Josephine (Gina Manès), Abel Gance, and Napoléon (Albert Dieudonné) on the Polyvision screen at the Paramount Theatre

Isn’t it fateful that Abel Gance chose to have Napoléon try to woo Joséphine by complimenting her on her irresistible silence? After all, Gance’s Napoléon is not only the most ambitious silent film ever made: it is one that would only come to completion in 1926, after 5 years of work, for a release in 1927, at the very dusk of the silent film era.

The movie, which tells the story of the early years of Napoléon and set the premise of his rise to power, was intended as the first of a six film series: the 600 pages screenplay written by Abel Gance was to be cut out as follows: Arcole 1782-1798, 18 Brumaire 1798-1800, Austerlitz 1804-1808, Retreat from Moscow 1809-1813, Waterloo 1814-1815, St Helena 1815-1821. Mr. Gance had the idea of what would become his greatest project after a trip to the United States he took in 1921. Having met American director D.W. Griffith there, the director of the iconic The Birth of a Nation (1915), he set out to tell as fundamental a story to the French nation as The Birth of a Nation was to the American people and he picked Napoléon as a way to study the transitionary period that was the aftermath of the French Revolution and the emergence of the Republican feeling among French nationals.

But after having spent over 6 years working on the first episode and having sunk 17M francs from his investors (his initial valuation was 7M francs for the whole series, which he believed could gross 75M francs at the box office), Mr. Gance realized the whole project could never come to fruition. Of this epic project, 5h30 of film are left, preserved and restored thanks to the tireless efforts of film preservationist Kevin Brownlow, for contemporary audiences to see. 

Just another Sunday watching a 5h30 silent movie 

Poster of the event, designed by illustrator Paul Davis

I started to get very concerned about my plan of attending the 2012 presentation of Napoléon by Abel Gance at the Paramount Theatre early in the week of March 19^th. In the week leading up to the event, I received not one, not two but THREE advisory emails by the SF Silent Film Festival regarding the event.

Having my Sunday come with three different warnings (careful about parking, please arrive early and remember to make dinner arrangements since the whole thing, including dinner break, will last a full eight hours, from 1:30pm to 9:40pm) wasn’t exactly what I had in mind when I booked my ticket for the March 25^th 2012 showing in late July 2011, eight months in advance of the screening, in what could be considered an impulse buy (more on that later).

Add to that very puzzled looks on the faces of pretty much everyone I told my week end plans. Their understanding of what it means to be a movie freak only goes so far and a 5h30 long silent movie apparently doesn’t cut it.

At that point, I was starting to forget why I had gotten so excited about the film in the first place and was really concerned about what I had gotten myself into.

My ticket to Napoleon: I was there!

Flashback to July 14^th 2011, the day that put this “cinema event of a lifetime” on my radar

On July 14^th 2011, I was attending the opening night of the 16th San Francisco Silent Film Festival. The speaker from the Silent Film Festival kicked off the festival, and warned us to wait for a special announcement that was to come after the showing of John Ford’s Upstream (1927).

After the lights went back on, the speaker took to the stage to announce what he referred to as the achievement of his professional life, the cinematic event of a lifetime. If all the hyperbolic wording hadn’t convinced me already that I was about to run into something important, the fact that we could hear the tears in his voice definitely did. The trailer hadn’t even started yet and I was already hooked.

It was a nice touch by the SF Silent Film Festival to pick Bastille Day to announce it was bringing to the screen the most epic silent movie ever made, by a French filmmaker, about a French icon. And if I had not understood already what it meant to be given an opportunity to attend the screening of this silent masterpiece, attending Kevin Brownlow’s talk about what it took to bring this newly restored version of the classic to the screen would do it.

Kevin Brownlow first ran into Napoléon vu par Abel Gance in 1953; almost 60 years later, he is bringing his latest restoration to the big screen 

Kevin Brownlow tells the story of restoring Napoleon during a special masterclass at the 16th SF Silent Film Festival

On Sunday July 17^th 2011, as part of the 16th San Francisco Silent Film Festival, Kevin Brownlow hosted a lecture on his lifelong efforts to find, restore and present Napoléon on the big screen. As a teenager in England, Mr. Brownlow progressively grew fascinated by the world of early films. In 1953, the 15 year old teenager ran into two 9.5mm reels of Napoléon at a street market (the reels covered the Marseillaise sequence, the chase across Corsica and ‘The Double Storm).

Thus began his obsession with the silent masterpiece. In 1954-1955, the young Mr. Brownlow had already managed to buy stills of the film as well as a copy of the script (in French) when, in an incredible turn of events, he had the chance to meet his idol, Abel Gance. The young man’s fascination with the forgotten filmmaker was no secret and he had shared his passion with his friend Liam O’Leary, then deputy curator of the National Film Theatre. It is a good thing he had done so, for Mr. O’Leary was able to recognize Mr. Gance standing in the hall of the British Film Institute, based on a picture Mr. Brownlow had shown him. Mr. Gance, delighted to be recognized, stayed for an impromptu reception in his honor. Which gave Mr. O’Leary a chance to call Mr. Brownlow’s mother, asking her to get her son to rush to the British Film Institute (Mrs. Brownlow had to call the school to get her son out of a mock German school certificate exam).

Film preservationist and Academy Award winner Kevin Brownlow

Various interviews of Mr. Brownlow telling the Napoléon story can be found online, some of the best here and here. About his meeting with Mr. Gance, Mr. Brownlow says:

“Gance could not have been more perfect. He looked like a mediaeval saint, with his white hair swept back. He was only in his 60s, my God, the age I am now, and this was 1954. He had a tremendous sense of humour, he was very enthusiastic still, despite the years he’d not been allowed to work, and the only problem was I kicked myself for not having learned French more diligently at school. We had to have an interpreter. But I remember at the end of our meeting he said in broken English ‘keep your eyes straight forward… non, non, les yeux Polyvision.’ That was the beginning of a long friendship …”

This event set Mr. Brownlow on a quest to find and restore the film according to the initial vision of its author.

And a quest it was indeed. When Mr. Brownlow started hunting for the various reels of the film, Napoléon was overly dismissed by critics and film historians who remembered seeing it during its original run. What they didn’t know then, was that they had only seen, as Mr. Brownlow puts it, butchered versions of the film, cut or rearranged by the studio or exhibitors to facilitate showings.

Kevin Brownlow and Abel Gance discussing Napoleon

In 1968, Mr. Brownlow started working on a documentary for the BBC titled The Charm of Dynamite in an attempt to restore Mr. Gance’s reputation as a major filmmaker. Reaching out to La Cinémathèque Française, he found footage of the opening scene: the snowball fight of Brienne. But even though La Cinémathèque Française had almost all the footage at its disposal (except for a key dramatic sequence which showed hostages being executed in Toulon, that was apparently lost or destroyed in a fire), gathering all the reels would prove a tricky task. Whatever its reasons might have been, La Cinémathèque Française was very protective of its archives and thus not willing to open its archive (Mr. Gance himself had to go through Mr. Brownlow to view the snowball fight sequence).

According to Mr. Brownlow, La Cinémathèque Française shipped a terrible version of the film for a cycle on French Avant Garde programmed in London in 1963.  With help from friendly filmmakers and archives however, Mr. Brownlow progressively managed to find enough footage to work on a full restoration in the spirit of what Abel Gance had intended.

Showing Napoléon, the charm of dynamite

The first Brownlow version was shown on August 31, 1979, at the Telluride Film Festival, in Colorado. It was almost 4h50 long and was projected outdoors. The weather was so cold that the organist that was set to accompany the movie had to stop playing due to frozen hands.  The film was shown in silence. Mr. Gance had retreated to his nearby hotel room and saw the movie through his window. Attendees stayed up all night to watch the movie.

Another version was presented at Radio City Hall in New York in 1980 with a score by Carmine Coppola that incorporated music from Ludwig van Beethoven, Hector Berlioz, Bedřich Smetana, and George Frideric Handel. That version was 4h long. In parallel, Kevin Brownlow tapped American composer Carl Davis to compose another score to fit the 4h50 long version. Mr. Davis only had 3 and a half months to assemble a score and he also resorted to using music from Napoléon’s contemporaries, opting to make Napoléon a “textbook of European music of the time.” In particular, he used the third Eroica Symphony by Beethoven, which had originally been dedicated to the emperor. He also used traditional Corsican music for the sequences set on Napoléon’s birth island.

In the three decades between these showings and now, additional footage was discovered, restored and added resulting in a 5h30 long version by Mr. Brownlow in 2000. Disagreements between right holders kept this version off of US screens, as well as a new 2004 version (augmented by 2 minutes of new footage).

Flyman Rick Bautista works on the support system for the large screen to be hung on the stage at the Paramount Theate (Laura A. Oda/Staff)

Thankfully, these disagreements seem to have been somewhat sorted. In 2012, what is considered the closest version of the initial Napoléon vu par Abel Gance was shown at the art deco movie palace Paramount Theatre in Oakland, CA as part of an exclusive 4 day engagement (this new version features new tinting of some key sequences as well as new intertitles, re-designed to match the original fonts used by Abel Gance). These showings are the result of a collaboration between the SF Silent Film Festival , American Zoetrope, The Film Preserve, Photoplay Productions, and the British Film Institute. Organizers stressed out that this was a feat unlikely to be achieved again in a very long time.

The technical challenges that come with bringing the masterpiece to the big screen are tantalizing: the Polyvision ending itself make Napoléon screenable only in a handful of theatres. The Paramount Theatre had to have new projection booths constructed to accommodate the three projectors required for Polyvision. Even the Castro Theatre, the home of the yearly San Francisco Silent Film Festival didn’t make the cut (it also doesn’t have a pit for the orchestra and its 1,407 seats capacity is not large enough for the organizers to hope to be able to break even). Talking about the orchestra, factor in the live accompaniment by a 48 piece orchestra and you understand why the event is prohibitively expensive to produce. Touring the film would mean either retraining a new orchestra in each new city, or bringing along 84 musicians everywhere. Mr. Davis wrote a web diary in the days leading up to the event that clearly highlights the difficulties of preparing for such an event.

There is also no plan to bring the new restoration on DVD/Blu ray: as the SF Silent Film Festival explains, “the cost of recording the 5½ hour Carl Davis score is prohibitively expensive” and the Polyvision triptych cannot be reproduced on a TV screen (“it would merely be letterboxed onto your television — no matter how big it is.”)

The SF Silent Film Festival is expected to take a write-down on the 2012 event, especially as not all performances were full houses. In spite of the tremendous costs associated with showing the movie, the SF Silent Film Festival had ticket prices range from $45 to $120 in an effort to make sure all could afford to attend this once in a lifetime event.  The 5h30 concert by the Oakland East Bay Symphony conducted by composer Mr. Davis is already worth more than that.

Napoléon vu par Abel Gance is not only incredibly beautiful, it is impressively modern

Marquee of the Paramount Theatre, home of four exceptional screenings of Napoleon

On the eve of March 25^th 2012, I was torn. On the one hand my friends looked at me as if I was a mad woman and on the other hand, all the press coverage was overly enthusiastic. Director Martin Scorsese, a campaigner for film preservation whose latest film Hugo (2011) tells the story of another French forgotten genius silent filmmaker, Georges Méliès, was quoted in Vanity Fair in March saying it was “A MAJOR EVENT! Don’t wait for it to come to a theater near you — getting Gance’s magnum opus on a screen is a Herculean task!”

Ditching the skeptics, I left home on Sunday morning for what would be one of the most surprising and fascinating experience of my life at the movies. Napoléon is uniquely amazing and amazingly unique. I feared I would be bored, I was mesmerized.

The film was presented in 4 parts, with intermission and a dinner break, each one building on the preceding. It might be a black and white silent movie but it is astonishingly modern. Intended as a textbook on French history, transformed in a textbook of European music per Mr. Davis’ wishes, it is also a textbook of cinematic grammar.

Like most early filmmakers, Mr. Gance was as much an artist as he was a scientific inventor. As a matter of fact, he had written two scripts for Napoléon: one featuring the story and the other one providing technical guidance for the shooting. And the film features a great number of technical prowess, especially considering the constraints of the equipment at hand then. In no particular, Napoléon features quick cutting editing, split screen (from 1 to 4 to 9 frames in the square box 1.33 aspect ratio), surimpositions and the majestic Polyvision, a 85 foot wide image composed of three different images, captured simultaneously by three different cameras and projected synchronously by three projectors.

Young Napoleon (Vladimir Roudenko) launches a daring offensive during a snowball fight

The opening snowball fight scene, based on true event, pictures a ten year old Napoléon’s natural military talent and charisma, and has nothing to envy to war scenes from recent movies thanks to the creative use of portable cameras: one of them was set on a sledge moving around the action, another strapped to the director of photography’s chest, another modified to pan in circle commanded by a remote control mechanism and the “ascenseur de prise de vues” was designed and created for this shot (inspired by the French guillotine, it features a camera on a crane mounted on a sledge; as the sledge moves forward, the camera goes down). For this scene, Mr. Gance used local boys from Briancon as extras (school was canceled for a week to allow shooting). The harsh weather conditions (the children were freezing) had parents try to pull their children out of the shooting. Mr. Gance used his dynamite charm to personally convince them to allow their children to continue the shooting.

The film also includes shots taken from a suspended camera sliding down cables (Corsican scenes), as well as fantastic horseride scene with what seems to be a horseback held camera. One of the most ambitious scenes combines Napoléon fleeing Corsica (he defied the political power in place by proclaiming again and again Corsica’s allegiance to France – and to him) with a political confrontation at La Convention between Jacobins and Girondins. As Napoléon escapes on a small boat, he is caught in a middle of a tempest. At the same time, a political tempest is forming at La Convention. The scenes at La Convention, some of which shot by having the camera swinging back and forth like a trapeze over the members of La Convention, are designed to illustrate Victor Hugo’s phrase “to be a member of the Convention is to be a wave on the ocean.” These scenes are intercut with those of Napoléon fighting against the waves crashing on his boat.

The poetic nature of Napoléon also extends to the colors used to tint or tone the film. Technicolor would not be invented until 1934 but already Mr. Gance worked in sepia, blue, pink and red tones into his film to complement the black and white of other scenes. The film can be seen as an ode to Napoléon, the young brave and brilliant general that sticks to his certain idea of France. The ideals of the French Revolution and the Republic are his moral compass, even in the dark hours of the aftermath of 1789, and he keeps on coming back in the game, progressively imposing himself as the natural leader, the savior of Toulon and the hero of the Italian campaign. The film ends with him gazing upon the Alps, envisioning his great destiny and picturing the face of Joséphine, the eagle and the French flag.

Napoléon overlooking the last battle of the film

But above all, Napoléon vu par Abel Gabe is an ode to France. And as the film suggests, Napoléon might have loved France more than he loved himself. Didn’t he taunt the Corsican traitors ready to  pledge allegiance to the English by grabbing the French flag and shouting at them “It is too great for you!” Doesn’t he use the same flag as his sail as he is fleeing his birth land? Can’t he be found, in the middle of what seems a lost battle, ranting that “impossible is not French!”

Napoleon to Rouget de Lisle ""Your hymn will save many a cannon."

One of the most emotional scenes of the film shows a young captain, Rouget De Lisle arriving in Paris and presenting his Marseillaise, the War Song for the Army of the Rhine, to the Danton, Marat and Robespierre at Le Club des Cordeliers. The music sheet is passed along and everyone in attendance learns to sing what would become the national anthem of the French nation. Emotion is palpable: Mr. Gance used 770 striking workers from the Renault factory of Boulogne Billancourt, close to the studios were the film was shot, as extras for this scene and many of the tears on the screen are real.

But it is the Polyvision that is the natural dramatic and technical climax of the film.

It seems that every year, independent studio The Weinstein Company (TWC) embarks on a crusade to question the relevance of the Motion Picture Association of America rating system. In late 2010, TWC successfully campaigned to turn a NC-17 rating into an R rating for the romantic drama Blue Valentine by Derek Cianfrance. This year, however, it failed to convince the MPAA to change its rating of the documentary Bully by Lee Hirsch, whose R-rating was not modified for a PG-13 one. [NB: as I am publishing this post, the news just broke that the MPAA Ratings and Classification Administration finally agreed to changing Bully's rating from R to PG-13, thereby authorizing children under 17 to attend a screening of the documentary about school bullying without their parent or legal guardian present. It is not violence or cruelty that initially made the MPAA object to a PG-13 but the repeated use of foul language by teenagers. TWC agreed to edit out three of the six curse words that occur in the movie.]

MPAA ratings matter to parents and above all exhibitors, which means than impact the commercial success of a movie

Distributors care greatly about ratings because they can a strong impact on the box office numbers of a movie. Ratings might impact moviegoers’ decision to see or not see a movie but most importantly, exhibitors have policies regarding programming movies depending on their ratings. A NC-17 rating greatly limits a movie’s commercial distribution as the major theaters chains refuse to program movies that received this rating. Theatre chains also have a policy not to program a movie that is released as unrated. The decision by TWC to release  Bully without a rating, in a sign of protest, meant the movie could be shunned by chains such as Regal Entertainment (17% of all movies screens in the US), AMC (13%) or Cinemark (9.5%), the leading chains in the US. TWC essentially forced theater chains to take a stance: Regal Entertainment decided to show the movie and treat it according to its initial R rating (meaning children under 17 must be accompanied by a parent or legal guardian), AMC opted for a more flexible approach, letting underage kids view the movies as long as they could provide written authorization from a parent or guardian, and Cinemark held a long standing tradition of not showing unrated movies.

The MPAA classification system

The MPAA rating system is not a law (which is why distributors always have the option to release a movie as unrated). Its purpose is to provide guidelines to parents and exhibitors who want to protect youngsters from being exposed to sensitive material. Content creators that are not happy with a MPAA rating have several options: they can appeal the rating and argue their case to have the MPAA overturn its initial decision (this is what TWC successfully did with Blue Valentine), they can make a compromise, cut or edit their movie to get a different rating and submit it again (it can happen that a studio commits to delivering a movie with a specific rating as a guarantee to external investors, this was the case for Warner Bros. with Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, which decided to  CGI cloaked figures in an orgy scene to tone down the scene), and they can choose to release two versions of the movie with two different ratings (that’s the option TWC chose in 2010 for Tom Hooper‘s The King’s Speech which had gotten an R rating for profanity, the distributor released a different version with muted cursing: the R rated version grossed $135M compared with $3M for the PG one).

While the notion of creators having to compromise their artistic vision to comply with subjective criteria can seem very damaging, especially to the believers of the auteur theory, it should be noted that MPAA ratings only apply to the theatrical window. The home video market provides an opportunity for creators to restore their initial vision by releasing director’s cut or uncut versions of the movies.

To decide ratings, the MPAA Classification and Ratings Administration looks in particular at the use of foul language, drug use, violence and sexual content. Rating a movie is often a matter of interpretation and is always somehow subjective. As a result, comparing ratings from one movie to the next will necessarily raise questions: is the system too lenient in its rating of violent scenes? Conversely, isn’t its approach to curse words too prudish? Is the system misogynistic or homophobic in the way it rates sex scenes?  A recent article by Indiewire lists 10 MPAA rating decisions that highlight the controversial nature of the administration’s work.

