Gratitude

Thanksgiving approaches, and it’s time to express gratitude in a more specific, articulate way than maybe we normally do. Expressions of gratitude increase our satisfaction with our lives and improve our relationships. Grateful people generally live longer and report being happier with what they have. So in that spirit, I want to express some of the things I’m grateful for.

First of all, I’m grateful I have a family of passionate, observant film fans. Between my wife and three daughters, I live with people who can crack jokes about giant, irradiated ants from 1954’s THEM!, make meaningful comparisons between Charles Addams’ original cartoons and the filmed adaptations of his work, and give me insights into why certain teenagers find the recent Joker film so compelling. One of the prime joys of movie going for me is sharing the experience and ideas with smart, witty people, and there’s no one I like seeing movies with more than my family.

As much as I complain about it, I am grateful for streaming technology. While I do believe it makes movie going almost too easy and removes a lot of the ritual and communal nature of film, there have been times just in the last few months when streaming has just made my life easier. Obscure documentaries and independent films don’t make it to Midland, Michigan that often, but thanks to Amazon Prime, Netflix, and Hulu, I get to see them anyway. I can appreciate ease of access even while I criticize it.

I’m grateful for my Genres in Film History class this semester. Any teacher knows that it’s every few years that through fate, luck, or just the pedagogy gods smiling down you, you end up with a group of smart, funny, enthusiastic students all in the same room and for that semester or that year, your life is pretty great because those students unconsciously work together to make a classroom environment where people want to be. My Genres students have been equally enthusiastic and curious about black and white slapstick comedy as they have about sci fi, horror, and westerns. It is good to be with students who enjoy learning.

I’m grateful for Delta’s digital filmmaking program. It is a rare thing for a community college to have the kinds of resources we have, and to be able to send students out in the world with a degree that enables them to go right to work on a film set or in a production studio is remarkable. My colleagues Jeff Vandezande and Kim Wells are award-winning professionals who give our students invaluable real-world insight into directing, editing, producing, and the thousand other skills needed to be successful. It’s nice to feel like you’re part of something important and unique which I think our filmmaking program is.

I’m grateful for the recent debate about whether or not superhero movies count as “cinema.” Martin Scorcese, certainly one of America’s best and most important living filmmakers, said that they weren’t, and people have been taking sides, offering think pieces, defending, rejecting, or clarifying his definitions. I think it’s good and healthy to think about what movies are, what cinema might be, and to discuss what our expectations really are when we sit down to watch something. Anything that causes us to question how we define, think about, and relate to the movie-going experience is valuable in my opinion. Movies are a huge part of our culture and lives, and examining our beliefs and preconceptions in intelligent, civil ways makes us better people and smarter movie-goers.

And of course, I am grateful for this show and for you out there, whoever you are, listening in. It’s a privilege to be able to work with the good folks from Q90.1 and to be able to have my idiosyncratic, weirdo say about movies once a week. I’m very grateful for those of you who tune in each Friday and give it a listen.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

The Kid Stays in the Picture

Movie producer Robert Evans died earlier this month in his palatial Beverly Hills home of as-yet-undisclosed causes. Given the life Evans led, the fact that he made it to age 89 is remarkable. You may not be familiar with his name, but it’s a guarantee you have heard of, seen, and love some of the films that he was responsible for producing in his half-century Hollywood career. His filmography is practically a who’s-who of 1970s New Hollywood filmmaking. As a producer and Paramount Studio executive, Evans was a driving force behind the creation of Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple, Rosemary's Baby, The Italian Job, True Grit, Love Story, Harold and Maude, The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, Serpico, The Conversation, Chinatown, and The Great Gatsby. He had a successful run that is practically unparalleled in Hollywood history. While he hasn’t produced a picture since 2003’s How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, his influence as a producer and as a Hollywood icon will last well beyond his death.

If you’d like to learn more about Evans and you’d like to hear it from the man himself, I highly recommend the 2002 documentary, The Kid Stays in the Picture. Directed by Nanette Burstein and Bret Morgen, it’s an adaptation of Evan’s autobiography of the same name. Using a combination of rarely seen personal photos and vintage footage, Evans narrates the entire film in his unmistakable voice that sounds as though it is made of whiskey and fine Corinthian leather. He recounts how he was already a successful business executive running a women’s clothing line with his brother in New York when he was discovered while on vacation in Los Angeles. None other than the great Gloria Swanson saw him swimming at a Beverly Hills pool and immediately asked him to play her deceased husband, super-producer Irving Thalberg, in the upcoming production of The Man with a Thousand Faces. Completely unrelated, later that same year, while at a nightclub in New York, Evans was approached by another super producer, Daryl Zanuck, about playing the matador in the film adaptation of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. 

