put on any kind of production in the arts, but something about movie or TV production more specifically.
In a high school marking period spanning about November 1977 through about January 1978, I took an English-department class called something like Radio & TV Production. Taking something like that always seemed, in school, to be a matter of slumming, because so much of my high school and then college education was oriented to serious stuff (math, science, heavy-duty major classes in college, which were essential to my getting somewhere in life) that taking something devoted to the popular arts seemed like taking (to make the point anachronistically) “Suntanning with Snooky.” I had something of the same feeling in about May 1984 when, just after I graduated from college, I took an American Studies course that focused on movies as reflecting American culture, or some such thing. It just seemed like this was the thing to do for myself, as “frivolous” as it might have seemed at the time (and what made it seem frivolous was my own guilty conscience, in a way, but I also recall someone making some kind of snarky remark about my movies class in 1984).
Today, looking back, I would see this all as being very germane to my longer-range development as a writer and “culture vulture.” Also, I would say to school kids today, Prepare for every eventuality you might face in life: take the hard classes, the boring classes; if you have to, take Trigonometry (though I myself can’t tell you today what that’s for); and get in a movies course now and then. You may be glad you did take the whole spectrum of classes, from hard/boring to more-entertaining, when you’re older.
The high school class was interesting because everyone in the class except for me was not a high-achieving student. I was the only such student. And so, maybe inevitably, I became the writer and director (with guidance from the teacher, a Mr. John Ritter, of whom I have fond memories) of a production we the class put together—and the script was based on some weird conversation from a short story I aborted in late 1977. (Somehow I think that this told me more about movie production than I would have expected at the time; it seems that in past history [while today all levels of the technical production staff of a movie seem well schooled and astute] movies used to be helmed by the likes of an ingenious trained engineer like Hitchcock because just about all the rest of the production staff were blue-collarish lugs, or close to it.)
There also were a few interesting overlaps with actual movie-type productions.
In high school, I was part of the “stage tech” crew, a group of nerds who helped build scenery (and, later, move it as needed during the performances) for big shows the drama club put on; some of us also helped work the lights, too. Some students, who were with the drama club per se—I remember them well—felt cut out to be performers on the stage. I knew that wasn’t me, not that I disparaged them. In those days, my personality wasn’t the type that would work well on the stage (and ever since then, I’ve felt that has long and permanently been true). My good friend at the time Joe Coles, and another I’d known longer named Pat Rizzuto, got me involved with stage tech. My first show was Fiddler on the Roof, staged in spring 1978. Somehow that helped me emerge from a nervous breakdown (not widely known about, and not by these friends) that I endured during the winter of 1977-78. I remained in stage tech for the rest of my high school years; it was my steadiest extracurricular, school-related activity then.
Near the end of my time in Washington, D.C., there was an interesting episode. In 1985, I was part of the Marvin Center technical support staff that was, ad hoc, roped into helping with setup for a live TV production of Ted Koppel’s occasional Viewpoint show (it was a special feature of his Nightline program), from the Marvin Center’s theater; this was a very atypical thing to happen at the Marvin Center in those days. There were tons and tons of preparation over time—wires everywhere, big lights, union rules that seemed just too crazy…and I still have relics from that production, some of the printed copy of Koppel’s script for the TelePrompTer that he used, as well as some of the paper that that contraption used (typically for any TV news program). (The weird capitalization reflects the trademark-type way in which it was first spelled.) In those days, a TelePrompTer used roll-based (or computer-printout-type) paper, printed with type, that contained the words that were read; the words were reflected on tilted glass in front of the camera in such a way that the camera filmed through the reflected words.
Then, in 1997, when I worked for a magazine based in South Orange, N.J., I walked up a street during lunch break to a book store, and there was all sorts of equipment around, posing as a sort of maze for me to work around, typical of a TV or movie production (maybe it was for filming a commercial). In general, I recognized the impressive equipment from my 1985 Viewpoint experience.