The purpose of this post is not to debate the validity of some specific decisions by the MPAA Classification and Ratings Administration or the overall legitimacy of the rating system, but to look at the origins of this system.

The MPAA ratings system is the legacy of a much more leonine system: the Hollywood Production Code, also known as the Hays Code.

The cover of the Production Code

Like the MPAA rating system, the Production Code was a voluntary self-censorship effort by the studios. Its purpose was to hold movies to certain moral standards. Put together by William H. Hays, the Production Code, often called Hays Code, was adopted by the Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA, the ancestor of the MPAA) in 1930 and was widely enforced between 1934 and the mid 1950s before being formally abandoned in 1968. It featured a list of 11 “Don’ts” and 25 “Be Carefuls” to which the MPPDA members agreed to conform. After 4 years of more than loose adherence to the Code, the MPPDA amended the Code in 1934 to create the Production Code Administration, whose prerogative it was to enforce the Code. Headed by Joseph Breen, the Administration was commonly referred to as the Breen Office.

Similar to the MPAA system, the “Don’ts” focus on the use of profane language, drug trafficking, sex / showing of sexual organs and violence. It also forbade blasphemy and open criticism of a nation/government. Finally, the now antiquated notion of miscegenation (sex relations between people of different “races”) was a clear “Don’t”. The “Be Carefuls” involved subjects which were not off-limits in and of themselves but which had to be handled with care. These topics like adultery, criminal behavior, prostitution could be part of a plot but they had to be depicted in such a way that they are not made attractive or desirable. Their outcomes had to be destructive. In addition to that and in direct line with the US’s political stance not to intervene in foreign countries’ domestic affairs, the Production Code forbad movies from presenting foreign countries or nations in a disparaging light (this de facto meant that, in the wake of World War II, no openly anti-Nazi films could be released).

Contrary to the MPAA rating system, however, the ambition of the Production Code was to promote traditional values and “good taste.” As a result, it meddled with the very content and message of a movie, forcing screenwriters to take the Code into account when writing the story. Evil could not go unpunished, villains had to pay for their crimes and sanctity of marriage had to be respected. The screenwriters also had limited options in terms of characters: clergymen could not be villains or comical figures for that matter and public authorities (politicians or police officers) could be villains only if it was made clear that the were black sheep.

While the MPAA Classification and Ratings Administration is asked to comment on finished works and to give an indicative rating that parents and exhibitors are free to deal with as they see fit, the Breen Office was involved as early as the pre-production phases of filmmaking and had the power of forcing cuts, as movies by the MPPDA members had to be approved to be released. 

The Production Code was 11 Don’ts and 25 Be Carefuls

Resolved, that those things which are included in the following list shall not appear in pictures produced by the members of this Association, irrespective of the manner in which they are treated:

• Pointed profanity-by either title or lip-this includes the words “God,” “Lord,” “Jesus,” “Christ” (unless they be used reverently in connection with proper religious ceremonies), “hell,” ” damn,” “Gawd,” and every other profane and vulgar expression however it may be spelled;
• Any licentious or suggestive nudity-in fact or in silhouette; and any lecherous or licentious notice thereof by other characters in the picture;
• The illegal traffic in drugs;
• Any inference of sex perversion;
• White slavery;
• Miscegenation (sex relationships between the white and black races);
• Sex hygiene and venereal diseases;
• Scenes of actual childbirth-in fact or in silhouette;
• Children’s sex organs;
• Ridicule of the clergy;
• Willful offense to any nation, race or creed;

And be it further resolved, That special care be exercised in the manner in which the following subjects are treated, to the end that vulgarity and suggestiveness may be eliminated and that good taste may be emphasized:

• The use of the flag;
• International relations (avoiding picturizing in an unfavorable light another country’s religion, history, institutions, prominent people, and citizenry);
• Arson;
• The use of firearms;
• Theft, robbery, safe-cracking, and dynamiting of trains, mines, buildings, etc. (having in mind the effect which a too-detailed description of these may have upon the moron);
• Brutality and possible gruesomeness;
• Technique of committing murder by whatever method;
• Methods of smuggling;
• Third-degree methods;
• Actual hangings or electrocutions as legal punishment for crime;
• Sympathy for criminals;
• Attitude toward public characters and institutions;
• Sedition;
• Apparent cruelty to children and animals;
• Branding of people or animals;
• The sale of women, or of a woman selling her virtue;
• Rape or attempted rape;
• First-night scenes;
• Man and woman in bed together;
• Deliberate seduction of girls;
• The institution of marriage;
• Surgical operations;
• The use of drugs;
• Titles or scenes having to do with law enforcement or law-enforcing officers;
• Excessive or lustful kissing, particularly when one character or the other is a “heavy.”

The willingness to institute a Code was driven by an important Supreme Court decision of 1915: the free speech protection does not extend to movie pictures

The Production Code was a voluntary effort of the MPPDA to adhere to a certain set of rules and to enforce a certain idea of morality. The key question then is why? Why would an industry of creative talents agree to limit the extent of its freedom of expression to obey morale rules that are subjective by nature and bound to be antiquated in the near future? And the reason is, because these creative talents could not claim a right to free speech.

Associate Justice Joseph McKenna penned the Supreme Court decision that movie pictures were not an art form to which the notion of free speech applied

In 1915, the Supreme Court of the United States decided unanimously that motion pictures were not covered by the free speech protection of the Ohio Constitution (substantially similar to the First Amendment of the United States Constitution).

This decision originated after an attempt by the Mutual Film Corporation, a movie distributor,  to counter the powers of the Industrial Commission of Ohio, a board of censors formed in 1913 at the initiative of the state government of Ohio to review, approve or censor films exhibited in the state of Ohio. The commission had the power of arresting exhibitors programming unapproved pictures in their theatres.

The Supreme Court declared that the commercial nature of the movie business made it fundamentally different from that of the press or others organs of public opinion. Adding that movies “could be used for evil”, the Supreme Court ruled that it couldn’t “regard [the censorship of movies] as beyond the power of government.”

The decision created a precedent that could be used to recognize censorships powers to the governments of each of the states. In 1921, legislators in 37 states introduced almost 100 movie censorship bills. In 1921, the state of New York instituted a censorship board, followed in 1922 by the state of Virginia. By 1927, there were eight individual states with such a board dedicated to the censorship of filmed entertainment.

Submitting itself to censorship from a multitude of boards had a crucial impact on the commercial potential of a movie: either movies would be prohibited from showing in certain territories, mechanically reducing their box office receipts, or the studios would have to release different versions of the same movie for different territories to comply with different censor standards.

The movie industry faced a dilemma: should it run the risk of being censored in certain territories and not others (accounting for the fact that moral standards vary from one state to the next and that what might be considered acceptable in New York might not be so mainstream in the Midwest) or should it be proactive?

Studios picked the lesser of two evils and decided that if America was going to censor their works anyways, they might as well do some internal whitewashing and present works that would be comply with the strictest standards to have the greater reach. For both political and commercial reasons, studios decided that self-censorship was a better option than having to deal with a multitude of censor boards.

The Code was written in 1927 as a preemptive strike against government control over the movie industry but was only enforced starting 1934

In 1922, the MPPDA asked the services of Presbyterian William H. Hays to rehabilitate its reputation and bury its image of a corrupt and decadent industry.

William H. Hays as the savior of the movie industry (Editorial cartoon by Cy Hungerford, published in 1922.)

William Hays helped studios pen the Production Code as early as 1927 but it was only in 1934 that Joseph Breen started enforcing it

At the impulse of William Hays, Irving G. Thalberg, Sol Wurtzel, and E. H. Allen, respectively the heads of MGM, Fox and Paramount, sat at the same table to discuss a list of subjects that were off limits or were to be handled carefully, based on local censor boards’ bones of contention. Out came the Don’ts and Be Carefuls. The list was approved by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and a regulatory committee, the SRC, was set up to implement the Code.

But like any self regulatory effort, the list was only as good as the studios’ commitment to enforcing it. Which was very weak until 1934. The first heads of the Hays office, Jason Joy from 1930 to 1932 and Dr James Wingate from 1932 and 1934, showed little passion in strictly enforcing the standards. In fact, the SRC had no power to censor movies, it had to negotiate with the studios to find a compromise. Articles started taking shots at the ineffective office and in 1933, the Code was considered by some insiders as “not even a joke any more; just a memory.”

Realizing that a superficial adherence to the Code would not be enough to shield them from political pressure, studios amended it to create the Production Code Administration (PCA) with a mission to give a certificate of approval mandatory for the movie to be release.  In 1934, Joseph Breen was appointed head of the PCA, whose informal name became the Breen Office. He helmed the Office for 20 years, before retiring in 1954.

Howard Hughes' "lewd" picture The Outlaw

Mr. Breen’s approach to the enforcement of the Code was very strict and negotiations between studios and the Office sometimes took comical proportions: in 1943, the release of the movie The Outlaw directed and produced by Howard Hughes involved a marketing campaign that prominently featured the anatomy of the film’s female lead, Jane Russell. After the Breen Office denied a certificate of approval, producer Howard Hughes decided to appeal the decision by bringing scientific evidence that the square footage of Ms. Russell’s exposed skin was not greater than that of other previously approved campaign material. That didn’t stop him from subsequently playing the provocative card as a marketing tactic: he added the line “The film that couldn’t be stopped” to promotional material and orchestrated a viral “buzz” by having his managers calling ministers and housewives to rally them against the upcoming “lewd” picture (the outcry only generated more coverage and demand for the movie.)

Evolution in America’s morals over the years on topics such as miscegenation resulted in the Breen Office loosening its standards on some items of the list but overall strict enforcement was the rule until 1954. Mr. Breen’s retirement marked a departure from strict enforcement to a more casual understanding of the Don’ts and Be Carefuls.

A number of factors contributed to replacing the Code with the MPAA rating system but the true nail in the Code’s coffin was a new Supreme Court decision

Italian short film "Il Miracolo" marked the beginning of the end of the Production Code

In 1948, Italian directors Roberto Rossellini and Federico Fellini worked together on a short film titled Il Miracolo (The Miracle), the first part of L’Amore. Il Miracolo tells the story of how Saint Joseph impregnates a simple minded peasant girl who believes she is the Virgin Mary. The film was controversial everywhere, including in devout Italy. But its most important legacy would prove to be on the other side of Atlantic.

Distributor Joseph Burstyn acquired the American rights for the movie which was released in New York in 1950. The film was voted best foreign language film award by the New York Film Critics Circle. But not every one was a fan and it wasn’t long before the New York State Board of Regents received complains regarding The Miracle. In 1951, the license to exhibit the picture was rescinded by the Commissioner of Education.

Things could have stopped her if it hadn’t been for Joseph Burstyn who was determined to go all the way to the Supreme Court to challenge the ruling that the film was “sacrilegious.”  He argued that the term sacrilegious was vague and indefinite and that censoring the movie on such ground was a violation of the fundamental principle of separation of church and state. He also argued that it violated the First Amendment by hindering freedom of speech. The New York State Board refused to change its ruling and was backed by the New York Court as well as the Court of Appeals. The only recourse left at that point was the Supreme Court.

After Mutual Film Corp vs. Industrial Commission of Ohio in 1915, the Supreme Court of the United States reversed its position to grant free speech protection to motion pictures in 1952

In 1952, the nine Justices, none of which was serving the Supreme Court in 1915, examined the case. Six of them agreed that films were an artistic medium entitled to protection by the First Amendment. Tackling head on the precedent of Mutual Film Corp vs  the Industrial Commission of Ohio, the majority agreed that:

(a) It cannot be doubted that motion pictures are a significant medium for the communication of ideas. Their importance as an organ of public opinion is not lessened by the fact that they are designed to entertain as well as to inform.

(b) That the production, distribution and exhibition of motion pictures is a large-scale business conducted for private profit does not prevent motion pictures from being a form of expression whose liberty is safeguarded by the First Amendment.

(c) Even if it be assumed that motion pictures possess a greater capacity for evil, particularly among the youth of a community, than other modes of expression, it does not follow that they are not entitled to the protection of the First Amendment or may be subjected to substantially unbridled censorship.

This landmark decision, aptly referred to as the Miracle decision, combined with the shift in the movie industry (end of the studio era, emergence of home entertainment via adoption of TV sets, globalization of the movie industry which brought foreign films produced with a different understanding of the mission of cinema to American screens) signed the beginning of the progressive death of the Production Code.

The Production Code died a slow death, and was replaced by the classification system in 1968

An increasing number of risqué films made it to the screen beginning in the mid 1950s to the mid 1960s. In 1959, Joseph Mankiewicz’s Suddenly Last Summer deals with homosexuality, underage prostitution, cannibalism as well as extreme psychological cruelty (the character played by Elizabeth Taylor is successively used as sexual bait by her cousin and locked up in an asylum by her aunt who plans on having her lobotomized.) In 1964, the PCA reversed its decision not to give its approval to Sidney Lumet‘s The Pawnbroker on the condition that certain scenes be reduced. After minimal changes were made, The Pawnbroker became the first movies featuring bare breasts to be endorsed by the PCA.

In 1966, MGM became the first member of the MPAA to refuse to obey a decision by the PCA. Despite not having gotten the approval from the PCA, the company released Michelangelo Antonioni‘s Blow-Up.

The Production Code was rewritten in 1966. The Don’ts and Be Carefuls were replaced with the notion that movies had to stay within the boundaries of current moral standards and good taste. The label “Suggested for Mature Audiences” (SMA) was also introduced , the first attempt at classifying movies in place of a binary approval/denial approach.

In 1968, the Production Code was formally abandoned and the MPAA rating system was introduced with four rating categories: General Audiences (G), Mature Audiences – Parental discretion advised (M), Restricted – People under 16 not admitted unless accompanying parent or adult guardian (R) and Adults Only (X).

Did the Production Code influence some movies for the best?

Advocating censorship is becoming an increasingly antiquated value and I am certainly not one calling for it. But if one is to admit that greater constraints can bring out the most creativity, one has to ask: is it possible that some movies ended up being better than what they would have been without the Production Code?

I would argue that, in addition to the delighting pleasure that modern audiences can find in analyzing the subtext of 1930s-1940s-1950s movies, the involvement of the PCA in the pre-production phases might have given some of the best most melodramatic endings of film history.

To the first point, screenwriters and directors must have had a great time finding ways to work around the constraints of the Code to deliver various levels of understanding.

In Charles Vidor's Gilda, the cane is not really a cane...

In early 2012, as he introduced the screening of Gilda as part of the SF Film Noir Festival, Eddie Muller praised director Charles Vidor’s talent for symbolism. While watching the movie with Mr. Vidor’s then wife, he questioned her about Mr. Vidor’s use of symbols. The former Mrs. Vidor exclaimed “Let me tell you, the cane is not really a cane and the sword is not really a sword.”

Film noir, which by nature deals with corrupted politicians and law enforcement officers, criminals, crooks and women of easy virtue, emerged in the 1940s-1950s colliding head on with the Production Code. One of the most iconic movies of the genre, Howard Hawks‘ The Big Sleep, provides us with a flawless demonstration of double entendre. If you have seen the movie, I’m pretty sure you already know which scene I am referring to: Humphrey Bogart’s Philip Marlowe and Lauren Bacall’s Vivian Rutledge in a nightclub, engaged in a certain conversation about horseracing.

And to the second point, I only need to say one word: Casablanca. The fact that the movie is a timeless classic speaks of the universality of the topics it addresses: freedom against oppression, but most of all the conflict between love and duty, self interest vs ideals. Taking a first stab at a romantic lead role, Humphrey Bogart became nothing short of a sex symbol. Mr. Bogart is Rick Blaine,  a disillusioned man whose philosophy in life (“I stick my neck out for *nobody*!”), the result of a heartbreak, is challenged when he is reunited with his true love, Ingrid Bergman’s Ilsa, asking him the favor to help her and her husband, a hero of the French Resistance, to flee Casablanca. The movie is a story of a man who finds his way  back to feeling something and being ready to sacrifice his self interest in order to stand for a cause greater than him.

The fact that the star crossed lovers do not end up together makes Casablanca (Michael Curtiz – 1942) a great melodrama, instead of a classic love story with a happy ending.  The very reason Rick and Isla do not end up together can be found in the Production Code: Isla is married to Victor Laszlo, whom she thought dead when she first embarked on a relationship with Rick; the news that he is in fact alive is what prompted her not to meet Rick at the train station when they were supposed to leave Paris; having Rick and Ilsa elope together would have meant condoning adultery. We can credit the Production Code for giving us one of the most powerful scenes of the movie, Rick’s selfless renunciation: “I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you’ll understand that.”

Casablanca won the Academy Award for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay at the 16th Academy Awards and is on eight of the American Film Institute (AFI) 100 Best lists. It ranks as the second best American movie ever, an as the first American passion movie.

Retrospectively, it is fascinating to see how much directors and producers actually got away with. The Breen Office was adamant on not showing clearly that Rick and Ilsa had been intimate in Paris or that Captain Renault asked for sexual favors from distressed ladies in need of a service. One would have to be very naive not to deduce all of this. The same goes for Rick and Ilsa’s reunion: we don’t need to see them making love to know what happened. As Rick tells Ilsa “We’ll always have Paris. We didn’t have, we, we lost it until you came to Casablanca. We got it back last night.”

It is also interesting to reflect on how European directors expatriated in the US reacted to a system that was so foreign to their way of working. They not only had to adapt  to the studio system, which granted a lot of power to the producer, as opposed to the director but also had to adhere to the moral standards and good taste as defined by the Breen Office.

British expatriate Alfred Hitchcock had to comply with the requests of the Breen Office

British director Alfred Hitchcock, for one, had a hard time relinquishing some of the control he used to have in Britain to third parties (his first American producer, David O. Selznick, or the Breen Office). As a young director, Alfred Hitchcock had to agree to requests from his producers (in terms of casting or endings for example), but the privilege that comes naturally not with age but with success is the freedom and control to do your film the way you intended. In 1939, when the 40 year old director moved to the US, he was bound by a 7 year contract with DOS and from then on. Put off by American producers’ culture to interfere heavily in the filmmaking process, Alfred Hitchcock patiently awaited the expiration of his contract to become his own producer. In the meantime, he limited Mr. Selznick’s potential of interference with his movies by refusing to provide “coverage” (the term refers to the practice of shooting the same scene from varying angles to give many options to the producer in terms of editing). Mr. Hitchcock’s contract featured clauses that he could be loaned to other studios and he actually produced his first film in 1941 (Suspicion). He went on to produce all of his films after his contract with DOS expired in 1947.

Mr. Hitchcock’s most famous workaround the Production Code can be found in Notorious (1946). The Code limited the length of on screen kisses to 3 seconds. Mr. Hitchcock managed the tour de force of complying with this rule while offering the audience a 150 second kissing scene. He had his lead actors, Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, unlock lips every 3 seconds to whisper at each other’s ear. Which raises an interesting question regarding the point 25 in the Be Carefuls list: what exactly wasn’t lustful in this scene?

