Just watched the two-part four-hour documentary A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies, which I gather was made in 1995... I think this is being re-broadcast now because they've since produced a Part 3.
Really interesting stuff, although the interviews with Martin get a little visually tedious, done as they are in extreme close-up on Martin's not-very-expressive face. But the insight he imparts is invaluable to anyone who wants to better understand the evolution of the American film director and the Uniquely American art form to which they aspire. At least as valuable as any four hours I spent in a film class during college.
It's particularly interesting to watch as Martin points out tricks and techniques that were truly revolutionary at the time, for without someone specifically pointing that out, it's often difficult to look back and know that something had never been done before. I was particularly struck by his analysis of a DW Griffith film that pioneered the art of cutting back-and-forth between action happening simultaneously in two different locations... Martin tells us that Griffith had to fight tooth and nail with the studio who were convinced that audiences would have no idea what the hell was going on. Think about how crucial that device has become in modern films... I kept thinking about that great sequence near the end of THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS which plays with our expectations about intercut scenes to make us think the FBI is about to kick in the bad guy's door when in actuality, it's Clarice who has found the killer and the FBI are barking up the wrong tree. When Jame Gumb opened that door and Starling was standing there instead of the FBI agent with the flowers I'm pretty sure my heart stopped beating for a second.
Also note Martin's analysis of the final scene in THE PUBLIC ENEMY which, despite being a climax that the audience has been waiting for, for quite some time, happens entirely off-stage such that we don't know what's happening until Cagney walks back into the view of the camera, which is situated outside in a static master shot. All we have to go on are gunshots and screams... brilliant way to build tension.
Saturday, July 14, 2007
Friday, July 13, 2007
DVD review: THANK YOU FOR SMOKING
Goddamned brilliant!!!
Best opening twenty minutes in comedic film since KISS KISS BANG BANG... before that? Hell I don't know... FIGHT CLUB? I can't remember when I've laughed so hard.
You must see this movie. Seriously... I'm going to find a way to get Jason Reitman on the phone Monday and tell him he's a genius. Not kidding!
And the most amazing thing is the film is politcally neutral. Most highly charged politcal film I've seen in years and I'll be damned if I can figure out what side it comes down on. In the same way they used to say Don Rickles was great because he was an equal opportunity insultor, this one takes jabs at literally everyone.
If you really hate government, and with Bush at 29% and Congress at 24%, realistically, who doesn't? Then this is the movie for you!
Best opening twenty minutes in comedic film since KISS KISS BANG BANG... before that? Hell I don't know... FIGHT CLUB? I can't remember when I've laughed so hard.
You must see this movie. Seriously... I'm going to find a way to get Jason Reitman on the phone Monday and tell him he's a genius. Not kidding!
And the most amazing thing is the film is politcally neutral. Most highly charged politcal film I've seen in years and I'll be damned if I can figure out what side it comes down on. In the same way they used to say Don Rickles was great because he was an equal opportunity insultor, this one takes jabs at literally everyone.
If you really hate government, and with Bush at 29% and Congress at 24%, realistically, who doesn't? Then this is the movie for you!
Monday, July 9, 2007
Politics and the summer blockbuster
I generally shy away from assigning intentional political motivations to popular filmed entertainment. Movies like A MIGHTY HEART, JFK, or THE KILLING FIELDS obviously DO embrace a particular political point of view and I'm happy to point them out when I see them, but those aren't the kind of movies I want to talk about in this post… no I’m more interested in the big summer blockbusters that, after the fact, attract the attention of political pundits in the Mainstream Media and blogosphere alike because of perceived political leanings that go this way or that.
Take 300 for instance. In the days after 300 shocked the world by knocking over the box office like a wave of impotent Persian infantrymen, the debate raged on the web as to whether the filmmakers meant for us to think of George Bush as Leonidas or Xerxes. Was the Battle of Thermopylae served up by the filmmakers as some methaphor for a brewing disaster in Iraq? Or was it a treatise on valor and heroism and a call to stay the course against the Al Qaeda horde in Mesopotamia? The very fact that both sides could muster up equally convincing arguments made the discussion seem all the more irrelevant and amusing to me, but director Zack Snyder’s bemused reaction to the debate was the nail in its coffin. He found it fascinating that audiences might ascribe contemporary political motivations to a movie that sought to replicate as faithfully as possible a graphic novel written before George W Bush was elected President, and which described events that happened well over two thousand years ago.
In a related dust-up, I also quite enjoyed the argument that sprang up between John Rogers (one of the writers of TRANSFORMERS) and the Libertas guys after Libertas wrote a review suggesting that TRANSFORMERS was pro-military and that the writers might have been espousing conservative values. Rogers took exception to that and wrote an angry rebuke, which is not really all that surprising. There's history in them thar hills.... Somewhere out there on the Web you’ll find a famous letter he wrote to the guys at Ain’t-It-Cool after a reviewer there had the unbelievable gall to suggest that THE CORE was not believable. I loved Rogers’ letter responding to the criticism… it really was a brilliant rebuttal, but dude, come on… if the guys at Aint-It-Cool aren't believing what you're selling, that's a You Problem, not a Me Problem. Yelling at the reviewer is missing the point. It's the writer's responsibility to sell the movie's, ahem, core concept to the audience... and in the case of THE CORE, I think Rogers failed to do that. I thought the movie was ridiculous the first time I saw it, too. And I don't care how many theoretical physicists told you your script made perfect sense, none of them were in the theatre with me when I saw the movie.