Evans’ acting career stalled pretty quickly because, as he points out, he wasn’t very good. But he loved Hollywood and particularly appreciated how producers had the power to make things happen. So he decided that’s what he wanted to do. The beginning of his acting career was unlikely and lucky to be sure, but no one could have predicted that within eight years of starting as a producer, Evans would be named the head of Paramount Pictures. To go from semi-talented pretty boy actor to the head of a major studio in a decade was unheard of, and no one savored it like Evans. While at Paramount, he made strong, original scripts a priority beginning with Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, and that began his long winning streak that saved the then-sagging Paramount from certain destruction. 

There are plenty of other juicy stories in The Kid Stays in the Picture, including details about how his wife, Ali McGraw, left him for Steve McQueen, and how he was implicated in a murder and arrested for cocaine trafficking. All of the stories have the polish of having been told and retold and perfected by Evans himself for maximum dramatic impact and making him look awesome. It’s clear in this movie about Evans that he has always been the star of his own show. Listening to him narrate his own curated story is a little like listening to your slightly inebriated uncle if your uncle had married models and produced industry-altering films like The Godfather. He’s pompous, dramatic, casually racist at times, and self-aggrandizing, but he is never boring. The Kid Stays in the Picture isn’t a clear-eyed, warts-and-all historical document so much as it is the embodiment of the man himself. Nothing and no one pays tribute to Robert Evans more than Robert Evans.

Memory: Origins of Alien

This year marks the 40^th anniversary of Ridley Scott’s seminal sci fi horror masterpiece, Alien. It was only Scott’s second major film, and yet he managed to make a movie that has stayed in the public consciousness for four decades and has spawned eight other big screen movies, as well as countless video games, comic books, novels, and toys. I can walk into any Target in America today and buy an action figure of the xenomorph, the terrifying, phallic apex predator alien of the film’s title. Got that? I can still buy brand-new toys from a film made when I was five years old. That, my friends, is pop culture staying power. 

The story, of course, follows the crew of the Nostromo, a tugboat in space making its way back to earth after a long mission. The crew members are awakened from their deep sleep by the ship’s computer reporting a potential distress signal. They land on a rocky, forbidding moon to investigate and discover the signal is coming from the remains of a marooned alien ship. Inside, they find a chamber filled with hundreds of egg-like objects. A crew member touches one only to have it open and have a combination of a spider, a witch’s hand, and my worst nightmare jump out and attach itself to his face. This frightening violation leads to one of the most memorable and shocking deaths in movie history when it becomes apparent that the face hugger planted an egg in the crew member that then gestates and is “born” when a baby alien bursts out of his chest in spectacularly gory fashion while everyone is eating dinner. The rest of the crew, especially our protagonist, Ellen Ripley as played by Sigourney Weaver, spends the rest of the film trying to kill and then just survive the unstoppable killing machine that’s been unleashed on their ship.

The whole film is atmospheric, strung with electrified tension wires, and speckled with the sweat of desperation. The cinematography, production design, sound design, script, and performances are powerful and still perfect after all these years. If you haven’t ever seen the original Alien or you just want to be good and scared, you should screen it tonight. 

 If you’re a fan from way back, another film you may want to consider is the 2019 documentary Memory: The Origins of Alien. It’s not a behind-the-scenes or making-of so much as it is a meditation on where some of the major story points and images came from. Rather than focusing on the production itself or, say, Ripley’s role as a feminist icon, Memory focuses on Dan O’Bannon, the writer whose love for horror, comics, and H.P. Lovecraft eventually became a story that became a script that became a film that became the cultural juggernaut that is Alien. Memory also highlights the contributions of H. R. Giger, the Swiss painter whose nightmarish, techno-sexual designs inspired the truly alien aspects of the xenomorph and the ship where it originates. The film features interviews with the now-deceased O’Bannon’s wife along with actors like Veronica Cartwright and Tom Skerritt who appeared in the film and a variety of producers and intellectuals who touch on Alien’s subversive, controversial undertones dealing with male rape and impregnation. They shed interesting light on some of what has given Alien such unsettling staying power.

The documentary’s focus is quite tight in the sense that it really does zero in on the origins of the story, the images, and the infamous chest burster scene with John Hurt. Some would argue this makes the film myopic or shallow, but I choose to think of it as one specific chapter in the much larger collection of things written and filmed about Alien over the last forty years. It’s stylishly filmed and edited, and is a nice addition to the body of work about Ridley Scott’s influential film.

So to sum up, Memory: The Origins of Alien is good, but 1979’s Alien is truly great.