 —

Vanessa Méheut

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPAA_rating_system

http://www.indiewire.com/article/the-mpaa-being-a-bully-10-films-that-fought-with-mpaa-to-change-their-ratings?offset=0

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Production_code

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_Film_Corporation_v._Industrial_Commission_of_Ohio

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Burstyn,_Inc_v._Wilson

http://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/343/495/case.html

The Rocky Horror Picture Show and the Castro theatre are a match made in heaven. And San Franciscans experienced heaven on earth on Saturday, February 4^th 2011.  The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Jim Sharman – 1975) is a midnight movie glorifying transvestites and, through them, all the misfits and freaks of the world. Seeing it in the Castro Theatre is a special treat not only because the Castro is the natural habitat of transvestites in San Francisco but because the Castro theatre’s attendees are pros when it comes to audience participation.

I have professed my love for midnight screenings and audience participation screenings in previous posts (here and here). So you can imagine how excited I was when I learnt that the holy grail of audience participation movies was showing at my favorite San Francisco theatre.

 Honoring all the sweet transvestites of San Francisco, California

The event was programmed for the closing night of 11th SF Sketchfest, San Francisco’s annual comedy festival (the festival features mostly comedians in live acts and Q&As but also includes music events and theater screenings).  And Sketchfest sure went with a bang. Not only did Barry Bostwick, who plays Brad Majors, “the hero” in the movie, attend for a special Q&A with hostess Peaches Christ, but various Bay Area performers, including shadow casts, were performing also on stage. The show included a slightly modified version of “Sweet Transvestite,” the quasi anthem of the movie, performed by Peaches Christ and the Midnight Mass players (while Peaches Christ might be a sweet transvestite, she is not from Transexual, Transylvania  but of San Francisco, California-a-a). As usual with Castro’s audience participation screenings, a costume contest was organized which meant a number of attendees arrived dressed up in lace-up corsets, fishnet stocking or tiny golden briefs. The Rocky Horror Picture Show is famous for its worldwide cult following and San Franciscans didn’t disappoint: the waiting line literally went halfway around the block, from the Castro Theatre, to 17th street, to halfway down Hartford.

For these readers not familiar with The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the movie is a nothing short of a cult phenomenon (there is even a wikipedia article on the movie’s cult following). Released in August 1975 as the screen adaptation of a musical (The Rocky Horror Show), it has the longest theatrical run in history.  While it initially didn’t perform well, the decision to move it to midnight shows proved a fateful one. The movie grossed close to $115M in the US alone according to number from data aggregator boxofficemojo.com, on a $1.2M budget.

What makes the movie one of its kind is the previously mentioned audience participation. Not all movie critics / viewers agree on the intrinsic quality of the movie but everyone seems to agree: it is best scene in a theatre with an audience of fans. Somehow over time, audiences have crafted alternative dialogues (most of it PG or R rated) that are now an integral part of the show. Audience participation also involves throwing a bunch of things in the theatre (rice in the wedding scene, water in the raining scene, toasts in the dinner scene, etc.) but Castro moviegoers were asked to refrain from doing so, in order to preserve the historical building. Similarly, while most screenings have “shadow casts” of local performers doing a live reenactment of the movie, all the action on stage on February 4^th happened before the movie started, with the very excited audience filling in during the movie.

A pair of red lips, a flat tire, a naive couple, an extra-terrestrial mad scientist, a creature and a swimming pool 

Frank N. Furter (Tim Curry) welcomes Brad Majors (Barry Bostwick) and Janet Weiss (Susan Sarandon) at his mansion

The story is simple (a good thing since it is almost impossible to hear anything with everyone shouting funny repartees in the theatre): a preppy and newly engaged couple, Brad and Janet, decides to go pay a visit to the professor in whose class they first met. Unfortunately, they soon find themselves stuck in the rain due to a flat tire and have to go get help at a nearby castle. Little do they know that they are about to step in the middle of a Annual Transylvanian Convention and meet a number of visitors from another galaxy, the most colorful of which is their host, Dr. Frank N. Furter. Frank N Furter is not only a proud sex-crazed transsexual transvestite; he is also a mad scientist who is just ready to unveil its latest project: a real life creature named Rocky Horror. The whole movie is a freak show: from an ice axe turned into a weapon in a wacky murder to a cannibal dinner party to a transducer turning people into statues. The whole is punctuated with a tremendous amount of sex (including an orgy in a swimming pool). As a musical, the movie features a number of singing and one dancing number (The Time Warp) that is an invitation for everyone to participate with the lyrics teaching the various steps.

Frank N. Furter (Tim Curry) and his creature Rocky Horror (Peter Hinwood)

As Peaches Christ pointed out, the movie is something of a “it’s getter better movie,” for “the abnormal youth of America” she proudly considers herself a part of. But thinking it promotes limitless debauchery would be to misunderstand it. The end of the movie sees Frank N. Furter ultimately being punished for failing to fulfill his mission: while he did unveil the secret to human life, he ultimately got more interested in satisfying his impulses and got out of control (lyrics read: “Frank N. Furter / It’s all over / Your mission is a failure / Your lifestyle’s too extreme”).The movie leaves Brad and Janet confused about what they just experienced (the conservative pair is now wearing fishnet stockings and corsets). And the voice over concludes: “And crawling, on the planet’s face, some insects, called the human race. Lost in time, and lost in space… and meaning.”

The movie is not only about self discovery and self acceptance, it also is about how confusing it can be to find one’s place in the world.

Brad Majors (Barry Bostwick) and Janet Weiss (Susan Sarandon) have been stripped of their wet clothes

It struggles with a fundamental question: how far can you go in terms of questioning moral imperatives before it becomes too much? It is not surprising to read in an interview of Richard O’Brien, the creator of The Rocky Horror Show who played the hunchback servant Riff-Raff in both the stage and the movie versions, that he has been struggling all his life with a sense of not belonging. In another interview, he reveals that writing The Rocky Horror Show “had nothing to do with shocking people. I wrote Rocky for me. I didn’t write it with an audience in mind or for it to be a hit.”

Not that you should take The Rocky Horror Picture Show too seriously. Moral dilemmas and philosophical debates on morale and law are not the heart of The Rocky Horror Picture Show experience. Audiences are here to enjoy the moment, not question the implications of what they just saw. And in spite of the rather pessimistic ending, audiences leave the theatre in awe of the creativity and audacity of the movie.

Even though it was released almost 40 years ago, The Rocky Horror Picture Show doesn’t feel dated. There are two reasons to that: 1/ the story is so out there that it cannot be linked to a specific time, and 2/ the movie is a well crafted one (the lightning, editing, etc haven’t lost their punch).

The exuberant plot is served by flawless acting: it takes great skills for actors to manage over the top roles without ever being ridiculous. In that respect, Tim Curry, as Frank N. Furter, has no match: he pulls off a charming sociopath and his last number “I’m going home,” is fantastic. Mick Jagger is rumored to have wanted to play the role in the movie version. The movie also features Susan Sarandon, in one of her first roles, as the not so ingenious after all Janet.

Having actor Barry Bostwick on stage at the Castro was a real delight. Mr. Bostwick might be best known for his role as NYC mayor Randall Winston in the TV sitcom Spin City but his career started on Broadway stages: he was the original Danny Zuko in the stage production of the musical Grease in 1972. More than 35 years after the shooting of Rocky Horror, he seemed to have kept a special spot in his heart for the movie. He appeared in the tribute Rocky Horror Glee Show episode of the Fox hit TV show Glee last year with co-star MeatLoaf.

“I look like an old man in drag”

He made a grand entrance on the Castro stage wearing, to everyone’s surprise including interviewer Peaches Christ’s, corset, fishnet stockings and high heels and throwing a boa around his neck and yelling to the roaring crowd “Why don’t you guys just let this movie die?”

The following interview, whose audio is available above, touched on the realities of location shooting a low budget movie in a small British castle, Oakley Court (no heating, a freezing pool, Susan Sarandon getting a pneumonia and a warm up room catching on fire), Mr. Bostwick’s favorite memory of the shooting as well as his favorite audience participation line and his future endeavors (he plays a werewolf chasing Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the upcoming FDR, American Badass by Garrett Brawith; not to be confused with the upcoming Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Timur Bekmambetov – yes, there is some serious work around US history going on in Hollywood right now). His Q&A also reveals what happened to Brad Majors’ briefs (which had to be flown from New York to Britain because no, Europeans do not wear underwear like that).

Luke Perry surprises Barry Bostwick and Peaches Christ on stage

Mr. Bostwick’s whimsical sense of humor was just what the audience needed to get ready for the show. Even interviewer Peaches Christ indicated that the Q&A with Mr. Bostwick had been “one of the finest moments” of her career. The fact that Luke Perry, who was in town for the Sketchfest and incidentally had reprised the role of Brad Majors on stage for the 2001 Broadway revival of the Rocky Horror Show, hopped on stage at the end of the interview probably only added to that. The appearance of the Beverly Hills, 90210 alum was not planned but you didn’t hear anyone complain.

Actually, it might have been just the thing the audience needed to shiver with antici- say it! – pation.

Additional pictures of Barry Bostwick demonstrating the leg stretch can be found on Sketchfest’s website.

NB: those who missed this one in a lifetime event can still attend the monthly screening of  The Rocky Horror Picture Show at the Clay theatre (where the movie plays every last Saturday of the month).

—

Vanessa Méheut

Every year since 1929, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has been honoring the  best professionals in the film industry. The 84th Academy Awards ceremony is now right around the corner and I might have gone a little over-excited this year! I’m a player which means I like to bet with friends on winners and losers. I’m also competitive so this year, to make sure I maximize my outcomes, I decided to design a system to make the most accurate predictions.  Finally because I am a nice person after all (and because I felt the hours I spent building spreadsheets should someone else in addition of me), I decided to share my insights with you.

The model I worked on is based on the idea that the Oscars are nothing but the pinnacle of awards season that begins with film critics circles picking their top for the year, continues with the Golden Globes ceremony where the foreign press designates its bests and intensifies with the various professional guilds (Directors Guild of America or DGA, Producers Guild of America or PGA, Screen Actors Guild or SAG and Writers Guild of America or WGA) recognizing outstanding talents in their particular field.

Using historical data from up to 35 years, I looked at correlation between wins at the Golden Globes and guilds’ ceremonies and at the Oscars for 8 of the 24 Academy categories. I have not automated a system to measure correlation between wins in different categories (eg: likelihood for a movie to win Best Picture if the movie’s director has been crowned Best Director), so observations of this kind are ad hoc.

The categories I looked at are the following:

• Best Actor in a leading role,
• Best Actress in a leading role,
• Best Actor in a supporting role,
• Best Actress in a supporting role,
• Best Adapted Screenplay,
• Best Original Screenplay,
• Best Director,
• Best Picture.

The categories I have not looked at are the following:

• Best Animated Feature,
• Best Animated Short Film,
• Best Documentary Feature,
• Best Documentary Short,
• Best Foreign Language Film,
• Best Live Action Short Film,
• Best Art Direction,
• Best Cinematography,
• Best Costume Design,
• Best Film Editing,
• Best Makeup,
• Best Original Score,
• Best Original Song,
• Best Sound Editing,
• Best Sound Mixing,
• Best Visual Effects.

84th Academy Awards nominations luncheon - Family Portrait

The various guilds’ awards are oftentimes considered the most accurate predictors of an Oscar win (and generally speaking they are as I will detail later.) Most of the guilds, at the exception of the DGA, have started given out awards in the recent years. I decided to go back in time to the year the guilds started hosting awards ceremonies. The DGA gave out its first award in 1949 for a movie released in 1948 but since I was too lazy to work on 60+ lines of data (times 3 since I needed to collect information for three different ceremonies) for a single category, I arbitrarily went back to 1989 only. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) started giving out Golden Globe awards as early as 1944 for films released in 1943 so readers with more free time and patience than me could go back as much as 69 years to add more historical perspective to their correlation statistics.

For each category, I will present the results of my data analysis as well as identify the likely winner for the 84^th Academy Awards ceremony. When possible, I will add who I think is the most accurate runner up as well as a potential wild card that would prove that statistics are just that (statistics). Art cannot be reduced to numbers.

A couple of general observations first: you can accurately predict Oscar winners, especially when there is a consensus between the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and the guilds

Academy Award winners can be predicted pretty accurately if you focus on the right data: awards given out earlier during the awards season are very strong indicators of the likelihood of being awarded an Oscar.

Guild awards are the most accurate indicator that you might pick up an Oscar: depending on the category, your chances of winning an Oscar if you won the guild awards are around 60%. If you don’t have to lose looking in depth at Oscar contenders, picking the guild award winner is your safest bet.

Generally speaking, Golden Globe winners have 50% chance of winning on Oscar night and the probability only goes up when the Golden Globe doubles up with a guild award: usually if you win a Golden Globe as well as a guild award, your chances of getting the Oscar are around 80%.

This number has to be nuanced because there is no direct overlap between Oscar and Golden Globe categories. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association makes a distinction between dramas and comedies/musicals. As a result, it rewards two movies with a Golden Globe for Best Picture, two actors with a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a lead role and two actresses with a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a lead role. The Academy only crowns one in each craft. Reversely, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association gives away only one screenplay award, while the Academy separates original screenplays from adapted screenplays.

There is no question that ultimately, the 5,765 voting members decide the fate of the Academy Award winners. This exercise was simply designed to point out striking consistency between awards given out by different people (granted that the different professional guild members can also be Academy voters.) This suggests two things: either Academy voters lack originality and let themselves be heavily influenced by what others in the industry or the press consider best performances, or said performances are so excellent that their superiority is a no brainer. I’ll let you decide how you view it.

Avid readers of the industry’s specialized publications should not be surprised by any of the conclusions below. My hope only is to bring quantified evidence of what most observers already know: only one or two Oscar contenders have a real shot at winning the statuette.

My picks for the 84th Academy Awards ceremony

To sum it up, here are my picks:

Now if you’re willing to drill down 5,500 words of data driven analytics justifying these picks, be my guest.

• BEST ACTOR IN A LEAD ROLE: Winning both the SAG and Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Lead Performance in a Comedy/Musical is a very rare occurrence but it has always been a golden ticket so far

The SAG award is the best predictor of an Oscar win: over the last 17 years (since the SAG started giving out awards), 76% of SAG award winners also won the Academy Award for Best Actor. The Academy has little love for comedies and only two Golden Globe winners in the comedy / musical subcategory ended up winning the Oscar (Jamie Foxx in 2004 for his performance in Taylor Hackford‘s Ray and Jack Nicholson in 1997 for his role in James L. Brooks‘ As Good as It Gets). Both of them had also won the SAG award. So statistically, 100% of the actors who won both the SAG award and the Golden Globe for Best Lead Performance in a Comedy / Musical won the Academy Award for Best Actor in a Lead Role.

Jack Nicholson and Jamie Foxx both got the Oscar after having won SAG award and Golden Globe for a performance in a comedy / musical

Winning the SAG award and the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Drama is a more common occurrence (9 times over the last 17 years) that usually bodes well too (89% did win the Oscar). The only loss occurred in 2001, when Denzel Washington won for Best Actor over Russell Crowe who had won both the Golden Globe and the SAG award for his role in Ron Howard‘s A Beautiful Mind. That being said, Russell Crowe had been a surprise winner the year prior, when he picked up the statuette for his role in Ridley Scott‘s Gladiator (the race was rather open there, with George Clooney winning the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Comedy / Musical for his role in the Coen brothers‘ O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Tom Hanks winning the drama category for his performance in Robert Zemeckis‘ Cast Away and Benicio Del Toro being recognized with a SAG award for his work in Steven Soderbergh‘s Traffic).

The only other time the four awards went to four different actors was in 2002: Adrien Brody won the Academy Award for Roman Polanski‘s The Pianist, Richard Gere had gotten the Golden Globe in the Comedy / Musical subcategory for Rob Marshall‘s Chicago, Jack Nicholson had picked up the Golden Globe in the Drama subcategory for his role in Alexander Payne‘s About Schmidt and Daniel Day-Lewis had gotten the SAG award for his performance in Martin Scorsese‘s Gangs of New York.

Six times over the last 17 years did the SAG award didn’t go to someone who had gotten a Golden Globe already. Three times out of these six, the SAG award winner picked up the Oscar and only once did the Golden Globe winner for a performance in a Drama went on to win the Academy Award. This occurred in 2003 when Sean Penn won the Oscar for his role in Clint Eastwood‘s Mystic River, beating both Johnny Depp (SAG award winner for his role in Gore Verbinski‘s Pirates of the Caribbeans: the Curse of the Black Pearl) and Bill Murray who had won the Golden Globe for Sofia Coppola‘s Lost in Translation.

In the two other occurrences, a third actor changed the game: in 2002, Adrien Brody won for The Pianist (becoming the youngest actor to win an Academy Award for Best Actor at age 29) and in 2000 Russell Crowe for Gladiator.

So what does this mean for 2011?

In 2011, Jean Dujardin should be crowned Best Actor in a Lead Role for The Artist

Jean Dujardin and George Clooney at the 84th Academy Award luncheon

Winner:

Like Jamie Foxx and Jack Nicholson, Jean Dujardin won both the SAG award and the Golden Globe for a Lead Performance in a Comedy/Musical. With both Mr. Foxx and Mr. Nicholson winning the Oscar in 2004 and 1997 respectively, this bodes really well for Jean Dujardin. But with only two cases in history, this 100% win rate should be taken with a grain of salt.

Runner up:

Having won the Golden Globe for Lead Performance in a Drama, George Clooney is the only serious challenger.

There is no real wild card in this category, the race is between Mr. Dujardin and Mr. Clooney.

• BEST ACTRESS IN A LEAD ROLE: This category never sees a wild card win, the optimal pick is some who won both the SAG award and the Golden Globe for Best Lead Performance in a Drama

Kate Winslet won the Oscar in 2008 for her role in The Reader (the role also got her awards in the supporting category from both the SAG and the HFPA)

Over the last 17 years, the Academy never picked an actress that had not won either the SAG award or a Golden Globe for Lead Performance. However, it is interesting to point out that in 2008, Kate Winslet won both the Academy Award and the Golden Globe in the Drama subcategory for performances in two different movies (respectively Stephen Daldry‘s The Reader and Sam Mendes‘ Revolutionary Road). More interestingly, Mrs. Winslet was only nominated for the Academy Award for her role in The Reader, not for also for Revolutionary Road. However, she had been nominated (and had won) a Golden Globe for her performance in The Reader but she was competing in the supporting actress category (she also won the SAG award, also in the supporting category that same year).

The SAG award is again the best indicator with 12 SAG award recipients going on to win the Academy Award.  Similarly to the Best Actor in a leading role categoriy, your odds are better if you combined the SAG award with a Golden Globe in the Drama subcategory. Only four actresses with a Golden Globe win for performances in a Comedy / Musical won the Oscar and 3 of them had also gotten the SAG award: Reese Witherspoon in 2005 for her role in James Mangold‘s Walk the Line, Gwyneth Paltrow in 1998 for her role in John Madden‘s Shakespeare in Love and Helen Hunt in 1997 for her performance in As Good as It Gets. The only exception is Marion Cotillard who won the Academy Award in 2007 for her role in Olivier Dahan‘s La Vie en Rose, beating Julie Christie who had won both the SAG award and the Golden Globe in the Drama subcategory for her performance in Sarah Polley‘s Away from Her.