And in any case, let's not forget what Kevin Costner said in JFK… “Theoretical physics will tell you an elephant can hang from a cliff with its tail tied to a daisy.”
Now, enter HARRY POTTER: AND THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX …
I just got through arguing that big studio blockbusters almost never set out to make an overt political point... the very idea of being political is anathema to the concept of a "four quadrant" summer movie spectacular... every potential audience member you scare off with an overt political message puts you one step further away from breaking even. So I'd be crazy to reverse myself now and tell you that the new HARRY POTTER movie DOES make a political point... so I won't. But if you sat down to write a treatise on Libertarian philosophy, you could do worse than to liberally quote examples from this film.
There's a lot going on in the film but the main plot thrust concerns the attempts by a new Headmistress who represents the Ministry of Magic to micromanage everything the students at Hogwarts are learning. There comes a point in the middle of the film where she has added so many rules and restrictions to the curriculum, hanging framed versions of them one after the other on an imposing wall, that the students are effectively learning nothing at all. Rather they seem to spend the bulk of their days endlessly preapring for a series of standardized tests that test nothing about their ability to survive in the real world, but rather their ability to memorize a standard set of facts and figures. She sucks the life out of the school.
The nanny-state creep starts out simply enough with seemingly reasonable and well-intentioned rules about curfews and such... after all, she's only concerned about the safety of the students, who could be against that!? But by the end of the movie, the rules have been expanded to include serious breaches of civil liberties including bans on public assemblies of more than two students at once and outright physical torture for rule breakers. Soon an army of Hogwarts brownshirts, students conscripted into the power structure of the nanny-state, roam the halls informing on students they once called friends.
I read this as a not-so-subtle warning against the slow creep of popular but civil-liberty abusing laws like anti-smoking regulations... sure it's nice to hang out in a smoke free bar now, but what happens when government decides that because candy bars, or cell phones, or left turns, or radios in our cars are dangerous to our health, they should be banned as well, under the same theory. Having given the Government that inch, it will be that much harder to say no when they ask for a mile.
Not 24 hours after I made these comments while walking out of the premiere, I saw this piece, which perfectly crystalized my thoughts on the matter. So let that be a lesson to you, the Commander is all-seeing and all-knowing.
Now where I think the Libertas guys got into trouble was when they assumed that Rogers not only made the same point in TRANSFORMERS that they took away from the film, but that he did so intentionally out of a desire to make some political point. So to be fair, I want to point out that my interpretation of the new Harry Potter movie springs from my own political pre-conceptions... in fact, to show you how open minded I am, I'll give you an alternate interpretation of the same storyline, just for kicks.
The filmmakers dressed the headmistress in a classic, pink, high-collar wool outfit that was very reminiscent of the classic 50's conservative, middle-America, bible thumping, rock-n-roll album-burning mom. We also see her use magic to do things like force apart two students she spots kissing in the halls. Furthermore, the torture she uses to punish students looks an awful lot like the kind of turture we're used to seeing sadistic Nuns use in the movies when students do BAD things, usually relating to natural sexual impulses. So you could just as easily argue that the movie is a warning about right-wing ultra-conservative oppression, and not busybody left wing nanny-statism.
I guess the bottom line is that movies are what you make of them, and what you bring to them. But be careful when assuming that the people who make the movies you see are espousing one particular poilitical point or another. You're probably reading too much into it.
Sunday, July 8, 2007
Structure is key
M*A*S*H was on the Fox Movie Channel this past weekend and was introduced by Tom Rothman who runs the studio. As he told the story of the movie's journey from book to screenplay to film, he pointed out that simply having great source material is not enough... that great material has to be put into the three-act screenplay structure by a talented writer (in the case of M*A*S*H it was Ring Lardner Jr., who won an Oscar for his efforts)... failing that, even the best book ever written will result in a crappy film every single time.
I've said this before on this site, but don't take it from me, Tom Rothman has been running a studio very successfully for a decade. If "structure first" is the message he's sending downstream to his executives, then you'd better be sure you're getting it right in your screenplay before you send it out to be read. Structure is what they'll critique first. If the movie doesn't work from a structural point of view, all the great dialogue and action in the world won't save it from getting a "pass."
I've said this before on this site, but don't take it from me, Tom Rothman has been running a studio very successfully for a decade. If "structure first" is the message he's sending downstream to his executives, then you'd better be sure you're getting it right in your screenplay before you send it out to be read. Structure is what they'll critique first. If the movie doesn't work from a structural point of view, all the great dialogue and action in the world won't save it from getting a "pass."
Down and dirty character development...
