Kieth Merrill and an Obscure Genre

This summer, I took a trip with my family to Niagara Falls. Now for me, a guy raised in perpetually water-starved, drought-stricken Idaho,  Niagara might was well be Narnia or Unicorn Land. The idea of that much constant, crashing water all the time is just ludicrous to me. So I leaned into it – literally. When we went on the Maid of the Mist, I rejected the blue poncho in favor of letting the falls plaster me. It was great. As part of doing all the touristy things in the state park, we went to the appropriately branded Niagara Adventure Theater in the visitors’ center and watched the creatively titled Niagara Falls Movie: Legends of Adventure! It’s projected on a largish 45 foot screen in a smallish 314 seat theater with a really nice sound system giving the venue a bigger, more epic scale than it actually has.

The film recreates significant moments in the history of the falls from Native American legends about the thundering waters and being documented by French explorers to tales of people crossing the falls on tightropes or going over them in barrels. The film is pretty much everything you would expect from a state park sponsored project. It’s handsome with some really nice cinematography that highlights the natural beauty of the area and contains shots that could easily be reproduced as prints or postcards for their composed loveliness. And the script is the expected combination of efficiently presented historical fact along with florid, rah-rah narration about Niagara’s beauty and place in history and popular culture. 

 

 The film was fine for what it was, but what struck me was how similar it was in tone and content to the IMAX film my wife and I saw in Yellowstone Park years ago. Same combo of beautiful pictures and park-approved propaganda script. With just a little investigation, I found that both films were made by the same guy, Kieth Merrill, along with about ten other films just like them, including IMAX films for the Grand Canyon, the Alamo, and Zion Canyon.

Merrill made an auspicious debut in 1973 when he won the Academy Award with his first feature, a documentary called The Great American Cowboy. For about ten years, Merrill worked in Hollywood, writing and directing various projects, many of which centered around the American west. In 1980, he directed my second favorite Jimmy Stewart Christmas project of all time, Mr. Krueger’s Christmas, featuring Stewart as a lonely, slightly delusional janitor who finds comfort in the true meaning of the season. But in 1984, Merrill wrote, produced, and directed a 34 minute IMAX documentary called Grand Canyon: The Hidden Secrets, and that film opened up a subgenre for Merrill that he continued to work on for the next fifteen years. It was in this field that Merrill earned another Oscar nomination for 1997’s IMAX documentary, Amazon.

While the movies themselves are a little cheesy and stylistically either classical or old fashioned depending on your point of view, I am fascinated by the fact that this subgenre of film exists and that there’s one guy who is kind of master of it. We often think of movies as a homogenous thing – big budget things starring Dwayne Johnson or Jennifer Lawrence that are released in multiplexes and then go to DVD or streaming a couple of months later. But in reality, there are whole worlds of film that exist outside of or next to that world. Short, promotional IMAX nature-based documentaries for state and national park visitors’ centers is one of them. And if you’ve seen one of them, chances are it was either made by or at very least influenced by Kieth Merrill. 

So the next time you’re at Yellowstone or the Ozarks or San Francisco, stop for thirty or forty minutes and enjoy the IMAX movie. Casually lean over to your seatmate just before the credits roll and say, “I’ll bet this is a Kieth Merrill film.” It will make you look smart.

John Heard and Deceived

This week, a tribute to a journeyman actor and a movie you might have missed. 

Last month, the veteran actor John Heard passed away. As is usually the case when an actor dies, the headline includes the title of his most prominent role. So in John Heard’s case, there were a lot of headlines reading “Home Alone Dad Dies at 72.” So yeah, he was the dad in Chris Columbus’s 1990 Christmastime monster hit. He played the part of the decent but exasperated dad who accidentally flew to Paris not realizing he left one of his kids behind in Chicago. And he did a good job with it – just like he did a good job with a raft of other supporting roles as good dads, bad dads, sheriffs, sons, coworkers, etc. He rarely got the lead but instead was usually the reliable face next to the lead.

However, Heard did play the lead in one largely unseen and unfortunately unappreciated thriller from 1991, Deceived, directed by Damian Harris and co-starring Goldie Hawn back when they made movies that co-starred Goldie Hawn. 