Most double winners go on to win the Oscar. In only two cases did a SAG award and Golden Globe winner lose. In addition to Julie Christie in 2007, Renee Zellweger also lost the Oscar to Nicole Kidman in 2002 (for performances in Chicago and Stephen Daldry‘s The Hours respectively).

Marion Cotillard lost the SAG award but added the Academy Award to her Golden Globe (Comedy/Musical) for her performance in La Vie en Rose

If you only won one of the three awards, your luck is better if you received the SAG award. In the case of an open race where all three awards got to different actresses, the likely winner is the SAG award recipient (50% with 3 wins in 2001, 1996 and 1995 over 6 occurrences, see below). If you won only the Golden Globe for a role in a Drama, your odds are slightly smaller (40%, with 4 wins in 10 occurrences). Achieving the same result with a Golden Globe for a role in a Comedy / Musical is a tour de force (1 occurrence in 13 situations): only Mrs. Cotillard has managed to pull it off so far.

Over the last 17 years, only 6 times did the three awards go to three different actresses: 1994, 1995, 1996, 1999, 2001 and 2008.

In three out of these 6 cases, the Academy Award went to the SAG award winner: Halle Berry in 2001 for Marc Forster‘s Monster’s Ball, Frances McDormand in 1996 for her performance in the Coen brothers‘ Fargo and Susan Sarandon in 1995 for Tim Robbins‘ Dead Man Walking.

In two cases, the Oscar went to the Golden Globe recipient for a role in a Drama: Hillary Swank in 1999 for Kimberly Peirce‘s Boys Don’t Cry and Jessica Lange in 1994 for Tony Richardson‘s Blue Sky.

The last case is that of Kate Winslet in 2008: while Mrs. Winslet did win the Golden Globe for Best Drama, it was not for the role which got her the Academy Award.

So what does this mean for 2011?

Viola Davis is the favorite in what is probably the most open of all categories in 2011

SAG winner Viola Davis should win the Academy Award for Best Actress unless Golden Globe winner (Drama) Meryl Streep steals it

Winner:

The race is pretty open with the three awards going to three different actresses. Statistically, Viola Davis has the most chances to win the category since she was awarded the SAG award.

Runner up:

Having won the Golden Globe for Lead Actress in a Drama, Meryl Streep is the logical runner up. That being said, her own acceptance speech at the Golden Globe ceremony seemed to indicate that she herself thought Mrs. Davis deserved the award.

NB: Mrs. Streep has already won 2 Academy Award (supporting actress in 1979 for Robert Benton‘s Kramer vs. Kramer and lead performance in 1982 for Alan J. Pakula‘s Sophie’s Choice) and been nominated a staggering 17 times (14 times for a lead performance and 3 times for a supporting role), the most of any actor ever.

Wild Card:

Michelle Williams is the logical wild card: the Academy never gave the award to a complete wild card over the last 17 years. Having won the Golden Globe in the Comedy / Musical subcategory, Mrs. Williams is the only one with a legitimate shot.

• BEST ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE: taken separately, the SAG award and the Golden Globe are weaker indicators of an Oscar win, but it is very rare to see the Oscar go to someone that hasn’t won either one or the other

Over the last 17 years, the HFPA and the SAG have agreed on best performance for an actor in a supporting role in a minority of cases (7 out of 17, 41%). Both organizations have rewarded actors that went on to win the Academy Award with the same probability (10 times out of 17 each, 59%), including six actors who had gotten both the SAG award and the Golden Globe.

When the HFPA and the SAG do agree, your chances to win the Oscar are substantially increased: getting both awards more than doubles your chances compared to getting either one or the other, from 40% to 86%.

Over the 7 times the HFPA and SAG have agreed on a winner, 6 nominees picked up the Academy Award. The only time the combination didn’t result in an Oscar win was in 2006 when Eddie Murphy, nominated for his performance in Bill Condon‘s Dreamgirls, lost to Alan Arkin (Little Miss Sunshine by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris). Oscars fans might remember that Mr. Murphy  stormed out of the Kodak Theatre, right after the category was announced: statistically, he had all reasons to be upset.

Eddie Murphy is the only SAG award / Golden Globe winner to have lost the Academy Award (it went to Alan Arkin)

In addition to Mr. Arkin, only James Coburn and Kevin Spacey managed to pick up the Oscar after having lost both the SAG award and the Golden Globe. Mr. Coburn won in 1998 for his performance in Paul Schrader‘s Affliction, beating SAG winner Robert Duvall (A Civil Action by Jonathan Harr) and Golden Globe recipient Ed Harris (Peter Weir‘s The Truman Show), Mr. Coburn had not been nominated for the Golden Globe. Mr. Spacey won in 1995 for his role in Bryan Singer‘s The Usual Suspects, he had lost the Golden Globe to Brad Pitt (Terry Gilliam‘s 12 Monkeys) and the SAG award to Ed Harris (Ron Howard‘s Apollo 13). 

So what does this mean for 2011?

In 2011, the Oscar for Best Actor in a Supporting Role should go to Christopher Plummer

SAG award and Golden Globe winner Christopher Plummer is the favorite, but the long shot challenger would be Max Von Sydow

Runner up:Having won both the SAG award and the Golden Globe, Christopher Plummer should go on and win the Academy Award for his role in Mike Mills‘ Beginners.

This year, two Academy Award nominees were not in competition for either the Golden Globe or the SAG award which brings a certain level of uncertainty: Nick Nolte (Gavin O’Connor‘s Warrior) and Max von Sydow (Stephen Daldry‘s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close). If I were forced to pick, I’d say that Max von Sydow is in the best position to challenge Mr. Plummer: Mr. von Sydow is a veteran with 60+ years experience and impressive credits (the man played chess against death itself in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal), and the Academy could see fit to hand him an award to symbolically acknowledge his whole career.

Mr. von Sydow is already a really long shot. Apart from him, I don’t see any real challenger.

• BEST ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE: as for actors, the SAG award and the Golden Globe are strong signals of an Oscar win only if they went to the same actress

The HFPA and the SAG are more aligned for supporting performances  by actresses than by actors : over the last 17 years, the SAG award and the Golden Globe went to the same actress 10 times (59%). These double winners have gone on to win the Academy Award with extreme regularity (8 times out of 10, 80%). The combo didn’t prove successful in two occurrences: 2008 and 1996. However, the 2008 result artificially skews the result: the double SAG award and Golden Globe winner was Kate Winslet for The Reader but the actress was competing in the lead category, not supporting for the Academy Award (that she did win). In 1996, Juliette Binoche won the Academy Award for her performance in Anthony Minghella‘s The English Patient despite having lost both the SAG award and the Golden Globe to Lauren Bacall  (Barbra Streisand‘s The Mirror Has Two Faces).

If the two awards go to different actresses, then the odds actually are that the Academy Award will go to a third contender: over the 7 times this occurred, the SAG award winner picked up the Oscar on 2 occasions, as did the Golden Globe winner. Outsiders were rewarded in 3 occurrences.  Tilda Swinton won the Academy Award in 2007  (Tony Gilroy‘s Michael Clayton) after having lost the Golden Globe to Cate Blanchett (Todd Haynes‘ I’m Not There) and the SAG award to Ruby Dee (Ridley Scott‘s American Gangster). In 2000, Marcia Gay Harden (Ed Harris‘ Pollock) was nominated only in the Oscar race where she prevailed over Golden Globe winner Kate Hudson (Cameron Crowe‘s Almost Famous) and SAG award winner Judi Dench (Lasse Hallström‘s Chocolat). That being said, in 1998, Judi Dench was crowned best actress in a supporting role for her performance in Shakespeare in Love over Lynn Redgrave (Golden Globe winner for Bill Condon‘s Gods and Monsters) and Kathy Bates (SAG award winner for Mike Nichols‘ Primary Colors).

So what does this mean for 2011?

Octavia Spencer not getting the 2011 Academy award for Best Actress in a supporting role would be a really surprising turn of events 

Octavia Spencer (second to the left) is almost a sure win, with Berenice Bejo (right) as a very long shot

Winner:

Having won both the SAG award and the Golden Globe, Octavia Spencer is the favorite. The last time a double winner such as her didn’t get an Oscar for her performance was in 1996 when Lauren Bacall lost to Juliette Binoche.

Runner up:

Since the only time a SAG award / Golden Globe winner didn’t win the Oscar involved a French actress (and partly I am a chauvinistic French), I’m going to pick Bérénice Bejo as the runner up but she statistically has no more chances than any of the other three cotenders (Jessica Chastain for her performance in Tate Taylor‘s The Help, Melissa McCarthy in Paul Feig‘s Bridesmaids and Janet McTeer in Rodrigo Garcia‘s Albert Nobbs).

• BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY: The WGA award winner is again most likely to win the Oscar, especially if it also picked up the Golden Globe for Best Screenplay

In a surprising turn of events, Precious won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2009 in spite of having lost the WGA award and the Golden Globe

The screenplay category is one for which both the guild award and the Golden Globe are not overwhelmingly indicative of an Oscar win. That being said, winning the guild award gives you better odds to win the Oscar. Over the last 35 years, the Writers Guild of America rewarded a movie that went on to win the Oscar 69% of the time (24 out of 35 times).

The Golden Globe is a very weak indicator for this category. That’s because the Golden Globe doesn’t distinguish original screenplays from adapted screenplays. This splits probabilities in two. It also results in the HFPA and WGA rewarded the same movie only 12 times over the last 35 years. Again this number is slightly skewed since the Golden Globe can go to either an original or adapted screenplay while there are two different WGA awards. However, even adding the 4 occurrences when the Golden Globe was given out to a movie that won the WGA award for Best Original Screenplay, the awards historically went to different movies in a majority of cases (12+4=16 over of 35 years). A closer look at the years indicates that the HFPA and WGA have been getting more aligned in the recent years: eight times over the last 10 years did the Golden Globe winner also win the WGA award (7 times for an adapted work and once, in 2003, for the original screenplay of Lost in Translation).

Winning both the WGA award and the Golden Globe gives you overwhelming odds of winning the Oscar: only once ouf ot 12 times did a double winner lose during the Oscar ceremony. It happened in 2009, when Jason Reitman‘s Up in the Air lost the Oscar to Lee Daniels‘ Precious.

Again as usual, if you win only one of the two awards, your odds are better if you picked up the WGA award. These awards went to different winners 23 times over the last 35 years and the WGA award winner picked up an Oscar statuette 13 times out of those 23. The Golden Globe winner, in comparison, prevailed in only 4 occurrences. The big question however, should be to look at whether or not the Golden Globe winner was competing in the Original or Adapted category at the Oscars, which could contribute to a lower number of wins.

The other six occurrences saw movies that picked neither the WGA award nor the Golden Globe win: 2003 (Peter Jackson‘s The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King), 2002 (The Pianist), 1999 (Lasse Hallström‘s The Cider House Rules), 1998 (Gods and Monsters), 1992 (James Ivory‘s Howards End), 1985 (Sydney Pollack‘s Out of Africa).

So what does this mean for 2011?

In 2011, The Descendants is best positioned to win but the race is pretty open

Winner:

The Descendants won the WGA award but lost the Golden Globe to Midnight in Paris. However since Midnight in Paris is an original work that is competing  in  the Original Screenplay category, The Descendants is likely to pick up the statuette on Sunday 26^th.

Runner-up:

Martin Scorsese‘s Hugo could change the game. It got the most nominations for 2011 (it is competing in 11 categories). Three other movies that got an impressive number of Academy Award accolades despite losing the WGA award and the Golden Globe went on to win the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay: Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (2003, 11 nominations), Howards End (1992, 9 nominations), Out of Africa (1985, 11 nominations).

Wild Card:

In a very long shot, Bennett Miller‘s Moneyball could win. It garnered 7 nominations for the 84^th Academy Awards ceremony, similar to The Pianist (2002, 7 nominations), The Cider House Rules (1999, 7 nominations), Gods and Monsters (1998, 4 nominations), all of which won for Best Adapted Screenplay in spite of having lost both the WGA award and the Golden Globe.

• BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY: The HFPA only hands out one award for screenplay which usually goes to an adaptation rather than an original work so combining Golden Globe and WGA award makes you a sure Oscar winner

As usual, winning the guild award still gives you better odds to win the Oscar. Over the last 27 years, the Writers Guild of America rewarded a movie that went on to win the Oscar 63% of the time (17 out of 27 times), only slightly below the 69% for the Adapted Screenplay category.

As described above, the Golden Globe is a relatively weak indicator for screenplays but with more Golden Globes given out to adapted screenplays than original ones, the Golden Globe is a better Oscar indicator for adapted screenplays.

Having won the Golden Globe is only really interesting when there is a combined win WGA award /Golden Globe. It happens rarely (4 times over the last 27 years) but every time it did, the movie won the Oscar. The four movies that managed this Grand Slam are Lost in Translation (2003), Sam Mendes‘ American Beauty (1999), Shakespeare in Love (1998) and Ridley Scott‘s Thelma and Louise (1991).

Again, if your movie won only one award, you better hope it is the WGA award: on the 23 times this happened, the WGA award winner won the Oscar 13 times (57%). By comparison, scoring an Oscar with the Golden Globe but not the WGA award happened only in 9% of cases (1997 and 1994 when Gus Van Sant‘s Good Will Hunting prevailed over WGA award winner As Good as it Gets and Quentin Tarantino‘s Pulp Fiction over Mike Newell‘s Four Weddings and a Funeral).

So what does this mean for 2011?

In 2011, there are virtually no chances Woody Allen’s original screenplay for Midnight in Paris will not get the Oscar

Woody Allen (here on the set of Midnight in Paris) will win Best Original Screenplay for the movie

Winner:

Woody Allen is as close as it gets to a sure win for his writing of Midnight in Paris.

Runner up:

If I were forced to name a runner up, I would take a chance and pick Asghar Faradi‘s A Separation: it is rather unlikely for a foreign language movie to be nominated  in the Best Original Screenplay category.  It occurred eight times over the last 27 years: Louis Malle‘s Au revoir les enfants (1987), Krzysztof Kieślowski‘s Three colors: Red (1994), Roberto Benigni‘s Life is Beautiful (1998), Jean-Pierre Jeunet‘s Amélie (2001), Pedro Almodóvar‘s Talk to Her (2002), Alfonso Cuarón‘s Y tu Mamá También (2002), Denys Arcand‘s The Barbarian Invasions (2003) and Guillermo del Toro‘s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006). The only movie in a foreign language which went on to win the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay was Talk to Her. Like A Separation, it had been praised by critics, nominated in two categories only at the Academy Awards but very important ones (Best Original Screenplay and Best Director).

• BEST DIRECTOR: The award for Best Director is a pretty closed race as the  DGA winner gets the Oscar with a staggering 86% probability

Best Director is the category for which the guild award is the strongest signal of an Oscar win. Over the last 22 years, the winner of the DGA award collected the Oscar in 86% of cases (19 out of 22).

If the DGA award winner also picked up a Golden Globe, the likelihood to win the Oscar goes up to 93%. The only time a double winner lost the Oscar was in 2000, when Steven Soderbergh won for Traffic (Ang Lee who had won both the Golden Globe and the DGA award that year for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon).

In cases when the DGA award and Golden Globe went to two different winners, as is the case this year, with  Michel Hazanavicius winning the DGA award for The Artist and Martin Scorsese getting the Golden Globe for Hugo, the Oscar went to the DGA award winner in 75% of cases (6 out of 8 times when the situation occurred). The Oscar only went to the Golden Globe recipient in one case: in 1995, when Mel Gibson picked up the statuette for Braveheart (the movie also won Best Picture at the Academy Awards) over DGA award winner Ron Howard (Apollo 13). The other case occurred in 2002 when Roman Polanski won for The Pianist (NB: it is unclear how Mr. Polanski’s status in the US negatively or positively impacts his propension to win at such ceremonies so his case should be handled with a grain of salt).

So what does this mean for 2011?

In 2011, the odds favor Michel Hazanavicius getting the Oscar for Best Director

DGA winner Michel Hazanavicius (left) has the most chances to win Best Director with Martin Scorsese (middle) as the runner up and Alexander Payne (right) as the unlikely wild card

Winner:

The Golden Globe and DGA award went to two different directors. Having won the DGA award, Michel Hazanavicius is a favorite.

Runner up:

With the Golden Globe for Best Director under his belt, Martin Scorsese is the best positioned runner up.

Wild card:

Interestingly enough, over the last 22 years, the Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director were awarded for the same movie 19 times. The three exceptions are: 1989 (Oliver Stone won for his work on Born on the Fourth of July but the movie lost to Bruce Beresford‘s Driving Miss Daisy), 1998 (Steven Spielberg was recognized for his work on Saving Private Ryan but the movie lost to Shakespeare in Love) and 2000 (Steven Soderbergh’s work on Traffic brought him an Oscar but it is Ridley Scott’s Gladiator that was crowned Best Picture). All of these directors’ movies were nominated for many awards: Born on the Fourth of July had 7 nominations, Saving Private Ryan scored 11 noms and Traffic had 5.

The three other contending directors are Alexander Payne, Woody Allen and Terrence Malick. While all have movies nominated for Best Picture, The Descendants has the most nominations (5 vss 4 for Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris and 3 for Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life). This would give a slight edge to Alexander Payne as the wild card.

• BEST PICTURE: The PGA award winner gets the Oscar in 68% of cases but the best combination is to win both the PGA award and the Golden Globe for Best Drama Picture

Chicago and Shakespeare in Love are the only Golden Globe winners in Comedy / Musical category to have won the Oscar for Best Picture in the last 22 years

Winning both the PGA award and the Golden Globe for Best Drama brings chances up to 75%: out of the 12 times this scenario happened in the last 22 years, only three movies with such wins lost on the Academy Awards night (Ang Lee‘s Brokeback Mountain lost to Paul Haggis‘ Crash in 2005, Martin Scorsese‘s The Aviator lost to Clint Eastwood‘s Million Dollar Baby in 2004, Saving Private Ryan lost to Shakespeare in Love in 1998.) Both Crash and Million Dollar Baby were true wild cards that had not been recognized as best picture earlier during award season (Shakespeare in Love had won the Golden Globe for Best Picture in the Comedy / Musical subcategory).

A Beautiful Mind lost the PGA award but still beat Moulin Rouge! on Oscars night

In a sign that the PGA also tends to favor dramas over comedies, winning both the PGA award and the Golden Globe for Best Comedy/Musical is a rare occurrence (3 times over the last 22 years). Two out of these 3 went on to win the Academy Award (Chicago and Driving Miss Daisy). Baz Luhrmann‘s Moulin Rouge! however, lost to A Beautiful Mind in 2001 (A Beautiful Mind had won Golden Globe for Best Drama).

If you only won one award pre-Oscar night, you better hope it is the PGA award: out of the seven times the PGA award didn’t go to a Golden Globe winner, 4 times did the Academy go to the PGA award winner. The other three were complete wild cards , awarded to movies that hadn’t won any award in pre-season: Martin Scorsese‘s The Departed in 2006, Braveheart in 1995 and Clint Eastwood‘s Unforgiven in 1992.