Moviemaking is all about finding ways to give your audience constant clues about the character motivations of the people in your films. Lots of ways to do that of course, some obvious, some more subtle and clever.
Couple things I noticed with regard to the kinds of clues I'm talking about here while re-watching some classic of the 80's and 90's this weekend. I've argued in past postings that action movies often skimp on character development in favor of driving the action forward faster and with more regularity. I still believe this is true, but I also think it's worth clarifying that this does not absolve the action movie writer from the responsibility of developing great characters. You simply gotta pick the right moments in which to skimp.
Let's take a look at two classic military thrillers of the 80's and early 90's... TOP GUN and THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER. One major screenwriting challenge these two movies both have in common is a TON of characters to service throughout the story. By the time Cash and Epps got around to fully developing Maverick, Goose, Charlie, Iceman, Hollywood, Slider, Viper, Jester, and Carole, there was very little time left to develop that one thing every single movie needs... an antagonist... otherwise known as, the villain.
Now true, the main antagonists in the film are Maverick's inner demons... but inner demons don't make for very photogenic movie villains, and so in TOP GUN, the main enemy faced by Maverick and his band of brothers are Russian fighter pilots... and they are literally faceless.
TOP GUN is about a lot of things, and really, aerial combat is among the least of them. We don't need to get to know the Russian adversaries in order to enjoy the story, in fact, I would argue the less we know about them the better. And so, with that in mind, in order to create intimidating villains that we would instinctively want to root against without the filmmakers having to spend a lot of time explainging WHY we need to root against them, the filmmakers employed some clever techniques. For one thing, all the American pilots wear individually colorized helmets with open face plates. In this way we are able to easily identify each pilot by his helmet, and by his eyes... the facial feature by which most humans first connect with one another.
Maverick's Russian adversaries, by contrast, have black reflective faceplates, unadorned helmets, and we never hear any of their radio chatter. The filmmakers basically turn them into flying robots with whom it would be virtually impossible for an audience member to connect or identify. They are a faceless, emotionless enemy... because that's really all we have time for, and in point of fact, those characteristics are exactly what we Americans spent most of the Cold War believing were the major hallmarks of our faceless enemies from Russia.
The writers of THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER (THuFRO for short) faced a similar problem as did the writers of TOP GUN... that of an absolutely huge cast of critical characters, plus one additional problem Cash and Epps did NOT face... an extremely complicated and detailed plot line involving the surreptitious theft of a Russian submarine. With all these characters and plot lines to service, THuFRO was going to need a lot of help quickly and efficiently crafting easy to understand Russian villains to pepper throughout the piece.
Fortunately for the writers, by the time THuFRO rolled around in 1990, the stereotype of the emotionless, truth-obfuscating Russian official and the bombastic, Folksy, vaguely Southern American policy official was firmly ingrained in the American psyche, and so building characters around that concept turned out to be deceptively easy.
The best example comes at about the midway point... Jack Ryan tries to explain to Admiral Painter (played by 2008 Presidential candidate Fred Thompson) that Marko Ramius intends to defect with the Red October and that it's simply a matter of helping him do that. Not so easy, says the Admiral... first we'd need to know what Ramius' plan is...
"Plan?" asks Ryan...
"The Average Russian don't take a dump without a plan, son."
And so one short, nicely crafted line instantly evokes the image of the scheming Russian.
But the writers of THuFRO were equal opportunists when it came to stereotyping their characters for quick and easy effect. There's a recurring series of scenes featuring an American National Security Advisor played by Richard Jordan, who does his own stereotyping for us... describing himself as the typical loudmouth, untrustworthy American politician by telling Ryan...
"Listen, I'm a politician which means I'm a cheat and a liar, and when I'm not kissing babies I'm stealing their lollipops. But it also means I keep my options open."
Later, that stereotype will be reinforced when, in a moment of frustration, Pelt shouts at his Russian counterpart...
"Mr. Ambassador, you have nearly a hundred naval vessels operating in the North Atlantic right now. Your aircraft has dropped enough sonar buoys so that a man could walk from Greenland to Iceland to Scotland without getting his feet wet. Now, shall we dispense with the bull?"
Only to have the Russian parry with "you make your point as delicately as ever, Mr. Pelt."
These little reminders of the character traits we already expect based on our own stereotypes and preconceptions about American and Russian politicians and soldiers of the period are peppered throughout the movie. Watch it again and I'm sure you'll find literally dozens that I missed.
One other thing about the movie I find interesting is the filmmaker's use of set and lighting design both to evoke mood, as well us to remind us in subtle ways where we are from one scene to the next.
The thing about the insides of naval vessels is they all look the same... small, dark, gray, and full of anonymous men and machinery. Given that throughout much of the film, we will be quickly cutting from the inside of one Naval warship to another, the filmmakers needed a quick and easy way for the audience to visually recognize an American ship from a Russian one.