Deceived is an old-school, slow-burn thriller, the kind that aren’t really made much for the big screen anymore. In it, Hawn plays Adrienne, an art restorer who meets and falls in love with a man named Jack Saunders at the outset of the film. Heard plays Jack and is all charm, good looks, and husbandly attentiveness for six years. They have a cute daughter together, they live in a great apartment, and everything is idyllic and perfect until its not. Strange occurrences start to pile up around Jack. He’s supposed to be away on a business trip but one of Adrienne’s friends sees him around town in New York. There’s a call from a department store about some sexy lingerie that Adrienne is sure she never got from Jack. And so on. Just as things look increasingly shady for Jack, he dies in a fiery car accident. End of story? Not so fast. It soon becomes apparent that Jack perhaps wasn’t Jack at all. Adrienne discovers he has a second family, complete with cute kids and another wife with another baby on the way, and as far as that family is concerned, Dad is just fine and will be home from a business trip soon.

So from there, the tension ratchets up as Adrienne discovers what it was that Jack wanted and why he had to disappear and the lengths to which he will go to get what he wants.

Parts of the plot are contrived, for sure, but much of Deceived works. Heard especially is fun to watch. He had the acting chops to fluidly transition from trustworthy nice guy to psychotic nutjob in a flash. By the time the story builds to its climax, Heard’s character is genuinely scary – primarily because he was so effective at being a good guy at the beginning. When Kubrick made The Shining, Stephen King objected to him casting Jack Nicholson as the family man writer who eventually goes mad. His problem was that Nicholson already looked crazy, so his character had nowhere to go. In the case of John Heard and Deceived, he definitely had somewhere to go. Though not often thought of as a serious actress, Goldie Hawn does a nice job as a smart career woman, and even though the film is a drama, she manages to illicit a few laughs with some clever line delivery. The cinematography is surprisingly polished and rich, and there’s some nice direction by director Damian Harris, who for lovers of Hollywood trivia, is the son of the great Richard Harris, the original Dumbledore, and brother of Jared Harris of Mad Men fame.

Deceived opened well back in 1991 but then sank into obscurity, which I think is too bad. It was a moment for John Heard to step into the spotlight and show that he could do more than just be Kevin McCallister’s dad.

Failure and The Lost City of Z

I am interested in failure when it comes to movies, especially for projects where the expectations are high. What causes something with big stars or a huge budget or the finest production values to just tank? And what does it mean for a film to fail anyway?  We all know films that failed at the box office but that we love and would watch over and over again. And we all know there are films that have made a kajillion dollars but are still stone-cold garbage burgers to watch.

Anyway, in my ruminations on filmic failure, I’ll sometimes seek out a movie that tanked financially just to see if I can spot what the problem was. To this end, I recently watched 2016’s The Lost City of Z, directed by James Gray and starring former Sons of Anarchy lead, Charlie Hunnam. The film is based on the true story of Percy Fawcett, a British military man who explored sections of South America, sometimes for the Royal Geographical Society to create maps, sometimes to find a mythical golden city, a lost civilization in the green desert of the Amazon jungle. 

 The film cost 30 million to make and made 17 million in theaters. Barely over half. While it had a modest budget for a Hollywood film, only making back half of any investment is generally considered failure with a capitol F.

So what went wrong? Why did this handsome looking film based on a New York Times bestselling book fail to draw in audiences? Why did it have no legs?

With something as complicated and multi-faceted as big budget Hollywood filmmaking, it’s difficult to nail down exactly one cause for things like this, but looking at the film on its own, it seems The Lost City of Z had problems both with its script and its casting.

First of all, it is a story of obsession. Despite popular opinion at the time, Fawcett was convinced this lost civilization existed and would write a new chapter in human history. And he was willing to endure profound physical hardship as well as years away from his own family in order prove it. When he’s injured fighting in World War I, even though he’s survived a chorine gas attack and he’s safely reunited with his loving family, when he’s told he may not be well enough to return to the Amazon, that’s when Fawcett breaks down in tears. The problem is that the script never really makes the motivation for his obsession clear. It never transcends the narrative and becomes anything more than “This happened and then this happened and then this happened.” So the script fails to compel because we don’t really know why the main character does what he does beyond the obvious, stated reasons. The film tells rather than shows.

Second, Charlie Hunnam was just not the right guy. He’s British, he’s handsome, he sports a series of fantastic very proper-looking early 20^th century mustaches, but at no point do you really care about what happens to him or believe his compulsion to press through the green hell of unexplored Amazonia. He looks the part but his performance is surface-only.

If there’s a third problem with the film, it’s the source material itself. The non-fiction book its based on is all about journalist David Grann’s failed attempt to find out whatever happened to Fawcett after he disappeared on his final expedition. The ambiguity of the unknown is a big part of what makes the book fascinating, but it doesn’t necessarily translate into an effective film story. The film leaves Grann and the 21^st century out of it altogether and tries to create an ending where there really was none.

So while it had all appearances of a polished, prestige project, The Lost City of Z, proves that without the right script or actors, appearances can clearly be deceiving.