However, if the PGA award went to a movie that also got one of the two Golden Globe awards for Best Picture, having won the other Golden Globe will barely give an edge: only two movies who scored a Golden Globe win but saw the PGA award go to the winner of the other Golden Globe category managed to win the Oscar (in 14 occurrences). Both occurrences happened over 10 years ago: A Beautiful Mind in 2001 and Shakespeare in Love in 1998.

So what does this mean for 2011?

In 2011, the Academy Award for best picture is a contest between The Descendants and The Artist

The Artist has the best odds of being crowned Best Picture of 2011

Winner:

Having won both PGA award and the Golden Globe for Best Comedy/Musical, The Artist already beat the odds (this only happens 14% of the time over the last 22 years). The three times this occurred (2002, 1998, 1989), the movie also won the Academy Award for Best Picture. The Artist is statistically the favorite.

Runner up:

A likely trouble maker would be The Descendants which could try to emulate a 2001 scenario, where A Beautiful Mind got the Academy Award for Best Picture in spite of having lost the PGA award to Moulin Rouge!  The two films had been Golden Globe winners.

—

Vanessa Méheut

Finding a precise and consensual decision of film noir is a difficult exercise.  Luckily for San Franciscan audiences, they are given the special treat of sampling some of the best examples of film noir during a 10 day festival programmed in late January. To conclude my series on the Noir City X festival, I decided to give readers a quick overview of the festival and of the 26 movies that were programmed.

Film noir is more a mood than a genre: noir is the understanding that the world is a hopeless place

The Noir City X program gives festival attendees an overview of each film, from conception to production

The reason film noir is hard to codify is because noir is more of a mood, an atmosphere. While a number of stylistic and visuals conventions could be listed (use of black and white stock, strong light and dark contrasts, urban settings, character types such as the detective, the private eye or the femme fatale, occurrence of crime and demonstration of loose morals,) film noir could not be reduced to these. While some of the most iconic noir pictures are set in cities and feature such characters, there are numerous counter-examples. The same is true for usual noir stylistic conventions. Noir is a view of the world as a cold dark place with little hope for redemption. In spite of the Production Code regulated scenarios and endings, where virtue triumphs and vice is punished, films noirs depict human beings as profoundly flawed individuals moved by self interest (or self preservation), greed or destructive passions. The world is a hostile place in films noirs.

In Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City, American film critic Nicholas Christopher explains the presence of this feeling of despair as the logical consequence of 15+ years of hardships for Americans. He writes “In 1945, it is as if the war, and the social eruptions in its aftermath, unleashed demons that had been bottled up in the national psyche, not just since 1939, or the Great Depression (for the noir movement, as much as it is a collective shudder on the threshold of the Atomic Age, is also a delayed reaction – delayed by the war – to the Depression.”

Noir City 9 worked the craziness angle in noir 

Every year, the Noir City festival seems to highlight a specific aspect of noir. Last year, Noir City 9 revolved around the theme of craziness, featuring films where characters with mental illnesses threaten the lives of others who manage to stay incredibly ignorant about the true nature of their close ones until it is (almost) too late. The best movie to illustrate this theme on the program might have been George Cukor’s Gaslight (1944) in which a devious Charles Boyer marries a young and naive Ingrid Bergman before tormenting her into thinking she is becoming crazy. The movie is a case in hand on how psychological manipulation works. As a matter of fact, the movie, and the play from which it is adapted, led to the use of the term “gaslighting” to qualify this form of psychological abuse.

Other movies programmed included Anatole Litvak‘s Sorry Wrong Number (1948), George Cukor‘s A Double Life (1947), Anthony Mann‘s Strangers in the Night (1944), Curtis Bernhardt‘s High Wall (1947), Michael Gordon‘s The Lady Gambles (1949), Peter Godfrey‘s The Two Mrs Carrolls (1947), Otto Preminger‘s Angel Face (1952), Jack Bernhard‘s The Hunted (1948), Roy Ward Baker‘s Don’t Bother to Knock (1952), Jean Renoir‘s The Woman on the Beach (1947), Fritz Lang‘s Secret Beyond the Door (1948), Lewis Allen‘s So Evil My Love (1948), Joseph H. Lewis‘ My name is Julia Ross (1945), Robert Siodmak‘s The Dark Mirror (1946), Irving Reis‘ Crack Up  (1946)and what is sometimes refereed to as the first film noir Boris Ingster‘s Stranger on the Third Floor (1940).

Noir City X focused on the destructive nature of overwhelming passions 

The main theme of Noir City X, as evidenced by the ambiguous use of the roman letter X in place of the number 10, seemed to have been sex, and its derivatives: love and passion. The poster, and the trailer that comes with it, are recreations of a risqué scene of Dashiel Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon in which private eye Sam Spade asks femme fatale Brigid O’Shaughnessy to strip to prove to him that she has not hidden a missing $1,000 bill  (this film was not included in the 1941 movie adaptation by John Huston.) The picture was taken in the very San Franciscan apartment where Mr. Hammett lived and wrote Red Harvest, The Dain Curse and The Maltese Falcon. The apartment is located at 891 Post Street, in the City’s Lower Nob Hill, a few blocks away from Burritt Alley, where Hammett fans can find a commemorative plaque that reads “On approximately this spot, Miles Archer, partner of Sam Spade, was done in by Brigid O’Shaughnessy.”

The  Monday double bill was a tribute to Rita Hayworth, the Love Goddess with all-consuming passions

One of the movies that best exemplified the destructive impact of uncontrolled passion on human beings was Charles Vidor’s Gilda (1946) starring Rita Hayworth in the role that made her America’s Love Goddess and Glenn Ford. As Eddie Muller explained during the introduction, the movie was produced by Virginia Van Upp and the fact that a woman was the creative force behind this story might explain why the femme fatale turns out to be the victim of abuses by both of her husbands. On her end, a married Gilda finds no other way to express her unlicensed love for Johnny than to constantly show up in public with attractive male companions.  The situation is especially perverse since Johnny has been put in charge by his boss and friend Ballin Mundson of taking care of his wife for him. And when Ballin Mundson’s connections to shady characters are exposed and he fakes his own death, Johnny decides to marry Gilda not to be reunited at last, but because he wants to punish her for having been disloyal. Because the Production Code required a happy ending, the bad guy dies and the lovers end up reunited and at peace. But viewers are left with a sense of looming disaster: their love is toxic.  And Gilda’s unrestrained acceptance of Johnny’s apology is a tribute to her deeplyflawed conception of what a “wonderful” (and healthy) relationship is. One of the last few exchanges between Gilda and Johnny goes as follows:

Johnny Farrell: I want to go with you, Gilda. Please take me. I know I did everything wrong…
Gilda: [sobbing] Isn’t it wonderful? Nobody has to apologize, because we were both stinkers, weren’t we? Isn’t it wonderful?
Johnny Farrell: Wonderful.

Rita Hayworth, the Love Goddess, in Gilda

The second movie on the double bill, Burt Kennedy‘s  The Money Trap (1965) also stars Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford. The movie plays off their onscreen (and offscreen) history by having them playing, again, ex-lovers who end up being reunited, albeit for a brief period of time. Interestingly enough, the movie also plays on the self-destructive nature of Rita Hayworth, a trait that she shares with Gilda (her character says at one point in the movie to Johnny “I hate you so much that I would destroy myself to take you down with me.”) Rita Hayworth herself suffered from alcoholism and her health and physical appearance deteriorated quickly. Her character in the movie inspires pithy: she is a faded beauty who tries to reconnects with her former flame, a still handsome mature man married to a young hot blonde, only to end up lying dead on the street. To be fair, Glenn Ford’s character, Joe Baron, only enjoys a slightly better fate: a cop that ends up involved with drug dealers, he is shot and while the movie suggests he will live, the movie ends with police sirens on the background as he makes it home to confess everything to his wife. The movie was inferior to most of the movies on the program but it might have one of the most poignant lines of the selection: as Joe’s wife tries to understand how things spiraled out of control, Joe simply explains “It wasn’t the money. It never is. It is the people. The things they want. And the things they’ll do to get them. »

Eddie Muller’s introduction also touched on Mr. Vidor’s ability to work around the Production Code through the use of sexual symbolism throughout the movie, and included a very funny and colorful anecdote of power struggles at Columbia, the studio that produced and released Gilda, between executive producer Harry Cohn and Mr. Vidor. The recorded introduction can be found right below.

The Great Gatsby, Laura and The Killers are all stories of betrayed or unrequited loves

Gatsy (Alan Ladd) and Daisy (Betty Field) in the 1949 adaptation

Another heartbreaking example of the terrible consequences of passion on people’s life was the 1949 film adaptation of Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby by Elliott Nugent starring Alan Ladd. While it might be surprising for audiences to have Gatsby included in a tribute to noir, the tragic plot illustrates the darkness of American class society in the 1920s: a working class boy, whose ambition to (successfully) climb the social ladder is largely fueled by his desire to win over the heart of a high class socialite, is destroyed when she essentially puts her lifestyle over her feelings.

Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944) starring Gene Tierney in the eponymous role is also another example of how unreciprocated love and jealousy can lead people to kill the very object of their affection. The movie begins with a murder investigation: Laura Hunt has been shot in her New York apartment and detective Mark McPherson is in charge of interrogating Laura’s close friends and family, to unveil the truth. Things get complicated when a very much alive Laura resurfaces and the victim is identified as Diane Redfern, a model involved in a romantic relationship with Laura’s fiancé Shelby Carpenter.

Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) contemplates the portrait of Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney)

Passion is at the center of the plot, with love a central force that either drives characters to act or is used by characters to get what they want: McPherson’s drive to unmask the murderer stems from his loving in love with Laura and his desire to protect her (as well as to prove to himself that she didn’t kill Diane), Shelby alternatively plays both Laura’s and her aunt’s feelings to maintain his lifestyle. Even Laura, a sympathetic character (she is after all the target of an assassination attempt and a damsel in distress), benefits from her good friend Waldo Lydecker’s feelings for her to advance her career.  She is not naive enough to not understand that as such, she is using him.

Along the same lines, Don Siegel’s The Killers (1964) which I already covered in more length in another post, also illustrates how, in the matters of the heart, betrayal takes a terrible toll. The whole movie, which revolves around the efforts of two hit men to find out why their latest targets didn’t try to escape its fate, is summarized in the tagline: “there is more than one way to kill a man.’

Hardboiled author an fellow San Franciscan Dashiell Hammett, the epitome of noir,  was honored as the festival closed with a full day of movies adapted from his works

To be fair, not all movies are a perfect fit with the sex and passion theme, unless one adopts a very broad definition of passion, that encompasses all excesses of human nature (including vices such as greed, avidity or egotism.)

This is especially true of the movie adaptations of works by Dashiell Hammett. After all, the most iconic of all Hammett characters, private eye Sam Spade the central character of The Maltese Falcon, is nothing if not blasé:    he knows there is nothing good to expect from the world, he is not trying to make it better, he is simply navigating it.

Noir City X closed with a full day tribute to Dashiell Hammett; no less than 6 movies based on his novels or works for the studios.

Dashiell Hammett is without a doubt one of the biggest influencers of the noir style, along with other novelists / screenwriters such as Raymond Chandler  (The Big Sleep and screenplays for George Marshall‘s The Blue Dahlia,  and Billy Wilder‘s Double Indemnity) or James M. Cain (Double Indemnity, The Postman always rings twice.) In fact, the hardboiled school of American crime fiction is a major lirerary influence of the film noir style, with many novels adapted to the big screen becoming iconic examples of noir style. The fact that Mr. Hammett is nothing short of a San Francisco landmark adds to the pleasure of viewing movies he inspired as part of the SF film noir festival.

Dashiell Hammett, dean of the hardboiled school of detective fiction

The movies programmed spanned a full decade of film history, starting with Roadhouse Nights by Hobart Henley, an early talkie from 1930 and including not one but two versions of The Maltese Falcon (Roy Del Ruth’s 1931 version and John Huston’s version of 1941) as well as Stuart Heisler’s The Glass Key (1942). Two lesser known movies were also screened: Rouben Mamoulian’s City Streets (1932) and Alan Crosland’s Mr. Dynamite (1935), both based on movie treatments written by Dashiell Hammett.

While Mr. Hammett wrote only five novels, all have been adapted for either the big or the small screen.

Roadhouse Nights is an early talkie and as such suffers from the technical limitations typical of that time (fixed camera, static characters …) As Eddie Muller pointed out, City Streets is, by contrast, much more sophisticated. It is credited as one of the first American talkies to use a voice-over, despite studio executives’ concerns that it would be confusing for the audience to understand the disconnect between sound and image. The camera is very mobile in this movie, with a gripping car ride scene. The full introduction by Mr. Muller, which readers can listen to right below, also reflects on the influence of the movie industry on Mr. Hammett’s writing style and the evolution of the script from teenage characters to a more adult tone. Betrayal and passion are again at the center of the story with a trusting daughter who takes the fall for a murder she participated in but didn’t commit to protect her mob father and a young man who gets into dirty business out of love for her.

Mr. Dynamite is a reworked script from a Dashiell Hammett movie treatment turned into a comedy

San Franciscan publisher and Hammett specialist Vince Emery introduced Mr. Dynamite, which based on a movie treatment originally written by Dashiell Hammett for Warner Bros. that was rejected. The premise of the movie treatment was to examine what would happen if a private eye broke the law.  As Mr. Emery explained, the successful release of the adaptation of The Thin Man by W.S. Van Dyke in 1934 turned Mr. Hammett into movie gold and he managed to sell his story to Universal Pictures. Titled On The Make, the script told the story of a crooked private eye that opens a shop in LA and scams his clients. Mr. Hammett wrote, as he described it himself, “a gritty expose with vivid characters and surprising themes.” Universal, which was not looking for a dark tragedy but a noir comedy similar to The Thin Man, brought in a comedy writer that kept only what was designed to be an introduction scene, featuring two cops putting a private eye on a train and telling him never to return to their city. It was used as a conclusion to the story. Mr. Dynamite is indeed a noir comedy where murder weapons are not what you would expect and detectives would be nothing without the help of their insightful secretaries.  The full introduction, which gives more details, is available below.

Ed Beaumont (Alan Ladd) stays quiet despite being beaten up in The Glass Key

While The Maltese Falcon is the quintessence of noir, Mr. Hammett’s personal favorite was The Glass Key, which, as Eddie Muller introduced it, tells the story of ordinary political corruption in big cities. The movie bares similarities with The Maltese Falcon: both feature loyal friends (or at least colleagues with a sense of duty) investigating crimes to either exonerate their friend or avenge their death. That being said, Ed Beaumont, the lead character in The Glass Key, has much stronger ethics that Sam Spade: Sam Spade is moved by a strong self-preservation instinct, he gives in to threats to hurt his physical integrity and has what can be referred to as “situational ethics.” Ed Beaumont, by contrast, is ready to get beaten black and blue up to the point when he has to be sent to the hospital to protect his friend. Similarly, Sam Spade doesn’t hesitate to begin an affair with his partner’s wife (he might not even really like his partner, but as he puts it  ”When a man’s partner is killed, he’s supposed to do something about it. It doesn’t make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you’re supposed to do something about it.”) Ed Beaumont only gets involved with his friend’s fiancé after they have his blessing.

The complete introductions for The Glass Key and The Maltese Falcon respectively can be found below.

Noir City is a popular festival, with screenings often sold out

The thing that perpetually amazes me at the Noir City festival is the impressive turn out. It seems like no outside factor have any influence on whether San Franciscans attend the festival: nothing, not even an incredibly sunny January afternoon or an epic showdown at the Candlestick Park, can stop noir fans from dressing up in pure 40s fashion and gathering in the dark Castro Theatre.

The festival is so popular that the first two nights were completely sold out. The opening night of the festival had been a tribute to San Francisco noir: the double bill featured Delmer Daves‘ Dark Passage (1947) and Robert Wise‘s The House on Telegraph Hill (1951), both movies set and/or shot in the city by the bay. Lauren Bacall character’s apartment in Dark Passage is in the Malloch Apartment building (1360 Montgomery Street, between Alta and Filbert streets). The current tenant of the apartment has put a cardboard cutout of Humphrey Bogart in front of the window. A couple of blocks away stands Julius Castle, at 1541 Montgomery Street, between Chestnut and Lombard, which is the official address of the house on Telegraph Hill in the eponymous movie (the house was superimposed photographically but the interiors match the style of the actual building.) The second night was a tribute to actress Angie Dickinson with the festival branching to neo-noir and programming two 1960s movies. The actress attended the double bill in person and participated in a Q&A with Eddie Muller during intermission.

To be fair, afternoon shows are generally less crowded and while the house was busy in the closing Sunday, moviegoer fatigue was starting to it and the theatre was not completely packed. Nevertheless, the dedication of the crowd is pretty impressive. Which is good news from the movie industry as a whole, since proceeds of the festival go to the Film Noir Foundation, which works actively with a number of partners to preserve print copies of movies. During Noir City 9, Eddie Muller explained that the box office receipts of the Monday night essentially financed the restoration of the print of The Lady Gambles by Michael Gordon (1949). The movie, which was part of the Noir City 9 programming, was digitally projected from DVD as a 35mm print was no longer available.

With original films noirs dating back from the 1940s-1950s, film preservation is a great concern and all proceeds from the festival go to the Film Noir Foundation preservation effort

Film preservation is central to the festival. And host Eddie Muller never fails to explain how some of the movies on the program were saved thanks to the efforts of the foundation, the UCLA Film & Television Archive, the Film Foundation, etc. The fact that a number of the movies projected during Noir City are not available on DVD is only one example of the limitations of digital (the reason these movies are not available is because the relatively low demand for them makes it unprofitable for the studios to work on digital conversion and production, the same economics issues would probably exist if these same movies were only available in digital). Out of the 26 movies programmed, 10+ were not available on DVD in US format.

Digital is an access medium, not a preservation one. "Digital data cannot survive unattented."

The real difficulty with digital is that it comes with the flawed understanding that digital exonerates movies from the limitations of physical format. The truth is, digital is a wonderful access medium: copying or distributing are much more easy in digital than they are in print. However, digital is not a preservation format. There is no guarantee that five, ten or fifty years from now, the current digital standards will still be in use. As a matter of fact, digital is known for ever-changing standards: just think of how DVDs are being replaced by Blu Rays now, or how the CD-ROM killed the floppy disk before USB drives started to make CD-ROMs obsolete. This concern is not lost on the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the same ones that hands out Oscars for movie excellence every year). The Academy released right at the beginning of the Noir City festival  (which coincidently takes place at the same time as the Sundance Festival) the second part of a report titled Digital Dilemma – Perspectives from Independent Filmmakers, Documentarians and Nonprofit Audiovisual Archives.

This report is the second part of a report that was initially released in 2007 and that focused more on Hollywood studios than independent producers and small-sized archives. While small players without the financial backing of a studio are without a doubt the ones that benefit the most from digital moviemaking reduced cost and easy access, they are also the ones that are the most vulnerable to its short shelf life. As the report points out “”In general, independent films that beat the odds and secure some form of distribution do so after a much longer time period than movies produced by the major studios. This time period quite likely exceeds the ‘shelf life’ of any digital work; that is, by the time distribution is secured, the digital data may become inaccessible.”

Worse, independent players tend to be oblivious of this important limitation “Most of the filmmakers surveyed and interviewed for this report were not aware of the perishable nature of digital content or how short its unmanaged lifespan is compared to the 95-plus years that U.S. copyright laws allow filmmakers to benefit from their work.”