And so, you'll note that throughout the movie, whenever we are inside an American vessel, the overall lighting scheme is blue... contrasting that with the Russian vessels, most notably the Kenevelov, which are primarily red. This gives our brains a down-and-dirty visual clue as to where we are at any given moment. Blue is good, Red is bad. (I can think of at least one other series of movies that identified good and evil through the use of red and blue color schemes... see if you can guess which one I mean and I'll give you the answer at the end).*
Oh come on Shears, you're out of your mind, I can hear you saying... this goofy color theory of yours is a coincidence at best? Maybe, but take a look at the Red October herself. Throughout the first act, before we know for sure that Ramius intends to defect, the lights in the Red October are indeed red, as my theory predicts. Only after it becomes clear that he DOES intend to defect, and not to launch his missiles on the United States as so many other characters in the film are arguing, does the fake "nuclear accident" occur... from that moment on, after we know for sure that the Red October is no longer a threat, the lighting scheme within the Red October is neutral yellow.
* THE STAR WARS SERIES (Bad guys (Vader, Dooku) have red light sabers, good guys (Luke, Yoda) have blue or green)
Couple things I noticed with regard to the kinds of clues I'm talking about here while re-watching some classic of the 80's and 90's this weekend. I've argued in past postings that action movies often skimp on character development in favor of driving the action forward faster and with more regularity. I still believe this is true, but I also think it's worth clarifying that this does not absolve the action movie writer from the responsibility of developing great characters. You simply gotta pick the right moments in which to skimp.
Let's take a look at two classic military thrillers of the 80's and early 90's... TOP GUN and THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER. One major screenwriting challenge these two movies both have in common is a TON of characters to service throughout the story. By the time Cash and Epps got around to fully developing Maverick, Goose, Charlie, Iceman, Hollywood, Slider, Viper, Jester, and Carole, there was very little time left to develop that one thing every single movie needs... an antagonist... otherwise known as, the villain.
Now true, the main antagonists in the film are Maverick's inner demons... but inner demons don't make for very photogenic movie villains, and so in TOP GUN, the main enemy faced by Maverick and his band of brothers are Russian fighter pilots... and they are literally faceless.
TOP GUN is about a lot of things, and really, aerial combat is among the least of them. We don't need to get to know the Russian adversaries in order to enjoy the story, in fact, I would argue the less we know about them the better. And so, with that in mind, in order to create intimidating villains that we would instinctively want to root against without the filmmakers having to spend a lot of time explainging WHY we need to root against them, the filmmakers employed some clever techniques. For one thing, all the American pilots wear individually colorized helmets with open face plates. In this way we are able to easily identify each pilot by his helmet, and by his eyes... the facial feature by which most humans first connect with one another.
Maverick's Russian adversaries, by contrast, have black reflective faceplates, unadorned helmets, and we never hear any of their radio chatter. The filmmakers basically turn them into flying robots with whom it would be virtually impossible for an audience member to connect or identify. They are a faceless, emotionless enemy... because that's really all we have time for, and in point of fact, those characteristics are exactly what we Americans spent most of the Cold War believing were the major hallmarks of our faceless enemies from Russia.
The writers of THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER (THuFRO for short) faced a similar problem as did the writers of TOP GUN... that of an absolutely huge cast of critical characters, plus one additional problem Cash and Epps did NOT face... an extremely complicated and detailed plot line involving the surreptitious theft of a Russian submarine. With all these characters and plot lines to service, THuFRO was going to need a lot of help quickly and efficiently crafting easy to understand Russian villains to pepper throughout the piece.
Fortunately for the writers, by the time THuFRO rolled around in 1990, the stereotype of the emotionless, truth-obfuscating Russian official and the bombastic, Folksy, vaguely Southern American policy official was firmly ingrained in the American psyche, and so building characters around that concept turned out to be deceptively easy.
The best example comes at about the midway point... Jack Ryan tries to explain to Admiral Painter (played by 2008 Presidential candidate Fred Thompson) that Marko Ramius intends to defect with the Red October and that it's simply a matter of helping him do that. Not so easy, says the Admiral... first we'd need to know what Ramius' plan is...
"Plan?" asks Ryan...
"The Average Russian don't take a dump without a plan, son."
And so one short, nicely crafted line instantly evokes the image of the scheming Russian.
But the writers of THuFRO were equal opportunists when it came to stereotyping their characters for quick and easy effect. There's a recurring series of scenes featuring an American National Security Advisor played by Richard Jordan, who does his own stereotyping for us... describing himself as the typical loudmouth, untrustworthy American politician by telling Ryan...
"Listen, I'm a politician which means I'm a cheat and a liar, and when I'm not kissing babies I'm stealing their lollipops. But it also means I keep my options open."
Later, that stereotype will be reinforced when, in a moment of frustration, Pelt shouts at his Russian counterpart...
"Mr. Ambassador, you have nearly a hundred naval vessels operating in the North Atlantic right now. Your aircraft has dropped enough sonar buoys so that a man could walk from Greenland to Iceland to Scotland without getting his feet wet. Now, shall we dispense with the bull?"
Only to have the Russian parry with "you make your point as delicately as ever, Mr. Pelt."
These little reminders of the character traits we already expect based on our own stereotypes and preconceptions about American and Russian politicians and soldiers of the period are peppered throughout the movie. Watch it again and I'm sure you'll find literally dozens that I missed.
One other thing about the movie I find interesting is the filmmaker's use of set and lighting design both to evoke mood, as well us to remind us in subtle ways where we are from one scene to the next.
The thing about the insides of naval vessels is they all look the same... small, dark, gray, and full of anonymous men and machinery. Given that throughout much of the film, we will be quickly cutting from the inside of one Naval warship to another, the filmmakers needed a quick and easy way for the audience to visually recognize an American ship from a Russian one.
And so, you'll note that throughout the movie, whenever we are inside an American vessel, the overall lighting scheme is blue... contrasting that with the Russian vessels, most notably the Kenevelov, which are primarily red. This gives our brains a down-and-dirty visual clue as to where we are at any given moment. Blue is good, Red is bad. (I can think of at least one other series of movies that identified good and evil through the use of red and blue color schemes... see if you can guess which one I mean and I'll give you the answer at the end).*
Oh come on Shears, you're out of your mind, I can hear you saying... this goofy color theory of yours is a coincidence at best? Maybe, but take a look at the Red October herself. Throughout the first act, before we know for sure that Ramius intends to defect, the lights in the Red October are indeed red, as my theory predicts. Only after it becomes clear that he DOES intend to defect, and not to launch his missiles on the United States as so many other characters in the film are arguing, does the fake "nuclear accident" occur... from that moment on, after we know for sure that the Red October is no longer a threat, the lighting scheme within the Red October is neutral yellow.
* THE STAR WARS SERIES (Bad guys (Vader, Dooku) have red light sabers, good guys (Luke, Yoda) have blue or green)
Friday, July 6, 2007
Man, I love Westerns!
Just finished watching HIGH NOON, which I caught for about the fiftieth time on AMC. Why are Westerns so damned awesome!? They're like pizza, even when they're bad, they're still pretty good. I think what appeals to us about Westerns is the way they strip away all those layers of stuff that separate modern humans from the realities of daily life and force characters to deal with things head on, and often all alone. Think about the lives we lead... has there ever been a more cushioned, protected, leisurely generation than the one currently ruling the roost? I don't say that as if it's a bad thing, in fact, I think this is what we've been striving for lo these 230 years... a peaceful easy life where we are free to pursue life, liberty, and happiness in all the ways we, as individuals, see fit. The harsh realities of life on the Western Frontier are things to be regarded from afar, like exhibits in a museum... not to be longed for like a lost treasure. Life on the Western frontier was cruel, difficult, and often tragically short... and even though it was crucial period in the building of our national character, we are well rid of it.
Now, of course, in modern America, every now and then, desperate problems DO enter into our lives... but we have doctors, and policemen, and soldiers to deal with things that get too crazy for us to handle individually. Not so much for Western heroes. Out on the frontier, law was what you made of it. There was a basic moral code that everyone instinctively understood... don't kill anyone unless it's in self defense, and keep your hands to yourself. Other than that, it was, well, the Wild West. But of course bad men were drawn to the anarchy of the lawless frontier, and as energetic, ambitious Americans made their way west, those predators followed. A soldier, or a real man of the law might be a hundred miles away when trouble started, and so early Westerners had to learn to take care of themselves in a way that no modern American ever has to.
I think John Wayne put it best in his tour de force performance in THE SHOOTIST...
"I won't be wronged. I won't be insulted. I won't be laid a-hand on. I don't do these things to other people, and I require the same from them."
But to be fair, Wayne's character was a gunfighter, and was quite used to living that sort of life and to backing up those words with decisive action when required to do so. In HIGH NOON, however, Gary Cooper faces a different reality... the reality of what happens when that Shootist philosophy runs smack dab into men who are more adept at killin' than you are, and who don't necessarily appreciate or understand the meaning of a "fair fight."
HIGH NOON is not about a gun fight, though that IS what ultimately ends it. HIGH NOON is a philosophical treatise on civic responsibility. Gary Cooper sends a man up for murder, and as a result, criminals far and wide get the message that law and order is here to stay in Cooper's town. Because of Cooper's sacrifice, putting his life on the line for his fellow townsfolk, women and children can once again walk the streets in peace. But a northern judge pardons the murderer who then comes back to town looking for revenge.
And yet Gary Cooper's life is not all that hangs in the balance... this is not just a battle over some long lost grudge... within this battle, and hundreds of others like it across the West, hung the very fate of the Western frontier itself. Would it be a land of justice and peace in the best spirit of a fledgling Democracy? Or would it descend into lawlessness... on this day, one man, Gary Cooper, will help answer that question one way or the other, and not the US Army, or the President himself, can help him. That's what's great about these stories... within this structure, one single man can hold the future of the country itself in his hands.
Of course, I'm no screenwriter, and it shouldn't surprise anyone that Cooper's charcter's ex-girlfriend in the film puts it much more succinctly...