Film stock has a 100+ lifespan

By contrast, film has a lifespan of 100+ years and above all, benefits from known preservation techniques that can extend its shelf life. Digital data “cannot survive unattended.” The report ends with a call to action for these communities to work on a “comprehensive and coordinated digital preservation plan for the future.”

Noir is not limited to the American crime movies of the 1940s-1950s, its influence transcends time and space and can be found in European, Asian as well as contemporary films

The highlight of the noir era was the 1940s-1950s. In 1955, French movie critics Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton authored A Panorama of American Film Noir (1941-1953) in which they identify 22 Hollywood films of this period as core illustrations of the film noir categorization. They list an additional 59 movies that correspond to a looser definition of what noir is. As time passes, other critics and historians tend to consider an increasingly larger body of works as relevant to the noir style: in 1984, Jon Tuska identified 320 movies as noir (Dark Cinema: American Film Noir in Cultural Perspective); in 2003 Michael F. Keaney wrote Film Noir Guide: 745 Films of the Classic Era, 1940–1959. All three books can be found on amazon.com.

All these books tend to focus on the 1940s-1950s and fail to take into account that the spirit of noir both preceded and followed this timeframe. The aftermath of WWII doesn’t have the monopoly on illustrating the darkness of the human soul. While there is no consensus, it can be argued that a generation of European and Asian were (and some still are) influenced by the noir style.

All hell breaks loose around Max (Jean Gabin) in Touchez pas au Grisbi (1954)

American director Jules Dassin (who directed Thieves’ Highway (1949), which was shown during Noir City X) moved to France as a result of the blacklist and directed Rififi in 1955, an adaptation of a crime novel. Henri-Georges Clouzot is another French director who specialized on depicting how individuals give in to temptation, manipulate their peers and end up paying for their hubris (Quai des Orfevres in 1947, Les Diaboliques  in 1955 and The Wages of Fear in 1953). His last movie, unfinished, L’Enfer, for which Mr. Clouzot received unlimited financial support from Columbia Pictures, tells the story of a possessive hotel owner convinced that his wife is cheating on him, eaten alive by his jealousy. French crime and gangster movies from the 1950s such as Touchez pas au Grisbi as well as some of the movies of the French New Wave would also fit the definition (or lack thereof.)

The Coen brothers are among the most talented heirs of noir

Finally, noir lives on today not only through restorations and screenings of past masterpieces. Many new filmmakers still convey this vision of a hopeless world. Quentin Tarantino is often cited an example of modern noir but I would argue that his movies, actually depict the existence of, if not necessarily hope, a chance for redemption. He gives a sense of closure and leaves his viewers thinking that in spite of the existence of crime, conflicts can be resolved. Kill Bill  (2003-2004) is the story of a rightful revenge that ends with the words “The lioness has rejoined her cub, and all is right in the jungle.” Inglorious Basters (2009) reinvents factual history to have good triumph from evil. Even his first film Reservoir Dogs (1992) ends with order being restored. None of the characters in Reservoir Dogs really inspires profound sympathy and ultimately their deaths doesn’t leave the viewer with a sense of terrible waste. In addition, his style has a very comic dimension, not only through the use of exaggerated gorish shots but also with his very fast paces dialogues, marked with cultural references. Noir is an ominous presence.  It doesn’t run up to you to cut your head off: it fills in the room and progressively asphyxiates you.Mr. Tarantino does often depict a world of crime, but he is an optimist at heart.

On the contrary, Joel and Ethan Coen are more traditional heirs of noir style. Blood Simple (1984), whose title is a reference to Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest (a term used to describe how continued exposure to violence messes with people’s minds), features a jealous husband who hires a private eye to spy and kill off his wife and her lover, but ends up double crossed. A series of misunderstandings and quid pro quos ensue, with tragic consequences for all involved. Both Fargo (1996) and No Country for Old Men  (2007) end up with disillusioned police officers that investigate crimes gone wrong. While there is a sense of comedy in these films, it consists more of a satire than actual relief from the underlying tension.

Frances McDormand’s character in Fargo, police chief Marge Gunderson, is pregnant. Yet her pregnancy, which should be symbolic of new beginnings, clean slate, and hope, adds to the feeling of despair: Marge herself has strong morales and she keeps the darkness of her job away from the positive forces of her home (her husband is supportive and caring, but he is also so disconnected from her day to day reality that the movie ends with a conversation about his achievement as an artist: one of his design will be used for a postage stamp.) There are few things more inane than the design of a postage stamp, especially when you have just seen someone feed his ex-partner’s body into a wood chipper. What can a postage stamp do in the face of that?

—

Vanessa Méheut

Sources:

http://www.noircity.com/

http://www.noircity.com/noircity9.html

Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City by Nicholas Christopher

A Panorama of American Film Noir (1941-1953) by Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton

Dark Cinema: American Film Noir in Cultural Perspective by Jon Tuska

Film Noir Guide: 745 Films of the Classic Era, 1940–1959 by Michael F. Keaney

San Francisco Noir by Nathaniel Rich

http://www.oscars.org/science-technology/council/projects/digitaldilemma2/index.html

Noir City host Eddie Muller interviewing actress Angie Dickinson on stage

As promised, here is the second post on the 10th edition of the San Francisco film noir festival that took place at the Castro theatre between January 20th and 29th. On Saturday 21th and for the second night in a row, the house was sold out in honor of special guest Angie Dickinson. The double bill programmed that night consisted of two modern film noirs starring Ms. Dickinson with legendary badass Lee Marvin, with a lenghty on stage interview of Ms. Dickinson by host Eddie Muller scheduled during intermission.

The Killers and Point Blank double bill honored movie and TV actress Angie Dickinson The first one, The Killers by Don Siegel (1964) is a remake of the 1946 movie of the same name and stars John Cassavetes and Ronald Reagan in his last role, alongside Ms. Dickinson and Mr. Marvin. Ronald Reagan had never played bad guys on screen and he didn’t like the original version of The Killers by Robert Siodmak (1946) based on a Ernest Hemingway short story arguing that “everybody in the script was a villain and there was no one to root for.” In his autobiography Ronal Reagan: an American Life, Mr. Reagan explains that the studio played his ego by challenging him to accept the role of mob boss Jack Browning. The film opens with hit man Charlie Strom (Mr. Marvin) and his partner Lee (Clu Gulager) executing John Cassavetes’ character, Johnny North. When Johnny makes no attempt to escape his killers even though he knows they are coming, Charlie and Lee go on a mission to find out the story of their target. As the story unfolds enter the character of Jack Browning and his mistress and subsequent wife Sheila Farr, played by Ms. Dickinson, also a romantic interest of Johnny North. The movie was originally designed to be the first “made for TV” movie, but NBC, which was supposed to air it, considered it too violent for TV. The second movie Point Blank by John Boorman (1967) is partly set in San Francisco: Alcatraz is used as a drop point for stolen money in the beginning of the movie. However, as Ms. Dickinson pointed out in the interview, most of the movie production was done in LA (Ms. Dickinson, whose character appears later in the story, only set foot on the island for a photo shoot with Life magazine to be used as promotion for the movie release.) Anyway, and as Ms. Dickinson herself teased the audience during the intermission: it really gets interesting when the plot moves to LA.

Ms. Dickinson’s career spanned from the mid 1950s to the early 200s, though she did appear in a TV movie for the Hallmark Channel in 2009. In spite of her many movie roles, Ms. Dickinson is best known by American audiences as Sergeant Suzanne “Pepper” Anderson in the TV show Police Woman that aired on NBC from 1974 to 1978.

A beauty contest and Frank Sinatra are the starting points of Angie Dickinson’s career 

Fully dressed in noir, but sporting a mauve hat, Ms. Dickinson appeared on stage with a radiant smile on her face, under the applause of the audience. She didn’t disappoint. Funny and enthusiastic, she seemed genuinely happy to answer Mr. Muller’s questions, even the “touchier” ones. As a matter of fact, the only person who seemed happier than her was probably Mr. Muller himself who had joked before he introduced the double bill that he might die a happy man that night because  Ms. Dickinson had told me earlier that day, when she arrived at the theater, that she had heard that he made “a mean martini” and that she might “give [him] a chance tonight.”The obvious thing about Ms. Dickinson is that she has a pretty positive uptake on life. She talked fondly about pretty much everyone she worked with. The only exception to that might be French director Roger Vadim with whom Ms. Dickinson worked in 1971 for Pretty Maids All in a Row, Mr. Vadim’s first American film: as she summed up “French movies tend to favor looking beautiful versus meaning something. Honestly, I’m pretty sure And God Created Woman is about nothing.”

Going over her life, Ms. Dickinson explained how she had gone into acting by chance. Debunking the myth that she had wanted to become a writer (“the things you find on the internet…”), she explained that she was working as a secretary (“and a damn good one”) when her boss suggested she entered a beauty pageant. She placed second but got noticed by a TV executive that invited her to guest star in a number of variety shows. And it so happened that one day, another guest of the show, was Frank Sinatra (“that had just separated from Ava Gardner” as Ms. Dickinson pointed out). Opting to stay private about their relationship, she chose to emphasize their lifelong friendship rather than their romance. But she credited this as the moment her 22 years old self thought that after all, she could be in Hollywood too. Armed with the naive ambition of youth, she didn’t see her lack of connections and/or showbiz background as problematic. The rest is history, with a slew of roles where she co-stars with John Wayne, Marlon Brando, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra and Michael Caine to name a few.

Since her big break in 1959, Ms. Dickinson’s ambition has been to prove that she was “the whole package”

John Wayne and Angie Dickinson as Sheriff John Chance and Feathers in Rio Bravo (1959)

She credited her role as the mysterious Feathers opposite John Wayne and Dean Martin, another of her Rat Pack friends with whom she co-starred in Lewis Milestone‘s Ocean’s Eleven (1960), in Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo (1959) as her big break. Howard Hawks is known as a woman’s director but as Ms. Dickinson took great pleasure in explaining, she was not thought of as the archetypical Hawksian woman: she recollected her first encounter with Mrs. Hawks who had told her that she was surprised to see Ms. Dickinson being cast by her husband for the role. To which Ms. Dickinson simply replied (in a very Hawksian way) “Good.” But being an Hawksian woman also means having to develop a thick skin: Ms. Dickinson was “kind of mad” when she discovered that Mr. Hawks had sold her contract to Warner studios without telling her about it: she learnt about it when she came to the studio to audition for a role and the gatekeeper told her he would go get her permanent pass.

But as Ms. Dickinson pointed out, studios had trouble putting her in a box and finding the right roles for her: in an interview to the Neward Star-Ledger quoted in the Noir City X program, she explains ““They couldn’t peg me. I wasn’t this, I wasn’t that. I wasn’t voluptuous like Marilyn Monroe…But that was okay. If you’re only trading on looks and your body, that’s only going to go so far. But that was never my bag. I was always about the whole package.” The inability of studios to offer her roles at her measure was probably instrumental in making her transitioning from movies to episodic TV in the 1970s. That being said, and even though she didn’t see herself as such, Angie Dickinson was a beauty. In 1962 she won the Hollywood Golden Garter Award for best legs, and in 1999 Playboy ranked her No. 42 in the 100 Sexiest Stars of the Century. Rumor has it than she had an affair with President Kennedy and we have to hand it to Eddie Muller to be bold enough to ask her the question during the Noir City Q&A. To think she might reveal an inside scoop would be to underestimate Ms. Dickinson: she is the whole package, which means she can rely on humor and dignity to get out of a tricky situation. Her first reaction? A very shocked and exaggerated “OH MY GOD! What have I stepped into? They told me such nice things about you….”  Her serious answer? “I felt lucky to be exposed to such a great group of people, not only [the President] but also Jackie and Ethel.” We could still hear the emotion in her voice.

From playing Marlon Brando’s wife to shocking audiences with sex-ridden role in Brian De Palma’s “sexual fantasy” Dressed to Kill

Ronald Reagan slaps Angie Dickinson in The Killers (1964)

The news of President Kennedy’s assassination came during the filming of The Killers and as Ms. Dickinson simply put it, “it was a very sad set.” She has fond memories of Lee Marvin and John Cassavetes and even Ronald Reagan, who plays her mob boyfriend/husband in the movie (the hard core Democrat and the inventor of modern US political right ideology managed their differences by not talking politics.) But she was also very lucid about her co-stars: John Cassavetes had already caught the directing virus (his first movie, Shadows, had come out five years prior to The Killers) and its passion was slowly moving away from acting; Ronald Reagan was doing his last movie before embarking into a full blown political career (he started campaigning for the gubernatorial election right after the shooting and was elected Governor of California in 1966); Lee Marvin was still haunted by his WWII experience and the wound that gave him his trademark rigid and decisive walk (Mr. Marvin served in the Pacific, and was wounded in June 1944 when his sciatic nerve got severed during the Battle of Saipan, which saw most of his company get killed; Mr. Marvin was awarded the Purple Heart and given a medical discharge).  It is no surprise that Mr. Marvin’s filmography contains some of the most iconic war dramas ever filmed: Robert Aldrich‘s Attack (1956) and The Dirty Dozen (1967), John Boorman‘s Hell in the Pacific (1968), …

Marlon Brandon and Angie Dickinson as husband and wife in The Chase (1966)

Ms. Dickinson remembers her co-stars vividly. Asked about her role in Arthur Penn‘s The Chase (1966) where she plays the wife of Marlon Brando’s character, she provides an original perspective on the temperamental bad boy: she recalls a playful Mr. Brando that loved to put her on the spot in front of other people by repeatedly asking questions until she embarrassed herself and blushed. She also explained that her participation in the movie was sealed by her agent insisting that she take the role even without reading the script because “it’s Brando’s wife, for God’s sake, just say yes.” But the movie she is proudest of is Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980) in which she stars as a sexually frustrated New York City housewife who shares a steamy ride with a stranger met at the MET in the back of a taxi. Ms. Dickinson and Mr. De Palma  quickly agreed to work on something after they met at the Montreal Film Festival. Mr. De Palma was looking a familiar face that the audience would sympathize with instantly since she was going to be dead 20mins into the movie. When Ms. Dickinson received the script for Dressed to Kill, her first reaction was to call Mr. De Palma to say that she couldn’t do the role because she “[was] a police woman! [She] couldn’t do that! In the back of a taxi!…” Mr. De Palma suggested that they use a body double and the deal was sealed although the scenes did cause a fair amount of controversy.

The real Angie Dickinson might very well be the antithesis of noir: an optimist with a love of things past, present and future

Angie Dickinson on stage at the Castro Theatre

During the full 45mins on stage interview, Ms. Dickinson irradiated a love of cinema, as well as life itself. She loves movies and still goes to the theatre regularly. When asked about the movies she liked the most in 2011, the first that come to her mind are all love letters to the art of cinema: Martin Scorsese’s Hugo is a reflection on the art’s legacy from the early 1900s when almost everything about cinema had yet to be invented; Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist is a bold exercise on form and an appreciation of the silent area; Simon Curtis’ My Week with Marylin exposes the on-set and off-set complexities of one of the most iconic actress and sex symbol of the 20^th century (Marilyn Monroe is one of only three professional actors named by Time magazine in the 100 Persons of the Century  list published in 1999; the other two are Charlie Chaplin and Marlon Brando). I have no doubts Ms. Dickinson is nostalgic about these days (who wouldn’t?) but I also think she is not trapped in her memories. After all she did a last minute addition to her list of best movies of 2011:  Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, an understanding and loving rebuttal of the premises of nostalgia.. And despite her jokes that the interview forced her to stay up after her bedtime and her “Those were the days” when she reminisces her photo shoots and lean figure, she seemed very at ease in the 21st century. Especially when it came to educating Eddie Muller (and myself, I have to admit) about runpee.com, a site that references the best times for moviegoers to go empty their bladder. Asked about what she and the Rat Pack did for fun when they were going out, she had not trouble up finding an answer: “we were the fun!” 50 years later, Ms. Dickinson still is.

—

Vanessa Meheut

Sources:

http://www.noircity.com/program1.html#

http://www.examiner.com/stage-and-screen-in-pittsburgh/angie-dickinson-candidly-chats-about-marilyn-monroe-frank-sinatra-brad-pitt-and-growing-old

http://classictvbeauties.com/angiedickinson.html

January in San Francisco can be rainy and gloomy, especially when the 49ers lose the NFC Championship Game (on our home turf!). But local cinephiles can keep their spirits up because January is also the month of the Noir City Festival at the Castro Theatre. The 10th edition of the festival went with a bang: an all day showing of six movie adaptations of Dashiel Hammett’s novels and stories. Noir City X closed on Sunday January 29th and I am now beginning a series of three posts that will recap the highlights of the film noir fest.

First things first, let’s look at the hors d’oeuvres: the annual Christmas Noir mini-festival.

Christmas Noir teases audiences hungry for the Film Noir Festival

On December 14th 2011, for the second year in a row and as a teaser to the following ten day festival, Eddie Muller and the Noir City team hosted a double bill of Christmas themed films noirs at the Castro Theatre.

Noir host Eddie Muller introduces the Christmas Noir 2011 program

Introducing the movies on stage, host Eddie Muller joked that they didn’t know how long they could keep this new tradition up: after all, how many films noir can there be set on or around Christmas?

In December 2010, the double bill mixed Mr. Soft Touch (1949) by Gordon Douglas and Henry Levin with Mitchell Leisen’s Remember the Night (1940). Remember the Night stars Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray, who would later star together in the iconic noir Double Indemnity by Billy Wilder (1944), an adaptation of the story by Raymond Chandler. Another Raymond Chandler story that was adapted on the big screen as a film is Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake (1947), featuring the iconic detective character Philip Marlowe investigating the disappearance of a publisher’s wife as well as a series of murders… all on Christmas Eve.  Sounds like a perfect match for Christmas Noir 2011 right? Except there is no 35mm print available in good enough condition to be screened as Eddie Muller, true to his film preservationist self,  made a point of explaining it when he introduced the December 2011 double bill.

Christmas Noir 2011 double bill celebrated oft forgotten actress Deanna Durbin

Christmas Noir 2011 turned out to be a tribute to actress and singer Deanna Durbin: Charles David’s Lady on a Train (1945) stars Deanna Durbin as a crime novel fan who becomes the eyewitness of a murder while traveling on a train to New York to spend Christmas with her family; Robert Siodmak’s Christmas Holiday (1945) casts Ms. Durbin as a dance hall “hostess” whose dark past with a murderous husband catches up with on Christmas Eve.

The two movies are very different. Lady on a Train plays like a comedy with amateur detective Nikki Collins (Deanne Durbin’s character) foolhardily investigating a murder and getting in over her head with real bad guys. She turns to her idol and crush Wayne Morgan, a mystery writer who would rather face killers on paper than in real life. A lot of the comic comes from these two non-seasoned detectives managing, often by chance, to stay ahead of the murderer. Deanna Durbin’s character is treated like a child, dismissed by police officers who are not particularly eager to investigate a murder claim on Christmas Eve, especially if it is reported by a young woman who might very well be confusing the novels she reads with reality. Her character is comfortable impersonating a night club singer who happens to be the fiancée of murdered billionaire Josiah Waring and as such just inherited his millions at the expense of Waring’s family. Identified as the new target, she walks into lion’s den without thinking twice. It is not that her character is fearless; it is that she has no conception of danger.