"Kane will be a dead man in half an hour and nobody's gonna do anything about it. And when he dies, this town dies too. I can feel it. I am all alone in the world. I have to make a living. So I'm going someplace else. That's all."
She knows the message Cooper's death will send back East... Cooper's friend Martin knows it too... he makes an impassioned speech to the Church congregation in which he talks about how the big money men back East are watching this town, trying to decide if they should invest money in stores and factories... and stories of death and murder will convince them to put their money somewheres else. Their town will die, and with it, the West itself.
In other words, Cooper has a civic responsibility... or to quote the current summer box office leader TRANSFORMERS... "There can be no victory without sacrifice."
Hollywood development executives always talk about these kinds of movies in terms of stakes... always asking the writers they work with to raise the stakes so that the audience will care about the story and engage itseif in the action that will determine how those stakes shake out. Harder to imagine bigger stakes, isn't it, than the very future of the entire western half of a developing nation?
It occurs to me that we have become a country that does not understand this simple reality anymore. Maybe that's why I like watching Westerns, because it reminds me of an America that people believed was worth fighting for. Now we expect wars to be over in a week and we don't want to see a single body bag on the news. Hell two soldiers wandered off during the bombing of Bosnia back in the 90's... WANDERED OFF mind you... they weren't captured, they weren't lost securing some beachhead or taking out some critical enemy position, they just got lost... and a local politician here in Southern California (where one of the men was from) named a particular day of the week in their honor.
I like to think that any of the characters John Wayne played during his storied career would be insulted at the very idea of being honored for what amounts to poor soldiering.
Watch most modern action movies and you'll see these themes hashed out over and over again, so desperate are we to be tested as men, women, and Americans that we go to dark movie theatres on Friday and Saturday nights to watch made up men and women sacrifice for what's right. John McClane, Indiana Jones, Will Kane...
But back to the western, for a minute... if you think it through, I think you'll agree with my assertion that DIE HARD owes it's basic structure to movies like HIGH NOON.
One man trapped in a skyscraper (small western town) facing overwhelming numbers of gunmen who struggles to find even a single competent individual willing to help him. And in the same way that Gary Cooper assumes it will be a simple thing to deputize 10 able-bodied men in a town full of them, and then spends two hours going from Justice of the Peace, to Churches, to saloons looking for help and getting turned down at every location, John McLane looks for help from 911 dispatchers, cops, SWAT, even the FBI before realizing that if this thing is going to be stopped, he's going to have to do it alone.
They say DIE HARD created a new genre... for years, agents, producers, and executives pitched movies as "it's DIE HARD on a plane" or "it's DIE HARD at the zoo" or "it's DIE HARD at the petrified forest"... but was DIE HARD's structure really all the revolutionary?
Most good action movies and thrillers (hell even the bad ones) follow the same pattern. Think about THE FUGITIVE, THE BOURNE TRILOGY, UNDER SIEGE, CHAIN REACTION, and IN THE LINE OF FIRE... what must you do in order to make your hero into someone the audience can relate to? First you must take away his safety net... you must strip him bare. Now none of those movies I listed above do anything as overt as trapping their hero in a tall building... but putting them in a dangerous physical location from which they cannot escape without confronting the villain is not the only way to utterly isolate a human being. Harrison Ford's Richard Kimble is a rich surgeon with the world at his fingertips, and so we must take that all away from him and set him out on his own in order to begin his journey... or Clint Eastwood is a Secret Service agent with 40 years of experience and an army of agents willing to die for him... but to make his character interesting, we must strip all that away and set him out in the wilderness... discredited and alone... only then do we get to see what he's really capable of.
Now I do not intend for this to be some neo-conservative "kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out" screed... though I certainly think that there's a lot to learn about our responsibilities with regard to Iraq by watching HIGH NOON... rather, it's worth noting that the best Westerns are melancholy about sacrifice... rather than revelatory. When they come to the house of an old friend looking for any escape from the expert mercenaries tracking them to Hole-In-The-Wall, Butch and Sundance (populist, Robin-Hoodian heroes that they are) are told...
"You know, you should have let yourself get killed a long time ago when you had the chance. See, you may be the biggest thing that ever hit this area, but you're still two-bit outlaws. I never met a soul more affable than you, Butch, or faster than the Kid, but you're still nothing but two-bit outlaws on the dodge. It's over, don't you get that? Your time is over and you're gonna die bloody, and all you can do is choose where."
When Chico tells Vin in THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN that his gun has gotten him everything he has, Vin replies soberly...
"Yeah, sure. Everything. After awhile you can call bartenders and faro dealers by their first name - maybe two hundred of 'em! Rented rooms you live in - five hundred! Meals you eat in hash houses - a thousand! Home - none! Wife - none! Kids... none! Prospects - zero. Suppose I left anything out?"
There is no victory without sacrifice...
Westerns are great because they break that equation down to its simplest, starkest terms... They strip away all the layers of law, bureaucracy, and authority that protect everyday Americans from the harsh realities of life and force us to face responsibility and consequence without filters and without safety nets.
Because that's really what we fear isn't it... being alone at the moment of truth? Hearing the sound of someone kicking your door in at 3 am and knowing that by the time the cops get there it will all be over? What would you do? Could you protect yourself? Your wife? Your kids? Fortunately most of us will never find out... but the reason why we love watching Chris and Vin turn a village of Farmers into the defenders of their own freedom to live and prosper as they see fit, is because it gives us faith and confidence in our own abilities to do those things for ourselves.
I've often said that if you really want to connect with an audience, figure out what they're afraid of, and hit them in the face with it. Sometimes that happens accidentally... like when Steven Spielberg found out quite by accident that most humans have a fear of the things that hunt us in deep dark waters.
I think what keeps us coming back to westerns, action movies and contained thrillers is our basic fear that when the shit hits the fan... we're not smart enough, or tough enough, or resourceful enough to make it on our own.
But Gary Cooper and Yul Brynner and Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne and Steve McQueen and James Coburn and Charlton Heston and Burt Lancaster and Paul Newman and William Holden give us hope that maybe, on the right day... we can be.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING:
HIGH NOON
THE SHOOTIST
THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN
THE WILD BUNCH
ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST
THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE
THE PROFESSIONALS
SILVERADO
GOOD THE BAD AND THE UGLY, FIST FULL OF DOLLARS, and FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE
OPEN RANGE
DANCES WITH WOLVES
Now, of course, in modern America, every now and then, desperate problems DO enter into our lives... but we have doctors, and policemen, and soldiers to deal with things that get too crazy for us to handle individually. Not so much for Western heroes. Out on the frontier, law was what you made of it. There was a basic moral code that everyone instinctively understood... don't kill anyone unless it's in self defense, and keep your hands to yourself. Other than that, it was, well, the Wild West. But of course bad men were drawn to the anarchy of the lawless frontier, and as energetic, ambitious Americans made their way west, those predators followed. A soldier, or a real man of the law might be a hundred miles away when trouble started, and so early Westerners had to learn to take care of themselves in a way that no modern American ever has to.
I think John Wayne put it best in his tour de force performance in THE SHOOTIST...
"I won't be wronged. I won't be insulted. I won't be laid a-hand on. I don't do these things to other people, and I require the same from them."
But to be fair, Wayne's character was a gunfighter, and was quite used to living that sort of life and to backing up those words with decisive action when required to do so. In HIGH NOON, however, Gary Cooper faces a different reality... the reality of what happens when that Shootist philosophy runs smack dab into men who are more adept at killin' than you are, and who don't necessarily appreciate or understand the meaning of a "fair fight."
HIGH NOON is not about a gun fight, though that IS what ultimately ends it. HIGH NOON is a philosophical treatise on civic responsibility. Gary Cooper sends a man up for murder, and as a result, criminals far and wide get the message that law and order is here to stay in Cooper's town. Because of Cooper's sacrifice, putting his life on the line for his fellow townsfolk, women and children can once again walk the streets in peace. But a northern judge pardons the murderer who then comes back to town looking for revenge.
And yet Gary Cooper's life is not all that hangs in the balance... this is not just a battle over some long lost grudge... within this battle, and hundreds of others like it across the West, hung the very fate of the Western frontier itself. Would it be a land of justice and peace in the best spirit of a fledgling Democracy? Or would it descend into lawlessness... on this day, one man, Gary Cooper, will help answer that question one way or the other, and not the US Army, or the President himself, can help him. That's what's great about these stories... within this structure, one single man can hold the future of the country itself in his hands.
Of course, I'm no screenwriter, and it shouldn't surprise anyone that Cooper's charcter's ex-girlfriend in the film puts it much more succinctly...
"Kane will be a dead man in half an hour and nobody's gonna do anything about it. And when he dies, this town dies too. I can feel it. I am all alone in the world. I have to make a living. So I'm going someplace else. That's all."
She knows the message Cooper's death will send back East... Cooper's friend Martin knows it too... he makes an impassioned speech to the Church congregation in which he talks about how the big money men back East are watching this town, trying to decide if they should invest money in stores and factories... and stories of death and murder will convince them to put their money somewheres else. Their town will die, and with it, the West itself.
In other words, Cooper has a civic responsibility... or to quote the current summer box office leader TRANSFORMERS... "There can be no victory without sacrifice."
Hollywood development executives always talk about these kinds of movies in terms of stakes... always asking the writers they work with to raise the stakes so that the audience will care about the story and engage itseif in the action that will determine how those stakes shake out. Harder to imagine bigger stakes, isn't it, than the very future of the entire western half of a developing nation?
It occurs to me that we have become a country that does not understand this simple reality anymore. Maybe that's why I like watching Westerns, because it reminds me of an America that people believed was worth fighting for. Now we expect wars to be over in a week and we don't want to see a single body bag on the news. Hell two soldiers wandered off during the bombing of Bosnia back in the 90's... WANDERED OFF mind you... they weren't captured, they weren't lost securing some beachhead or taking out some critical enemy position, they just got lost... and a local politician here in Southern California (where one of the men was from) named a particular day of the week in their honor.