Christmas Holiday might be one of the darkest, most depressing movies ever. Deanna Durbin plays “hostess” (and by that, we mean prostitute) Jackie Lamont/Abigail Lamont who ends up telling to Lieutenant Charles Mason, strained in New Orleans due to weather conditions preventing planes from taking off, the heartbreaking story of her marriage with the dangerous Robert Manette. Desperately in love with Manette, she bore with his secrets and scheming even when it becomes obvious that he is a murderer and a madman.  To the point she becomes his target and is in actual danger or being murdered herself.

As Eddie Mueller explained prior to the screening, in both these films, Deanne Durbin was trying to move away from her typecasted roles of the nice and funny girl next door that had been assigned to her since the beginning of her career in the mid-1930s.

Deanna Durbin was once the highest paid actress in Hollywood 

Deanna Durbin and Judy Garland in MGM's Every Sunday

Deanna Durbin’s family moved to Hollywood in the early 1920s when Deanna (real name Edna Mae) was still an infant. She took singing lessons from a very age on and became a child actress at 14 years old. At the time, the studio system was in full force and her public persona was managed by Universal, the major she was under contract with. Her stage name, Deanna, was also picked by executives at the studio. In the mid 1930s, studios were starting to develop the concept of musical movies and a multi-talented youngster like Deanna Durbin, who could sing and act, was in demand. Her first role, before she signed with Universal, with in MGM produced short musical Every Sunday (1936) by Felix E. Feist. She stars in it with another young gifted singer/actress named Judy Garland.

Deanna Durbin became a teen sensation with her first long feature Henry Koster’s musical comedy Three Smart Girls (1936). The movie was a smashing it and because of this movie, she is credited as having helped save Universal from bankruptcy.  In 1938, she received a special Academy Juvenile Award, and her fame was international. She achieved international fame with Russian cellist/conductor Mstislav Rostropovich citing her pure voice as a major influence on his music. After all, Deanna Durbin was first trained to be a singer and she demonstrated her talent in all her movies, including  Christmas Holiday and Lady on a Train, where her singing the Christmas classic Silent Night over the phone to her father moves even the intruder in her house.

Deanna Durbin and Gene Kelly co-star in "Christmas Holiday"

After eight years showcasing her acting talent and amazing voice in light musicals, Deanna Durbin made the bold choice of appearing in the role of a dance hall “hostess” in Christmas Holiday. While the movie as a commercial success, she was heavily criticized for this choice. Interestingly enough, her co-star in the movie also grew to have a career at odds with his role in the movie: Gene Kelly, whose career started in 1942, plays a mad murderer in one of his first roles and, contrary to Ms. Durbin, he will happily go back to making some of the most successful filmed musicals ever. Mr. Kelly was as talented as they get, proving his acting, singing, choreographing, and above all dancing talents in close to 50 movies, 11 of which he directed.

In 1945, Deanna Durbin was the highest paid actress in the US and had the largest international fan base of all. So how come her name is pretty much unknown today?

After her desire to avoid typecasting clashed with the studio system, Deanna Durbin chose to retire early from acting

The answer is that Deanna Durbin decided that she didn’t want to spend her life being a typical Hollywood movie star. In 1946, Universal decided to go in a different direction and started releasing less musicals. Ms. Durbin’s last releases were not as successful as hoped and in 1948, after only 26 movie credits, she decided to retire from acting. In 1950, she married Charles David, the French-American that directed her in Lady on a Train and moved to France with him.

Deanna Durbin decided to withdraw from the public eye. Since 1948, she has turned opportunities to appear in movies or on stage, as well as all demands for interviews. The only known interview she gave in recent years happened in 1983, when she agreed to talk to film historian David Shipman. The interview, of which I could only find short excerpts, hints at the fact that instrumental in her decision was her frustration with the lack of control she had over the films she was to star in: “Just take a look at my last four films and you’ll appreciate that the stories I had to defend were mediocre, near impossible. Whenever I complained or asked for story or director approval, the studio refused. I was the highest paid star with the poorest material.”

In a private letter sent to film historian William K. Everson, she apparently distanced herself for public image and referred to Deanna Durbin in the third person, a practice that is not unheard of for other over mediatized starts and icons. The recent My Week with Marilyn by Simon Curtis’s  (2011) weighs in on how Marilyn Monroe struggled to reconcile her public image of a maneating temptress with her own personal insecurities. Michelle Williams, in the role of the sex symbol, says it in the movie: “People always see Marilyn Monroe. As soon as they realize I’m not her, they run.” And Rita Hayworth, the Love Goddess, was reported as having said

Deanna Durbin proves she didn't turn fat for Life magazine

“Men fell in love with Gilda, but they wake up with me,” referring to one of her most iconic role as a femme fatale in Charles Vidor’s 1946 Gilda.

The perception I have of Deanna Durbin is that she was a strong willed young woman who would rather walk away from a large paycheck if it meant having to do what she was told. She had been put on a path to become a showbiz star and decided she wanted something different. She just wants people to respect her right to privacy. In 1980, she decided to prove that articles reporting that she had gained a lot of weight were greatly exaggerated by sending a picture of herself, looking lean and happy, by sending a picture of herself holding a copy of Life magazine to the editorial staff.

In 1936, Deanna Durbin was auditioned for the most ambitious project to date for the Walt Disney Company: an animated long feature based on the fairy tale by the brothers Grimm‘s Snow White. The part required some singing but Walt Disney decided not to go with Ms. Durbin because he thought her voice sounded too mature.  She was only 15 years old at the time but I think he could already sense this maturity in her. And he was right.

—

Vanessa Méheut

Sources:

http://talkingmoviezzz.blogspot.com/2007/06/what-ever-happened-to-deanna-durbin.html

http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/10/29/2476387/tcm-features-deanna-durbin-in.html

You expect cities like Los Angeles, New York or San Francisco to be the setting of numerous movies. However, I am often (pleasantly) surprised to find out that other smaller towns and cities, all over the US,  have contributed to cinematic heritage. So I have decided to start a new section called “On Location.” Hopefully you’ll use these tidbits of information to brag in front of your friends the next time you’ll visit these places. Or may be just to pick what movie to watch when you wish you had more time to travel.

And we’re kicking off this section with a trip to Lake Tahoe, at the border of California and Nevada.

A number of movies have been shot in Lake Tahoe since the early 20^th century and I would imagine that we have to credit the location (Lake Tahoe is approximately 8h away from Los Angeles, not too far considering the size of the US) and the diverse scenery (mountain, forest, rivers, lakes in summer and winter) for that.  The presence of Reno on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe also explains why a number of movies taking place in casinos were shot in Tahoe, but more on that later.

Truckee, CA was a very popular filming location with over 50 movies in the 1920s

The Truckee Historical Society lists close to 100 movies that were shot in or around Truckee, CA (Truckee is located on the North-North West of Lake Tahoe) between the mid 1910s and the late 1990s.

The town is located railroad lines which makes it easy to transport people and material there for shooting purposes. As a matter of fact, Amtrak passenger lines still stop in Truckee on the services from San Francisco to Chicago. The first movie shot in Truckee dates back from 1910 and was reportedly a recreation of the initial Arctic expeditions. Truckee was an exceptionally popular filming location in the 1920s with close to 55 movies shot.

Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and John Wayne were among the major Hollywood stars filming around Lake Tahoe

Director Charlie Chaplin and cinematographer Roland Totheroh during filming of the Gold Rush in Truckee, CA

One of these movies is the famous Gold Rush by Charlie Chaplin (1925), where Truckee is standing in for Yukon, Canada. As the movie retraces the actual Klondike Gold Rush, Mr. Chaplin considered it important to film on location as opposed to a set. The introduction scene where gold-seekers are seen ascending the Chilkoot Pass to get into Yukon territory was filmed in just one day, with 600 extras from Sacramento that had been sent by train, on a ridge near Donner Summit. Film critic Jeffrey Vance considers it “the most spectacular image of silent-film comedy.”

Buster Keaton, a dear friend of Charlie Chaplin, had probably recommended Truckee as a filming location: he had shot the short film The Frozen North there in 1922, as well as some scenes of the longform feature Our hospitality in 1923. Shooting for this movie proved dangerous for Mr. Keaton, who almost drowned during a scene filmed in the Truckee River. In the scene, Mr. Keaton’s character has to save his girl, played by Natalie Talmadge, Mr. Keaton’s real life wife: following a sequence of events, Mr. Keaton’s character is thrown into a river, with a rope around his waist that ties him to a log, but he has to free himself for the log if he is to catch in time Ms. Talmadge’s character who fell into the same river and is in grave danger of being swept of the downstream waterfall. When his wire broke during filming, Mr. Keaton couldn’t resist the water current that carried him towards the river rocks. But as in all movies, all is well that ends well and Mr. Keaton managed to grand and hang unto an overlooking branch and thus saved his life.

Truckee was also as a filming location to recreate the Wild West. In 1924, director John Ford picked Truckee as the setting for its silent movie The Iron Horse which recounts how the story of the first transcontinental railroad was constructed. Mr. Ford apparently insisted on actually having an old locomotive hauled over Donner Summit, going through the same ordeal the Central Pacific Railroad company had to go through in 1867. The Iron Horse was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 2011.

Aircraft used during the shooting of Island in the Sky with John Wayne

While screen legend John Wayne might be best known for his roles in westerns, it is a frozen desert movie that brought him to Truckee. In 1953, John Wayne co-produced and starred in Island in the Sky by Ernest K. Gann, an adventure movie inspired by an actual plane crash in Labrador, Canada during World War II and the efforts of the crew to survive while a rescue team assembles to come and get them. The movie was mostly shot on Truckee’s old airstrip. The Truckee Historical Society website reports that over 100 from cast and crew were in Truckee during the filming, with some stars staying as guests of the Donner Lake Lodge.

While the 1920s were the heyday, Truckee’s movie heritage seems to have rebounded in the 1980s and 1990s.

Kevin Costner, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Ben Affleck have been part of the new roster of Hollywood stars shooting in Tahoe from the 1980s to 2000s

In 1992, scenes from Mick Jackson’s The Bodyguard were shot at Fallen Leaf Lake. And in 1994, James Cameron took to Truckee to film some sequences of True Lies: Donner Pass Road, along the north side of Donner Lake, is used during the opening scene of the action-comedy starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis.

Jeremy Piven as FBI informant Buddy Israel hiding out in Tahoe

2006 provided one of the best opportunities to spot a slew of stars and celebrities hanging out in Tahoe for a filming: Joe Carnahan’s Smokin’ Aces is set in Tahoe (on the Nevada side) and features Jeremy Piven of Entourage fame as Las Vegas magician and FBI informant Buddy “Aces” Israel, as well as Ryan Reynolds in the role of the FBI agent in charge of protecting “Aces,” Ben Affleck, Alicia Keys, Jason Bateman who broke thanks to his role in the short lived Fox sitcom Arrested Development, Andy Garcia, Ray Liotta and Matthew Fox, Jack Shepard in Lost among other things. The plot is set in Lake Tahoe and centers on mafia and gambling so the Nevada casinos were a great fit: many scenes were shot in the MontBleu Resort Casino & Spa (Highway 50 in South Lake Tahoe, NV) which stands in for the “Nomad Casino” in the movie. Other scenes were also shot at the Shoreline Cafe, on Lake Tahoe Blvd in South Lake Tahoe, CA.

1950s and 1970s were not the heyday for on location filming in Tahoe, but that’s when two of the most iconic movies ever were filmed there

It is hard to pick the most iconic movie ever shot in Tahoe and if I had to, I would make a point to answer that there is not such thing as the most iconic movie ever shot in Tahoe: there are two. To be fair, for neither of them is the majority of the action set in Tahoe but both movies tell a story of a power, how some people try to rise to it and how hard they can fall. Both use the lake as a backdrop for a death scene.

In one of them, Lake Tahoe marks the beginning of the end for a starstruck character whose ambition blinded him into foolishly thinking he could get rid of what was holding him back by letting it go at the bottom of a lake. He does not realize that his attempts at social success will be the demise of him.

In the other one, a character who has successfully eliminated all obstacles on his way to risen to power comes to the realization that not only can’t power and money buy you what matters the most, they will also take away from you what you’re holding dearest to your heart. It is lonely at the top.

Tahoe is where Montgomery Clift was ready to commit murder for Elizabeth Taylor’s eyes in A Place in the Sun

The first one is George Stevens’ A Place in the Sun (1951) with Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift. Based on Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925), it tells the story of George Eastman, a poor working man who hopes that his hard working and skills will finally get him accepted within the power social circle that his uncle and cousins belong to. George Eastman enters the story as an outcast and a relationship with the factory girl Alice Tripp played by Shelley Winters seems to be the best he can get at the beginning. But when he successfully works his way up in the factory to become a legitimate member of the exclusive circle, how is he supposed to resist the irresistible, personified by Elizabeth Taylor in the role of socialite Angela Vickers? What he always yearned for is now within his reach and he doesn’t look back when he decides to go for it.

Elizabeth Taylor's and Montgomery Clift's romantic get together in A Place in the Sun

Lake Tahoe provides the perfect setting for a romantic getaway as George spends a idyllic holiday with Angela and her high society friends. The chemistry between Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift was so blatant that, as reported in Elizabeth Taylor’s biography by Kitty Kelley (Elizabeth: the last star), when Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper was invited to watch the rehearsals of the stars on set, she quipped “Elizabeth, where on earth did you ever learn to make love like that?” Ms. Kelley adds that Ms. Hopper raced off to her typewriter to tell the world about the “the magnificient lovebirds.” The lake scenes are the ones of a blossoming romance.

But Lake Tahoe is also where things will take a turn for the worst, as Alice shows up to confront George about her unplanned pregnancy and the consequences of his actions. While George takes action to drown Alice in the lake, it remains unclear whether her drowning is actually an accident or a murder. Whatever happened and whatever was in George’s heart when he did or didn’t do what he should or shouldn’t have done, the moral of the story is that power hunger can be a destructive force.

The location filming took place in October and the temperatures had dropped. But this was little concern to George Stevens who wanted to shoot lake scenes as if they had occurred during the summer. During the drowning scene, Mr. Clift and Ms. Winters asked for their double to get into the water for the scene were the row boat capsizes. Mr. Stevens, fully dressed, jumped into the cold water; and after he got out, he started giving directions to his actors. Both Ms. Winters and Mr. Clift ended up doing the scene.  However, it was Elizabeth Taylor that ended up being the most affected by the October filming.

17 year old Elizabeth Taylor shot the bathing scene in freezing Tahoe water in October

The beach scene where George and Angela cuddle by the side of the lake originally had both Ms. Taylor and Mr. Clift splashing around in the water. When Mr. Clift refused to do it due to the freezing temperatures, Mr. Stevens rewrote the scene to have only Ms. Taylor run into the lake. Ms. Taylor was 17 years old at the time of the filming and had been trained, as a child actor, to be cooperative. It had snowed in Tahoe at that time of the year and crew members had to hose the snow off the ground before the take. She ran into the water over and over again until Mr. Stevens was satisfied. Her mother, Sara Taylor, who acted as her agent and manager for the studio, was infuriated with Mr. Stevens: fearing for her daughter’s health, she had brought to his attention the fact that Elizabeth was menstruating at the time and that the cold water not only made cramps worse, it could also imperil future pregnancies. Since that movie, and for twenty years, Elizabeth Taylor had it written in her contracts that she was not to work during her period. She had four children.

Al Pacino was alone at the top in Tahoe in The Godfather Part II

The second iconic Tahoe movie is Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part II (1974).

The Corleone compound on Lake Tahoe in The Godafther Part II

The movie was shot in 1974 and the Michael Corleone’s storyline, set in 1958, is heavily set in Tahoe, where the Corleone compound is located. The compound used for filming is located in Fleur du Lac on the West shore of the Lake, between Tahoe City and Homewood.

The film opens with young Vito Corleone fleeing Sicily in 1901 and arriving in New York, but the 1958 storylines opens, similarly to The Godfather, with a family celebration: the First Communion of Michael’s son Anthony. Similarly to The Godfather, family reunion and business meeting quickly get mixed up as Nevada Senator Pat Geary meets with the Godfather.

The family’s operations have extended beyond New York into real estate and gambling and Michael moved his family to Tahoe from where he runs things. But his rise to power becomes a burden as he alienates some of his closest family members. The gorgeous setting becomes hostile when an assassination attempt is carried against Michael Corleone that likely involves “someone close.” But Michael is not a man to flee in the face of threats and danger, he is a man who carefully plans his move to make sure he comes out of the fight more powerful.

Michael's brother Fredo is shot by Michael's bodyguard Al Neri while fishing on the Lake

It is not the assassination attempt that upsets him, that’s to be expected when you are in his business and he understands that, which doesn’t mean he will tolerate. What “breaks his heart,” is realizing that his own brother, Fredo, played by John Cazale, was involved. And while he won’t take any action against his brother as long as her mother is alive, he can’t let this betrayal go unpunished. Even Fredo’s tearful apology and explanation, which leads to Fredo’s aparent reintegration into the family, can’t move Michael now. And when Fredo agrees to go fishing with Michael’s bodyguard Al Neri on Lake Tahoe, we have to wonder  if he knows what is about to happen. His secret to catching fish is to say the Hail Mary before he casts the line; hearing him say it as Al Neri stands up to shoot him in the back of the head, it makes for an heartbreaking scene. This assassination is probably the turning moment that definitely makes Michael the Godfather.

The Godfather Part II: Michael, Kay and their children by the Corleone compound, before the separation

In The Godfather Part II, Michael not only loses his brother, he loses his wife, Kay (Diane Keaton) who cannot bring herself to see her children brought up in a world of crime and violence. To a certain extend, Michael loses his whole family. Kay and Michael’s separation, following the revelation of Kay’s decision to get an abortion, is violent. Michael’s reaction when he runs into Kay at the Tahoe compound where she came to visit the children is no less violent: his closing the door in her face is an indication that she made a decision to step out of this family, therefore she doesn’t exist to him anymore. It is a denial she ever meant something to him.

As the movie ends, Michael is left reflecting on what had happened to his family. In a flashback to family celebration of Vito’s birthday in December 1941 where Michael announces he has enlisted in the Marines. This scene happens before the events recollected in The Godfather and while we knew from the first opus that Michael’s intentions had been to keep his distances with his family’s business, the scene casts an interesting light on his ideals and values as a young man. It also shows what his relationship with Fredo could have been: as everyone seems upset that Michael is dropping out of college to go to war, only Fredo supports his decision.

Michael is left alone contemplating the lake, but then again, hasn’t he always carried this loneliness with him?

American legend Walt Disney orchestrated the ceremonies of the  Squaw Valley Olympics in 1960 

One of the 30 flagpoles of Squaw Valley 1960 Winter Olympics bearing a commemorative plaque signed by Walt Disney

Because I wanted to end his post on a more optimistic, I decided to add the contribution of Walt Disney to the history of Tahoe and Hollywood. Mr. Disney’s involvement with Tahoe had nothing to do with movies, but it had to do with TV.