I like to think that any of the characters John Wayne played during his storied career would be insulted at the very idea of being honored for what amounts to poor soldiering.
Watch most modern action movies and you'll see these themes hashed out over and over again, so desperate are we to be tested as men, women, and Americans that we go to dark movie theatres on Friday and Saturday nights to watch made up men and women sacrifice for what's right. John McClane, Indiana Jones, Will Kane...
But back to the western, for a minute... if you think it through, I think you'll agree with my assertion that DIE HARD owes it's basic structure to movies like HIGH NOON.
One man trapped in a skyscraper (small western town) facing overwhelming numbers of gunmen who struggles to find even a single competent individual willing to help him. And in the same way that Gary Cooper assumes it will be a simple thing to deputize 10 able-bodied men in a town full of them, and then spends two hours going from Justice of the Peace, to Churches, to saloons looking for help and getting turned down at every location, John McLane looks for help from 911 dispatchers, cops, SWAT, even the FBI before realizing that if this thing is going to be stopped, he's going to have to do it alone.
They say DIE HARD created a new genre... for years, agents, producers, and executives pitched movies as "it's DIE HARD on a plane" or "it's DIE HARD at the zoo" or "it's DIE HARD at the petrified forest"... but was DIE HARD's structure really all the revolutionary?
Most good action movies and thrillers (hell even the bad ones) follow the same pattern. Think about THE FUGITIVE, THE BOURNE TRILOGY, UNDER SIEGE, CHAIN REACTION, and IN THE LINE OF FIRE... what must you do in order to make your hero into someone the audience can relate to? First you must take away his safety net... you must strip him bare. Now none of those movies I listed above do anything as overt as trapping their hero in a tall building... but putting them in a dangerous physical location from which they cannot escape without confronting the villain is not the only way to utterly isolate a human being. Harrison Ford's Richard Kimble is a rich surgeon with the world at his fingertips, and so we must take that all away from him and set him out on his own in order to begin his journey... or Clint Eastwood is a Secret Service agent with 40 years of experience and an army of agents willing to die for him... but to make his character interesting, we must strip all that away and set him out in the wilderness... discredited and alone... only then do we get to see what he's really capable of.
Now I do not intend for this to be some neo-conservative "kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out" screed... though I certainly think that there's a lot to learn about our responsibilities with regard to Iraq by watching HIGH NOON... rather, it's worth noting that the best Westerns are melancholy about sacrifice... rather than revelatory. When they come to the house of an old friend looking for any escape from the expert mercenaries tracking them to Hole-In-The-Wall, Butch and Sundance (populist, Robin-Hoodian heroes that they are) are told...
"You know, you should have let yourself get killed a long time ago when you had the chance. See, you may be the biggest thing that ever hit this area, but you're still two-bit outlaws. I never met a soul more affable than you, Butch, or faster than the Kid, but you're still nothing but two-bit outlaws on the dodge. It's over, don't you get that? Your time is over and you're gonna die bloody, and all you can do is choose where."
When Chico tells Vin in THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN that his gun has gotten him everything he has, Vin replies soberly...
"Yeah, sure. Everything. After awhile you can call bartenders and faro dealers by their first name - maybe two hundred of 'em! Rented rooms you live in - five hundred! Meals you eat in hash houses - a thousand! Home - none! Wife - none! Kids... none! Prospects - zero. Suppose I left anything out?"
There is no victory without sacrifice...
Westerns are great because they break that equation down to its simplest, starkest terms... They strip away all the layers of law, bureaucracy, and authority that protect everyday Americans from the harsh realities of life and force us to face responsibility and consequence without filters and without safety nets.
Because that's really what we fear isn't it... being alone at the moment of truth? Hearing the sound of someone kicking your door in at 3 am and knowing that by the time the cops get there it will all be over? What would you do? Could you protect yourself? Your wife? Your kids? Fortunately most of us will never find out... but the reason why we love watching Chris and Vin turn a village of Farmers into the defenders of their own freedom to live and prosper as they see fit, is because it gives us faith and confidence in our own abilities to do those things for ourselves.
I've often said that if you really want to connect with an audience, figure out what they're afraid of, and hit them in the face with it. Sometimes that happens accidentally... like when Steven Spielberg found out quite by accident that most humans have a fear of the things that hunt us in deep dark waters.
I think what keeps us coming back to westerns, action movies and contained thrillers is our basic fear that when the shit hits the fan... we're not smart enough, or tough enough, or resourceful enough to make it on our own.
But Gary Cooper and Yul Brynner and Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne and Steve McQueen and James Coburn and Charlton Heston and Burt Lancaster and Paul Newman and William Holden give us hope that maybe, on the right day... we can be.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING:
HIGH NOON
THE SHOOTIST
THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN
THE WILD BUNCH
ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST
THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE
THE PROFESSIONALS
SILVERADO
GOOD THE BAD AND THE UGLY, FIST FULL OF DOLLARS, and FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE
OPEN RANGE
DANCES WITH WOLVES
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