In 1960, the Winter Olympics were held at Squaw Valley, CA in North Lake Tahoe. These were the first Olympics for which the broadcast TV rights were awarded to the highest bidder: CBS’s bid ran $50,000 and the Eye won the exclusive rights for the US (NB: the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin were the first to be broadcast but to local audiences only, the 1956 Winter Olympics were the first to be broadcast internationally).

Walt Disney was named the Chairman of Pageantry and produced both the Opening and Closing ceremonies. Walt Disney was obviously not new to the world of entertainment, and moreover he had gained TV experience in the years prior to the Olympics: he had successfully launched the Mickey Mouse Club on ABC between 1955 and 1959 as well as the Walt Disney Presents series that ran for five decades in the US. In addition, he had been researching shows and parades for the last few years as he was crafted plans for his ambitious theme park project (the first Disneyland Park was opened in Anaheim, CA in 1955).

Walt and Lilian Disney at Squaw Valley, CA (courtesy of the Walt Disney company)

Walt Disney had planned a grandiose opening ceremony that involved 3,700 high school musicians and choir members that were to be led by band director Clarence Sawhill and choir director Dr. Charles Hirt respectively. An article by Scott Richter in the 1993 Disney News recounts how things were about to take a turn for the worst on February 18, 1960, the very day of the opening ceremony. Ten inches of snow had fallen over Squaw Valley and cold wind was blowing. The band and choir couldn’t even see the directors amidst these snowfalls. The safe bet option was to move the ceremony indoors, in a skating rink. This would have met drastically cutting the number of musicians and singers involved. A decision that neither Dr. Hirt, nor Mr. Disney, were ready to make. Despite the risk of having the musicians and choir members not being able to see the conductors in the midst of this blizzard, Dr. Hirt and Mr. Disney decided to take a chance.

In what sounds like a true miracle out of a Disney movie, Dr. Hirt recalls that:   “The clock ticked down to showtime, and at that moment, the sky parted and the sun shone. It was a miracle. My choir was in front of me. I could see them. Clarence could see his band, and he could see me. And the program went off without a hitch. Then, just at the very close of the final Olympic hymn, the sky covered up again and the blizzard resumed.”

What do you know: reality can be stranger than fiction. Why couldn’t it be more magical too?

—

Vanessa Méheut

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truckee,_California

http://truckeehistory.org/historyArticles/history12.htm

http://www.silentsaregolden.com/featurefolder9/OHcommentary.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Hospitality

http://www.sierracollege.edu/ejournals/jsnhb/v1n3/chaplin.html

http://www.placer.ca.gov/Departments/CEO/EconDev/PlacerLTFilmOfc/ShotInPlacer.aspx

http://www.reno.com/article/20110525/RECREATION02/305259971/1019&parentprofile=

http://www.virtualtahoe.com/Community/TahoeFAQs.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Place_in_the_Sun_(film)

http://www.tcm.com/this-month/article/12682%7C0/A-Place-in-the-Sun.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Godfather_Part_II

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_Winter_Olympics

http://progresscityusa.com/2010/02/13/walt-disney-and-the-winter-olympics/

Arriving at the West Wind Capitol 6 drive-in in San Jose, CA

One of the great advantages of being in the US is that you get to live a series of all American experiences. This involves seriously contemplating the possibility of being run over by the SUV on 20 inch wheels in the next lane, learning the delicate balance of the appropriate hug (not too close, not too long), realizing that the nacho cheese late you found ridiculously rich when you first landed now sounds like a reasonable appetizer option and finally giving up on understand any sort of temperature, weight, height, speed or distance measurement.

Out of all of these, on of my favorite all American experience has been going to the drive-in movie theater.

Drive-ins date back from the early 1930s and 4,000 were in operation by the early 1960s

Various angles on the ground at West Wind Capitol 6 drive-in allow for undisturbed viewing for all patrons

Drive-ins were invented by Richard M. Hollingshead Jr. in 1932 in Camden, New Jersey. Experimenting in his driveway with his car, screen nailed to tree trunks, a 1928 Kodak projector and a radio, he figured out the optimal size, spacing and angle required to have several cars park in front of the screen which blocking anyone’s vision. He applied for a patent, was granted one in 1933 (U.S. Patent 1,909,537) which ended up being declared invalid in 1950, following a legal battle over licensing fees with Loews Drive-In Theaters, Inc. owned by exhibition giant Loews Theatres.

Drive-in movie theaters started gaining popularity after World War II. According to Eddie Muller’s essay The Great White Way in Noir City, to be read in Left in the Dark: Portraits of San Francisco Movie Theaters by Julie Lindow and R.A. McBride, 2,000 drive-in theaters opened in the US between 1946 and 1950 (in the meantime, 2,000 single screen movie theaters closed down). The development of road infrastructure and private car ownership explain the rise of drive-in movie theaters all over the US. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, there were over 4,000 drive-ins in the US.

Privacy and convenience were the main attributes of drive-ins until the late 1960s

Close to 4 out of 5 US household had at least one car in 1960

Cars are a symbol of freedom; they are an invitation to travel, they can take you anywhere. They help you master your surroundings, and explore new territories. They let you escape your human condition and are a demonstration of humanity’s intellectual power. For all legal purposes, cars are not an extension of one’s homes, but for whoever has been dancing behind their wheel like nobody’s watching, it sure feels like it.

Drive-ins emerged as private cars shifted from luxury items to commodities. According to data from the US Census Bureau, 78.5% of US households had a least one car in 1960. With real estate more affordable outside of the big cities (and you need estate to fit these cars) and US families gaining in mobility thanks to cars, drive-ins started to serve a growing potential audience. The largest drive-in, the All-Weather drive-in could be found in Copiague, New York: it fitted  2,500 cars, had a 1,200 seat indoor area and offered a shuttle service for patrons to go around the 28 acre area. A family with kids could go to the drive-in while saving on babysitting expenses. Sometimes dubbed “passion pits,” drive-ins also afford teenagers great privacy for a date night.

The economics of drive-ins proved too challenging with the rise of multiplexes in the late 1960s and early 1970s

In 1960s-1970s, multiplexes started to emerge in the US (AMC Theatres opened its first multiplex in 1963 in Kansas City). The great advantage of multiplexes is in the concentration of movie options in one location.

Coincidentally, the 1960s-1970s saw the decline of drive-ins theaters. Apart from real estate, which limits the number of screens and therefore programming options, the major difficulty in drive-in business model is the limited showing times: drive-ins can only be operated at twilight, once luminosity is low enough that the beam of light can turn the white screen into the welcoming host of fictional characters and their adventures. Finally, seasonal weather differences create uncertainties in business operations.

It should also be noted that sales from the concession stands, that theaters owners don’t have to share with movie studios contrary to ticket receipts, can be challenging, as drive-in patrons can easily bring food from the outside to eat in their car.

Today there are around 400 drive-in theatres left in the US, vestiges of times gone by.

Luckily enough, there is still one in operation in the Bay area: the West Wind Capitol 6 drive-in located in San Jose, CA is operated parent company Syufy Enterprises. Seven drive-ins under the West Wind brand are still in operation in California (Concord, Sacramento, San Jose and Santa Barbara), Nevada (Las Vegas and Reno) and Arizona (Glendale).

Drive-ins make you feel at home at the theatre, and are a good bargain too

Drive-in speakers are now memorabilia items (Photo from Willard Library (9PC-83))

The routine is always the same: my friends and I stop at a nearby mall to get food to go and we then head to the drive-in theater. Prices there are $6.95 for a double feature, pretty much the cheapest it gets in the Bay area for those who don’t qualify for youth, senior or military discounts. As a reminder, the average movie ticket price in 2011 is $7.96 according to Box Office Mojo. As you pass the gate, the cashier indicates which radio frequency you have to tune to get the movie audio track. Getting sound to patrons was a major challenge during the early days of the drive-in: the initial technology developed by RCA Victor (the result of a merger between Radio Corporation of America and Victor Talking Machine Company, the leading phonograph manufacturer at the time) a  had main speakers mounted on the screen, which created discrepancy in the experience depending on where one’s car was parked. The problem was solved through small portable speakers that patrons could use in their cars or hook to the side windows, which now constitute memorabilia).

The best part of the drive-in experience is found in the balance of private comfort for a publicly shared experience.  Drive-ins make you feel at home while you are at the theatre. In that sense, they are an expression of customers’ individualism: you don’t go to the drive-in to meet new people (but then again how often do you really meet new people at the regular indoor movie theater?); you go to the drive-in to have a preferred experience with your friends while watching a newly released title. And as a major plus, you don’t get annoying neighbors unable to put their cellphones down or to refrain from commenting.

Drive-ins enable every one in the audience to view the film as they want, without becoming a disturbance to other attendees. I remain constantly amazed at Americans’ resourcefulness when it comes to event planning. My first drive-in experience took place in June 2010, when a few friends decided to go watch Toy Story 3, by Lee Unkrich, at the West Wind Capitol 6 drive-in. Needless to say a number of families were in attendance (which coincidentally meant a number of SUVs). But I should say the family that made the strongest impression on me was the one who came with a pick up truck: mattresses and covers were installed at the back of the pick-up truck, facing the screen and the kids watched the movie in their pajamas, under the covers. How more home-like can it get?

Disney's 1965 That darn cat! stars Dean Jones pursuing an FBI informant Siamese cat in a drive-in

You can’t drive in without a car

It is possible that drive-ins are something of a Proustian Madeleine for me: my parents had recorded a tape of Disney’s 1965 feature film That Darn Cat! by Robert Stevenson that my sister, brother and I must have watched a hundred times.

The movie features a Siamese cat involuntary turned into an FBI informant in a case involving bank robbers, a kidnapping, a watch wristband and surf movies. The end of the movie involves a chase scene in a drive-in between the cat, the FBI agent and a zealous drive-in owner who insists patrons cannot just walk-in.

Going to the drive-in, I can’t help remembering these movie nights. It might be the nostalgic in me but going to the drive-in movie theatre is a special experience. And an all American one.

Showtimes of and directions to all West Wind drive-in movie theatres can be found on West Wind’s website: http://www.westwinddriveins.com/theaters/

Copies of Julie Lindow’s  and R.A. McBride’s Left in the Dark: Portraits of San Francisco Movie Theaters can be bought on the dedicated website: http://www.leftinthedark.info/

That Darn Cat! is available on DVD with Netflix or can be bought online on Amazon. The 1997 remake by Bob Spiers, which I haven’t seen so can’t recommend, is available for rental or electronic sell through on Amazon VOD.

—

Vanessa Méheut

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive-in_theater

http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa980121.htm

http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=138008

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplex_(movie_theater)

http://boxofficemojo.com/about/adjuster.htm

http://www.ebay.com/sch/Entertainment-Memorabilia-/45100/i.html?_nkw=drive+in+speakers

The Red Vic, one of the few single screen rep theaters of SF, closed down in July 2011

This is it then: the Red Vic, one of the most iconic movie theaters in San Francisco, and one that was very dear to my heart, closed down on July 25^th 2011, 31 years to the day after it opened in 1980. A year ago, in honor of the 30^th anniversary of the movie theater, past and present collective members were reminiscing of their favorite moments at the Red Vic. They told moving stories of community, of strange Haight characters and of crossgenerational love of movies.

The real estate will be used as an incubator and a smaller screening room will be kept for special events

Screenshot of the "no smoking in the theater" message played before each screening at the Red Vic

A worker owned and operated repertory movie house, the Red Vic was a relic of an area now gone when access to home entertainment (legal or illegal) was not as convenient as it is now and when people were going out in the Haight. With only a handful of people in the audience on most nights and in spite of benefits and community support, the economics of the theater simply didn’t work anymore and the four collective members had to take the sad decision to close the theater down. The Red Vic has an impressive collection of movie posters and between July 2011 and now, it has organized a few poster sales events so fetishists, such as yours truly, have an opportunity to get a pretty cool souvenir to remember the Red Vic by.

The real estate is owned by Jack Rix, the only original founder to have stayed involved until the end, and his wife Betsy Rix who was also one of the founders. They plan on turning the space in an incubator for start ups working on new business models around local agriculture and sustainable growth. They also plan on keeping part of the space as a smaller sized screening room that would be available for private events (classes, community meetings, filmmakers, etc).

Midnight screenings of the Room will join Rocky Horror at the Clay

Poster of the infamous "The Room"

A big legacy of the Red Vic also lives on: The Room, which probably brought the Red Vic its best attendance numbers in the last few years, is now showing as a midnight screening every second Saturday of the month at the Clay theatre. The Clay was already the home of the  Rocky Horror Picture Show monthly midnight screenings so it only made sense that it would become the home of what as sometimes been referred to as the new Rocky Horror. Sam Sharkey, one of the ultimate four collective members of the Red Vic, is the man we have to thank for one of the best movie theater events in San Francisco. Sam, who became a collective member in 2008, started a program of midnight screenings in 2009 and hit the jackpot when he booked The Room. The infamous movie by director/producer/writer/actor Tommy Wiseau, shot in Los Angeles but set in San Francisco, often sold out the house.

I wrote in a previous post that the main difference between these two is that the appeal of The Room comes from the abysmal levels it reaches on all fronts (scenario, acting, editing, special effects, etc): it is hard to imagine a movie that demonstrates better the importance of all separate roles, creative and technical, when making a movie. The poster itself has the look and feel of a bad omen. The Room is an ironic example of a movie that took itself too seriously, yet can only be seen at the nth degree. Rocky Horror, on the other hand, is a pretty great movie that only set itself to entertain its audience and accomplishes just that. Other than that, I guarantee you will have an awesome time at the Clay theatre for both events.

The Castro Theatre is now officially the last line of demarcation

I also wrote previously about how I thought that the Red Vic and the Castro were the best theatres in San Francisco for rep programming. One of these hallmarks is gone now and I sure hope to death the Castro is here for the long run. But then again, that’s what some people said about the Red Vic a few years before it closed. Jesse Hawthorne Ficks, the curator of the Midnites for Maniacs series, said recently at one of the last benefits for the Red Vic that the Castro was not in the best financial situation and had to book second run high profile titles like Tron: Legacy by Joseph Kosinski (2010) or The Social Network by David Fincher (2010), which were both showing in January 2011, to optimize revenues.

On Tuesday December 6^th, a rumor was out that the Castro was to stop its movie showings in 2012, focusing instead in live stage performances. The rumor was reported through a blog post by Bay area blogger Michael Petrelis, based on a conversation he had had with Bill Longen, who had worked at the Castro from 2005 until recently (his source had asked to remain anonymous at the time the first blog entry was posted). Movie fans all over the US got really nervous (legendary Chicagoan film critic Roger Ebert tweeted that seeing the Castro close down would be “a crushing blow”) but the Castro Theatre quickly denied these rumors and announced the arrival in their team of Keith Arnold as film booker and general manager of all theatre operations.

On Friday December 9^th, Michael Petrelis published a second blog post where he revealed the name of his source. He also published an email from Bill Longen, the above mentioned source, where Bill explains that “Through creative programming and lots of hard work we brought the theatre from a money hemorrhaging mess to the peak of success, with 2009 and 2011 having the biggest incomes in the 90 year history of the theatre.”

This is overall good news but the consensus among Bay area movie lovers is that if this rumor brought some people to the realization of how exceptional the Castro Theatre is, and how important it is to make sure we keep this national treasure alive, it might have been such a bad thing after all.

Only one fourth of the single screen movie theaters ever opened in San Francisco are still in operation today

Repertory movie houses got their start in the Bay area, one of the key domestic markets for movie exhibition. But technological changes enabled the rise of services like Netflix, which also emerged from the Bay area, which seem to gradually reduce the appeal of rep movie houses. The closing of the Red Vic should serve as a cautionary tale. Other San Francisco independent theaters struggled recently: both the Clay Theatre and the Roxie Theatre recently experienced very real threats of having to shut down. The Clay Theatre actually closed down in August 2010 before its status was changed to a Landmark theatre (it is now showing indie content, mostly foreign or arty movies, instead of repertory movies) and it was reopened. The Roxie Theatre in the Mission was taken over by new managers in 2008 who managed to turn around the theatre by turning it into a non-profit.

In the very well documented Left in the Dark: Portraits of San Francisco Movie Theaters by Julie Lindow and R.A. McBride, the authors list all the movie theaters that were open in the US and shows how many of them are still in operation today. The first movie theater in san Francisco was the Unique Theatre, a nickelodeon opened on 1132 Market Street, writes Katherine Perin, who penned the chapter titled Palaces for the people: architecture and the cinematic experience.

Lobby of the Fox Theatre San Francisco, torn down in 1963

By 1920, there were 63 movie theaters in San Francisco and the downtown area, nicknamed “the Great White Way” in reference to Broadway to its high concentration of theatres, had a record concentration of 20 theaters on six blocks. Movie theaters were a hit and the gigantic Fox Theatre was built in 1929 on 1350 Market Street: it had an impressive 4,650 seats capacity (across all theaters, 25K theater seats were available in San Francisco at the time, meaning that the Fox Theatre accounted for  roughly 20% of all seats). This was the heyday, post Great Depression and pre rise of the television.

Neighborhood theaters, affectionately referred to as “nabes,” hosted second run movies until the 1950s, when new releases started to bypass Market Street and its big movie palaces. In 1940, an all time high, San Francisco was home to 79 theaters, one per 8,000 inhabitants, according to Eddie Muller, who contributes The Great White Way in Noir City to the book. It was all downhill from there. Many of the movie palaces were eventually torn down: the Fox was destroyed in 1963, despite effort from the community (proposition I, which would have allowed the city to acquire the building for $1.1M, less than the cost of the land, and turn into a center for the arts, didn’t pass). And the neighborhood theaters have been replaced by a mix of home entertainment and multiplexes.

In a funny turn of the events, some of the palaces of the Great White Way built in the 1920s, at the horror of theater owners who saw the movies as cheap lowbrow entertainment, are now hosting musicals, plays and concerts (the Orpheum, the Curran, the Golden Gate and the Warfield).

Of the 79 single screen movie theaters that once were in operation, only 18 are still in operation today and 7 have been preserved, kept open albeit put to a different use, among which the Alhambra, the New Mission and the Brava.

The majestic Castro Theatre is the only movie palace still in operation in San Francisco

It is hard for repertory movie houses, even one as majestic as the Castro. Hopefully the great efforts of the Castro team make audiences realize that some experiences can only happen in the movie theater, on a big screen, in the dark with a room full of people. And that this can be complementary to their Netflix subscription. It doesn’t have to be an either/or situation. If you love movies, you don’t have to choose.

So there you go. One battle has been lost but we’ll live to fight another day. The Red Vic is dead, long live the Red Vic.

—

Vanessa Meheut

Sources:

http://www.american.coop/content/red-vic-san-franciscos-worker-owned-movie-house-closing-after-31-years

http://articles.sfgate.com/2011-07-07/news/29746004_1_theater-seats-netflix-poster

http://www.sf360.org/?pageid=12925

http://www.baycitizen.org/blogs/culturefeed/rumors-castro-theatres-film-death/

http://mpetrelis.blogspot.com/2011/12/castro-theatre-live-acts-replacing-all.html

http://mpetrelis.blogspot.com/2011/12/castro-theatres-deep-throat-revealed.html